Monday, December 18, 2006
Poetry, but not really
Over a week ago, the New York Times ran a mash note to a poetry critic at Harvard named Ann Vendler. It absolutely crystallizes the pernicious anti-intellectualism that is endemic over there, particularly in one three word phrase. When heaping praise on this venerable woman of letters and her authoritative judgments on what is or is not fine verse, the piece said, "Eschewing fashionable theory, Vendler is a school of one, an impassioned aesthete who pay minute attention to the structures and words that are a poem's genetic code" before going on to quote (who else?) Harold Bloom.
Eschewing fashionable theory. What a brazenly dismissive gesture towards far smarter people than the author of this love letter. It's endlessly irksome how the Times wishes to inculcate in its readership a desire for knowledge up to and including the level of literacy that the Times' editorial manual holds itself to, and no further. As the final arbiters on what's meritorious and what's simply intellectual masturbation, they will assign themselves the task of fawning over 'aesthetes' who see past the bullshit (read: things that are hard to read and which challenge intuitive or unexamined thinking) to get to the timeless, the eternal qualities of poetry--rather than succumb to the sirensong of, say, Roland Barthes, whose work is a mere plaything for the unserious and wishy-washy. And it can all be done without even reading this "fashionable theory," which may contain playful typography, French terms or sentences that require re-reading. I wonder if people who eschew fashionable theory might also eschew "eschew."
It's not that everyone has to tear down the canon at all times. You just can't set yourself up in opposition to academia with a single condescending throwaway phrase summing it up. But the liberal media doesn't care about its credibility among lefties. They just want to please the people who don't want Toni Morrison listed among the greats.
Eschewing fashionable theory. What a brazenly dismissive gesture towards far smarter people than the author of this love letter. It's endlessly irksome how the Times wishes to inculcate in its readership a desire for knowledge up to and including the level of literacy that the Times' editorial manual holds itself to, and no further. As the final arbiters on what's meritorious and what's simply intellectual masturbation, they will assign themselves the task of fawning over 'aesthetes' who see past the bullshit (read: things that are hard to read and which challenge intuitive or unexamined thinking) to get to the timeless, the eternal qualities of poetry--rather than succumb to the sirensong of, say, Roland Barthes, whose work is a mere plaything for the unserious and wishy-washy. And it can all be done without even reading this "fashionable theory," which may contain playful typography, French terms or sentences that require re-reading. I wonder if people who eschew fashionable theory might also eschew "eschew."
It's not that everyone has to tear down the canon at all times. You just can't set yourself up in opposition to academia with a single condescending throwaway phrase summing it up. But the liberal media doesn't care about its credibility among lefties. They just want to please the people who don't want Toni Morrison listed among the greats.
