Today I’m going to give you random, unrelated, disconnected, completely-out-of-context sentence fragments from a review of two books by poet-critic Adam Kirsch. The review/article is titled The Plight of the Poet-Critic and it is by Carmine Starnino in the May 2008 issue of Poetrymagazine. Some of the quotes are from Starnino and some are Starnino’s quotes of Kirsch.
The bits and pieces are intended to stir up your mind. They are partial sentences and are not directly related to one another. Follow them wherever they may lead reference art in general and photography in particular.
… who can be transgressive, not in the fashionable way of the seminar, but in the disturbing and baffling way of the nightmare
… achieves a telescoping of ideas and images
… buoyant, clowning, exclamatory — a rhapsody of friendship and love
… whether risks, to use Frost’s words, “were weakly lost or richly spent.”
… the wish-fulfillment of a young man who enjoys the vanity of his own good sense, but is restless under a dispensation he is helpless to change
… an ability to evoke the way the climate of a period manner can suddenly be made to pivot into the private weather of a poem
… Solemnity is to seriousness as sentimentality is to emotion: the attempt to induce a feeling that refuses to occur spontaneously.
… he simply refuses to believe that what a poet has put into a poem automatically belongs there
… [his] devotion to the ordinary is not a disciplined response to disenchantment. It is, rather, a peculiarly American form of mental laziness.
… his canon seem[s] like a toy kingdom, a Monaco of poetry existing in placid unrelation to the empire all around it.
The whole review is very good, but it’s long. Read it if you have time. [ link ]
-Julie
