A review of Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia By William Harryman I recently picked up a copy of Camille Paglia's new book, Break, Blow, Burn, on Matthew Dallman's recommendation — and I'm glad I did. I was a big fan of her first book, Sexual Personae, back when I was in college. When the ensuing books came out — Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays and Vamps & Tramps: New Essays. I was alternately excited and frustrated by the uneven essays. Sexual Personae clearly benefited from having Harold Bloom as her thesis advisor. Still, as much as I often disagree with her on details or find her cultural essays uneven, I admire her vision and I am grateful that she can make me think in ways that few other authors can. Thus, my excitement with her new book, which is a collection of 43 essays on important poems from the English tradition. She purposely excluded translations due to her sense that English is the ideal language for poetry: The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry. It's why the pragmatic Anglo-American tradition (unlike the effete French rationalism) doesn't need poststructuralism: in English, usage depends upon context; the words jostle and provoke one another and mischievously shift their meanings over time. See how I snuck in that part about postructuralism? She abhors it as an approach to poetry, and that informs how she reads each poem. In the end, she upholds the sanctity of the text. She came of age during the supremacy of the New Criticism, as did I, strangely enough. Many of my college English teachers were brought up in that tradition and passed it on to us students. As weird as it may sound, it was a big deal on my campus in 1991 when one of the faculty went to a conference on post-modernism and came back to lecture on what he had learned — especially Derrida and Deconstruction. By this time, post-modernism had already taken control of academia. I guess there are some advantages to having attended a small college. Like Paglia, I was not a fan of the sterile approach to reading that the New Criticism supported, despite its strengths when compared to poststructuralism. Here is her take on it: The foundation of my literary education in college and graduate school in the 1960s was a technique known as the New Criticism, which studied the internal or formal qualities of poetry. I was impatient with what I regarded as its genteel sentimentality, its prim evasion of the sex and aggression in artistic creativity. Urgent supplementation was needed by psychology as well as history, toward which I had been oriented since adolescence, when I began exploring books about Greco-Roman and Near Eastern archeology. The New Critics' admirable reaction against a prior era of bibliographic pedantry had eventually resulted in an annihilation of context, an orphaning of the text. New Criticism was also hostile or oblivious to popular culture, the master mythology of my postwar generation. For that I had to look to bohemian artists like Andy Warhol or dissident academics like Marshall McLuhan and Leslie Fielder. I agree with her completely, although I would quibble with "genteel" and "prim." I also tend toward Jung while she tends toward Freud, but that, too, is a minor quibble. I was taking the same approach in my lit classes that she advocates — a deep reading of the text, but within a cultural context including psychology, history, and sociology — when Sexual Personae came out. Her book was well-received by some of my teachers, and less so by the older males in the department. When I did my master's degree, I had to do it in the humanities department because I wanted to include comparative religion and psychology as an integral part of my thesis. All of this is to say that I am excited about getting into this book. She has included several of my favorite poems, many of which can easily be agreed upon as deserving of inclusion. Among the fine poems she looks at: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" Paglia also includes a few more recent poems that I have never seen — with the promise that she will convince me that each poem is "strong enough, as an artifact, to stand up to all the great poems that precede it". While the first 37 or so poems do not reveal too much about her taste in poems, since most are agreed upon classics, the last six or so do reveal something about Paglia — they all present a view from an "outsider." My Makeup is the perfect example here, and since it is short I will include it in full. My Makeup Paglia finds in this brief but provocative poem a statement of the modern woman, "tough, blunt, pragmatic." The title of the poem can refer either to the physical make up she wears or to her psychological "make up," a pun "on soul versus surface." Kraut's point is: I'm no snob; I take life as is comes and can fend for myself. Is her "flush" from booze, rage, sex — or all three? This poem, like most of the final poems in the book, is an interesting choice. While I am confident in Paglia's ability to select good poems, I am also aware of her interest in "outsider" writings, especially with her admission that Beat poetry was one of her primary influences. I would have chosen different poems, as I'm sure other critics would have, as well. We all have our biases and The Canon of contemporary poetry is still forming. In the end, however, we pick up Paglia's book to see how a great mind reads great poems. We would do well to adopt the strategy for reading her book that she recommends for readers when they approach a poem: My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape. Good advice, indeed. —William Harryman is the curator of Elegant Thorn Review. NOT YET A SUBSCRIBER TO POLYSEMY? Make the choice to become one today — click here for POLYSEMY Print, or here for POLYSEMY Digital. ©2006 Polysemy. All rights reserved. |
