Tony's got some interesting things to say re Ron on Ashbery.
The thing I wonder is would Dave Smith be able to comment on Ron's work at all. I rather suspect Ron cld comment, with some context, on Dave Smith. That's, perhaps, part of Ron's dismissal of that list of Medal for the Arts recipients. The tradition Ron is pushing, radical modernist comme Stein, Zukofsky - New American - Language etc is used to being overlooked in the awards/major review arena. I don't disagree with Tony that there's new terrain to be explored but I'm not sure championing Ashbery, against, for example Pinsky, could do anything but further that exploration.
All that said, I've never read Robert Penn Warren. & I'm ok with that.
But, seriously, is working with awareness in a tradition inherently an oedipal matter? Pollock, to go to another context, seemed to think so. But let's go to jazz, how about Lacy's relation to Monk? It seems to me possible to work in a furthering/celebratory manner that's highly conscious of a/the tradition(s).
Thursday, December 14, 2006
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3 comments:
glad you're ok with that. I feel better.
I've read more Pinsky than Warren, but the Warren I've read didn't do that much for me. On my limited evidence I'd say he's a better prose writer than poet. With Pinsky, no matter how much of it you read, you never come across anything worth remembering, or come up with one solid thing that's he actually saying.
Something else occurs to me that's interesting about Rod's question. When I was at Buffalo in the early 90s, very few people were willing to admit that poetic traditions had anything oedipal about them at all. I guess the walls have crumbled on that one if we're now at the point that the oedipal theory has become such a cliche that we have to argue for the existence of non-oedipal elements in the development of traditions.
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