At the Harold Washington Library, Chicago. 1.30.06
The reverence for poetry has been displaced by the love of rock/hip hop song lyrics.
70s humanities teachers were untouched by the true 60s spirit. Those with the 60s spirit either never made to graduate school, or dropped out.
Act of reading poem forces you to engage with the history of words.
Dickenson's bible was the dictionary. Plath's was the thesaurus. These help you find shades of meaning. Advice to play with this and other big books, to enter the quirky history of words. The dictionary is a parallel to archeology.
Library is a temple, ancestry in Alexandria.
In recent poetry there is a lack of focus on individual words. there is slack, flaccid speech without a discernible style of writing.
The British silently applaud the witty gestures of word.
She is in love with English. Multiple strands of meaning, from its Anglo-Saxon, Norman urbanity, even Greco-Roman heritage.
Break, Blow, Burn is primarily for those people who haven't a poem since their first year of college.
There is a complacent, coterie mentality of modern poets. There is a pretentious verbosity.
Yeats is the standard of modern poetry.
There is an incestuous, insular world of poetry today. So small that people don't criticize others out of fear of injury.
Here choice with this book is not popular nor commercial, though it has become a bestseller.
She thinks audiences have hunger for something of substance, in lieu of media flash, flash, flash.
She is heavily influenced by the Beat poetry school, where poets have a strong personal voice.
Authors live forever! (cf. death of the author) Part of artistry is developing a strong personal voice.
She sought poems one can return to, that create a legacy, that can sustain you. There is a spiritual center in poetry. Poetry is spiritual, not moral, in that art allows us to see more clearly. Art sharpens perception.
Poetry has a strong theatrical element.
She seeks the voices of real people. She listens to AM radio (politics, sports). This is how English is actually being used.
She found some very obscure poems for inclusion (Kraut, Wachtel).
Modern poems, with few exceptions, aren't talking about the proliferation of media today. How have artists processed media? Shocked at lack of understanding of media by modern poets.
The current media age requires a certain surreal humor.
Poems are objects. Not tissues of subjectivity. Like a painting on a wall. She wants there to be white space around the poem. Each poem gets its own respectful space in her book.
The layout of great poetry anthologies (Norton, et al) cram poems together too closely, killing the interest in poems. This is not an ideal way to teach poetry, to encourage a lifelong love.
Poem should be allowed to float and hover on page. As if a 'voice coming from the void'. This gives visual refreshment.
Large poetry texts are extortion and embezzelment. Poetry belongs in small, cheap books.
She has been very influenced by French culture, especially French film. Poststructuralism is the country's worst export.
A gay college friend showed her the O'Hara poem (A Mexican Guitar) and she remembered "plotz" but forgot the poem. Only to find it later, remembering that word. O'Hara's is a peotry of voluminous allusion, reference.
Ezra Pound -- poetry is adolescent showiness. Great editor, mentor for others. His poetry is paralyzed by self-consciousness.
Auden -- couldn't endorse a single poem of his.
Too many contemporary poems start with a great idea that goes nowhere. Require editing, condensing.
There is an acid bitterness in our culture, in our artists. We cannot endorse public figures, everyone is cut down. Thus we are affectless about government. There has been a slow diminution of exposure to political history.
In the younger generation, there is collegiality but too little (useful) hubris. This will negatively effect the artists. We need strong, even radical voices. These must be encouraged.
Artists suffer from a thin and strident attitude towards politics.
The media fosters a clubhouse mentality about political discourse. Language is polluted by overuse. Political TV talk shows just repeat the same stuff.
In reading poetry, one can find the kind of language that lasts. Even in Shakespeare, there is language with immediacy.
Poetry reading is a meditative exercise that encourages focusing. The intellect unites with the senses. Best to let the poem act upon you.
Beat poets were engaged physically, even with chanting and dancing. This was inspired by be-bop.
Poems is physical and organic. Not effete. Not like moving pawns on a chessboard.
