Not long ago I re-read John Hollander's short piece on Wallace Stevens for the magazine of the Academy of American Poets. Hollander's Stevens is culturally conservative - a conservator of "our cardinal nobilities," etc. In essayistically surveying the uses of Stevens after 1975 about a year ago, I wrote a few paragraphs in protest against such a view. I won't quote or summarize that protest here, but I will provide a link to a PDF of the Hollander piece.
Friday, June 12, 2009
conserves our cardinal nobilities, thank goodness
Not long ago I re-read John Hollander's short piece on Wallace Stevens for the magazine of the Academy of American Poets. Hollander's Stevens is culturally conservative - a conservator of "our cardinal nobilities," etc. In essayistically surveying the uses of Stevens after 1975 about a year ago, I wrote a few paragraphs in protest against such a view. I won't quote or summarize that protest here, but I will provide a link to a PDF of the Hollander piece.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
