R n F
Interesting that Rich at one time saw the creative production at odds, or even mutually exclusive from, "women's work," and finds in the canon of men and women an odd regard or deference to women's role in the creative production of men. I see what she's saying, but I wonder if she's speaking more to a particular time, to a particular political and sexual "dead awakening" felt by the aging youth of that time. She's right, I think, to point to the pessimism of men's work (especially in light of the many many failed "men's projects"), but that seems, overall, not particularly new by the fifties or sixties, and I wonder at its inclusion, and at how her particular experience is translated into a larger, generational awakening, when she individually has so much vested in the tradition, and in her bearing away from it, of her craft.
I wonder too if more might be made, in the way of Harrington's piece, of the trajectory of industrialization and the progressivist push of the century's history, which gave birth to the individual and the emphasis on the private perhaps because of the public and national costs of persuing those progressivist ideological goals. That the awakening that Rich speaks of seems to occur so closely in time to the Civil Rights Movement, a racial awakening, also seems particularly important, given that both highlight to an incredible degree the hypocrisy of a political system that utilized the individual in a way meant to conserve the power of a particular political order.
I do wonder though, re: Harrington, if Rich seems a bit too self-serious (I wish she were funnier, less earnest), which I think drives home the sense of the work's intense individualism. In some ways I think that this selfish intensity is what poetry does best; like all good art it, the individual consciousness, gives us a sense of the new, which I feel that in the same sense public poetry does not--public poetry is to remind us of a common language, ideology, society--but I do think that at times the newness precludes the comprehension of the public, thus warranting the cry: Elitism! I like what Leroi Jones writes: "Fuck poetry and it is useful," and it seems to me that Rich is saying the same, albeit laughing less when she says it.
I wonder too if more might be made, in the way of Harrington's piece, of the trajectory of industrialization and the progressivist push of the century's history, which gave birth to the individual and the emphasis on the private perhaps because of the public and national costs of persuing those progressivist ideological goals. That the awakening that Rich speaks of seems to occur so closely in time to the Civil Rights Movement, a racial awakening, also seems particularly important, given that both highlight to an incredible degree the hypocrisy of a political system that utilized the individual in a way meant to conserve the power of a particular political order.
I do wonder though, re: Harrington, if Rich seems a bit too self-serious (I wish she were funnier, less earnest), which I think drives home the sense of the work's intense individualism. In some ways I think that this selfish intensity is what poetry does best; like all good art it, the individual consciousness, gives us a sense of the new, which I feel that in the same sense public poetry does not--public poetry is to remind us of a common language, ideology, society--but I do think that at times the newness precludes the comprehension of the public, thus warranting the cry: Elitism! I like what Leroi Jones writes: "Fuck poetry and it is useful," and it seems to me that Rich is saying the same, albeit laughing less when she says it.
posted by B. R. Smith at 9:41 PM
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