Thank you for putting yourself through such misery, thereby sparing me the trouble. How did you manage to do that? That is an exceptional analysis and explanation. What a shame it needs to be presented, but thank you.
You don't have to like her poetry, but it certainly means something, and it's certainly engaged with "the ecstasies and pitfalls of the human condition." Good poetry can be all kinds of things. Sometimes it's lush and operatic, sometimes it's bone dry. Sometimes it's great to describe emotions in intense language, but sometimes writing achieves a kind of hidden emotionality by eschewing emotional language. I don't think you're reading these poems with any generosity.
I could be wrong, but it appears you've mistakenly used nonplussed as a synonym for unfazed, as is common in your generation. I know that language is alive and ever-changing, but this is one I have to defend because nonplussed has traditionally meant the very opposite of unfazed. Vexed, baffled, beside oneself. And if you do mean unfazed, we have no shortage of aesthetically worthy alternatives: unruffled, unaffected.
Re-reading the paragraph now, I can't help but wonder if you did in fact mean baffled. Initially I thought you were reacting to the banality of her language, but equally plausible is the notion that you were agog at how undeservedly celebrated she is. Regardless, given the ambiguity, a clearer alternative may still be advisable in either case.
Apologies if I misread it, but this is a battle I have to fight because language should never devolve through ignorance. We've already lost 'enormity' to those who would use it as a synonym for immensity. When we permit language to deform through misuse, we're letting its course by determined by its least adept practitioners.
Oh dear, after a number of missives disagreeing with Ms. Libes' essays I am beginning to find myself increasingly won over to her point of view.I cannot tell if she is just cherry picking egregiously bad examples but, my god, these are truly horrendous instances of the failure of contemporary writing. Yikes! And thanks for saving me the trouble of reading any further in their efforts.
I could see the beginnings of a serviceable poem in "The Glass Essay", but the end product was quite boring overall. The other two poem examples you gave were just bleh.
I attended a poetry workshop led by Rick Barot yesterday and he included a few Anne Carson poems. They were much better than what I read here in Liza's column. Still not Nobel worthy IMO, but it was only a few poems, hardly enough to determine that.
The literary establishment is at war with meaning and beauty. Without reflection there is no poem because meaning is the soul of poetry. Great literature has made us dream, feel, and think deeply about what it means to be human.
I agree with you that all these passages are awful, vacant slop. But this is an inevitable turn of the wheel if you regard literature as being built on style and meaning. Such a literature will cycle through styles and ideas in an unending scrabble for the appearance of originality. If all you want is more florid thoughts expressed in more florid prose, you have only to wait for the wheel to turn, and it will come to you in time.
The real fault in literature today is that it has turned from the thing that literature is actually about: telling stories. There is nothing you can do with poetic language to evoke emotion that cannot be done with ten times the force by telling a story. But the moderns are too post-modern to see life in story terms, and so they refuse to tell stories. They play with style and with fashionable moods to try to fill the void, but it is all dust and ashes without a story.
Writers down the centuries have told stories in language florid and in language plain, according to the fashion of their time. But it is not for their language that we remember or revere them, but for the particularity and authenticity of the stories they told, and the memory of how those stories made us feel.
One of your best takedowns! 🤓 and judging by the excerpts you quoted, it was well-deserved 🙄 In my opinion, Nobels should be given only every five years. The quality might be better. 🤔
I did not think I would be alive to see the death of creativity in the West.
I do not expect our Nobel Prize winners to be Milton or Homer but I do expect something more than thoughts that could be found in a teenager's diary. It is not as though there is no meaning to what she has written, it simply comes across as shallow and does not point to anything beyond the immediate here, now.
This reminds me of an early "The Simpsons" episode where Lisa is attending jazz concert. A person at another table says how bad the music is and Lisa responds that he needs to listen to the notes the artist isn't playing. The customer then quips that he could have done that from home.
It seems that I will need to do something similar with the current crop of "it" writers. Read the words they are not writing, enjoy the stories they are not telling, get to know the characters they are not creating. There are plenty of other works of the past and some in the present that I have not read or discovered. Libraries are wonderful worlds for that kind of venture, and far more reliable than the NYT Bestseller List.
Sally Rooney is also my book enemy. I stopped reading Normal People halfway through because it was so depressing and nihilistic and pretentious. I thought, why can’t she discover some kind of meaning before she writes a book?
Thank you for putting yourself through such misery, thereby sparing me the trouble. How did you manage to do that? That is an exceptional analysis and explanation. What a shame it needs to be presented, but thank you.
