Thursday, September 18, 2008

How Many Laureates Can Dance On The Head Of A Pinsky? (Monday Love)

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Robert Pinsky
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"Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe"

--John Lennon


How many laureates can dance on the head of a Pinsky?

Modernists have blocked up the Hall.

Search every Engle, try every Bell, there's no Justice at Iowa.

And what Haas Stanford got? The Winters of our discontent.

The Brooks (Cleanth and Van) are frozen, the public's deserted,

Yet the blurbs go Trilling on, the Criterion's applied to a Dial in the costume of an Egoist.

Cubism at the court of James. Who's Kenner's son?

Raise your Stein to Whitman's mothers and Ruskin's stones.

Yankee traitor went to London. Harvard, Oxford, God, Lord.

Make it new, critics! College for poets, poets for college.

Re-Joyce and be naughty. Unreadable, banned, famous.

Poems are taken Ransom; Shelley sings no Moore.

The Southern sublime at Vanderbilt.

Sir Bishop Lowell reminds you, Williams, not Will. The rest is Donne.

How many rabbits in the Warren? Shine, golden dawn.

What's your favorite cracker, Tate or Graham?

Shun the Rhooshuns, frigidly pretend authority in a Romance tongue.

You're in my Faber. The ode to Auden damns the Berry to Ash.

Where shall I put these poems, now? The Bloom's off the Rosenthal.

Eliot writes like an old hag.

Ezra Pound is a douchebag.

Notes:

1.Pinksy, 2.Haas, 3.Wendell Berry, 4.Donald Justice all students of 5.Yvor Winters (Stanford U.) New Critic and notorious Romantics & Edgar Poe-hater.

6.Paul Engle, studied at Oxford like all the New Critics, began Iowa Worskshop
7.Cleanth Brooks, New Critic, friend of Pound, 8. Van Wyck Brooks, New England renaissance scholar, Harvard critic, won Dial Prize in the 20s when Moore, Pound, Williams, Eliot, Cummings, Burke given that honor.

9.Marvin Bell and Donald Justice taught at Iowa Workshop for years, Justice mentored 10.Jorie Graham. 11.Lionell Trilling, liberal/conservative bore, 12.James-Henry James, praised by 13. Ezra Pound, William James, Emerson's godson, taught Santayana at Harvard who taught Eliot. 14. Hugh Kenner, attacked Millay, praised Pound, 15.Gertrude Stein also taught by Santayana at Harvard,

16. Whitman, like almost all American writers, mostly ignored by New Critics, but child of Emerson and pre-Raphaelites, 17. Ruskin, author of 'Stones of Venice,' quirky, pro-Gothic critic, supported pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 18. James Joyce, Irish writer, published by Pound, 19. John Crowe Ransom, Southern Agrarian, New Critic, led professionalization of new writing which invaded Academy as crackpot Modernists/New Critics failed to get a hearing with the actual public,

20. Shelley, Romantic poet, attacked, together with many great writers, including Milton, Shakespeare, Poe, et al, by 21. T.S. Eliot, New Critics, Modernists, 22. Marianne Moore, editor of Dial, 1925-9 one of the few women tolerated by the Modernist 'revolution,' 23. Elizabeth Bishop, poet, friend of Robert Lowell, championed by pro-Pound and pro-WC Williams

24. M.L. Rosenthal, Lowell also studied with Ransom at Kenyon college after Harvard, 25. Will refers to Shakespeare, who was dismissed by Pound, 26. Donne championed by TS Eliot, who also damned many great writers as well, 27. Robert Penn Warren, part of Vanderbilt, Rhodes Scholar, Southern Agrarian clique, wrote textbook "Understanding Poetry" with Cleanth Brooks, golden dawn, occult society of W.B. Yeats, Pound married daughter of Yeats' dearest woman friend

28. Allen Tate, poet, Southern Agrarian, and New Critic who attacked professors of literary history, softening up the Academy for its eventual take-over, Jorie Graham, Foet, 'the Rhooshuns' was a term Pound used in his rant, "How To Read," to dismiss all Russian literature; Pound would later broadcast for the Axis powers in World War Two, Faber was Eliot's publisher,

29. Auden, poet annointed by Eliot, later Auden annoints 30. Ashbery, 31. Ash, poet, anthologized a great deal with Ashbery in early years of Best American Poetry. 32. Harold Bloom, critic, and Poe-hater, repeating Poe attacks by Winters, Henry James, Eliot, Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence, Yeats, Joseph Wood Krutch, Pound, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others.

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Robert Pinsky - "Samurai Song" (Delivered in a Lift)



VeritasEtSeveritas
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