Rick,
Your take on Kramer is just fascinating. Thanks for writing it.

I love much of the poetry published in the NC, and am especially fond of the April issue on that score!

Dave

I thought the big news here was Cally named on the cover. That ain't hay, Sunshine.

Rick,

I don't know much about him, but I was interested in this, from his obit in the NYT, the paper where he worked for years:

"He plunged into acrimonious debate on cultural politics, staking out a conservative position in attacks on the artists and programs financed by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and revisiting the political debates of the McCarthy era and the 1960s."

Maybe he wanted to go back to 1955, his formative times? But why? What would he resurrect? Then there's this:

"On the one side was postmodernism, “a revolt against the basic traditions of Western civilization.” On the other, Modernism, whose ideals he characterized as “the discipline of truthfulness, the rigor of honesty.”

I always get suspicious when people start talking about traditions and upholding standards, about truth and honesty. He says he was against "philistines," and yet those are precisely the tools and terms those same "philistines" love to employ. Reading that, I couldn't help but wonder what he would have said about the moderns had he been around when the Moderns were flourishing?

It's not fair to cite modern poets in this case, but I can't imagine him liking Pound or Eliot when their work first appeared. Were Braque and Picasso upholding 'standards' and 'tradition?' Would he have seen 'rigorous honesty' in Kandinsky, or 'the discipline of truthfulness' in Franz Marc?

If we apply the tenets of the Wolfe piece you cited, if we actually test his statements carefully, I find myself at a loss for why people admired this writer. Is it simply a case of the very kind of cultural and political adherence he argued against, but only when he disagreed about the cultural tenets or the politics? You seem to be arguing we should see a work of art *as* a work of art, and that's an honorable position. But it also seems to go against everything I've read about his own statements.

Best,

Bill

Tradition, standards, truth, and honesty are all I want to talk about when it comes to art, Bill. And while you may, in fact, have read too much, I suggest reading Wolfe's The Painted Word, if you haven't already. That opening stretch lets you know what you get--a look at how the latter half of the twentieth centry turned art into the words on the plaque next to the frame (thanks to the critics and gallery owners who literally invented Jackson Pollock with theory). It's a brilliant little book illustrated by Wolfe himself!

See Harris' great film on Jackson Pollock.
Especially if you are an alcoholic.