Further thoughts on blogs, nets, connections:
Blogs can help encourage the habit of seeing the world of discourse as a conversation rather than an avalanche of information. And being prepared to respond means your critical thinking hat is never off. That's information literacy. Always with a question, always engaged, never on autopilot. That, I think, is the goal of a university education, regardless of field.
-- this, from ongoing thoughts by a subversive librarian, highlights for me the kind of connection that can be made in a world of discourse that encompasses the responses of literate folk to the larger world.
The excerpt above captures so insightfully the attractions of setting down in blog form (still the word itself annoys -- oh for a lovelier neologism from our extensive word-hoard) some of the links made through individual seeing and being in and listening to the world. This morning, for example, in the phase known as "waking up", which runs the gamut from initial shuffling through coffee-making to the proper focusing of sight on text, I encountered the current issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, a periodical so rich in enduring content and excellent writing that I pray for the continued good health of its editor (since 1973), Herbert Leibowitz.
There is an interview of Leibowitz (by Christopher Bakken) on Contemporary Poetry Review (in the CPR Archive, alas only available through subscription, which seemed to me worth it for the wealth of coverage therein) in which the fastidious editor comments: "At its best the art of reviewing conducts a civilized and engaging conversation with the poet and with readers who are curious about how poems are put together, why some succeed and others fail. Above all, reviewing demands the exercise of informed judgment and that requires knowledge, analytical power, style, fairness, not short sound bytes or pompous pronouncements."
Make no mistake: the "conversational" tenor of a blog can not possibly aspire to the depth and informed analysis of the kind found in Parnassus. But within the confines of a blog connections can be made to writings of such quality. I accordingly ingested with my caffeine a brief (by Parnassus tradition, at barely 10 pages) yet incisive consideration of Harold Bloom as a literary critic. "Power Games", by poet Adam Kirsch, is a review of the hefty anthology edited by Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost (2004; HarperCollins). In the sense of "reviewing" as propounded by Leibowitz, Kirsch's essay is exemplary and indeed goes beyond the confines of review to look at the limitations of Bloom's poetry criticism. Kirsch's remarks are supported by numerous examples of Bloom's own "anxiety of influence" and are delivered with both candour and respect. In the spirit of Randall Jarrell, Kirsch in this fine review manages to give readers a glance through "the telescope through which the children see the stars" -- a phrase of Jarrell's that he quotes out of respect for the late (and much revered by me) poet and critic. Jarrell's "telescope" metaphor might seem a shade romantic to our universe-jaded eyes these days, but it nonetheless captures the capacity of a well-written review essay to engage the reader and take her beyond the one given text to venture further. The kind of "judgment" exercised in this case is of the kind that opens discussion and encourages further exploration.
And so I went to my shelves, and pulled down Jarrell's Poetry and the Age, and found in "A Verse Chronicle", this relevant passage:
"This is so much the age of anthologies that it is surprising that poets still waste their time on books of verse, instead of writing anthologies in the first place. If you are about to print a book of poems, don't: make up a few names and biographical sketches with which to punctuate your manuscript, change its title to Poems of Democracy, and you will find yourself transformed from an old pumpkin, always in the red, to a shiny black new coach. For the average reader knows poetry mainly from anthologies, just as he knows philosophy mainly from histories of philosophy or textbooks: the Complete Someone -- hundreds or thousands of small-type, double-column pages of poetry, without one informing repentant sentence of ordinary prose -- evokes from him a start of that savage and unreasoning timidity, that horror vacui, with which he stares at the lemmas and corollaries of Spinoza's Ethics. Those cultural entrepreneurs, the anthologists, have become figures of melancholy and deciding importance for the average reader of poetry, a man of great scope and little grasp, who still knows what he likes -- in the anthologies."
It's not for me to temper Jarrell's own melancholy with regard to "the average reader of poetry" -- possibly an even more endangered type than ever. Kirsch makes it clear that Bloom's anthology errs on the side of prose in the presentation of many of the poets included even to the extent of commending several poets without actually including their work. "Power Games" provides a strong argument that, in accord with Jarrell's own comment: "Anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism." In the case of Bloom's anthology, however, I get a keen sense that the result is less than "ideal."
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