... and the prize for best comment goes to...
Ladies and gentlemen, can I please direct your attention back to February 21st, 2007? It was the day WH Auden would have turned 100. Here at Baroque Mansions we hung out the bunting and celebrated with a new poem, made largely - not entirely - of lines from Uncle Wiz himself (though Madame here forgot to keep notes of where the pertinent lines came from! I know I have the book around somewhere...).
I think it is time to address attention to this post again, if only to address attention to the comment it received today. I've never made a post out of someone's comment before, much less the comment of an unknown poetaster. However, there is such a thing as progress, and just as Marie Antoinette might have put the world's first feather pompoms on her pink satin mules, I intend to break with tradition right now and post it.
Heiranonymous Bosh, Poetaster De Luxe, writes:
"Madame B., thank you for your delightful poem, which I like very much in all its alleged rough-hewness. I shall be sharing it with sympatico friends. It is a graceful & generous hommage to such a rare one as Auden, who did indeed (though certainly no angel himself) commit some of the 20th century's "sanest, most liberal, & chaste poetry in English", successfully interpenetrating the sacred & the profane in a "user-friendly" poetic fashion.
Incidentally, I have just chanced upon this interesting site of yours via a bewildering cascade of chance search-engine turns & twists whilst researching-- of all things-- the celebrated (or, more mischievously put, "the sainted") Maya Angelou as viewed speculatively in the light of both Vladimir Nabakov's provocatively iconoclastic ideas regarding the poshlost & its viral inroads into the heart of man in these days of the global exploitation of Admass, & Paul Fussell's conception of the ultimately barbaric jingoist-consumerist faux-Culture swindle of BAD. (Whew! Try saying that a few times!)
Just pour lagniappe, a few perhaps germane things I've also just chanced upon:
One Patrick Kurp, of Houston, Texas, usefully referencing The Prolific and the Devourer in a caustic protest against the misuse of poetry in the forlorn-hopery of misconceived Good Causing:
http://www.evidenceanecdotal
"It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done-- or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never _made_ anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself-- beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing."
I'm sure most will be familiar with this sharp-edged but humane piece by Randall Jarrell, but it is evergreen & bears another look:
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts
The Pakistani-American writer Maliha Masood spotlighting (against the current deep-darkness of the geopolitical background) a past master of what is arguably the most radical poetry conceivable who, though long dead, is currently holding his spirited, lively, & unyieldingly Sufic own against the rigours of attempted feel-good co-option by out-&-out frauds and even well-meaning but ignorant acolytes of the current terror-drenched dispensation of global provincialism & fuzzy-thinking/feeling (Whew! Try... O skip it):
http://www.atimes.com/atimes
Roger Downey's "In-sufi-cient: Translating Rumi's verse into the stuff of self-help books"--Traduttore, tradittore:
http://www.seattleweekly.com
Recently-read joke which I stared at, mind-nulled, for several seconds, like an emu contemplating a chrome lug-nut, before reaching Epiphany:
"Don't you know the King's English?"
"No, sir, is he?"
I am looking forward to perusing your site at greater length. Cheers!"
Ms B says cheers to you too, Mr Bosh.
Oh, and by the way - by following the links I came to a home page that seems to belong to Mr Bosh, and bless me if I didn't find a description of myself there!
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