*Man, poets sure are quarrelsome.
*It's a little odd that nobody talks about means of production here, it's all education, class and audience, basically. If you were blind and had a lyre and were confronted with a bunch of Greek nobles, could you lay down some Homeric riffing to earn your bowl of soup? Probably not, eh.
It's the Times "Literary" Supplement when it should be the Times "Viral" supplement
(...)
John Updike, for one, felt moved to dismay about the rise of the term “literary fiction” and how it denoted “a genre almost as rarefied and special and curious in its appeal, to contemporary Americans, as poetry”. That was in 2006, a few years before Updike died, but his remark occurs in a curious context: at the end of a brief interview, now available on the Poetry Foundation website, about the somewhat surprising popularity of his poem “Ex-Basketball Player”.
There is a neat confluence here, I suspect, of the two long-running controversies of which McNish-gate and the ACE report are the latest outbreaks. A poem is not expected to be popular – although “Ex-Basketball Player” was apparently more popular on the Poetry Foundation site than Shakespeare. A novel, meanwhile, is somehow troublesome if it evinces any aspirations towards, dare it be said – the poetic? That word is, after all, hackneyed enough, as a description of a novel that, as Mullan might put it, draws attention to “the manner of their telling”. Sue Halpern of the New York Review of Books once described “literary fiction” as literature that expresses an “allegiance to language”. That sounds like a fairly basic condition of poetry, too; and it is not uncommon to find that a “literary novelist” is also a poet – making next to nothing from one pursuit, of course, and absolutely nothing from the other....