McLuhan was comfortable and fluent with both new media and lyric poetry. Strong part of North American philosophical tradition. Gone for many years, then reappeared with the emergence of Wired magazine. Predicted so much.
MFA students often are missing and postponing the experience of life. This experience should be the subject of their artwork. Need to live normal life, as a means for discovery of oneself as an agent in the world. Better to use the tuition money to travel. Take regular jobs, meet regular people.
Too many modern young writers exxaggerate every possible trauma in their life.
They self-cannibalize in their writing, as a form of exhibitionism. Too much victimization. Unlike in the UK, where it is still inappropriate to reveal too much about one's private lives. Here, too much searching for the secret subject of yourself.
Plath's "Daddy". Fuses sex and politics, major poem, yet it exhausted the style that it created. No one has been able to produce a poem at its level.
New, original art won't come from writing programs. Rather, Americans who leave then return to America with a new cosmopolitanism, a new sophistication, a new drenching in experience to recharge the American arts.
On teaching arts to young children. The love alliteration, nonsensical, repetitive rhymes. Nursery rhymes are odd, weird strories often with historical meaning.
Best to expose children to great art (developmentally appropriate). This is customary in Europe. Here, art classes are too focused on art production (here's paper and watercolors, now create). Must develop habit of exposure to great works and art history.
Teachers are "custodians of culture". Culture needs to be preserved through the agents of teachers.
She has been charting the lack of understanding in students to allusions to the Bible. A majority of her current students don't recognize "Moses". It is an enormous work of art, can sustain for a lifetime. Great archtypal stories.
Education should be centered on the history of religions (including the great texts of each).
Nothing can replace direct contact with primary texts.
Advice to artists. Search history for precedents that resonate with you. Search history books for figures you like, male or female. Look backward for models. You can find a vision, then purpose, then program for your career.
Cites Emily Dickenson, Mary McCarthy and Dorothy Parker as very influential of her.
Dickenson is her role model. See the Johnson edition of her collected poems. Masterful use of syncopated rhythms, prefiguring jazz.
Women, after childbirth, tende to lose ambition. She thinks pregnancy changes a woman's chemical composition. Men can preserve rampant egotism longer. Women with children begin to care about the next generation. To them, unfettered ego is sterile, and solitary artist is seen as too neurotic. How many women really want to live like that?
She could have never written Sexual Personae if she was a mother. If she was, and still did write the book, she should have been put in jail due to child neglect.
She is now an adopted parent; her partner had a baby, She sees motherhood from the inside, and is very sympathetic with women with children who still make artwork.
On poetry slams. These are important performance art. Poetry ought go beyond the moment. Poets ought ask, "what is my legacy?" Slam poetry can vanish after the moment of expression. Does the poet want a place in history?
Performance art is generally based in shock. By nature, cannot sustain beyond the first performance.
Poetry is an ongoing process. It is part of a Mighty River. It needs revival, continuity.
On the West. It is not clear that the West will survive the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism.
The West is not sure of what it is.
Radical Islam sees the West as just media, sex, violence, and soulless.
It seems like the Roman empire. Intensity of passion is exactly what overthrows empires. (cf Christianity).
It used to be that touring the ruins of the Roman empire was an important exercise for all in Europe. A contemplative exercise, considering the immensity of what once was.
She believes in an "enlightened capitalism" that is more than just economic darwinism.
Our current economic and social systems are too dependent upon technology, and too complex. Shutting down the electrical grid would paralyze us. If there was another big terrorist attack in the monts after 9/11, this country might have shut down from the fears in the populace.
Multiculturalism must transcend the ideas the everything in America is bad, everything non-American is good. It is impossible for that attitude to condemn radical Islam.
She believes there will be a large clash of civilizations.
Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was about wire-tapping.
The solution to wiretapping is not easy, given that terrorist cells can use cellphones. The security of this country is absolutely vital.
More exposure to history is required at every level. Political thought requires the long view, 100, 200 years, not merely the moment, the instant need.
