Warrior for the Word//PAGLIA

Salon ^ | April 7 | By Kerry Lauerman

[constitoot]

Warrior for the word
Camille Paglia slams bloggers and trendy academics for degrading language -- and calls for a passionate revival of the great artistic tradition of the West.
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By Kerry Lauerman

April 7, 2005  |  Camille Paglia's first major work since "Sexual Personae," the 1990 bestseller that cracked a bullwhip over the heads of dogmatic feminists and a p.c. academe and turned its author into our favorite provocateur, appears, at first glance, to be a surprisingly demure offering. "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World's Best Poems," in fact, was almost titled something as modest as "Readings"; she says she didn't want anything to overshadow the poems (from Shakespeare to Plath) that she chose to honor.

But, true to Paglia's form, there's an incendiary call to arms inside "Break, Blow, Burn" (a phrase taken from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV"). Her celebration of these poems -- each reprinted and electrically interpreted -- is paired with a blistering critique of what she sees as the cultural and academic forces that have conspired to undermine our enjoyment of poetry, lessening its importance in the process. She demands reform and believes it will be up to graduate students and poets themselves to lead the way. "In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education," she writes.

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[constitoot]

She's apparentally raising a son with her partner, but later says she hates the example set by Rosie O'Donnell. Interesting . . .

[contemplator]

Pure elitist snobbery.

I am a self admitted non-artist. If I pick up a pencil and have a go at portraying some fruit so I can an idea across am I degrading serious artists?

Unfortunately the tools I have at my disposal for getting ideas across are few, and most of them involve language. If someone can't use the language at the level of someone who studies and perfects prose for a living are they to be derided?

She makes a point about Art needing to be moved back to the center of education. I suppose she feels this would solve the problem she has identified. I don't recall that Art has ever been at the center, and honestly don't think it needs to be there except for specialized education programs.

[Gefreiter]

c,
Arguably, art WAS at the center of education. At that time though, formal education taken at a relative handful of institutions was unavailable to the unwashed multitudes.

In this day and age, it is damn near impossible to be rejected for an assoc or bacc program outside of the Ivy League, other successful privates, and a handful of elite publics.

As education has become more widely available to a wider population, so the study of art (using the term liberally) has declined. A huge majority of current students, if polled right now, would declare that getting a good job is the goal of college, not studying art for its own sake.

[livius]

It's a good article. I don't think she quite understands Christianity, which she seems to think of as some grim puritanical force, overlooking the fact that much of the great art she praises came out of Christian societies or even directly related to the religion.

I think she's right about the academy with its "isms" (post-structuralism, for example) having destroyed poetry - that and drugs, which somehow made any raving into "poetry," no matter how unmelodic and self-referential. But one thing that kids love about rap, whether they know it or not, is that it has the basics of poetry: rhythm, a repeated rhyming pattern, and it's meant to be understood. Personally, I think poetry is an inborn linguistic need, and I think we'll see a resurgence of it, especially with folks like Camille Paglia willing to fight for it.

[technochick99]

But one thing that kids love about rap, whether they know it or not, is that it has the basics of poetry: rhythm, a repeated rhyming pattern, and it's meant to be understood.

What a good point!