Instructors at elite universities, fixated on "isms", have made poetry appreciation a minefield, says Camile Paglia, who is promoting her new poetry anthology, "Break, Blow, Burn." She tells a Chicago weekly, New City:

Thanks to twenty-five years of post-structuralism in our elite colleges, we have this idea now that you are supposed to use your pseudo-sociological critical eye to look down on the work and find everything that's wrong with it. The racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism. This style of teaching just nips students' enthusiasm in the bud.

The anthololgy includes Paul Blackburn's, "The Once Over," which:

...describes a subway car traveling downtown, its passengers enraptured by the image of a beautiful woman. "It has been condemned for sexism, as you can imagine," Paglia says, once again treading across controversy's high wire. "But this to me is a classic poem of my time. There's a mysterious girl in a beautiful dress, and everyone is staring at her. That's it. That's the entire thing. It's so wonderful, the way he captures that moment, and that's the purpose of reading poetry--which is that it teaches you to notice what other people don't notice. To find significance in the insignificant."

Why is Paglia skittishly described by the writer as "once again treading across controversy's high wire," for calling bullshit on the deconstructionist dung-peddlers of academe, who can't even read a poem about a beautiful woman without summoning up formulaic fears of an oppressive, objectifying, phallo-centric patriarchy? Paglia's right on target. Sad that it's so terribly controversial to call out the censorious thought police of the academy for what they really are.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at May 12, 2005 12:18 PM

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