D26-DES17
PC Elitist Poetry Anthologies: What Sinks To
The Bottom
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 6/19/03
Faux fascism
has hit its zenith in the last decade or so with the rise of ‘Politically
Correct’ Elitism’s utter dominance of the literary markets- mostly in
fiction, but increasingly in poetry. In fact, anyone who does not claim to have
suffered something stands no real shot at getting a book of poetry published.
Don’t get me wrong- the old Dead White Male’s good old boys network still
hangs on, but for the rest of the emergent good poets out there- it’s a slowly
simmering gloaming that awaits.
In this essay
I’m gonna review 2 utter pieces of garbage, 2 ‘poetry’ anthologies of
recent vintage which both have some legitimate claims to being ‘representative
of the times. The 1st is a 600 page monstrosity published by Penguin
books in 1999 called Scanning The Century, The Penguin Book Of The Twentieth
Century In Poetry, edited by Peter Forbes. Larded with reams of unreadable
poetry, the book does have an occasional good poem by a recognizable poet to
make it not totally vomitus-inducing. Still, it’s a bad book- BUT it’s a
absolute gem compared to Unsettling America, An Anthology Of Contemporary
Multicultural Poetry, edited by the mother-daughter team of Maria &
Jennifer Gillan. This précis of crapola came out 5 years earlier than Forbes’
garbage, but by the same publisher.
Let’s
tackle PF’s tome 1st- apparently PF edits a magalog called Poetry
Review. I did not bother looking this up online since it will only further
the distaste this crap has left in my mouth. The book claims to be a de facto
chronological poetic journey through the last century- dividing the poems into
periods defined by years & subjects- some examples being: Low Dishonest
Decade: The Thirties, The Dark Side: Crime, Vice & Low Life,
& We Billion Cheered: The Media. The basic problem is the book
sprinkles in 1 good or great poem from a known poet with 9 other poems by
virtual unknowns who deserve their anonymity. Or, worse, with ‘name’
doggerelists who will only date the anthology as the years go by. The point is
that this shows how utterly out of step PF is with poetry- to group- as example-
an unknown’s poetastry (Robert Wrigley’s Torch Songs) with a couple
of good-not-great poems from 2 hit-or-miss poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko (To
Charlie Chaplin) & Frank O’Hara (To The Film Industry In Crisis),
along with a piece from Wallace Stevens’ great The Man With The Blue Guitar
under a section on the arts displays amply how utterly PF misses the point about
anthologies. They are repositories of greatness, the best of a time, a culture,
or an individual- not a hodge-podge lumped together by specious reasoning- I
want to be representative of ALL the poetry of the last century- good, bad,
& indifferent! This shows that the primary aim of the anthology is not
to promote the readers’ interest in the art but to promote the name value of
the anthologist. Does he choose some good & great poems? Of course, but even
an idiot could do so by tossing enough darts. Does he make choices by bringing
forth lesser known poems & poets? No. He, instead re-anthologizes poems that
can be found in dozens of other anthologies, such as this poem about World War
1. STOP!!!! Don’t avert your eyes & look further! Can you guess what poem
is coming? If you guessed a poem by Wilfred Owen or Edward Thomas you were
correct. Here ‘tis:
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
This is a
great poem & rightly should be anthologized. Over 8 decades since its
publication it has lost none of its power. But, would you not rather have seen a
great WW1 poem by, say, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.? Who?, you say. My point
exactly. Go Google him & you’ll see that he was the closest American
equivalent to WO, died young, & was a black man to boot! Yet, nowhere is a
poet of that little renown & that much excellence thrust forward.
Worse yet is
when PF chooses bad poems from well-known doggerelists, just to pad out
sections. As example, in his section on sex & love he has marvelous poems
such as Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis & e.e. cummings’ may I
feel said he, only to throw in dull, trite ruminations like this from renowned poetaster Adrienne Rich:
She had thought the studio would
keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own---
envoy from some village in the moldings . . .
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
I will not get in to a lengthy exegesis of the # of clichés or the whole
predictable trope & prosaic nature of the poem’s phrasing & narrative,
save to say that comparing this poem to the 2 poems I just mentioned only
vitiates the arguments for gathering anthologies in the 1st place.
