Food for Thought: Politics, Autobiography & Money
Between feeling guilty that I’ll be leaving for 2 weeks just when this blog is getting started, and things being a bit “slow” at work, I have been doing more on-line reading about poetry than usual. I came across two articles about two different topics that I thought would be a good springboard for further discussion here, and a third that I read a few weeks ago.
The first is a not-so-recent one that I found on About.com, about one of my favorite poets, Mark Strand, and politics. The article, titled Stranded: Poet Mark Strand Preaches Political Indifference at UCI, is actually not so favorable of Strand, but raises some very valid points about the detachment and apathy prevalent in much of academic and “recognized” poetry. Still, I have to admit that I agree with Strand that “There’s no connection between rap and poetry. . . I can’t listen to it. It’s like being blasted up against a wall.”
The second article is a longer more recent one from Slate.com on Autobiography and Poetry, and the impulse to “confess”. It is actually in the form of a dialogue between Dan Chiasson and Meghan O’Rourke. The dialogue raises a lot of good questions, but like most of Slate’s article on poetry, gets a bit academic, dense, and tedious (at least for me). Yes, yes, I know Slate is mainstream reincarnated, but when it comes to poetry they’d like to think they are as haughty as the New Yorker.
Speaking of which, the third article comes from the New Yorker; it’s by Dana Goodyear and is titled The Moneyed Muse. It is, as the title suggests, about a topic that seems to be somehow taboo in poetry: money. It examines the effects of Ruth Lilly’s historic two hundred million dollars endowment to Poetry magazine on the publication, and poetry in general.
Aside from being interested in reading your thoughts on the topics that these articles discuss, I am also interested in what you think about the writing of the articles themselves: the language, the references, etc. Am I alone in feeling that the Slate article is symptomatic of writings on poetry in most literary journals these days: self-involved, self-referential, and somehow indulgent? And the bigger question: do you think this is partly behind the current marginalization of poetry in general?
