A rose is

Back in March I pointed to some observations on Camille Paglia's book on poetry "Break, Blow, Burn." Recently I found a terrific piece by Aaron Haspel in his blog "God of the Machine" Aaron knows poetry and he covers this book well in just a few paragraphs. I also found the comments interesting, revealing and educational.

"....What I cannot forgive is the violence she does to the poems themselves. Poetry achieves its effects through the relationship between sound and sense, and to elucidate them requires technical analysis. You have to read carefully and you have to know something. Zero for two, you may want to consider another line of work."

and

"...Everything Paglia writes about "Anecdote of the Jar" is wrong, including "and" and "the." "This cryptic poem is about art making," she says. It is not. It is about Stevens' single subject, the sterility of the human intellect, represented by the jar, and the consequent necessity of hedonism."

I hope you have the opportunity to read through Aaron's archives, its quite a trip!