The New York Times review of Maggie Dietz’s “Perennial Fall” was nothing short of magnanimous. David Kirby, the reviewer, grants plenty of credit where it’s due, but took a few disturbing turns that beg a brief discussion. When referencing Deitz’s dream poem “Three Dog Night”, Kirby juxtaposes his appreciation of the work with the
conventionally critical aversion to dreams and visions. This seems to reflect poorly not on Kirby but on the poetic community as a whole. If the current trend in poetry is to steer clear of all things surreal and intangible in an effort to make it more accessible, then I may be doomed to uncovering more birdhouses than birds. The stranger, the better. I live everyday looking through my own two eyes and, although I admit a tree isn’t a tree isn’t a tree, I know that her tree and his tree and my tree all boil down to THE Tree. I want something bizarre and foreign and unobtainable, like the “dark man / with joints of light brandishing the moon like a hatchet” Dietz sketches from one of her visions. This is a beautiful bird.
Perhaps more disturbing is Kirby’s completely unfounded (and unnecessary) paragraph in which he tries to equate Dietz’s poetic message to global warming. Climate change and carbon emissions have nothing to do with her poetry and Kirby knows it, as evidenced by the complete lack of specific references or citations in the paragraph. It didn’t ruin the review, but it kept me distracted throughout the following couple paragraphs. The shameless Gore plug ate away at my skull for a few moments, necessitating the rereading of some sentences. Or maybe the rising temperatures have begun to fry my brains. Save the shoddy science for your mainstream publications, Kirby.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/books/review/20dietz.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Todd my e-mail is raschwar@eagle.fgcu.edu--you can send me something there, and of course it, like all "user experiences," will be kept anonymous. Sorry for posting this on your blog, I wasn't sure how else to contact you!
I agree with you when you say "the stranger, the better." When I started to read American poetry or poems translated into American, I found what I call a sort of "lack of ingenuousness." That is, the American-English language, obsessed by concrete language, seems to dislike and consider "strange" whatever is left out of the realm of concreteness. In school, people are taught to think "concrete" is better. And it is better, but not always.
Perhaps, you remember that in October I went to the Writers Conference in Sanibel. For the event, I submitted some poems of mine to receive feedbacks from someone in the poetry’s field. Well, when my lines were "fleeing" from the “concrete,” this person didn't understand their meaning. She asked me what I wanted to say. For God's sake, woman, don't ask me what I wanted to say! Poetry is not as a theorem that must be addressed. Whatever you understand the "meaning" or not, you can appreciate the sound of the words in a line, the way they look on the page, the way you feel listening to the meter...
In that situation, she clearly told me that I should have written in a more American language, I should have been more concrete, in other words, I should have been more understandable. To tell you the truth, I did not write a "squeezed line" since then and, for the sake of clarity, I am stretching my verses more than I did before. It may be a trap because, sometime, I feel I am not free anymore, I am not myself anymore.
If you want to enjoy "dangling" lines that apparently don't say anything but are just words, I suggest you to read some French poet (Mallarme, Baudelaire), and some Italian poet (Ungaretti, my loved one, among the others). All this to dig up the human heart.
See, it seems to me that Americans dislike words like "heart," "soul," "spirit," and in poetry they need to "show" instead of "telling." However, this is a lack of experience and culture in the sense that your cultural tradition is only a couple century old, and the way you experience art is different from the way Europeans may experience it.
I should have a translation of some poems of my dear Giuseppe Ungaretti. I'll bring it to you.
Boo to those criticizers of the surreal; to sacrifice art for accessibility is the worst of crimes.
Perhaps it is as the old saying goes: We hate what we don't understand.
Maybe for once people should marvel and use their imaginations to see that strange, dreamlike bird, and try, try to understand, rather than shooting it down mid-flight.
Post a Comment