Seeing From a Limited Aesthetic

As one of Robert Peters’ publishers, I feel obliged to comment on Rebecca Arivizu’s letter of Jan. 11, in which she accused her former professor of “still disgusting people and provoking misery with his poetry.” She adds that she “was tortured through a quarter of Peters’ ‘works of art.’ ”

She may have realized more than she wanted in the course with this “crude and vulgar man” (yes, I’ve seen him eat raw cabbage, whole), but she still cannot shake the problem Americans have with defining art, poetry, and purpose. Space prohibits a lengthy rebuttal by citing the “disgusting” works of Goya and Chaucer, or summarizing the contemporary aloof aesthetic of Joyce; and it is sad that such educational growth in this generation of Americans limits our aesthetic and allows us to replace it with our personal punctuation, that, oh yes, has to put art in quotes.

Since the 1950s, and especially in this generation, we have insisted that art and poetry carry a message. We have been so trained to associate messages of politics, religion and social science in the popular works of art such as Beats, Third World, Feminist, etc., that we cannot see art without attaching agendas to it.

This kind of “over-correctness” has become so dangerous that the next step is to assign causality to it, which is not that far removed by implication in Arivizu’s charge that “he is still glorifying psychopaths in his work and calling it art.”

When are Americans ever going to be intelligent enough to realize that the artist’s (as in Joyce, aloof, paring his fingernails) greatness lies in his or her ability to pull up the anomalies of the psyche, such as anything “rank and gross in nature” for others to witness?

I think his suggestion of “close-minded” might also include the decaying intellect and aesthetic acumen that we Americans have learned to replace with the easy doublespeak of a standard or quality by throwing our personal quotation marks around art.

CHARLES PLYMELL

Cherry Valley, N.Y.