Word: poets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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James Russel Lowell, the famous Harvard English professor and 19th century abolitionist poet, wrote with regard to learning from the past, "[W]e make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free." Just as it is so easy to create an anachronistic philosophy of life out of an old truth passed down from previous generations, it is also easy to let our fears of repeating the past hold us prisoner. President Clinton can't let go and let the past be the past...
...outrageous character not better known? According to Codrescu, more than three centuries of Hungarian governments have suppressed the records to protect the national reputation. One Dracula was enough. But Transylvania-born Codrescu may be blowing paprika in the eyes of history. A professor at Louisiana State University, a poet and a guest commentator on National Public Radio, he also edits the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse. The name is pinched from an old surrealist parlor game in which verse and drawings are collaged from players' contributions...
...freshest production is a real oddball: one of the few stagings ever done of Benjamin Britten's first opera, Paul Bunyan. Written to a libretto by W.H. Auden shortly after the composer and poet came to America as pacifists in the late 1930s, the work was conceived as a comic-populist valentine to their new country, one that would be suitable for school productions. Singable it is: the stream of songs and choruses exploits and gently parodies everything from American folksiness to Broadway jazziness, from Italian opera to Victorian ballads...
Moyers might well have drawn more telling responses from a group that ranges from well-established poets like Sandra McPherson, Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich to such lesser-known practitioners as Daisy Zamora, Sekou Sundiata and Coleman Barks. But by ignoring specifics--by avoiding the poet's daily business of weighing word against word--he finally divorces most of the poets from their poems. Ideally, when the poet sits down to write he or she is claiming a kinship, however collateral, with Dickinson and Donne, Chaucer and Virgil. What Moyers too often gives us is the poem as self-therapy...
...series has some appealing moments, including scenes of poetry workshops that capture the fervent ingenuousness of young people who, in discovering poetry, feel they have found a new continent. But Moyers makes virtually no attempt to place the poet in a larger social context--to view poetry as a profession (or, perhaps more to the point, to analyze what it means that ours is a culture where it's all but impossible to be a professional poet). Ezra Pound once pointed out that history without economics is bunk. To which one might add that poetry without economics--without some sense...