Ron had a kind of odd take on the post below... I can't say he's wrong to associate me with Bill Knott's weird sense of third-rate despair. Why was I projecting such negative feelings that particular day? It certainly does not reflect my mood today.
When I think of my Successful Academic Career I can't be too discontented. It wasn't all that hard to be one of the top people in my field, from the very beginning after my PhD. I think the secret was the I actually knew something about poetry and had found a way of translating that into an academically acceptable form. Looking around at people in my field I can't say that all actually know enough about poetry itself to be really first-rate critics. You can master the academic language but without really having anything to say. I've seen the opposite case too, people who can't seem to muster the discipline to write acceptable academic articles. Not that that's the only desirable goal in life, but it is the metric of my particular corner of the world.
You wrote "angry most of the time"; Ron quoted, "angry all the time." Alas for the misreading.
ResponderEliminarAs a reader who has never met you, your self-assessment as "not nice" did not surprise me, nor did the low-key frankness. You often come off as curmudgeonly, not in a bad way.
Poetry is not community. Ron's dogmatic prioritizing of poetry cliques really wears thin. This is not to argue that comradery has not been good for many poets -- it has. But that ain't the whole story, and it hasn't been for centuries. Maybe poetry was community in Chaucer's age, maybe not.
Good for you for not going to poetry readings if you don't like them.
Bill Knott was kidding, I hope.
With or without a signed shovel, I dig your blog.
Mnnn.
ResponderEliminarI didn't know that you were into translation.
Now I have an entirely different opinion about you not knowing you or your work at all before further checking out your blog.
Nice poems you translated.
I do like your taste in music, though it could be broader.
What do you think of the journal, a quartely I think, it's called, O, of poetry in translation?
I certainly need to broaden my poetry blog reading, because I think I achieved a skewred perspective by reading too much Ron.