& don’t start in with the defensiveness over AR’s lesbianism, etc. That
has nothing to do with it. Here’s an example from the Cold war section where
he puts a white British male’s dull verse forth as if worth saving for
posterity. This is Peter Porter’s Your Attention Please:
The Polar DEW has just warned that
A nuclear rocket strike of
At least one thousand megatons
Has been launched by the enemy
Directly at our major cities.
This announcement will take
Two and a quarter minutes to make,
You therefore have a further
Eight and a quarter minutes
To comply with the shelter
Requirements published in the Civil
Defence Code - section Atomic Attack.
A specially shortened Mass
Will be broadcast at the end
Of this announcement -
Protestant and Jewish services
Will begin simultaneously -
Select your wavelength immediately
According to instructions
In the Defence Code. Do not
Take well-loved pets (including birds)
Into your shelter - they will consume
Fresh air. Leave the old and bed-
ridden, you can do nothing for them.
Remember to press the sealing
Switch when everyone is in
The shelter. Set the radiation
Aerial, turn on the geiger barometer.
Turn off your Television now.
Turn off your radio immediately
The Services end. At the same time
Secure explosion plugs in the ears
Of each member of your family. Take
Down your plasma flasks. Give your children
The pills marked one and two
In the C.D green container, then put
Them to bed. Do not break
The inside airlock seals until
The radiation All Clear shows
(Watch for the cuckoo in your
perspex panel), or your District
Touring Doctor rings your bell.
If before this, your air becomes
Exhausted or if any of your family
In critically injured, administer
The capsules marked 'Valley Forge'
(Red Pocket in No. 1 Survival Kit)
For painless death. (Catholics
Will have been instructed by their priests
What to do in this eventuality).
This announcement is ending. Our President
Has already given orders for
Massive retaliation - it will be
Decisive. Some of us may die.
Remember, statistically
It is not likely to be you.
All flags are flying fully dressed
On Government buildings - the sun is shining.
Death is the least we have to fear.
We are all in the hands of God,
Whatever happens happens by His Will.
Now go quickly to your shelters.
Is this a poem? Really, I mean to ask. Reread the poem’s end thusly:
Our President has already given orders for massive retaliation - it will be decisive. Some of us may die. Remember, statistically it is not likely to be you. All flags are flying fully dressed on Government buildings - the sun is shining. Death is the least we have to fear. We are all in the hands of God, Whatever happens happens by his will. Now go quickly to your shelters.
Where would you break the lines in to a poem? Yet, this is included.
Speaking of clichés & bad enjambment, he also includes widely anthologized
bad poems by bad poets. OK, I can let WO’s Dulce Et Decorum Est slide,
but Sharon Olds’ The Language Of The Brag? Ugh! & as the leadoff
poem in the Family & Children section?
I have wanted excellence in the
knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.
I have wanted some epic use for my
excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
I have wanted courage, I have
thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
my belly big with cowardice and
safety,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
I have lain down and sweated and
shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the center of the circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.
I have done what you wanted to do,
Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
Somehow it doesn’t exactly measure up to the best by the 2 named male
poets- incidentally both gay. Hmmm? I could rewrite this poem in a TOP, &
improve it immensely, by trimming it to 12-15 lines. Ironically the next poem
after this atrocity is the far superior Morning Song by Sylvia Plath, the
poetess SO obsessively emulates, then denies the emulation. Of course these
rather manifest observations on poets & poems never pass from the words of
PF, nor most of the critics of this book who- as you might guess- lavish
ridiculous praise upon it:
‘A
plethora of fin-de-siecle anthologies arrived last year and Forbes's is almost
certainly the best. From the front cover...to the rear index, which links poems
with the events of the century, it drips readability. This is not a book to
carry into a party or a pub - it will be stolen, as mine was, three times.’
-Euan Ferguson, The
Observer
[This is the
conscious attempt of a critic who knows not what to say, so tries to be
‘unique’, only after the obligatory ass-kiss that starts off the blurb.]