You don't have to like her poetry, but it certainly means something, and it's certainly engaged with "the ecstasies and pitfalls of the human condition." Good poetry can be all kinds of things. Sometimes it's lush and operatic, sometimes it's bone dry. Sometimes it's great to describe emotions in intense language, but sometimes writing achieves a kind of hidden emotionality by eschewing emotional language. I don't think you're reading these poems with any generosity.
‘You don't have to like her poetry’…thank you and my congratulations to #AnneCarson
The "green room" is the inside of a wave's barrel when it curves over.
For surfers, it is considered an optimal place to be.
I could be wrong, but it appears you've mistakenly used nonplussed as a synonym for unfazed, as is common in your generation. I know that language is alive and ever-changing, but this is one I have to defend because nonplussed has traditionally meant the very opposite of unfazed. Vexed, baffled, beside oneself. And if you do mean unfazed, we have no shortage of aesthetically worthy alternatives: unruffled, unaffected.
Re-reading the paragraph now, I can't help but wonder if you did in fact mean baffled. Initially I thought you were reacting to the banality of her language, but equally plausible is the notion that you were agog at how undeservedly celebrated she is. Regardless, given the ambiguity, a clearer alternative may still be advisable in either case.
Apologies if I misread it, but this is a battle I have to fight because language should never devolve through ignorance. We've already lost 'enormity' to those who would use it as a synonym for immensity. When we permit language to deform through misuse, we're letting its course by determined by its least adept practitioners.
When reading this crap be careful not to lobotomize yourself..
Mistah Kurtz - he dead …
Not with a bang but a whimper.
He woke. With an existential headache. He prayed to the muse of AI.
Oh dear, after a number of missives disagreeing with Ms. Libes' essays I am beginning to find myself increasingly won over to her point of view.I cannot tell if she is just cherry picking egregiously bad examples but, my god, these are truly horrendous instances of the failure of contemporary writing. Yikes! And thanks for saving me the trouble of reading any further in their efforts.
I could see the beginnings of a serviceable poem in "The Glass Essay", but the end product was quite boring overall. The other two poem examples you gave were just bleh.
I attended a poetry workshop led by Rick Barot yesterday and he included a few Anne Carson poems. They were much better than what I read here in Liza's column. Still not Nobel worthy IMO, but it was only a few poems, hardly enough to determine that.
The literary establishment is at war with meaning and beauty. Without reflection there is no poem because meaning is the soul of poetry. Great literature has made us dream, feel, and think deeply about what it means to be human.
I agree with you that all these passages are awful, vacant slop. But this is an inevitable turn of the wheel if you regard literature as being built on style and meaning. Such a literature will cycle through styles and ideas in an unending scrabble for the appearance of originality. If all you want is more florid thoughts expressed in more florid prose, you have only to wait for the wheel to turn, and it will come to you in time.
The real fault in literature today is that it has turned from the thing that literature is actually about: telling stories. There is nothing you can do with poetic language to evoke emotion that cannot be done with ten times the force by telling a story. But the moderns are too post-modern to see life in story terms, and so they refuse to tell stories. They play with style and with fashionable moods to try to fill the void, but it is all dust and ashes without a story.
Writers down the centuries have told stories in language florid and in language plain, according to the fashion of their time. But it is not for their language that we remember or revere them, but for the particularity and authenticity of the stories they told, and the memory of how those stories made us feel.
One of your best takedowns! 🤓 and judging by the excerpts you quoted, it was well-deserved 🙄 In my opinion, Nobels should be given only every five years. The quality might be better. 🤔
I did not think I would be alive to see the death of creativity in the West.
I do not expect our Nobel Prize winners to be Milton or Homer but I do expect something more than thoughts that could be found in a teenager's diary. It is not as though there is no meaning to what she has written, it simply comes across as shallow and does not point to anything beyond the immediate here, now.
This reminds me of an early "The Simpsons" episode where Lisa is attending jazz concert. A person at another table says how bad the music is and Lisa responds that he needs to listen to the notes the artist isn't playing. The customer then quips that he could have done that from home.
It seems that I will need to do something similar with the current crop of "it" writers. Read the words they are not writing, enjoy the stories they are not telling, get to know the characters they are not creating. There are plenty of other works of the past and some in the present that I have not read or discovered. Libraries are wonderful worlds for that kind of venture, and far more reliable than the NYT Bestseller List.
A teenager would have emotions
Try Heinrich Boll's Billiards at Half Past Nine--almost finished with it and am deeply moved, as I was 50 years ago reading The Clown.
Sally Rooney is also my book enemy. I stopped reading Normal People halfway through because it was so depressing and nihilistic and pretentious. I thought, why can’t she discover some kind of meaning before she writes a book?
Hahahaha, that “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” poem!
It seems things these days are gibberish or obscene. Or both.