Camille Paglia. Photo by Misa Martin. Courtesy Random House Canada.
Camille Paglia enjoys a privilege that eludes most academics – a rapt mainstream audience. The professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia has maintained a regular media presence since the 1991 publication of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. That 736-page book on art, literature and music brazenly juxtaposed high culture with pop culture – at one point referencing the Marquis de Sade, Renaissance art and Keith Richards all in the same paragraph – and made her name synonymous with controversial criticism.
Now, the best-selling author returns with Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems. The collection ranges from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias to Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, each one accompanied by Paglia’s trademark commentary: insightful and punchy, erudite yet approachable.
Q: Who decides the “world’s best poems?”
A: The original idea was that the book would truly encompass world poetry. I thought I would be using material from other languages. But that proved so problematic, what with translation issues. So I returned to the idea of English. Ransacking libraries for five years, I was looking for contemporary poems that could stand up to the greatest poems of earlier centuries. While I found a tremendous vitality in poetry from, say, the Caribbean, I wasn’t finding a respect for the individual poem as a free-standing object.
A: The original idea was that the book would truly encompass world poetry. I thought I would be using material from other languages. But that proved so problematic, what with translation issues. So I returned to the idea of English. Ransacking libraries for five years, I was looking for contemporary poems that could stand up to the greatest poems of earlier centuries. While I found a tremendous vitality in poetry from, say, the Caribbean, I wasn’t finding a respect for the individual poem as a free-standing object.
Q: What has been your experience with poetry?Courtesy Random House Canada.
A: The first book I had published, Sexual Personae, has a substantial amount of poetry criticism in it. There was such a storm over the theories about sex in it that people declared they would never read the book. What they failed to realize is the degree to which I am grounded in poetry and criticism. It goes right back to the ’60s when I was in college, back when the whole American culture was alive with a whole new kind of radical performance poetry. It was very politically engaged and coming out of the beat movement of the 1950s. Poetry itself, of course, is my holy writ. I am a lapsed Catholic and have no doubt transferred that sense of scripture from the Bible to poetry. Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.
Q:
Break, Blow, Burn is a very catchy title. What does it mean?
A: That’s from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV¸ a poem from the 17th century. That’s what’s so amazing: the title just seems so now. It’s stunning how a phrase from the 17th century could just leap out like that. I went through the poems to find phrases and gave them to my editors at Pantheon. But this one just grabbed them. They wanted it immediately. Then the art department did this amazing cover. What it resembles is one of the great graphic design works of the 20th century – the cover of the first issue of BLAST [an avant-garde magazine launched in 1913 by artist Wyndham Lewis to celebrate the burgeoning Modernist movement].
Q: You open the collection with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 and Sonnet 29 – which deal with the dread of aging, mortality, depression, helplessness, despair and love – as if to throw down the gauntlet to the poets that follow. Was that your intention?
A: It’s true, Shakespeare is a model for what it should be. It just shows you what you can squeeze into 14 lines. I would advise anyone aspiring to any of the art forms to look at these sonnets to see this kind of minimalism. How you can get the maximum into the minimum, the fine care that goes into each syllable.
A: It’s true, Shakespeare is a model for what it should be. It just shows you what you can squeeze into 14 lines. I would advise anyone aspiring to any of the art forms to look at these sonnets to see this kind of minimalism. How you can get the maximum into the minimum, the fine care that goes into each syllable.
Q: You include Sylvia Plath in your collection. Gwyneth Paltrow played her in the 2003 biopic Sylvia. I know you’ve never been a fan of hers. What did you think of Paltrow’s performance?
A: It’s true, I’ve never been a fan of Paltrow’s. I despised what she did with Jane Austen’s Emma. I find her lazy. I could go on and on. But when I heard she was going to play Sylvia Plath, I thought, ‘Perfect!’ She’s got that slightly pretty, self-conscious, sense-of-entitlement thing going on. That bratty quality. I was disappointed when I did see the film. The script was awful. I was also appalled by a scene in the movie when Sylvia takes her new husband [the poet Ted Hughes] back to America and her mother throws a party, inviting all her friends from the neighbourhood. And there’s this snobbery of the film that tries to show that these people are empty-headed matrons who could not possibly understand the depth of Sylvia and her husband. I happen to know that Mrs. Plath and her friends were well educated and all very supportive of her. As payback, this trashy movie treats them as small-minded provincials.
A: It’s true, I’ve never been a fan of Paltrow’s. I despised what she did with Jane Austen’s Emma. I find her lazy. I could go on and on. But when I heard she was going to play Sylvia Plath, I thought, ‘Perfect!’ She’s got that slightly pretty, self-conscious, sense-of-entitlement thing going on. That bratty quality. I was disappointed when I did see the film. The script was awful. I was also appalled by a scene in the movie when Sylvia takes her new husband [the poet Ted Hughes] back to America and her mother throws a party, inviting all her friends from the neighbourhood. And there’s this snobbery of the film that tries to show that these people are empty-headed matrons who could not possibly understand the depth of Sylvia and her husband. I happen to know that Mrs. Plath and her friends were well educated and all very supportive of her. As payback, this trashy movie treats them as small-minded provincials.
Q: In her poem Daddy, Sylvia Plath compares her plight to Jewish prisoners of concentration camps. You describe her as less a poet than a proto rock lyricist in the vein of Patti Smith or Chrissie Hynde.