‘Marvellously readable...[Forbes] is an inspired identifier of good
poems, a widely read and original collector of works often ignored by more
conventional anthologists...it is an unforecastable flocking of wildly
dissimilar poems all ready and willing to testify at the end of the millennium
to how imaginatively poets have concerned themselves with the experiences they
have lived through.’ -Peter Porter, The
Sunday Times
[Um, does this not constitute a conflict of
interest? Wanna bet old PP never stated his work was in the anthology?]
‘An exhilarating helter skelter through..the age's finest creative
spirits... there's fun and wit in this marvelous book.’
-Lesley Duncan, The
Glasgow Herald
[This is a 39¢ Clearance Special blurb!]
‘A brilliantly chosen selection of poems that manage, in the editor's
words, to 'capture the flavour of the century with something like the tang of
newsreel and the zest of popular song'.’
-London
Review of Books
[This is the lazy blurb- cribbing from
the writer/editor’s own self-defense.]
‘Forbes is relentless in his avoidance of the old chestnuts, and
insistent on an international outlook...his selection of songs and poems from
the civil rights movement are unexpected, sharp and moving. It is wonderful to
realise, for example, how strong Lewis Allen's 'Strange Fruit', made famous by
singer Billie Holliday, is as a poem.’
-Kate Clanchy, TES
[Actually, the ‘poem’ is not strong at all- but
more on that in a minute. The reliance on chestnuts is ample, though, as I
previously mentioned.]
‘Indispensable, for both devoted and casual lovers.’
-Metro
[Indistinguishable, this blurb is from the 1000s of
others adorning poetry books.]
Let me return to this 1 really ridiculous blurb- the 1 stating the Billie
Holiday song is a poem. This is 1 of the most exasperating tendencies of PC
Elitists- the utter dumbing down of everything, so that no one can claim to be
better at anything than another person. This book is filled with whoops, chants,
song lyrics, & such which are clearly not poems, by any
stretch of the imagination, save that which would also anthologize Mother Goose
& Dr. Seuss alongside Eliot, Plath, etc. Of course, the song-poems are all
from icons of the 1960s: Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, &- of course- Bob
Dylan. In this regard the book consciously tries to be a bit like the many
wretched anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg, who would have 1 believe a war whoop
is a valid poem. Perhaps worse is that the whole book follows the troubling
1990s anthological pattern of having poems picked not on excellence, but on
subject matter- usually political. Whole dreary tomes have been devoted to
nuclear annihilation, women in peril, ecology, abortion rights, & rightist
religion. &- of course- all these anthologies have been suffused with the
idiotic notion that ‘art is truth’- therefore a bad poem on
Hiroshima, say, is worth more than some mere reportage on the same event. This
is both condescending, & a dangerous notion. Can 1, using politics alone,
sort out that the bad Hiroshima poem is worth more than a good little poem on
Elvis Presley? Of course not, but anthologies are used to form Pantheons- like
it or not. The anthologists implicitly KNOW this, even as they
disingenuously deny that that is their intention. Reading that bad Hiroshima
poem is an annealment- even if it tastes horrible. 1 of the few reviews that
noted these trends was published in the Sunday Herald (U.K.) on 5/9/99 by
a radio host, Brian Morton- http://www.sundayherald.com/print1658:
It is hard not to hear some echoes of Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum
Est behind the rhetoric of disarmament. This is testimony, of course, to
Owen's abiding power, but it is also symptomatic of a collective inability to
shift the paradigms of fear. Puffs of mustard gas on the Western front are not
comparable to the nuclear erasure of entire populations. Poetic rhetoric
sometimes diminishes even as it tries to humanise.
Another obvious failure of this approach is that anything deemed not
‘politically correct’- however excellent- is not even mentioned, much less
included. How about some of the pro-Soviet poetry from the 1920s & 1930s?
None of the American ‘Red’ poets nor their apparatchik Russian counterparts
make the cut. Again from the Herald piece:
Why nothing from Josephine Miles, one of the best public poets of the
century, who wrote with magnificent reserve and finely judged black comedy of
the "pure pot" that took out America's most ambiguous President? Miles
is certainly a finer poet than the Nobel Prize winning Wislawa Szymborska, and
isn't there just a hint of sentimental snobbery in Forbes's seeming assumption
that Eastern-Bloc-equals-authentic?
