Somehow in ten years on tumblr I’ve never actually become cognizant of Carson until today, probably because I’ll admit I don’t really do poetry after a certain point. (When I was in school I always used to say that a real knowledge of poetry was what separated the English majors from the mere dilettantes.) that Tupitsyn (someone else I’ve somehow avoided encountering until now) you linked could inspire an essay in and of itself, but maybe that can’t wait. Personally, although I may have misunderstood what exactly is being signified by the your usage of the original quote (I myself being a mere dilettante) the place I’ve always found myself as a reader and writer is between Gertrude Stein and Borges, itself I a difficult (though I hope not a dishonorable!) place.
It's funny because Carson must be one of the last writers I found solely through print in, as I said, about summer 2003: Bloom called her a genius in Genius and then I saw The Beauty of the Husband in the library. Don't get me started on the way they no longer teach poetry. You can call me all the "elitist" names in the book, but a literary education in this language without a grounding in Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton is incomplete, and I say that in the full knowledge of my own sorry omissions (e.g., I came late to Spenser and pretty much not at all to Dryden, still have to read The Prelude and Don Juan in their entirety, etc.). I think in the quote "Gertrude Stein" is a synecdoche for the end of history, of grand narratives, of stable languages and identities and references, all of which begin with the epic ("Homer"). "The difference is spreading," as it says in Tender Buttons, a book I once threw across the room and never finished "reading." Stein is no part of my own genealogy; I'm with Woolf and with the human side of Joyce and, yes, with the Homer of the Iliad, the poet praised for neutrality by Northrop Frye and Simone Weil.
I was taught the Odyssey and bits of the Iliad, bits of Shakespeare and Chaucer, Milton is a glaring blind spot though! I’m with you with Gertrude Stein, I read about 75% of the way through Three Lives last year and found it intermittently fascinating and almost unspeakably obnoxious. As for the epic, the grand there is a part of me that I suppose agrees with the hoary old postmodernists of the midcentury that you really can’t do that mode anymore in modernity. Whether I think that’s a good or bad thing depends wildly on my mood and the day. But then again, there’s another part of me that is a Christian, and I suppose it would be a kind of silly thing to believe if you didn’t think there was still a space for grand narratives in the world.
Paradise Lost is really fun for most of its length (not so much Books 11 and 12), much easier to read than Chaucer, almost already a novel. Re: Chaucer and reconciling Christianity with postmodernism, this may be what happens in Geoff's Troilus and Criseyde, relentless metafictional and climactically pious, with the 14th-century postmodern idea that all secular productions will inherently fall short of Truth (I base this on my undergraduate reading from 20 years ago, however). I guess on the epic in general I'd say it's possible to gratify the epic impulse in more modern-contemporary forms, whether the novel, the movie, the graphic novel, etc.—or even, in Carson's case, ironical free verse. I would also point to the "postmodern" narrative recursion and metafiction already present in something like the Odyssey. Maybe true poetry is always aiming at the transcendent and never hitting it and perfectly aware of this, thus dissolving the whole supposed problem.
Somehow in ten years on tumblr I’ve never actually become cognizant of Carson until today, probably because I’ll admit I don’t really do poetry after a certain point. (When I was in school I always used to say that a real knowledge of poetry was what separated the English majors from the mere dilettantes.) that Tupitsyn (someone else I’ve somehow avoided encountering until now) you linked could inspire an essay in and of itself, but maybe that can’t wait. Personally, although I may have misunderstood what exactly is being signified by the your usage of the original quote (I myself being a mere dilettante) the place I’ve always found myself as a reader and writer is between Gertrude Stein and Borges, itself I a difficult (though I hope not a dishonorable!) place.
It's funny because Carson must be one of the last writers I found solely through print in, as I said, about summer 2003: Bloom called her a genius in Genius and then I saw The Beauty of the Husband in the library. Don't get me started on the way they no longer teach poetry. You can call me all the "elitist" names in the book, but a literary education in this language without a grounding in Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton is incomplete, and I say that in the full knowledge of my own sorry omissions (e.g., I came late to Spenser and pretty much not at all to Dryden, still have to read The Prelude and Don Juan in their entirety, etc.). I think in the quote "Gertrude Stein" is a synecdoche for the end of history, of grand narratives, of stable languages and identities and references, all of which begin with the epic ("Homer"). "The difference is spreading," as it says in Tender Buttons, a book I once threw across the room and never finished "reading." Stein is no part of my own genealogy; I'm with Woolf and with the human side of Joyce and, yes, with the Homer of the Iliad, the poet praised for neutrality by Northrop Frye and Simone Weil.
I was taught the Odyssey and bits of the Iliad, bits of Shakespeare and Chaucer, Milton is a glaring blind spot though! I’m with you with Gertrude Stein, I read about 75% of the way through Three Lives last year and found it intermittently fascinating and almost unspeakably obnoxious. As for the epic, the grand there is a part of me that I suppose agrees with the hoary old postmodernists of the midcentury that you really can’t do that mode anymore in modernity. Whether I think that’s a good or bad thing depends wildly on my mood and the day. But then again, there’s another part of me that is a Christian, and I suppose it would be a kind of silly thing to believe if you didn’t think there was still a space for grand narratives in the world.
Paradise Lost is really fun for most of its length (not so much Books 11 and 12), much easier to read than Chaucer, almost already a novel. Re: Chaucer and reconciling Christianity with postmodernism, this may be what happens in Geoff's Troilus and Criseyde, relentless metafictional and climactically pious, with the 14th-century postmodern idea that all secular productions will inherently fall short of Truth (I base this on my undergraduate reading from 20 years ago, however). I guess on the epic in general I'd say it's possible to gratify the epic impulse in more modern-contemporary forms, whether the novel, the movie, the graphic novel, etc.—or even, in Carson's case, ironical free verse. I would also point to the "postmodern" narrative recursion and metafiction already present in something like the Odyssey. Maybe true poetry is always aiming at the transcendent and never hitting it and perfectly aware of this, thus dissolving the whole supposed problem.