Book

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems

by Camille Paglia
New York: Pantheon, 247 pages, 2005. $20.00.

  Camille Paglia begins Break, Blow, Burn with a list of grievances concerning what she deems to be the lamentable state of practice and criticism in the English-language poetry world. The study of poetry has been "steadily marginalized by pretentious 'theory,'" and a "programmatic Marxism." She is shocked at how "weak individual poems have become over the past forty years." By way of inference, one can only intuit that this crisis of poetry is due in part to the number of poets still alive-Paglia seems to prefer dead ones: Of the twenty-eight poets she discusses, twenty-two are deceased. There is also apparently a dearth of New Critical readings of Kubla Kahn. Paglia states: "If humanities expect support and investment from society, there must be a reform of academe.. Poets must remember their calling and take stage again." What follows is a line-by-line analysis of the canonical Greatest Hits of English-language poetry.
   Paglia's analysis is reasonable enough, and the laws of probability dictate that she will touch upon some compelling observations: likening Dickinson's "Disc of Snow" in "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" as a clock face without hands as well as her explication of the "plush matrix or webwork of gummy secretions" in Whitman's "Song of Myself" stand out. Her piece on Whitman, like many others, however, is compromised by a judgmental conflation of her perceptions of the author's character. "Whitman was mild-mannered, diffident, and erotically drawn to men, though, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he may have been mainly celibate," a particularly offensive transgression of Paglia's implicit esthetic of hetero bawdiness.
   O'Hara's "A Mexican Guitar" is "defiantly anti-masculine." Her obsessive mining of each poem for any possible sexual subtext is the sole element that sets this text apart from any garden-variety New Critical dissection. Each analysis is focused through the lens of a preexisting stereotype. Her token Beat poem, Blackburn's "The Once-Over," is a "hipster's syncopated ode to female sexual power." The reforms she speaks of in her introduction mirror the neoconservative zeitgeist of our times: The only step forward is twelve steps back.
   It is unclear who Paglia's intended audience is. Her project offers an obeisance to the rubric of advertising in its surface obsession with sex and its promise of a sensual dynamism, "where the senses are played upon by rhythm, mood, and dreamlike metaphors." She's attempting to sell poetry to an imagined "general public," but in stating "the M&M peanuts jingle was a vivacious poem," another of her omissions becomes clear-she fails to reference her most obvious supporting example: Lew Welch's penning of "Raid kills bugs dead." The book's egregious omissions negate any usefulness as a survey of English-language poetry for the new student; she glosses over any mention of Projectivism, the Berkeley Renaissance, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, or even New Formalism. Whatever Paglia's intentions are, Break, Blow, Burn does no favors for, nor does it have any commerce with contemporary English-language poetry.