While Miles was an OK poet, the author is certainly correct in judging
her superior to the Nobel Prize’s version of Marissa Tomei. Unfortunately this
piece, more or less, tasks PF for not picking poets this writer would have
picked. That’s not why the anthology fails, though. It’s that the poems
& poets, overall, stink. There are no more than 15-20 good poems, most of
which, ala Wilfred Owens’ poem, you’ve grown accustomed to reading in
anthologies. An even better attack on this book- & lo, praise a Higher Power
that any contemporary book of poetry could generate not 1, but 2 essays
vilifying it. The 2nd piece can be found at http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/library/harris01.html,
called Editorial contra Editorial, by
Amanda Harris. In it she echoes many of the points I’ve made in this essay
& many others. Let me give you a few prescient snips with my addenda:
There
is an infiltration of banality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the
contemporary poetry anthology--that dumbed down effort to 'contextualise' verse
which perpetuates the notion that the reader is too stupid to appreciate it on
its own merits. In an ideal world, the poetry anthology would be a means of
teaching students of literature about the ebb and flow of literary movements,
and the way each movement is necessarily a continuation of every previous one.
Actually, an ideal
anthology would be to expose students to excellence in the art, period. But her
point has merit. She then rips PF’s book as being 1 of too many generic
anthologies of this sort. She then tasks him for including Brodsky in the 1st
section on the years 1900-1914, because he was not born yet, & PF’s
reasoning is that the Georgian poetry of that time was too 19th
Century. A better rip would be to ask why the section is about Omens- as if the
Chicken Little notion of history has not always been a trite & banal
presence in apocalyptic-minded poets through the eons? Still you gotta love it
that AH has the balls to rip off a criticism like this:
'Convergence of the Twain' (the poem Forbes includes to exemplify Hardy's
apparent archaism) is actually deeply critical of the self-satisfied bourgeoisie
(those bastions of traditional sentimentality) who were largely the victims of
the Titanic disaster. Hardy's phrase 'the Immanent Will', i.e., god or fate, is
undeniably satirical. One could argue that Hardy's language in this poem is
subversive in that it evokes staid traditionalism (both poetically and in
society) in order to criticise it. It's distressing to realise that the very
people who are supposed to be the arbiters of taste in contemporary poetry,
journal editors like Forbes, don't have a proper grasp of poetic chronology, or
an intimate knowledge of the poetry itself.
Outside of Cosmoetica it
is rare, indeed, to read anything approaching that last sentence. Or this:
Forbes also suggests that modernism, in the guise of Robert Frost,
'brought a new plain vernacular voice to poetry.' Here is a phrase for
undergraduates everywhere to parrot.
In the next paragraph she
rips PF’s conflation of the Modernists’ rebellion against over-simplisticness
with that against formalism. Yet, she suffers from a bit of overreaching when
she parrots the nonsense about Rudyard Kipling merely being accessible, or
paternalistic. Of course, anyone reading his Top 20 might conclude that, but
RK’s overall brilliance of technique, combined with a shrewd subversiveness
when read more deeply & closely, is something for another essay. She then
takes on PF’s boner over irony in Modern Poetry:
As such, it supposedly signals a writer's detachment from what is being
observed. Does it really though? Isn't it more likely that this type of
detachment is a rhetorical posture designed to elevate the status of the writer
because, this line of reasoning seems to suggest, if one is capable of sneering
then one must necessarily derive one's opinions from a position of complete, yet
incidental knowledge? If the knowledge is incidental, however, than so
is the ironic, or sarcastic put-down. Further, sarcasm, roughly translated from
the Greek, means 'to tear flesh'. The point is the verbal aggression, not the
subject of that aggression. So, the subject that generates such detachment can't
really be that important. It follows, then, that if the writer's verbal
aggression is more important than their subject, the writer is more concerned
with their own image than they are with their point of argument--hence the often
faulty logic displayed in 'ironic' editorial writing. Hence, also, the banal
themes.
I could argue with her
flow of logic & some of her conclusions, but not here. It’s enough to know
that AH even attempts to think things through, something PF has manifestly never
done. She then tackles the cult of banality- for lack of a better term-
before ripping on modern poets’ lack of engaging the unknown, if not
unknowable. Granted, this is a plague on ‘published’ poets mostly- since
theirs are the only 1s read by even a small audience- at least outside of poetry
circles & readings. Here she nails PF in a nutshell, although 1 could easily
apply its arrow to the whole of the PC Elitist mindset:
These days poets portray the knowable in conversational prose.
