Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
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21 sept 2007
"But the one thing that should have told us to kill the term was that Robert Bly was enthused by it. His promotion of it in his magazines, the Sixties and the Seventies, eventually eviscerated any intellectual significance it had."
I don't remember what the term was but I remember this from "Conversations with D.A. and C.B." And I remember laughing. That conversation was an education.
Bly's polemic isn't far removed from Rothenberg's disderata in your previous post, though it is certainly less pithy. That's why I don't get Antin's comment.
Bly can be plodding, and he has a bad rep as a translator, but I have a soft spot for him since he was one of the people who pointed me toward Jung, the Spanish poets, and Rilke. And I do like his polemic, by and large.
I guess you have to understand the whole dynamics by which Bly took the deep image and made it into a repeatable formula--aided by a rather sloppy conception of "Spanish surrealism." Maybe you're too young to remember the 70s, but what about his slovenly conception of masculinity in Iron John? Shouldn't that cure anyone of a soft spot for Robt. Bly?
You're right, I was not plugged into the poetry world in the '70s; first got involved circa 1982 in college. And -- Iron John is amazingly bad sociology and mediocre mythography. So I need to put brackets around my endorsement of his polemic -- it stops at the Men's Movement. (Though there are some hilarious parallels between Bly and Ted Nugent on this score, if anybody's interested.) Still . . . the soft spot remains. Very un-Iron of me, I know.
Meow!
ResponderEliminarWoof!
(And I heart Antin.)
I don't think Antin's comment is particularly inaccurate.
ResponderEliminarI don't remember what the term was but I remember this from "Conversations with D.A. and C.B." And I remember laughing. That conversation was an education.
ResponderEliminarThe terms is given in the "label" at the bottom of the post.
ResponderEliminarBly's polemic isn't far removed from Rothenberg's disderata in your previous post, though it is certainly less pithy. That's why I don't get Antin's comment.
ResponderEliminarBly can be plodding, and he has a bad rep as a translator, but I have a soft spot for him since he was one of the people who pointed me toward Jung, the Spanish poets, and Rilke. And I do like his polemic, by and large.
I guess you have to understand the whole dynamics by which Bly took the deep image and made it into a repeatable formula--aided by a rather sloppy conception of "Spanish surrealism." Maybe you're too young to remember the 70s, but what about his slovenly conception of masculinity in Iron John? Shouldn't that cure anyone of a soft spot for Robt. Bly?
ResponderEliminarYou're right, I was not plugged into the poetry world in the '70s; first got involved circa 1982 in college. And -- Iron John is amazingly bad sociology and mediocre mythography. So I need to put brackets around my endorsement of his polemic -- it stops at the Men's Movement. (Though there are some hilarious parallels between Bly and Ted Nugent on this score, if anybody's interested.) Still . . . the soft spot remains. Very un-Iron of me, I know.
ResponderEliminar