Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Nance Van Winkle makes the casual assertion that we’d agree that Rilke was a great poet (Letters, April 2005). No, in truth, I always found Rilke’s wisdom vague and unnourishing. “You must change your life,” some stoned fuzzy-wuzzy would intone and then pause with glassy eyes glistening, waiting for the epiphany to ricochet to revelation in my psyche. Ooga-booga. Even as these poets of the sixties narrowed their passionate “isms” down to only being faithful to academic careerism, and with a grim ferocity devoted their primary energies to making sure that their children were prepared to be successful yuppies, the notion that they’d changed their lives was a superficial illusion. If nothing changes, nothing changes, and these people never change. The successful poets of these times don’t confront the misapprehensions of the age but are content to self-embody and reflect the parochial misapprehensions of their class. Poetry, friends, is boring...

The idea of a personal, inward life, kept pure from your own bourgeois compromises in your daily affairs, with the object to write Great Poems, is desperate and absurd. The old ooga-booga “made new.” To use Dickinson’s reclusiveness and Rilke’s misanthropy as examples doesn’t succeed if the considerations are taken to completion. It’s a logic of rationalization and coping. The successful poets of my generation were not the sort of people who went to airports to spit on their peers returning from Vietnam, but were the sort of people who ignored that kind of thing. Whatever their tolerance of the moment might be, it’s fundamentally an indifference, and that is boring.