Putting Down a Poet - big time

[Rumple Foreskin]

I came across a literary put-down of Pablo Neruda today that was so complete and unexpected, it made my laugh. Whether it was deserved or not, I leave to ye poets. I'm just an old prose pusher.

This will take a minute to set-up, so please bear with me.

Stephen Schwartz, writing in the on-line publication JEWCY denounced an essay by Eric Hobsbawm that appeared in, The Glode, which claimed Stalin did not, as George Orwell and many others have argued, hasten the defeat of the left in the Spainish Civil War by trying to bring all leftist parties under Communist Party control.

In the course of his essay, Hobsbawm claimed several Spanish language writers, including Noble Prize winning Chilean poet and Communist Party member, Pablo Neruda, would have been in sympathy with his position.

Schwartz responded:

Neruda was a Stalinist agent and is highly overrated as a poet, mainly the object of devotion by teenagers in the Hispanic world and illiterates elsewhere.

Just thought a few of you poets might find that, well, interesting.

Rumple Foreskin

 

[ghost_girl]

well, let me see. He slurs teenagers, he slurs Hispanics, he makes a mockery of the plague of illiteracy. Sounds like an ignorant man, void of compassion, and I personally, would not take much stock in anything he has to say about Neruda or otherwise.



It is a shame there are such bigoted people with time enough to spread misery. makes me kinda sad

 

[champagne1982]

I also question the value of his opinion. I only briefly delved into a couple of links from that blog and found a few that were questionably anti-Semetic and anti-femininist that this Schwartz person was associated, albeit indirectly, with.

I really hope he appreciates how ridiculous he sounds accusing the illiterate of READING.

 

[Tzara]

Weird guy. Obnoxious as hell. Very strange background: Stalinist to Trotskyite to neocon, plus his Jewish heritage and his conversion to Islam thing thrown in for good measure.

Some slight poetry background, apparently, but his qualifications to shit all over Neruda's poetry seem to be only slightly better than mine. It seems to me the man just hates, hates Stalinists. Trotskyist thing.

Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but not the best qualification for rendering aesthetic judgments.

What's really odd is that he's born in the same year as this Stephen Schwartz. That really confused me at first.

 

[Angeline]

A while back, I read somewhere that chain bookstores (e.g., Borders, Barnes and Noble) in the United States sell more Pablo Neruda than any other poet. Or maybe darkmaas told me, lol, who remembers? Anyway what that says about the poetry reading habits of Americans, I'm not sure. Are we a bunch of pedestrian, lovestruck teenagers? Stalinists? I don't doubt that America's literary tastes are erm less than scholarly overall, but if we only read politcally correct, "mature" poets, who would that leave?

Anyway, I don't know what a poltically correct, mature poet (or writer) is. I do know that if I start censoring who I like to read on the basis of politics or someone else's definition of maturity, I've limited myself.

It's true that Neruda's poetry can be viscerally emotional although I can think of plenty of poets I would define as overly romantic or downright sappy in comparison to him.

It all comes down to taste. We like what we like, and as long as I'm not a Stalinist (which I assuredly am not) or a teenager (left that behind more years ago than I'm willing to admit), why sweat it?

Maybe we should let poor silenced Pablo defend himself.

Exhibit A

‘Leaning into the afternoon’
VII From:’ Veinte poemas de amor’

Leaning into the afternoon, I cast my saddened nets,
towards your oceanic eyes.

There, in the highest fire, my solitude unrolls and ignites,
arms flailing like a drowning man’s.

I send out crimson flares across your distant eyes,
that swell like the waves, at the base of a lighthouse.

You only guard darkness, far-off woman of mine,
from your gaze the shore of trepidation sometimes emerges.

Leaning towards afternoon, I fling my saddened nets,
into the sea, your eyes of ocean trouble.

The night-birds peck at the early stars,
that glitter as my soul does, while it loves you.

The night gallops, on its mare of shadows,
spilling blue silken tassels of corn, over the fields.

Exhibit B

‘The tree is here, still, in pure stone’
XVI: From: ‘Las Piedras del Cielo’

The tree is here, still, in pure stone,
in deep evidence, in solid beauty,
layered, through a hundred million years.
Agate, cornelian, gemstone
transmuted the timber and sap
until damp corruptions
fissured the giant’s trunk
fusing a parallel being:
the living leaves
unmade themselves
and when the pillar was overthrown
fire in the forest, blaze of the dust-cloud,
celestial ashes mantled it round,
until time, and the lava, created
this gift, of translucent stone.

