Those Who Can’t Do…

10 Comments

  1. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison February 6, 2009 at 5:36 pm .

    Joseph, if you want to call the poetry of <I>Desert Music</I>, <I>Pictures from Brueghel</I>, and the majority of <I>Paterson</I> Objectivist, I guess I’ll have to grant you Williams. I just feel that from the late ’30s on Williams began moving beyond Objectivism, though every book after <I>The Collected Later Poems</I> contains work I would call Objectivist—only less of it as time went on.

  2. Joseph P. Wood
    Joseph P. Wood February 6, 2009 at 4:30 pm .

    <I>Is there an example of a "movement poet" whose work is fresh from the beginning to the end of his or her career? </I><BR/><BR/>WC Williams?

  3. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison February 6, 2009 at 3:57 pm .

    It&#39;s probably my antipathy for elitism that makes Silliman &amp; Co. annoy me so, but I don&#39;t want the frequency of my complaints to mislead anyone: there are many writers Silliman would claim for his tribe whose work I admire. My sense is that most of the ones I like would reject his pigeon-holing of them, though, just as most of the &quot;New York School&quot; poets disliked that

  4. Joseph P. Wood
    Joseph P. Wood February 6, 2009 at 3:20 pm .

    You know, this is way offtopic, but as a reader of both this blog and Silliman’s, I wonder why it is I’m often more drawn to more of the experimental strain, but find myself nodding in agreement with your aesthetic and political concepts. <BR/><BR/>I don’t know. The elitism of the avant-whatever-the-hell-it-is bothers me; it proports democracy, but in reality, offers no such thing.<BR/><BR/>This

  5. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison February 5, 2009 at 3:16 pm .

    You’re probably right about Frost, Ron. I may have read too much into your comment. Pynchon put it best: "Paranoia is just the leading edge of the realization that <I>everything is connected</I>.<BR/><BR/>But why is an inaugural poem "an inherently doomed concept"? Honestly. Poets whine about having no audience but don’t want to participate in the public life of their nation. Is our public life

  6. Ron
    Ron February 5, 2009 at 4:34 am .

    It would appear that for me simply to mention Robert Frost is to attack him, since I certainly did little more than that. I doubt I could match you on a paranoia scale. <BR/><BR/>I actually expected Obama to pick Nikki Giovanni who would do a national variation of her "We are Virginia Tech" piece. That would have been a different kind of kitsch.<BR/><BR/>And, no, I meant "sacrificial" in that

  7. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison February 4, 2009 at 8:05 pm .

    Rachete—thanks! I’ll swing by your blog soon….<BR/><BR/>Iain—I’m definitely <I>not</I> defending Alexander’s poem, although it’s considerably better than Angelou’s or Williams’s; "The Gift Outright" is a fine poem and worked well for the occasion, so as modern inaugural poems go, it has to be the one to beat.<BR/><BR/>My beef with Silliman is the "vast anti-avant-garde conspiracy" he constantly

  8. J.H. Stotts
    J.H. Stotts February 4, 2009 at 7:29 pm .

    joseph, thought you’d like to know that i did actually write an inaugural poem, not as a challenge to alexander (unlike others, i held my judgment until i actually heard her poem, and up until then thought it might be good…and was genuinely disappointed)<BR/><BR/>here it is:<BR/>jhstotts.blogspot.com/2009/02/itinerary-for-jackson-james-headed-to.html

  9. Iain
    Iain February 4, 2009 at 6:34 pm .

    I haven’t, personally, attacked Alexander’s poem, because it had everything I expected. It was bland, non-confrontational, and had a vague kind of sentimentality. It was much like the inauguration ceremony in general: a toned down version of the campaign, which was a toned down version of his run for the nomination. The tone has to change, the larger the audience becomes. Given the

  10. Rachete
    Rachete February 4, 2009 at 5:21 pm .

    I like your blog!<BR/><BR/>http://racheteapaintersdiary.blogspot.com/

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