The Taste of the Age

Sheep or Wolf?

Jarrell made a comment once:

“The name Little Red Riding Hood seems to me both long and nonessential—why not call the child Red, and strip the story down to Red meets wolf, Red escapes wolf? At this rate, one could tell a child all of Grimm’s tales between dinner and bedtime.”

But then again, not everyone likes Jarrell. Misery loves company and it eventually finds it.

Oh, matters of taste. Ok so I made that up about my famous dead poet friend, the one licking poems on paper. It wasn’t true; the poet was neither famous nor dead. But she did lick poems on a page—something you might laugh about, but which, given time, might just help with the accessibility of poetry in America. I wouldn’t mind a Silliman popsicle myself. (Collins take note, Jimmy take note.) (And just as an aside the results of her licking choices were, well, accurate. She could actually tell the author of a poem by the taste of ink on paper: “Snow” was Frost’s by its cool, frosty touch on the palate; Bishop was identified as being basically fishy once, Lorca as minty green.)

Taste is like that, like that famous saying of it lying in the tongue of the beholder. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the editors of Little Emerson are having their bouts of difficulty with taste and choice. I must defend them, you know. (Others are also talking of taste in a different but related context. Interesting.) What surprises me about some of the reactions to this “experiment”, which is wholly lacking in any scientific rigor—no shit!—but which nonetheless sounds awfully serious as Little Emerson: That Failed Experiment in Quantum Poetics, is that as arbitrary as it is many people are focusing on the competitive aspect of getting through nine judges for a poem to be published. Will that mythical 9-vote poem, should we ever find it, be better than that lonesome ranger that got but one vote? (Mayhew over at C. Dale’s place essentially argues that it is a statistical impossibility; do check the man’s numbers—any person who can get through that calculation can no doubt make it through Little Emerson in a jiffy or at least to a tenured professorship in random stats at M.I.T.) If you want to see further statistical shock see The Hermit Poet via Dumbfoundry.

Will the mythical “niner” be schizophrenic in style as Charles has suggested (also at C. Dale’s place)? Or will it simply be bland, boring, blah? Or will the editors simply sigh in despair and say “Hey, Alberto, to hell with your little grammar-school-experiment-
in-the-attic thing! Anyway, some interesting comments—did I say it—over at C. Dale’s place.

Or we may turn to the simpler solution suggested by A.D.: Does anybody know Ashbery well enough to get him to submit to L.E.? (Oh, you mean-spirited ones, you’d love to see him rejected, wouldn’t you?)