Exhibit C

Walking Around
From: ‘Residencia en la tierra II’

It so happens I’m tired of being a man.
It so happens I enter clothes shops and movie-houses,
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing the water of ashes and origins.

The smell of a hairdresser’s has me crying and wailing.
I only want release from being stone or wool.
I only want not to see gardens and businesses,
merchandise, spectacles, lifts.

It so happens I’m tired of my feet and toenails,
my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I’m tired of being a man.

Still it would be a pleasure
to scare a lawyer with a severed lily
or deal death to a nun with a poke in the ear.
It would be good
to go through the streets with an emerald knife
and shout out till I died of cold.

I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows,
vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,
down in the damp bowels of earth,
absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day.

I don’t want to be so much misfortune,
I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,
a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death,
frozen, dying in pain.

This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,
when it sees me arrive with my prison features,
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.

And it drives me to certain street corners, certain damp houses,
towards hospitals where skeletons leap from the window,
to certain cobbler’s shops stinking of vinegar,
to alleyways awful as abysses.

There are sulphur-coloured birds and repulsive intestines,
hanging from doorways of houses I hate,
there are lost dentures in coffee pots
there are mirrors
that ought to have cried out from horror and shame,
there are umbrellas everywhere, poisons and navels.

I pass by calmly, with eyes and shoes,
with anger, oblivion,
pass by, cross through offices, orthopedic stores,
and yards where clothes hang down from wires:
underpants, towels, and shirts, that cry
slow guilty tears.

What do you think?

 

[MyNecroticSnail]

I came across a literary put-down of Pablo Neruda today that was so complete and unexpected, it made my laugh. Whether it was deserved or not, I leave to ye poets. I'm just an old prose pusher.

This will take a minute to set-up, so please bear with me.

Stephen Schwartz, writing in the on-line publication JEWCY denounced an essay by Eric Hobsbawm that appeared in, The Glode, which claimed Stalin did not, as George Orwell and many others have argued, hasten the defeat of the left in the Spainish Civil War by trying to bring all leftist parties under Communist Party control.

In the course of his essay, Hobsbawm claimed several Spanish language writers, including Noble Prize winning Chilean poet and Communist Party member, Pablo Neruda, would have been in sympathy with his position.

Schwartz responded:

Neruda was a Stalinist agent and is highly overrated as a poet, mainly the object of devotion by teenagers in the Hispanic world and illiterates elsewhere.

Just thought a few of you poets might find that, well, interesting.

Rumple Foreskin

Hobsbawm may be right, but I wonder what Neruda would have said about his writing style.
Schwartz's response is interesting, a curious mix of half-truths and conjecture, typical of politicos.
Neruda was a Stalinist, it is a leap to call him an agent.
Neruda may be overrated as a poet, but S. offers no reason why. He is the object of devotion of teenagers, not only in the Hispanic world, but also through translations in the english speaking world. Here is where is gets interesting, illiterates elsewhere. Does Schwartz mean if you don't speak spanish you are illiterate?
Really, this is nothing more than a battle of hardening arteries.
Stalin is dead.
Neruda is dead.
And both H&S are dead to the truth.

 

[Liar]

A while back, I read somewhere that chain bookstores (e.g., Borders, Barnes and Noble) in the United States sell more Pablo Neruda than any other poet. Or maybe darkmaas told me, lol, who remembers? Anyway what that says about the poetry reading habits of Americans, I'm not sure. Are we a bunch of pedestrian, lovestruck teenagers? Stalinists? I don't doubt that America's literary tastes are erm less than scholarly overall, but if we only read politcally correct, "mature" poets, who would that leave?

The best reading (or experiences) to stimulate your mind is that which is almost in your comfort zone. In didactics, it's called the proximal development zone (coned by Vygotskij I think - can't remember who), where you absorb the most new knowledge and insight. Neruda is artful whithout being obtuse, so people feel they are reading Serious Poetry, and feel their minds being challenged whithout losing track. And those who are more accustomed to more complex levels of poetry, will comfort read his stuff just because it's Damn Good Writing.

Was he a Stalinist? Who cares?