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Unread 03-31-2012, 01:24 AM
David Mason David Mason is offline
Honorary Poet Lariat
 
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Colorado
Posts: 1,444
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Christopher, or Chrisso, or whatever this lovely poetic universe decides to call you: I really like your mind, I must say. I like the way you have framed this particular issue. I think Eavan Boland was on the same track in her personal/critical book about the place of women poets in Ireland. It's just fundamentally true that the canon needed a kick in the ass. Yet it's also true that a lot of shoddy writing has been done (even on occasion by Rich) and excused on the grounds that the canon needed that kick in the ass.

What an interesting aesthetic dilemma. When is inclusiveness vitalizing, and when is it enervating? I don't think we will ever come up with generalizations that will help us here, but it remains a very important realm of critical thinking. I don't think the absolutists on either side can quite carry the day.

When I co-edited a poetry textbook, I convinced my co-editor that Rich needed a place in the book, and I really did not mean as a polemicist. I meant as a writer at the level of strong human experience: "Twenty-One Love Poems," "Diving Into the Wreck," etc.

I've just reviewed the new compendium of Larkin (more about that on April 14th when the review is out), and it is fascinating how this most fastidious of poets can be placed next to a much less fastidious poet like Rich, when you gather his uncollected work next to what she chose to publish. Both wrote exquisite things, and each would have despised the other's politics, and both wrote rather large amounts of stuff that will probably not matter in the great scheme of things...

So Larkin matters because of his best poems. Rich matters because of her best poems, and also because of her personal courage and the way she cleared a space for other writers, some of whom are not very good. She matters partly because of her time and her reaction to her time.

It's a blurry picture, isn't it? Still, I think some of her poems will be moving when no one can quite recall their contexts. I feel the same way about her opposite number, Larkin. The dross will be burned away.
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