A friend says he hates Wallace Stevens and Edgar Alan Poe. He reveals this in front of a crowd which has come to hear him read his poems. “In America they don’t like you if you say that,” he adds, and I think just how many things they really hate you for in this monolithic shopping mall of a nation, and of what a cowardly country it is. Wallace Stevens would be low on my list of miscreant writers but let’s be clear, he was a large pink man with a law degree and how many of those do we love? Oh I think we are schooled to love them and that’s an old story. I can’t stand T.S. Eliot and I really hate Ezra Pound both of whom were moral weaklings and whose poems were shoved down the throats of college students for decades.
Oscar Wilde once said there were two ways to hate poetry. One was to hate poetry, the other was to read Pope. Everyone can make his or her own list. The problem with Stevens and Poe is of course a matter of their respective metaphysics–each cultivated his own private cabalistic worship of death, a tautology that, when read against the bloody backdrop of American history, can appear like a critique but is really not much more than a reconfiguration of despair.
That last phrase is the reason I read very little contemporary fiction by American writers. I can’t stand short stories about divorces and quotidian disappointment, the measly plots tricked out with jazzy lingo. And that is pretty much what’s on the menu. There’s plenty if sadness to go around but not much bravery.
So who is brave? Pablo Neruda; Tomas Transtromer; Ben Okri; Alice Munro; Ruth Stone; Common; Bob Marley; Naguib Mahfouz; Alex Laguma; Abena Busia; Jim Harrison; Paul Eluard; Walt Whitman; Oscar Wilde; Mark Doty; Langston Hughes; Lou Reed; Wole Soyinka; Mahmoud Darwish; Nazim Hikmet; Tayeb Salih; Salman Rushdie; Colin Channer; Sam Hamill; Nancy Mairs; Yannis Ritsos, O it’s a long list, I could type all day…
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Planet of the Blind 