Tuesday, May 13, 2008
West, of course, left after an infamous blowup with [Harvard University president Lawrence] Summers. What have you thought of the controversy up there?
What many observers felt about the Cornel West incident was that Cornel West was so used to being pampered, idolized and coddled that to have any aspect of his academic performance questioned came as a mortal blow. It's pretty obvious that Lawrence Summers has very few people skills and that he is not suited to be the president of a major university. You have to bring groups together; you can't be a person who divides groups from each other. But I am sympathetic to Summers' desire to insert some reality into the knee-jerk, monolithic, Jurassic Park liberalism that passes for political thinking at that university. Talk about diversity -- there's hardly a conservative or dissident voice at that place. It's bad for the faculty, it's bad for the students, it makes a travesty of Harvard's claims of education -- which students are bankrupting their families to pay for.
I think that affirmative action in the way it has been applied does need to be questioned, but not in this ham-handed way. The issue that Summers is broaching in the most recent incident, whether there are genetic sex differences, is an enormously important one for academe to address. But for 30 years, the social-constructionist dogma has become entrenched in humanities departments from coast to coast. That's why, when "Sexual Personae" came on the scene, people went ballistic. They weren't used to hearing anything about nature. And they were saying, "Oh, she's an essentialist. She's using the no-no word 'nature.'" But I said that sex is the "intricate intersection of nature and culture," so it's a combination of the two.
But you have people who are getting enormous salaries for being gender-studies experts who have never studied biology or endocrinology, who know nothing about hormones. They're ignoramuses. Where the hell are they getting off saying that we're born blank slates and become male or female only through society's pressures -- what is this crap that they're teaching? But it's absolutely routine.
To open this debate is crucial, since there are very few dissident voices discussing this issue in the humanities. But Summers seems to be a dope. I applaud him for raising the subject -- the question of biology and its relation to gender. But I have to condemn him for his unscholarly approach to this matter and the sloppy way he handled it.
I wanted to know if there was a particular poet you were really excited to put in this anthology, who you felt never got the right amount of critical attention. Throughout the book, you mention how poststructuralist theory has managed to diminish essential poetry.
Well, yes, the Roethke poems. I can't remember the last time I heard his name mentioned anywhere. "Cuttings" and "Root Cellar" are about dirt! They're about the body and the body's responses. That's what has been totally excluded from poststructuralism, because poststructuralism sees the body as a passive victim to the forces of power "inscribing" their agenda on us. Poststructuralism is stupidly oblivious to the relationship between the body and nature -- our bodies are subsets of nature, not society. It should be rather obvious, but no. The body-centered approach, the speech-centered approach, to poetry was from the '60s, my era. It was partly coming from the Beats. For some reason it has been dissipated. I thought it would be a revolution in American culture.
The primary reason was drugs; the people most impacted by this radical view of life were destroyed by drugs. The solid academic poets just churned along, drinking alcohol, but everyone else was brain-dead. So it thrilled me to see Roethke depicted in the wonderful illustration accompanying my review in New York Times Book Review. Then when Matt Drudge put the picture up on the Drudge Report, I thought, "Hooray! This is Roethke's first appearance on a major news Web site!" My college teacher Milton Kessler was a graduate student of Roethke's at the University of Washington. I feel a particular thrill about that, because I believe in lineage, you see. This wonderful lineage -- it goes from Roethke to Kessler to me -- and from me to the young people who will read "Break, Blow, Burn." You never know who's going to be inspired.
It's like the movie "The Turning Point" when the old teacher says to the aging ballerina played by Anne Bancroft, "You are passé. You must be a teacher now. I learned from the great so-and-so in Russia. I passed it on to you, and now you must pass it on to her!" -- the ditsy young dancer who has to be waved away from the pastries. I just love that idea of lineage and transmission from generation to generation -- and those connections are precisely what I think have been broken in the domination of French theory in the last 30 years.
Right, because even though this book might not be as immediately, obviously contentious as "Sexual Personae," it's a shot across the bow of the academy.
Oh, yes, and I'm also trying to inspire an insurgency movement of embattled teachers everywhere. I want to say to the adjuncts who are working so hard, going from school to school, without benefits: Your love of literature and art and your teaching students who are not going to be big-shot Manhattan executives but who are just going about their workaday lives -- you belong to a real American cultural movement, and here's a manifesto for you. The way you approach things directly and honestly, that too is a theory! All these people who claim to be so superior to you because they "do" theory -- they're fakes. And they've destroyed the prestige of humanities departments.
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