A: Nobody has ever seen Plath as someone prefiguring the coming era of music, but that’s what she did. She’s always been thought of as a product of the 1950s – in rebellion against the 1950s. But with Daddy, it’s like she’s singing. Rock is driven by emotional expressiveness. And at its height, that’s what it is. It’s a form of emotional exhibitionism.
A: Nobody has ever seen Plath as someone prefiguring the coming era of music, but that’s what she did. She’s always been thought of as a product of the 1950s – in rebellion against the 1950s. But with Daddy, it’s like she’s singing. Rock is driven by emotional expressiveness. And at its height, that’s what it is. It’s a form of emotional exhibitionism.
Q: Not only did you exclude Robert Frost from this collection, you admit to loathing him in the introduction. What’s wrong with Frost?
A: It could very well be that he was just forced on us in high school, but I just could not stand him. It was all this plainness, this austerity, this pretension of not having a persona. Such overly simple “Yankee me, Robert Frost, in the Yankee countryside.” I came out of an immigrant family and this was the early 1960s, a period when the WASP was dominant in the arts. Frost made me gag because he was so Protestant. I found it corn pone. I’m from the rock ’n’ roll generation. When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards came on the scene, with this whole defiant, louche, decadent style – that was what drew my attention. I prefer a much purer WASP and that’s Emily Dickinson. In Sexual Personae, I have a chapter on her called “Amherst Madame de Sade.” I feel that Dickinson was alienated from her Protestant milieu. And what I find in her work is a lot of Italian baroque kind of gestures and grandiloquence. She uses imagery that comes from Catholicism.
A: It could very well be that he was just forced on us in high school, but I just could not stand him. It was all this plainness, this austerity, this pretension of not having a persona. Such overly simple “Yankee me, Robert Frost, in the Yankee countryside.” I came out of an immigrant family and this was the early 1960s, a period when the WASP was dominant in the arts. Frost made me gag because he was so Protestant. I found it corn pone. I’m from the rock ’n’ roll generation. When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards came on the scene, with this whole defiant, louche, decadent style – that was what drew my attention. I prefer a much purer WASP and that’s Emily Dickinson. In Sexual Personae, I have a chapter on her called “Amherst Madame de Sade.” I feel that Dickinson was alienated from her Protestant milieu. And what I find in her work is a lot of Italian baroque kind of gestures and grandiloquence. She uses imagery that comes from Catholicism.
Q: You’ve included Andrew Marvell’s brilliant To His Coy Mistress, which features the stanzas: “Two hundred to adore each Breast; But thirty thousand to the rest.” The basic message of the poem is that time’s a wastin’; let’s get it on! That seems like racy stuff for circa 1650 – was it?
A: It’s sad to realize just how bawdy literature was in the period that extended from Elizabethan times – the 16th century – right through to the 17th century. Things got cleaned up after that. There was so much sex innuendo in Shakespeare that there was an early compendium called Shakespeare’s Bawdy. English literature continues to be sexual right into the 18th century – think of Tom Jones – and it’s not until the 19th century where you see an attempt to purge all the sex out of it.
A: It’s sad to realize just how bawdy literature was in the period that extended from Elizabethan times – the 16th century – right through to the 17th century. Things got cleaned up after that. There was so much sex innuendo in Shakespeare that there was an early compendium called Shakespeare’s Bawdy. English literature continues to be sexual right into the 18th century – think of Tom Jones – and it’s not until the 19th century where you see an attempt to purge all the sex out of it.
Q: Midway through the book, you present Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, the first one in the collection not to rhyme. When did poets abandon rhyming?
A: Obviously Whitman was doing something radical and free-form and his style was either admired or, mostly, rejected in his time. But we find a lot of rhyming right into the ’60s. Certain radicals of that era tried to break free of it but we’ve always had both traditions going on side by side. There are still poets who rhyme, even though critics began to feel that it was conventional and conservative. Now it’s interesting to point out that there’s been a tremendous surge of rhyming in hip hop. There’s clearly something in the popular imagination that responds to it.
A: Obviously Whitman was doing something radical and free-form and his style was either admired or, mostly, rejected in his time. But we find a lot of rhyming right into the ’60s. Certain radicals of that era tried to break free of it but we’ve always had both traditions going on side by side. There are still poets who rhyme, even though critics began to feel that it was conventional and conservative. Now it’s interesting to point out that there’s been a tremendous surge of rhyming in hip hop. There’s clearly something in the popular imagination that responds to it.
Q: How did you decide on 43 poems? Was there a long and short list?
A: It didn’t quite work like that. I had no idea how many poems were going to be in this book when I started out. I just forged ahead and collected massive numbers of them. Finally, I got to the end and I felt: this is the end. Forty-three. It just felt right. It’s odd, because usually it’s 50 or 100. But 43? It has an unusual ring to it. An eccentric ring to it. But these are the ones that won the race.
A: It didn’t quite work like that. I had no idea how many poems were going to be in this book when I started out. I just forged ahead and collected massive numbers of them. Finally, I got to the end and I felt: this is the end. Forty-three. It just felt right. It’s odd, because usually it’s 50 or 100. But 43? It has an unusual ring to it. An eccentric ring to it. But these are the ones that won the race.
Liz Hodgson writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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