. In my Poetic License column for the fall issue of West, I return to last year’s New York Review of Books contretemps between Helen Vendler and Rita Dove over the latter’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. When I first wrote about the dispute, I considered the the politics in poetry. In “Diction and […]
Diction and Democracy
. The Huffington Post/Chronicle of Higher Education offered a well-written and observed overview late last week of the Vendler-Dove conflict regarding Dove’s Penguin anthology of twentieth century poetry. Author Peter Monaghan kindly cited my own “The Politics in Poetry” a couple of times, but he unfortunately covered only the more easily reviewed cultural politics – […]
Politics and Art
Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]
How We Lived on It (28) – “Time Was More Important Than Money”
“I still love the idea that poetry comes out of a lived life.” Linda Gregg, was the winner of the 2009 Jackson Poetry Prize. Sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc., the fifty-thousand dollar prize is intended to honor an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves greater recognition. Poets and Writers asked Gregg to offer […]
Eating Poetry* (VI)
William Carlos Williams This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold *Ink runs from the corners of my mouth There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. […]