It’s not that I dislike Levine as a poet, and in fact I think that politically he’s a great choice for Laureate. The trouble for me is inherent to the award itself. It seems to honor hindsight too much. Levine, like his predecessor Merwin, was important to his generation of poets, but the sense of…
Isn’t that the nature of the academy though? I think the literary establishment as a whole has largely no idea what to do with contemporary poetry as it happens. Is there a rubric for judging the value of it? Criticism is such a competitive field itself, going out on a limb for a younger poet who hasn’t ‘proven their mettle’ (or represented that they’re part of ‘the club’) is definitely not safe, dangerous even. The tendency of literary academia is to canonize for being part of the larger tradition, and naming the Laureate naturally follows that retrospective tendency. I think it’s also because, probably sadly, poetry doesn’t have much currency, except among professors and academic types and people who write it themselves, so it’s difficult to establish what’s working, what’s important, in its time, because these kinds of people have really divided, passionate opinions that can be so diverse as to make it seem there’s only room for subjective appraisal until someone’s got, like, a lifetime of work to show for themselves. No other profession is as divided into ‘Geniuses’ and ‘Idiots’ by its followers as writers. I dunno, maybe it takes 40 or 50 years before you’ve proven yourself to these people. Maybe you don’t get that kind of recognition from those kind of peers until you’ve SUFFERED ENOUGH.
Not that I don’t completely agree with you.
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cherryeatstheapple reblogged this from johnmurray and added:
Definitely. Like I said, it’s an award of hindsight. There’s no going out on a limb at all. It’s more of a lifetime of...
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johnmurray reblogged this from cherryeatstheapple and added:
the nature of the academy though?...think the literary establishment
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