Camille Paglia

Interview by Jenn Carbin

It's been almost 15 years since Camille Paglia exploded onto the cultural scene with her book Sexual Personae. Throughout the '90s, she continued to rock establishment feminism with her erudition and acknowledgement of nature and its brutal forces. These days, Paglia and her partner, artist Alison Maddex, are parents to a 2-year-old boy. A professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts for many years, she's spent the past five also working on her fifth book, Break, Blow, Burn (Pantheon). It's a sumptuously clear reading of 43 Western poems ranging from the canonical to the modern and obscure. Paglia's excited about turning readers on to not only Blake but Los Angeles' Wanda Coleman. On the eve of her book tour, she sat down with City Paper to talk about contemporary poetry and why all of those slams aren't necessarily a good thing.

City Paper: When did poetry first speak to you?
Camille Paglia: Well, it was probably Alice in Wonderland, the poem "Jabberwocky." Obviously, nursery rhymes — they're always reading those to you. But they're all namby-pamby. "Jabberwocky" is all about something monstrous and heroic. It was like a foreign language. To me it's the ultimate poem almost … because it says that poetry is something powerful, very assertive, yet mysterious.

CP: In Break, Blow, Burn, you condemn poetry removed from popular diction. How removed is the poetry clique from popular culture?
Paglia: Today the poetry world is very small because poetry doesn't sell. What you get is the poets feel very embattled; they've drawn into their inner world. And certain poets get honors — you have critics that, no matter what a poet puts out, it's praised as this incredible masterpiece. So you have Seamus Haney, who is at Harvard; he won the Nobel Prize for his poetry. Well, I couldn't find a single poem by him that I could put in this book. … It's all derivative. It's all fifth-rate Yeats. So I'm saying that the poets are themselves to blame for withdrawing into this world. It's very clubby. They give awards to each other. They have these grants committees from the foundations, and they're all scratching each other's backs. I'm asking poets to think again about what they're doing. And saying, "You better start addressing the public again and stop addressing each other."

CP: Is the self-protection at all necessary?
Paglia: Naturally you seek out your own. It's almost a bunker mentality. So I understand why it happened. But what I say in the introduction to the book is that the most pernicious thing that happened probably was when poetry became performance. ... That was a great liberation for poetry, to return it to the way it was in the ancient Greek period. But … I realized as I was looking for poems written in the last 30 years that many of these poems were being written for readings. Poets don't have any less talent now. What they lack now is the discipline to work on the page. To get it down and to compress and condense.

CP: Your selection process?
Paglia: I'm looking for the poem [with which] I can say to the general audience, "This will reward you. ... This is an important poem of our time." So I ended with — most of the contemporary writers are almost entirely unknown.

CP: So people don't read poetry.
Paglia: That's my whole point. Poetry has receded, it's gone off the map. Because contemporary poets have nothing to say to us anymore. ... Look at this whole period now, where you have the entire art world, which is opposed to the Iraq war. Where is the strong poem that comes from that? I saw a lot of stupid poems. There's one [adjusts voice] "Dick Cheney's at the White House today! Dick Cheney's --" Oh my God! This is so stupid! Sneering, snide, preaching-to-the-choir stuff. If you have something to say, and you are opposed to the war, where are you? We don't want "Bush is bad." That's not a poem. We can get that in an op-ed.

CP: How will feminists and female humanities professors find your selection?
Paglia: I looked everywhere for what I thought was a strong feminist poem that truly expressed my era. Some defiant voice that was denouncing male oppression and tyranny … actually the strongest I found was Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," even though she's pre-feminist. The only [relatively contemporary] one I found [is] the one by Rochelle Kraut. I found it in an anthology from the '80s. She is not someone who's written a lot of poetry. But boy, I think that is a feminist poem. It's called "My Makeup." It doesn't even pretend to be a feminist poem. But it is.

Camille Paglia reads from Break, Blow, Burn, Tue., April 5, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.

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