Saturday, May 17, 2003
Academics rarely understand how much more they know than is useful to them in common conversation. So if six people are sitting in a diner outside Paterson, New Jersey, having a late breakfast after a poetry reading, & two of them are professors of literature, & four are poets of varying ages & educations, the chat rarely centers around Williams or Ginsberg. The academics discuss the difficulties of translating the canzonets of 18th Century Italian poet, Pietro Metastasio. With luck, they might talk about Laura Riding. The poets talk about their kitchen window herb gardens.
