Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Mini-Review - Plath's Ennui

Is it just me or has anyone noticed that the New Yorker often publishes the worst poetry by America's most *famous* poets?

As I described before (re: the Pollock movie), the cult on the *name brand* artist. Pollock was a great painter; Plath was a great poet. They both made a name for themselves and deserved it. But, is that enough? Does an artist who gets there just have to ride the wave? Don't they have to keep at least trying to make the best art they can (like Bob Dylan and the Stones)?

The Plath poem IS important historically. It gets people in the mind of a young artist. But, let's keep it at that. It's not a very good poem, and I bet the New York would reject it...well, unless it had Plath's signature.

1 comment:

Jim Stewart said...

A great game would be to submit real but obscure poems from famous poets under someone else's name & see how they responded. Better would be poems they'd already published. It might work; how could they know every single one?