St. John to Gluck: Throw some D's (rims) on that

The lyric persona seems alive and well in these works; how to separate affectation from whatever it is that comprises the self? Who's being real here? It's an interesting question that's most likely misguided but well-meaning. I don't know why, but it's frustrating though to feel as if the poets here are simply playing dress-up in order to veil rather basic emotional states, accoutering themselves in a stately kind of suffering. Both are lovely at times, but the self-imbued grandiosity leaves me a bit harried at times. As when St. John finds himself suffering among the ruins of the rich and fabulous, subtly and not so subtly treading along the footpaths of his idols (whether River Pheonix or Antonioni), or when Gluck feels the historically distant as if she might inhabit or encapsulate the past's pain. It is easy I think to want to see ourselves in these roles, easier still to want to suffer as elegantly (the past made elegant of course because of our distance from it). But I wonder in the end if Joanie isn't correct when she writes below that what comes from "isolated delirium" is transformed into "a tradition of delirium," a mantle to wear in times of emergency, whether real or imagined. More strange: though I like St. John's writing less I find it more politically responsible, since out of the myth of the stable character and our sense of fealty to the mirage that constitutes the lives of the rich and famous comes a sense of loss of the personal that leaves the body and mind free only to find an artificial self, a self gleaned in the reflection of the Ducati's gas tank, or the gilded mirror in the host's elegant hallway (martini in hand). The authentic is made a kind of elaborate Wardrobe, which corresponds very sensibly to Myspace culture, to internet phenoms, etc. (an old idea and aspiration finding an oddly democratic outlet). Gluck's writing, on the other hand, I find incredibly beautiful and even moving, but I wonder to what degree she encapsulates St. John's critique of Hughes and Plath, embodying a kind of suffering for art, making art out of suffering. Like Rich there's some of the feminist prerogative here, but it seems so cloaked in the personal that finding a way out into the world feels like a project typified by uncertainty. What to apply and how and to what and for whom?