Václav Havel on Recent American Poetry: A Travesty

5 Comments

  1. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison January 15, 2012 at 5:41 am .

    I’d have to think more deeply about this question, Lyle. But off the top of my head—if ideology is “a system of ideas and ideals, esp. one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy,” as my dictionary tells me, then it probably suffers from all the defects of any system: tendencies toward rigidity, toward the establishment of bureaucracies, and toward self-perpetuation

  2. Lyle Daggett
    Lyle Daggett January 14, 2012 at 3:31 am .

    The one small disagreement I have with what Havel says in the excerpt you&#39;ve quoted here is that I don&#39;t think the problem is ideology, as such, but rather a specific range of ideologies.<br /><br />Ideology is present — by the intention of the poet — in a lot of poetry that speaks effectively about the world we live in: the poetry of Thomas McGrath, Adrienne Rich, Martin Espada,

  3. DaleJacobson
    DaleJacobson January 10, 2012 at 2:08 am .

    This is something, Joseph! What a tremendous connection and statement you make. This is marvelous. Odd, in a time when there exists so much technical opportunity for communication, there seems to be so little of it due to flattening out of message as well as language. Or maybe, at least in poetry, a kind of solipsistic implosion in so much work…

  4. Joseph Hutchison
    Joseph Hutchison January 9, 2012 at 10:08 pm .

    I fixed the link, Conrad. &quot;<a href="https://www.jhwriter.com/sharefile.html&quot; rel="nofollow">Here it is</a>.&quot; It now goes to a page on my Web site where folks can download either the PDF or the Word versions. I should say that there are small errors in them that I&#39;m working on fixing and will simply change out the files as soon as I&#39;m done proofreading it again. Cheers!

  5. Conrad DiDiodato
    Conrad DiDiodato January 9, 2012 at 5:09 pm .

    Wonderful!<br /><br />I don&#39;t know who to thank more, you or Havel.<br /><br />I agree about the need to create an alternate system. Actually my own Samperi researches (for a full-length monograph project I&#39;m presently doing)lead to the conclusion that Samperi was doing pretty much that, even amidst the Objectivist crowd he was dealing with.<br /><br />Joseph, is there the entire essay of

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Verified by ExactMetrics
Verified by MonsterInsights