Otherwise, what most published poets have in common is a superficial ability
with obvious imagery. Paradoxically, it is innovators like Ezra Pound who we can
blame for the notion that modern poetry must only ever depict simple, clear, and
concise images (which poetry editors across the country still maintain as law
today). Pound put this view across in his Imagist manifesto, and then moved on.
Peter Forbes hasn't.
After a personalized
defense of Derek Walcott’s blandeur, presumably by people she thinks as
Forbesian, AH ends with this paragraph:
In conclusion, I am not arguing for cultural elitism, where literature,
particularly poetry, becomes the province of educated cliques, but rather, for a
greater effort, on the part of the writers, editors, and the readers. Of course
it is easier for us to comfortably swallow minute portrayals of the everyday
(i.e. the poeticisation of nose hairs), to cheer when the vernacular of the
mundane smiles benignly, or alternatively whines in a manner we can all identify
with. But we must all stretch ourselves and confront the territory of deeper
meaning, and wider flights of the imagination. If we don't, we run the risk of
never really being moved beyond self-absorption, and that's terribly dull.
Amen to that! & an apt description of the crap that kills PF’s
book, which is so trite & predictable that I can heartily recommend letting
it settle into memory as swiftly as possible. That said, it did reveal 1 gem of
a poem by noted Australian poetess Gwen Harwood:
Silk-whispering of
knife on stone,
due sacrifice, and
my meat came.
Caressing whispers,
then my own
choice among laps by
leaping flame.
What shape is space?
Space will put on
the shape of any cat.
Know this:
my servant Schr¨odinger
is gone
before me to prepare
a place.
So worship me, the
Chosen One
in the great
thought-experiment.
As in a grave I will
lie down
and wait for the
divine event.
The lid will close.
I will retire
from sight, curl up
and say Amen
to geiger counter,
amplifier,
and a cylinder of HCN.
When will the geiger
counter feel
decay, its pulse be
amplified
to a current that
removes the seal
from the cylinder of
cyanide?
Dead or alive? The
case defies
all questions. Let
the lid be locked.
Truth, from your
little beady eyes,
is hidden. I will
not be mocked.
Quantum mechanics
has no place
for what's there
without observation.
Classical physics
cannot trace
spontaneous
disintegration.
If the box holds a
living cat
no scientist on
earth can tell.
But I'll be waiting,
sleek and fat.
Verily, all will not
be well
if, to the peril of
your souls,
you think me gone.
Know that this house
is mine, that
kittens by mouse-holes
wait, who have never seen a mouse.
The humor & tight structure of this little known poem & poet (at
least Stateside) is enough to recommend PF’s otherwise dreadful book over the
absolute & irredeemable atrocity I will next discuss- the Gillan ladies’
horrific Unsettling America, An Anthology Of Contemporary Multicultural
Poetry. However, I recommend poetry lovers to merely check PF’s book out
of their local libraries & photocopy the GH poem- it’s on pages 454-455.
Unfortunately, no one has been as willing to rip in to this horrorshow
before now. So, let me draw the virgin blood. UA is probably even worse than the
aforementioned Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies- if only because they could
induce stupor &/or humor; useful for meditation & manic depression. This
book does neither. Then, why should it? Especially if you see what its
editor’s capabilities are. Here’s a stanza from 1 of Maria Gillan’s poems,
My Daughter at 14, Christmas Dance,
1981, found at http://english.binghamton.edu/faculty/mgillan/:
all too well. He kisses you goodnight,
his body moving toward yours, and yours
responding. I am frightened, guard my
tongue for fear my mother will pop out
We Never Stopped Crossing Borders
In Response to Executive Order
9066:
All Americans of Japanese
Descent
Must Report to Relocation Centers
I am a fourteen-year-old girl with
bad spelling
and a messy room. If it helps any, I will tell you
I have always felt funny using chopsticks
and my favorite food is hot dogs.
