| Culturebox Who Are You Calling Opaque? A new Harper's essay says American poetry is obscure and out of touch. It couldn't be more wrong. By Katy Waldman
Posted Thursday, Jun 27, 2013, at 12:22 PM ET  Hi, Mark Edmundson, you big-time poetry troll. I am not sure where to start with you. You took to Harper's this month to denounce contemporary American poets. You upbraided them for their "inwardness and evasion," their "blander, more circumscribed mode," and claimed that they cast "unambitious spells." You scolded them for playing "small-time games" with "low stakes," timidly avoiding the words "we" and "our," neglecting pop culture, and refusing to offer up a "comprehensive vision," a "full-scale map of experience" encompassing politics, childhood, love, death, society, and nature. You scorched them in aggregate and you scorched them individually: W.S. Merwin is "oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning." John Ashbery "says little." Of Anne Carson: "The title of a recent profile in the New York Times, 'The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson,' has it half right." Jorie Graham is "portentous," Paul Muldoon "opaque." As for Adrienne Rich, "the gift for artful expression is not hers." You go after Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, and Robert Hass, even the late James Merrill, all of whom deserve pages and pages of defense (and are likely getting it: I don't even want to think about the contents of your inbox right now, Mark). Yes, your screed was a passionate piece of writing, dripping with erudition. You quoted great poets down through history: Dante, Milton, Emerson, Wordsworth, Yeats, Frost, Plath, Lowell. You did exactly what you want today's poets to do, which is make a sweeping, fervent argument ... To continue reading, click here.
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