Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001
Subject: Re: "New" Poet

Okay. (Poor Patrick Herron. Jumped ship just when the knitting circle really starts purling.)

The discussion seems to be thematicizing into like
this:

1. THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE TERRIBLE AND THE DREADFUL / CLASSISM

2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY

3. THE IDEAL OPRAH

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1. THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE TERRIBLE AND THE DREADFUL /
CLASSISM

I do not know what people mean by "good", "bad," and the increasingly escalating "terrible" and "dreadful" here. (I never understand what it means to slippage over those terms from ethics to aesthetics.) Certainly, there's a usefulness in being able to speak among the like-minded in a short-hand like that--- but I don't know how to imagine what criteria those assessments are being framed against.

(The only poem of his that I have read is the one that was quoted on-List.)

Even in putting forward the criteria by which I found his poem promisingly improveable and him educable ("unmonitored abstractions"), I was moving onto thin ice: no to Laura Riding Jackson's philosophical abstractions, too?

His poem is not personist or autobiographical of the type Buffalo satellites might be expected to object to. He's quite transcended "subjectivity" and The Subject per se (although not with the greatest eloquence),--- so it isn't objectionable on those grounds.

It's remarkable --- and may come as quite a head-spinner to Oprah's America --- that it does not rhyme or have detectable buh-BUM buh-BUM buh-BUM buh-BUM meter. I had to be educated out of that naivite, personally.

The tailoring of one complete sentence then PERIOD per-line is noteworthy: no enjambment.

Despite my previous criticism of the "unmonitored abstractions", his use of them is in fact so blissfully indulgent in its excess ("Freedom", "Tragedy", "terror", "Structure", "faith", "outrage", "support" . . . ) that it creeps over into an almost Blakean Songs of Innocence and Experience active abstractness: "mutual fear brings peace, Misery's increase / Are mercy, pity, and peace".

I also had to be educated out of thinking that "good"/ "bad", "taste", was some sort of absolute, univeralized standard recognizeable to everyone and true everywhere. It's not.

Currently, hierarchies from exemplary to lesser are really only understandable by dint of --- here we go again --- whom they serve and what groups they advance: power.

Is the poem "dreadful" and "terrible" because it's not displaying enough awareness of poetry at large (and post-modernist opaque poetry, specifically)?

2. UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR ALL POETRY REGARDLESS OF AGE
OR DISABILITY (OR GENDER? OR EDUCATIONAL LEVEL? OR
CLASS? ETC.?)

Coming from Millie, that gives me pause. But, again, I have to re-translate it:

If the sick wish to advance the social assimilation of their fellow disabled, they should conform to socially accepted norms.

Am I misrepresenting the thought?

It's better for the disadvantaged or special caste to impersonate the privileged majorities, in order better to promote inclusion of their group?

3. THE IDEAL OPRAH

The list of titles that Oprah's Book Club promotes does not match or even overlap with The New York Review of Book's table of contents. She is not known to be a purveyor of fine arts/high culture reading.

She does do some type of good, though. She's found a way of re-directing her celebrity away from gossip-raking over to the cause of high school level literacy.

Relatives very close to me buy the books Oprah mentions. And they weren't particularly reading before that. Intelligent but uneducated high school drop-outs now quite contently going through stacks of "bad" novels, experiencing at least some level of why ever we read. And the comparative pandering of Oprah's selections is not a dead-end to further expansion: it seems to be an inroad. My relative will still return to the series of novels about the detective whose cats help solve crimes,--- but when my Hawthorne-Melville opera piqued curiosity, there wasn't the old obstacle anymore and she picked up The Scarlet Letter and on her own went on to The Blithedale Romance. William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which she had the librarians reserve for her, was a little more impassable,--- but she tends to understand that she is not the infinite audience and is bound by her own indoctrinations.

But---

Oprah is not isolated. Elaine Paschen, the upper crust former head of Poetry Society of America, who shoved copies of her poetry books into Bill Clinton's hands at the White House, or the likes of Paschen have certainly crossed paths with Oprah at cocktail parties. Billy Collins, etc.

Do you think Oprah has never been asked, "Why don't you ever feature poetry books?"

So, my Ideal Oprah:

Recognizing that that's been an oversight and deficit in her recommendations, but understanding the prejudices of her viewers and working through her own limitations,---

Stepanek is a beginning in Oprah's Grand Scheme of introducing poetry to TV watchers.

First, get 'em on a sob story type they can't resist. Later, on the precedent and foundation of that preliminary introduction, you/she can move a level, go from Stepanek to some poet a little more multi-dimensional (although Oprah, from my scant knowledge of her, seems chauvinistically impervious to "high fallutin'" required reading).

It's a beginning. She and we are coming from below zero as far as television promotion of poetry.

I did read Book of the Month club Rod McKuen's Listen to the Warm, age 13, before I knew how to look elsewhere to find more English Department-accredited poetry.

There is absolutely no way a responsible talk show super-star --- or educator --- would jump start TV watchers directly to--- Tina Darragh or somebody like that. It would totally back-fire.

Is it that we believe poetries other than "ours" should not exist?! Is everything supposed to homogenize into healthy college-educated Caucasian salaried Manderley? (which I have not read yet. New School reading is on my calendar for tomorrow tonight. Luv ya, Rebecca! [Air kisses.] Welcome home)