In the old days of Bemsha Swing, I used to get quite angry at (what I saw as) the stupidity of the defenders of the so-called school of quietude, and those who attacked the avant-garde. It's not as though my core opinions have changed all that much, in the type of poets that I like or dislike. I still like Jean Valentine quite a bit, along with Clark Coolidge. I still don't like Tom Clark. My columns are a little more skewed than they might have been, a little less dogmatic, but I still lean pretty much the same way on any given day.
What I've realized, though, is that the more significant arguments are with myself, and that someone will always be wrong on the internet. I don't need to be crushing some idiot every day just because I can.
Another factor here is that some of my most esteemed interlocutors do not necessarily come from my own "camp," so to speak. I'm thinking of Henry Gould, Joseph Duemer, Joseph Hutchinson, and Andrew Shields, in particular, and you, other person or two whose name I should be mentioning here. Not to speak for them, but none is a rabid avant-gardist the way I am (if at all), and I've learned a lot from the way they carry themselves in a debate.
That being said, Simic is still fair game and I will continue to be mad about his review of Creeley.
"I don't need to be crushing some idiot every day just because I can."
ResponderEliminar-It's so much fun, though. :-)
I liked Simic for a while but got tired of him. It's all the same after a while.
ResponderEliminarI have liked Creeley from my earliest days of being interested in poetry until now. His work is superficially all the same, but only superficially. And he is much funnier, in his dry way, than Simic.
It was Levertov, at Stanford, who turned me on to Creeley.
(And it just crossed my mind that Levertov was also the first person to draw my attention to Simic, though I'm sure she preferred C to S, too.)
ResponderEliminar