Quote:
Originally posted by Jennifer Reeser:
The poet’s job is to find a name for everything; to be a fearless finder of the names of things...
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I think the act of naming is a very political act--particularly if the thing named is outside of the dominant/mainstream consciousness--and so I see no contradiction between the Kenyon quote and the non-lyric modes of poetry.
I'm currently not a particularly huge fan of either Kenyon or Pastan; there was a time I was quite taken by Pastan's
Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems and felt it should have won the National Book Award over Gerald Stern's
This Time: New and Selected Poems. (I know, this is debatable, but right now it doesn't really matter to me the way it did then.) But very few of the poems from that book resonate with me anymore. And I'm generally not taken with her recent work, with the possible exception of one that just came out in
Paris Review.
In contrast, "Otherwise," the title poem of Kenyon's posthumous selected poems volume, strikes me as one of the most moving poems I've ever encountered. "Pharoah" is also quite striking. [So, Mike, your comparison between the two was interesting, because I would have expected the opposite conclusion. But it doesn't really matter to me.]
Donald Hall is currently outside my radar.