Thriller

 The Lorca and real life book refers to Bodas de sangre as a "thriller." Seriously?  

Victorian Poetics

 When I was coming of age, ca. 1975, the poets looming largest were Olson, Auden, Lowell, Plath, etc... Ashbery if you leaned in that direction.  But now we are in 2022, unbelievably, and are 100 years past the modernists. Let's think of early 20s publications like Ulysses, Harmonium, Spring and All, Tulips and Chimneys. Or Lorca's Poema del cante jondo, written 100 years ago. To the Lighthouse is 1927.  

So in the 1920s, people were not debating Victorian poetics, worrying about Longfellow and Tennyson. My relation to the current moment is like that of a Victorian to a modernist. 

Dumber

 The book, Lorca, basado en los hechos reales has arrived. It's almost dumber than I expected. He goes on an on about a worker's strike that inspired "Romance de la guardia civil española," but the poem never mentions any strike at all. It is simply assumed that the repression of this strike must have inspired the poem. It is not just a lack of sensitivity or capability for reading literature, but almost an active hostility to fictionality. There is absolutely no insight into any text, and not even an effort in this direction.   

So I guess Lorca "dressed up" or adorned real life, as though making real life into literature were simply a cosmetic process. I keep coming back to Aristotle and the idea that if you versify Herodotus, it is still history, not poetry. 

Then the next day...

 The next day the defender of Olson's honor has another post where he apologizes for using the word "lackey" in an argument with someone. Then people can praise him for his humility in admitting to making a mistake. Really, if you want to call someone a lackey, go ahead. It's kind of stupid to do it, and then to make a big deal of apologizing for it as well.  

Olson

 Olson is not a "santo de mi devoción." I find "projective verse" rather derivative and pretentious. I also don't like that solemn tone and sense of self-importance. It is a luxury I have, since I'm in Spanish, not to have to deal with poets who don't appeal to me.  

That being said, many people I respect revere him. That is fine. 

But I wonder if it is a bit of a cult. There is extreme defensiveness around any critique of him, with open letters and stern denunciations. From my perspective now, I think of him as being important in mid-to-late 20th century circles, peaking about 40 years ago, but not as culturally central now to American poetics. Maybe this group of people cannot abide his (relative) eclipse? Demographically, I am talking about white men (but not only white) my age and older.  There was a "gruppo" which formed to defend him, including Baraka. I haven't seen any women jump in to defend him, nor people younger than me. So it is people who fell under his sway when they were young and he was at the height of his prestige.  

Really, it's fine for an influential figure to recede at times. It happens all the time. This does not mean his influence was for naught, but simply that his moment was in the past. I mean, even the language poets are in their 70s now.  They don't hold excitement for me, even those I like the best. 

O'Hara and Koch stand up better, but maybe because I always liked them more. I'm in that demographic too so I cannot cling to hard to my older opinions.    

The attack on Yépez ends with this weird paragraph, like seriously, WTF:   

"In a final historical irony, if you do a little bit of genealogical digging, you’ll discover that the Yépez name was granted to the family in 1492. That was one of the Occxidant’s/Christendom’s very big years. The name was a gift bestowed on them by a grateful King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella on the triumphant Christian return to Spain after 300 years of exile. It came with the village of the same name which was the site where the newly minted Yépez family had defended Christendom and the Occ(x)ident and helped drive the Moors out of Iberia and back into the benighted Orient from which they had crawled. Maybe that’s why he is so fascinated with Oxident."

There wasn't a triumphant return to Spain by the Christians in 1492. There wasn't 300 years of exile. Who exactly awash in exile? And attacking Yépez for his last name?

Yépez

 Now he is stoking meaningless resentment against Heriberto Yépez, for a book written about Olson a relatively long time ago, El imperio de la neomemoria.  I didn't know we had to defend Olson against all comers. Even if you don't like what Yépez says, it is not particularly relevant now.