My best friend is a white girl named Denise--
we look at boys together. She sat in front of me
all through grade school because of our names:
O'Conner, Ozawa. I know the back of Denise's head very well.
I tell her she's going bald. She tells me I copy on tests.
We're best friends.
"A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"
my father would say. And he'd prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.
In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.
Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn't have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
"Shihab"--"shooting star"--
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, "When we die, we give it back?"
He said that's what a true Arab would say.
Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.
I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?
The whole
‘true Arab’ trope is tired; part of the whole ‘this part of my clan’
poesizing used to distinguish bad people from the group- Rightists, extremists
who disagree, etc. The poem is really chopped up prose- a Naomi Nye specialty-
fuck her shooting star middle name. As anyone who’s ever met NSN can
tell you- she is as white, suburban middle class as they come- a true bourgeois
princess! In fact, ironically, the best poem in the book (although it’s not
good at all) comes from what I presume to be a straight white male- William J.
Harris (why the pretentious initials crap?)- since there is no mention of any
personal info about him save that he’s a professor (sigh along with me). But.
the ‘poem’ is a ditty trying hard to be Williamsian or cummingseque:
Rib Sandwich
I wanted a rib sandwich
So I got into my car
and drove as fast as I could
to a little black restaurant-
bar
and walked in
and so doing
walked out
of
America
and didn't even
need a passport
This is a
mere ‘gimmick’ poem- a 1 noter, as well. & this is the best of a raft of
them from this terrible anthology. But, look at how poorly constructed it is.
What reason is there for ‘of’ having a line to itself? Much less ‘bar’?
These basic questions matter even less to the Gillan girls than it did to Peter
Forbes. If they did they would not include such crap like Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s I Defy You?
I defy you Wallace Stevens
to prove "the exquisite truth."
Your thirteen blackbirds rolled into one
continuous seamless world
bob in and out of my world
as do the black men and women
in Durban who skitter
on my tv screen. There is something else
than mere vision, mere imagination,
fat man of language. Something other
than words and quiet time and cold mind,
although you have emptied your pockets
and peeked over the horizon of our desires
and turned back preferring your onanistic treasures.
The young Cambodian whose father drowned
in monsoon ocean knows
his sister's raped eyes are truth;
the hungry and dead are his "exquisite truth,"
and you an American fiction.
Attacking a
great poet for rising above the petty nonsense of his times is not a good
technique (if not bizarre, although often done to embolden bad poets that they
are on par with the Master), especially considering the poverty of quality that
the attacking poet displays. Not to mention his lack of self-pity being linked
to masturbation, more properly displayed in SGL’s words. As a rebuke the poem
lacks sting & individuality. Also, WS was not a part of some hegemonic
system but a consummate outsider. As for words, why repeat the 1st 3 words? It seems bad poets feel a need to
choose titles from 1st lines, or repeat title in those 1st
lines- why? The Gillans have not a clue. Besides, art is truth, &
all; suffering is art, therefore suffering is truth- or am I
misreading?
As I said,
negative reviews are hard to find- the 2 for PF’s book are oddities. Here’s
the closest to a negative review for the Gillans’ mess- from old Jack Foley.
Yet, here’s its trope:
Unsettling
America is a powerful anthology full of good work. There are, by my count,
one hundred and forty-four poets in the book, and the range of ethnicity is
wide….A good anthology creates a sense of community among the people included,
and Unsettling America accomplishes this goal with considerable skill.
Unfortunately the skill JF notes is the aforementioned bad poem from Luis
J. Rodriguez. Quoth JF: ‘Crossing borders is precisely what Unsettling
America is about.’ Unfortunately that’s NOT what anthologies are
about. Then JF laces a criticism:
Unsettling America is 406 pages long and, as the jacket blurb
says, it "stretches across the boundaries of skin color, language,
ethnicity, and religion." Not once in its stretching, however, does it
encounter an Irish American—and this despite the fact that co-editor Jennifer
Gillan describes herself as "half Italian American and half Irish
American." (There are plenty of Italian Americans in the book.) I think the
omission of Irish Americans is a serious one in what is otherwise an
extraordinarily fine and energetic book….Unsettling America is open to many
ethnicities, but: No Irish Need Apply. Where have we heard that before?
