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Incompatible Cleansers · Nov 20, 10:11 PM
Reading the NYRB just now, I almost swooned when I saw that Charles Simic had reviewed Donald Hall’s latest book. It was as if I had mixed incompatible cleansers when cleaning the bathroom, releasing a poisonous gas. [Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to the electronic edition of the NYRB to read the review online.] It is quite an astonishing piece of work. I’ve long thought of Hall as a rustic pre-Modernist of the sort celebrated by the New Formalists, what with all their cultural nostalgia; and I’ve thought of Simic as a soft surrealists hated by the New Formalists for his lack of concern with coherent narrative structures. There is an essay by Mark Jarman, I think, that takes Simic to task for lack of rigor & for being, I don’t know, vaguely un-American. So reading a review in which Simic praises Hall just upsets all the settled categories of my poetic existence. I suppose that’s a good thing, but somehow I don not feel grateful. I feel instead as if I am about to swoon.
What the hell ever happened to the New Formalists & Expansive Poetry, anyway? With any luck, they have gone the way of the Republican Congress. The cultural balance is delicate, though — either institution could swing back into power. Vigilance, my friends.
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