Just a Quickie
Hats off to David Orr for how artfully he avoids naming the concept of gender in his look at "greatness" among poets in today's New York Times Book Review. Though he glancingly slams Czeslaw Milosz's sexism, he doesn't explicitly state that gender might be influencing the receptions of Bishop and Lowell, though it's all over his description. Check it out. And though race and ethnicity don't come up in the piece, his thesis applies there, too.
But why avoid naming these categories of analysis? To do so would give the essay more specificity and bite. Is it too 60s, too academic, to name these factors that still hold powerful sway?
His unexamined use of inclusive pronouns gives him away. "What then do we assume greatness looks like?" he asks, referring to "our unconscious assumptions" and "the style we have in mind," which "tends to be grand, sober, sweeping," "an aristocrat, a rebel, a statesman, an apostate, a mad-eyed genius" (or, implicitly: white, male, bardic, Shelley, Whitman, Ted Hughes). Um, I'm not part of your "we," pal. I don't share your vision of what a "great" poet looks like, and I never have. But you must move in circles where you can assume agreement like that without flinching.
I do, however, agree with Orr's larger point, and here's an example that foregrounds both gender and race and ethnicity. I once saw Robert Pinsky and Natasha Trethewey share a stage. Pinsky, who went first, was all bluster and pomp. He shared a couple of adorable anecdotes, starring himself, that made the crowd chuckle, but the actual poems he read were fairly slight. He was all persona, riding on the reputation of his earlier work; his energy had gone into his performance of himself as Poet, not onto the page.
Trethewey walked out to the podium without fanfare, read her poems, and blew him out of the water. (Not that it's a competition. I'm just sayin'.)
But afterwards, I heard people talking about how amazing Pinsky was. Just as Orr describes, they'd bought the image.
But why avoid naming these categories of analysis? To do so would give the essay more specificity and bite. Is it too 60s, too academic, to name these factors that still hold powerful sway?
His unexamined use of inclusive pronouns gives him away. "What then do we assume greatness looks like?" he asks, referring to "our unconscious assumptions" and "the style we have in mind," which "tends to be grand, sober, sweeping," "an aristocrat, a rebel, a statesman, an apostate, a mad-eyed genius" (or, implicitly: white, male, bardic, Shelley, Whitman, Ted Hughes). Um, I'm not part of your "we," pal. I don't share your vision of what a "great" poet looks like, and I never have. But you must move in circles where you can assume agreement like that without flinching.
I do, however, agree with Orr's larger point, and here's an example that foregrounds both gender and race and ethnicity. I once saw Robert Pinsky and Natasha Trethewey share a stage. Pinsky, who went first, was all bluster and pomp. He shared a couple of adorable anecdotes, starring himself, that made the crowd chuckle, but the actual poems he read were fairly slight. He was all persona, riding on the reputation of his earlier work; his energy had gone into his performance of himself as Poet, not onto the page.
Trethewey walked out to the podium without fanfare, read her poems, and blew him out of the water. (Not that it's a competition. I'm just sayin'.)
But afterwards, I heard people talking about how amazing Pinsky was. Just as Orr describes, they'd bought the image.
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