Bookplanet: Paglia interviewed about her poetry book

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: 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. More here.