I utterly despise this argument. It's a bad poem, but at least they are talking about POETRY, which is so marginalized that we should be desperate for any crumbs of attention, presumably.
What if we took that attitude toward music? A musician as bad a musician as she is a bad poet would be sent back to woodshed some more.
Why is the praise for bad poetry good for poetry? It is because poetry has the lowest barrier for entrance, everyone is a poet. So identity politics can be all you care about any more. That is the sum total of the art form. Imagine if a white man wrote a poem like that, with those kinds of doggerel techniques. Then is would be seen as a prime instance of white male mediocrity.
So praise of bad poetry is an instance of contempt for poetry, not of defense for it.
5 comments:
My taste in poetry is wrong.
This person I have translated, and translate, I don't like their work. At all. But others really do, I've read with them twice now and people swoon and talk about how great they are.
That's tough on you, I'm sure. Did you hear Clatyon Eshleman has died?
Christ, no. Did you know him?
He complained once to me about a positive review I wrote of a collection of his translations. I didn't know him personally, and I forget exactly what the bone of contention was. I think I wasn't properly admiring of one particular thing in the book.
I have heard he was VERY disappointing in person, and I always found his writing lachrymose and grandiose. "I was in Japan trying to translate Vallejo without speaking Spanish, and it was so hard, and I found myself haunted by phantoms of Mexican death dogs," etc. I am, however, grateful for his work
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