Nick's comment certainly echoes with something I have been thinking for quite a while: that it's hard to like someone's poetry if you dislike that person. That the issue of trust is somehow important in poetry, and if you implicitly don't trust someone, you're going to find that person's flaws all over their poetry, because of how a poem is an ambiguous reflection of the writer's desire and worldview. You are more likely to be generous with interpreting the ambiguous clues to this worldview if you like the person who wrote the work. And Gary points out here that you can love someone's work and then they turn out to be a terrible reader in person -- exactly, it's like once you have met the person that perception colors your reading of their poems, tonally, sensually, ideologically. Blogging makes coming into contact with the person who wrote the poems unavoidable; and meeting the writer in this way can be dangerous. Everything's a clue, from how obnoxiously someone name-drops or references what books they've read to what kinds of questions they ask, what figure of a listener their daily writing tropes. And here, the boundaries between what is the poem and what is the life begin to blur.

Comments

[Laura Carter]

Thanks for bringing this up. We've been studying Anne Sexton in my 20th-century class, and I'm really having a tough time reading her for similar reasons (despite the fact that her life is all over her poetry---not always the case). It is hard to draw the line, and one reason I'm prone to call myself an essentialist, not a bad thing, I think. There's something to the idea that the life-art line is permeable.

[Kent Johnson]

(comment deleted, at author's request)

[Jonathan]

I know very few poets personally, which is an advantage in some cases. When I meet someone I don't like, my opinion of the person's poetry doesn't change all that much. There might be a brief "re-adjustment period." On the other hand if I do end up liking the person I will like the poetry more, if I already liked it. If I dislike the person's poetry already, and the person ends up being a jerk, then the two sets of "dislike" begin to feed into each other. If I have generally friendly relations with someone I am reluctant to criticize their poetry. Why bother?

Their are aspects of poets' personality, dead and alive, that are attractive -- or not. I feel I know Frank O'Hara personally quite well. If I met him nothing really *should* surprise me.