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Saturday, November 20, 2004
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No Justice in this World...
...in a couple of senses. One: Donald Justice, one of America's greatest poets, recently died. And two, though nominated posthumously for the National Book Award, he didn't get it. A poet named Jean Valentine, whose work is impressive but a good deal less impressive than Justice's got it. Valentine is a member of what UD calls the Buddhaburst school of American poetry. Most of her poems are very short buddhistic bursts of insight about personal life and its passages. But there's so little there on the page that I couldn't tell you the content of the insight beyond something platitudinous that everyone already knows. The American prose equivalent is the still-dominant school of minimalism, as in the work of Raymond Carver. (It was a lovely moment, a couple of semesters ago, when a strong minority of UD's students in her Short Story class dismissed a three-pages-of-enigmatic-dialogue Hemingway story as "Something you'd overhear in Starbucks.") UD's own theory is that a post-literate, attention-deficient culture like America drives desperate writers to this sort of thing. Great poets also tell us what we already know, of course. But their linguistic magic makes familiar truths excitingly clear and fresh. That's the sort of poet Donald Justice was. |