Rich & Eshleman & Mompou

Here's a really readable review of Adrienne Rich's career. I recently, lost in jstor land, started reading everything M. Perloff had written that hadn't got into her books. I found a long review of the "corn porn lyric" from the 1970s. At the end of a 40 page omnibus review she saves Rich from the bonfire... one of the only poets that could write an erotic lyric without corniness at that time. Stylistically, Rich is indebted to Lowell, whom Perloff had studied in her second book, The Poetic Art of RL. I'm not a big fan of Rich overall, but her work stands up better than a lot of things.

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The best known translator of Vallejo, CE, responds to Perloff's skewering of his book in the "corn porn" essay, trying to put her down as a mere critic. Perloff comes back brilliantly, saying, yes, poets rank higher than critics, but what makes your work poetry in the first place?

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A found an interview with Mompou on youtube. It's in Spanish with no subtitles. Anyway, he talks about not liking Beethoven.  He said that every composer he knew had strong and irrational dislikes of great composers, and that that was the composer's privilege, in a way. He wasn't saying other people had to share his view, just that Beethoven was the opposite of his own aesthetic. I think I would distrust a creator who liked everything equally or who didn't have some animus against some musical path thought to be the "wrong one." Mompou says that his music is the least "composed" of anyone's.  He doesn't like to call himself a composer because his music is "la menos compuesta."