I think you've answered our own question.
Do you believe our so-called "professional" / "careerist" poets slag others for a specific reason? Are these literary stars earning their stripes at the expense of our literature real or disposable; and, if so, does that not speak to our cultural desuetude? Before I gave up entirely applying for grants, I would read the winner lists and so many of them had fulltime tenured jobs. That slayed me. How can this be? How do such greedmeisters live with themselves . . . Never mind :).
I'm not sure we have "stars." I think that in the past few decades the English-speaking world — Britain, the United States, Canada — has seen the decline of the poet as cultural hero. Ergo, I haven't noticed that they do slag others, at least in public. I wish they would. Maybe they do it in private?
Maybe you need to get out and about Cyberistically a bit more (while I need to do the opposite :)). You know, I still have that pic of you taking that crispy golden bird out of the oven when you were writing in residence in Edinburgh? Yep. You cook good! But, allow me to conclude with a Paul Anka / Frank Sinatra coda: Regrets?
That I haven't travelled more.
You mean physically, I bet; because, in my measured opinion, you've travelled from point A to Infinity in The Book of Eternity with a sensibility and sensitivity that seldom fail to break the speed limit.
. . . The poem finds life as the poet leads it
inexpressibly tedious. The poem wants out.
The poem would like to live alone,
take light lunches,
watch what the wind does to grasses.
— "The Poem," The Philosophy of As If
(Hat tips, Robert Morgan and Dr. Ian Lancashire.)
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MUSE NEWS YOU CAN USE: Speaking of poetry and editors, you may find Kimiko Hahn's piece entitled "A Poet and Her Editor" worthy of a cyber-peek-see . . . BTW, later this same day @ 7:30? Diaspora Dialogues launches the fifth book in its anthology series, TOK: Writing the New Toronto @ the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon, Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge Street) featuring readings and lively conversation with contributors Shyam Selvadurai, Emma Donoghue, Marjorie Chan, Mayank Bhatt, Marni Van Dyk, Michael Fraser and Chang Liu (N/C) . . . An exquisitely conceived and brilliantly executed piece on the letters of T. S. Eliot by Eric Griffiths in the TLS will leave you breathless with delight . . . The always entertaining and musie-newsy Alison Flood @ The Guardian reports on the way in which Hull plans to honour the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death with a toady-type tribute come July 17th . . . Poetry's smokin' hot in Hamburg, Germany :) . . . Nobel Laureate and Essex Poetry Professor Derek Walcott's no-bulloney approach to the nuts and bolts (or art and craft) of making a beautiful thing, paradoxically, earns him an immense amount of clearly deserved respect (especially after he tells one of his students that he should take them outside and execute them as well as opining the "best songs are poems — by people like Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen") . . . Revered Rane Arroyo's finest obituary includes a lovely comment left for readers by his clearly grief-shattered brother in The Toledo Freep . . . Hrm . . . ARE pop lyrics literature? . . . Stephen Burt wonders if "there's more to life than poetry" in one of the current articles featured @ The Poetry Foundation's always sublime online repository, this one entitled "Art versus Laundry." (Personally? I covet that washing machine; bet it would keep my durty prose rally rally clean! :))
Photograph of Fraser Sutherland © Danielle Schaub. All Rights Reserved.
