Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Pepe on a Roman Holiday?

A Letter to Steyn:

CHANGING THE TONE IN WASHINGTON

Where's your arrogant cocksucker's political capital now? In your face--BITCH!!!!!

Sergio Rizzo
Posted by at
Labels:

8 comments:

Mr roT said...

Old friend, AA.
Extra-poetical Contexts and the Racial Other in "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Sergio Rizzo

Although once at the center of debates about modern poetry, the canonical status of William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow," along with the imagist and objectivist practice it represents, now seems beyond dispute. If anything, the poem runs the risk of becoming, as Denise Levertov described it, one of those "tiresomely familiar and basically unrevealing anthology 'specimens'" (263). By the same token, the tendency to treat the poem as an "anthology specimen" owes something to Williams' efforts to remove it from its original context in Spring and All. For despite the intense critical scrutiny the poem has received over the years, very little attention has been paid to what Williams said about it and the different frameworks he provided for it. As if transfixed by its telescopic power, critics see through these frames and, in the process, keep a dark figure in the poem's biographical history—Marshall, the red wheelbarrow's African-American owner—at the poem's margins.

To my knowledge, Williams only mentions the owner of the wheelbarrow on two occasions. One is in an article, "Seventy Years Deep," written for Holiday magazine (1954) and the other appears in an introduction to the poem in an anthology entitled Fifty Poets, An American Auto-Anthology (1933) edited by William Rose Benét.

The article "Seventy Years Deep" is a human-interest story in which Williams presents himself as a poet of the people. The article's subtitle describes him as "A physician who is considered by many to be America's greatest living poet...


Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (2005) 34-54

11/21/2006 6:24 PM
Mr roT said...

Sergio Rizzo taught courses in American literature and film for several years at the University of Houston-Downtown, then moved to Chicago where he has been...

11/21/2006 6:26 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Do you know him, JJ? This is the first I've heard of the man.

11/21/2006 6:29 PM
Mr roT said...

No. I don't know him. I thought it was funny he was at UH and Chicago, though.

11/21/2006 6:31 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Is he at the University of Chicago? If so, the place has descended further into the mire than I had thought

11/21/2006 6:59 PM
Mr roT said...

Here Rizzo goes after Steyn more. He's got a problem, huh?

11/21/2006 7:06 PM
Mr roT said...

Sergio Rizzo, English, University of Houston--Downtown
"Primary Fictions: Simulacra and Postmodern (Re)presentation Under Clinton"

Hilarious! Look at the title of the conference! Look where the link goes!

11/21/2006 7:08 PM
Mr roT said...

As of Fall '05 he's at Fayetteville State Univ.

11/21/2006 7:14 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)