Posted on 03/27/2005 6:58:50 AM PST by NutCrackerBoy
CLEARLY designed as a come-on for bright students who don't yet know very much about poetry, Camille Paglia's new book anthologizes 43 short works in verse from Shakespeare through to Joni Mitchell, with an essay about each. The essays do quite a lot of elementary explaining. Readers who think they already know something of the subject, however, would be rash if they gave her low marks just for spelling things out. Even they, if they were honest enough to admit it, might need help with the occasional Latin phrase, and they will find her analysis of individual poems quite taxing enough in its upper reaches. "Having had his epiphany," she says of the sonnet "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," "Wordsworth moves on, preserving his solitude and estrangement by shutting down his expanded perception." Nothing elementary about that.
1. George Herbert
2. Calliope
3. William
Wordsworth
4. Frank O'Hara
5. Joni Mitchell
6. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
7. John Donne
8. Theodore Roethke
9. Langston Hughes
10. William
Shakespeare
11. Sylvia Plath
12. Robert Lowell
13. William Carlos
Williams
14. Percy Bysshe
Shelley
15. William Butler
Yeats
16. Wallace Stevens
17. Jean Toomer
18. Emily Dickinson
19. Camille Paglia
She flies as high as you can go, in fact, without getting into the airless space of literary theory and cultural studies. Not that she has ever regarded those activities as elevated. She has always regarded them, with good reason, as examples of humanism's perverse gift for attacking itself, and for providing the academic world with a haven for tenured mediocrity. This book is the latest shot in her campaign to save culture from theory. It thus squares well with another of her aims, to rescue feminism from its unwise ideological allegiances. So in the first instance "Break, Blow, Burn" is about poetry, and in the second it is about Camille Paglia.
One measure of her quality as a commentator is that those two subjects are not in the reverse order. In view of her wide knowledge, her expressive gifts, her crackling personality and the inherent credibility problems posed by looking too much at her ease on top of a pair of Jimmy Choos, it is remarkable how good Paglia can be at not putting herself first. From this book you could doubt several aspects of her taste in poetry. But you couldn't doubt her love of it. She is humble enough to be enthralled by it; enthralled enough to be inspired; and inspired enough to write the sinuous and finely shaded prose that proves how a single poem can get the whole of her attention. From a woman who sometimes gives the impression that she finds reticence a big ask, this is a sure index of her subject's importance to her, and one quite likely to be infectious. My own prescription for making poetry popular in the schools would be to ban it -- with possession treated as a serious misdemeanor, and dealing as a felony -- but failing that, a book like this is probably the next best thing. If she doesn't make a poem sound like something dangerous, at least she makes it sound like something complicated. Students grown wary of pabulum might relish the nitty-gritty.
The term "a poem" is one we have to use, because our author is strong on the point that a poet should be measured by individual poems, and not by a "body of ... work." To a reader from outside America, she sounds tremendously right about this, but inside America her view is likely to go on smacking of subversion for some time to come. One can only hope that the subversion does its stuff. Good poems are written one at a time: written that way and read that way. Even "The Divine Comedy" is a poem in the first instance, not part of a body of work; and even in Shakespeare's plays there are passages that lift themselves out of context. ("Shakespeare the poet," she says, "often burns through Shakespeare the dramatist, not simply in the great soliloquies that have become actors' set pieces but in passages throughout his plays that can stand alone as poems.") The penalty for talking about poets in universal terms before, or instead of, talking about their particular achievements is to devalue what they do while fetishizing what they are.
This insidious process is far advanced in America, to the point where it corrupts not just the academics but the creators themselves. John Ashbery would have given us dozens more poems as thrilling as his jeu d'esprit about Daffy Duck if he had never been raised to the combined status of totem pole and wind tunnel, in which configuration he produces one interminable outpouring that deals with everything in general, with nothing in particular, can be cut off at any length from six inches to a mile, and will be printed by editors who feel that the presence in their publication of an isotropic rigmarole signed with Ashbery's name is a guarantee of seriousness precisely because they don't enjoy a line of it. Paglia, commendably, refuses such cargo-cult status even to Shakespeare.
Critical theory and cultural studies deserve to be subjected to as much derision as possible. Paglia fights the good fight.
Deserves repeating (many times).
Seems like she's got 'em pinned and wriggling on the wall, eh?
I remember when the publication of a book of poems by Robert Lowell merited a window by itself in a NYC bookstore, and people had signed up in advance to buy copies of the book. And then poetry died, victim of the academy and 1968 (when we ALL became poets, don't you remember?).
If Camille Paglia can do something to bring it back, I heartily commend her. I remember reading that the WWII POW's who fared best in long periods of captivity were those who knew the most poetry and songs - which once upon a time, would have included just about any religious person, since we also once sang beautiful songs and words - and who could recite these words to themselves to keep their sanity.
Poetry, the combination of words and meter (or rhythm) is obviously something that is almost hard-wired in us. I think that is why rap is so popular: the words may stink, but they usually rhyme (enabling us to remember them more easily) and they adhere to a meter. Once modern poetry moved away from music and became the free-form ravings of self-obsessed academics(Ashbery, for example), it ceased to have any popular appeal.
Agreed!
Who among us with verses of poetry stored away has not used those very words to make it through trying times. For this very reason I pushed me kids to ~find~ poetry that they love. Both have done so and now are appreciative of that gift. I can celebrate someone's work who brings poetry into bloom again.
I hadn't thought of postmodernism as "humanism's perverse gift for attacking itself," but it fits. It has gotten to the point where nowhere in academia (that I know of) can be found studies of what actually makes Western Civ. work, what makes it good. You try to make a point from Charles Murray in an intellectual discussion and it goes over like a lead balloon.
She is my favorite lesbian author. She usually gives the left a severe spasm.
They'll remember it. I used to read poems aloud to my kids and they still remember them. They grew up in a bad time when poetry was non-existent in the schools, but Americans have always essentially "home schooled." Learning begins at home.
Well, thankfully, her sexual preference doesn't overly inform her work. I prefer not to categorize authors that way; but if I must, Tammy Bruce is pretty good.
Any book that purports to be a serious look at poets who have had an influence on literature but omits T.S. Eliot and Leonard Cohen but which includes someone like Joni Mitchell has lost all claim to seriousness.
I'm afraid Joni was added so Camille could show us all how "with it" she really is in thinking outside the box.
I like Camille a lot for her aggressive posture and fiercely, articulated opinions on many (some might say too many) topics. However, the downside is that she is often wrong and has an ego the size of an elephant.
I used to think it a shame that she is a lesbian because the world has lost those great genes that could have been passed on through her children. Now, I'm not so sure that any children she might have had would have turned out normal after being subjected to this, "Absolutely Fabulous" type mother throughout their childhood.
As a sophomore in high school, Camille was my introduction to literary criticism and the one who opened my eyes to the insidious second-hand influence of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and other Frog deconstructionists on Academia. She provided me with the ammunition to take on my Foucault worshipping professor when I got to college.
Really? Paglia doesn't sound like a last name one hears in Beirut... ;-)
"However, the downside is that she is often wrong and has an ego the size of an elephant."
That describes all of us.
It doesn't sound as though she was creating a book of poetry from those she considered 'the best', just those she likes.
CP only does what she likes. She's one of our quirkiest intellects.
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