Reviving the love of poetry

Camille Paglia’s radical agenda is to win undergraduates (and the general public) back to poetry. Who better to do this than the renegade literary critic and author of “Sexual Personae,” who showed she could take up Emily Dickinson and Madonna in the same sentence, this cultural spokeswoman and media celebrity whose name appears in her new book’s subtitle.

In “Break, Blow, Burn,” Paglia contends that poetry has fallen on hard times in the United States. Contemporary poets, subsidized by self-interested and academic cliques, have become affected and precious. Poetry readings are exercises in narcissism; even the current craze of “slams” amounts to a pathetic bid for attention by annexing poetry to hip-hop.

But the real culprit in poetry’s demise is a new generation of professors who have sold their souls to Jacques Derrida and other effete French critics. Venerating theory-about-poetry over poetry itself, these solipsists bore students with their quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo. The love of poetry is in danger of being lost.

As a corrective, Paglia considers 43 poems and, in short essays of lucid prose, parses them and intelligently explains their meaning. Mixing the canonical with the contemporary, her choices include Shakespeare’s sonnets and Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock.” This last choice is revealing. Paglia means to bring back the 1960s and ‘70s.

I remember those days. When hundreds of us would pack an auditorium to hear Allen Ginsberg read poetry. When radicalism and poetry went hand in hand. When Sylvia Plath was avant-garde. When Dick Cavett’s television guests included Jimi Hendrix and W.H. Auden.

In clamoring to bring back those days, then, is Paglia’s agenda really radical or reactionary? At first glance, the poets she chooses (e.g., Donne, Herbert, Shelley, Lowell and Roethke) and the poems she examines (e.g., Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”) seem standard choices for a neo-con or classical anthology designed by, say, William Bennett. But Paglia mixes in some contemporary choices (Plath’s “Daddy,” for example) and makes the furious point in her introduction that the love of poetry is a radical act of cultural recuperation in the face of current mores and mediocrity.

I’m not sure my undergraduate students would buy this. They would easily size her up: the aging ‘60s radical, the professor willing to wear a leather bustier to class to stir Generation X-ers from their apathy and get them reading poetry. And if the truth be known, after the pugnacious radicalism of the introduction, this book is not that flamboyant; instead, it is a solid and impressive achievement that stands with the very best American writing on poetry by Helen Vendler and Randall Jarrell. Although such a compliment might unnerve someone whose notoriety rests on being a renegade, Paglia has no reason to be embarrassed that “Break, Blow, Burn” sheds more light than it does heat.

However, it is disconcerting when an accomplished critic such as Paglia misses the Big Clue that would get us to the target more directly. For example, she interprets this part of Gary Snyder’s poem “Old Pond”:

At Five Lakes Basin’s

Biggest little lake

after all day scrambling on the peaks,

a naked bug

with a white body and brown hair

dives in the water,

Splash!

These lines prompt Paglia to make an eccentric connection between Snyder’s comparison of himself as a bug and Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa changing into an insect. Snyder’s swimming oddly reminds her that the poet Byron was also a swimmer. Somewhat closer to the point, a quiet lake recalls to her the still mind sought in Buddhism. These are only a few of many fevered associations Paglia makes in a busy paragraph that begins with the question: What are we to make of the title of Snyder’s poem “Old Pond”?

But the answer is simple: Snyder is a longtime student of Japanese Zen, and his poem echoes the well-known poem with the same title by the monk Basho:

The old pond;

A frog jumps in --

[Splash!] The sound of water.

It’s embarrassing that she doesn’t seem to recognize this. As author and Zen master Robert Aitken observed, “This is probably the most famous poem in Japan.” This haiku is also a standard entry in many literature textbooks.

The old pond. A critic jumps in. [Oops!] The sound of falling short.

Jerry Griswold, who teaches undergraduates at San Diego State University, is the author of “The Meanings of ‘Beauty and the Beast’: A Handbook.”

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Break, Blow, Burn

Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems

Camille Paglia

Pantheon: 252 pp., $20

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