Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Actually, the contemporary poet's situation isn't altogether grim. What it is is complicated, in ways that Moyers rarely plumbs. Poetry readings and workshops, as he triumphantly points out, are flourishing; poetry as a communal, spoken experience--something to be shared with other listeners--seems far more vibrant today than a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, the market for poetry on the page remains dismal, and many trade publishers have abandoned it altogether. (This has led to a surreal situation in which talented poets sometimes find themselves wishing for rejection; they can't even manage that...
Surely, the life of the contemporary poet ought to seem as interesting as, say, that of the typewriter repairman--with whom the poet shares both a link to antiquated technology and a need for fineness of touch. But to get at what's really interesting means digging into a number of unsettling questions. Is the poet's embrace of academia (even more than fiction writers, poets are likely to teach for a living) a bad thing? In an age of computers whose memories dwarf our own, what is the fate of the old-fashioned practice of learning poems by heart...
...flood, car crashes, shootings, midnight departures, drinking and mulligrubbing. It's not all funny. There are a couple of childhood rapes and too many mornings of a mother hung over and useless. But Karr and her sister Lecia survive-Lecia to marry and turn Republican, Karr to be a poet (with such collections as The Devil's Tour) and to write a drop-dead reply to the question "Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl...
KATHA POLLITT POET, WRITER AND SOCIAL CRITIC...
...believed in Blake's notion that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, but in Mapplethorpe's case it seems to have led only to more excess. The one human relationship that comes alive in the book is his lifelong friendship with the rock singer and poet Patti Smith. Her tortured soulfulness, however, contrasts with Mapplethorpe's relentless superficiality; his photographs of her are the only ones that do not seem oppressively clinical. (Even his images of flowers look denatured...