Heroes

I don't feel defensive about potential weak aspects of my poetic and critical heroes. I can see how Barthes can feel brittle and dated, how Creeley has dull moments. To feel defensive would be to be have too much as stake in the identification, almost an "attachment" in the Buddhist sense.  I probably wouldn't get up in arms today about Simic's uncomprehending review of Creeley in the NYRB.  I would still disagree with him (and I do) and think of him as an idiot, but it wouldn't let it get to me any more.

Webern is not one of my heroes, because I simply haven't devoted much attention to him, but when a student in class responded very negatively to something I played by Webern, I felt a bit miffed. Not because of my non-existent attachment to Webern, but because it just seemed pointless. A reaction that negative is also evidence of an "attachment"--to one's own sense of taste and comfort. So, too, my resistance to Mary Oliver and Billy Collins is ego-driven, in a sense. That people like their poetry often seems intolerable to me, as though something were at stake for me personally. It is quite absurd, because the middle-brow poetry of the NPR-listening crowd has to like that, logically. Someone's work had to fit that sensibility the way theirs does.