Manifest Destiny

Ange Mlinko assesses Jorie Graham's challenging career:

Born in 1950 in the United States, raised in Italy, educated in France, and only returning to her native country as a young adult, Graham is, along with John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel, one of the very few living American poets to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century. She has seized for her own uses a patrimony rich with philosophical and linguistic experimentation, bypassing the sort of small-scale, homegrown free verse that has come to dominate the journals and university programs and public-radio stations of our time. Although she has not published collections of essays or lectures, she has taught for 30 years, first at Iowa and now at Harvard (where she inherited the Boylston Chair from Seamus Heaney), and has edited two major poetry anthologies, securing her influence on successive generations of poets and readers. Having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her first Selected Poems, she is now seeing the publication of her second. From the New World expands on the nearly 200-page The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994, which spanned her first five books; the new Selected covers the six books she has written since then, and presents four new poems as well. To remain a “frustrating and problematic” public figure for 40 years is a hard labor: Everything in the television and Internet age militates against it. To mine the legacy of the Modernists—specifically Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore—while making apt references to Pascal and Heidegger and Rimbaud and Rilke, at a time when the field of American poetry is becoming an adjunct of pop culture, is also a feat of integrity requiring an antisocial streak in our crowdsourcing age. And Graham has been warily celebrated for—or is it despite?—resisting expectations of speed, amusement, and digestibility. This also means resisting some of the classical pleasures of poetry: epigrammatic wit (or the “memorable line”), phrase-making, and metaphor—­the Apollonian qualities, you might say, of contour, line, and limit, and hence closure, a concept that is anathema to Graham and perhaps her country. There is a certain irony in Graham’s resistance and Americanness: Her long-lined long poems expand into time like a lyric version of manifest destiny.

The Greatest English Poet You Haven’t Heard Of?

Daniel Westover takes a stab:

In my estimation, the most neglected “great” poet of the twentieth century is Lynette Roberts (1909-1995), a wonderful, difficult poet who was born in Argentina to parents of Welsh extraction, moved to London as a Spanish-speaking child, and lived in Wales as an adult. Her work was championed by Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas, who was best man at her wedding. T. S. Eliot thought she was a tremendous writer, and he published both of her volumes at Faber. Wyndham Lewis (of BLAST fame) championed her work and sketched [the above] image of her. Like the work of most Modernist poets with experimental inclinations, Roberts’s work is uneven, but in the words of Robert Graves, who called her “one of the few true poets now writing,” “her best is the best.”

Patrick McGuinness, who has done yeoman's work in bringing Roberts' opus back into the light, calls her poetry "radically modern, almost futuristic":

Roberts's work stands out for its originality of conception, its bold and experimental use of language, and for its conviction that the present is as dramatic, extreme and finally as heroic as anything to be found in the world of myth and legend.

Ange Mlinko has written a cantata for her.

Storming the Castle?

David Biespiel is unimpressed by the now-infamous Kenneth Goldsmith tweet.

Our finest postmodernists have turned into purists and party base delegates. And that’s where things just get sad. The vigor and joy with which our best postmodernists attack any criticism of their aesthetic has all the hallmarks of the apparatchik.

He continues:

By adopting and tweeting the semantics of political shorthand for literary criticism (i.e., attacking Ange Mlinko as a ‘conservative’), it’s made the whole postmodernist movement jump the shark. This week Postmodern poetics is looking a lot like the Fonz in a leather jacket on skis.

Poseur Alert

"Boy oh boy. It's really scary to see how conservative poet Ange Mlinko has become. She used to be one of us."

Kenneth Goldsmith exposes the group-think the avant-garde are always at pains to deny, and confirms what "conservative" critics everywhere know to be their only sin: independent thought.

Debating Rich

Reviewing Adrienne Rich's Later Poems, Ange Mlinko worries about the late poet's legacy.

Rich’s signature style—fragmentary (even halting), earnest, direct—did not alter much in the four decades covered by Later Poems. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” Robert Frost warned; I thought of this maxim more than once while reading this thick volume. I also thought of Wallace Stevens’s distinction between the poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination; I thought of Keats writing “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us” and his insistence that the poetic character “has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.” I thought of Sir Philip Sidney, who died of a gangrenous battle injury in his early 30s, writing of the poet: “he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit.” These were poets who made a strong distinction between art and the world, imagination and reality. Rich belonged to a tradition that collapsed that distinction. The fact that such poetry attracts large, committed audiences is not lost on either its proponents or its detractors. Even so, most poets are not willing to give up their prerogative to be uncommitted: ambiguous, ambivalent, negatively capable and, yes, playful. 

Carol Muske-Dukes is having none of it:

O those devil-may-care playful trickster poets—lazily stretching in their negatively capable workout clothes! So different than the rest of us, worker-drone poets, dully collapsing the distinction between art and the world and imagination and reality! Does Mlinko really believe that poets like Rich never offered themselves up to the aleatory in composing a poem—as ANY POET does who imagines the world, or worlds, familiar and strange... even (as implied) while dreaming of attracting those "large committed audiences"? Excuse me, is she talking about a Springsteen concert or "open mic" at the bookstore?