User talk:Compensations

I just edited the entry on Richard Poirier. Someone, in the past few days, added a sentence to the end of the entry reading: "He was a closeted homosexual," citing a remark by Edmund White. I wager that the source is unreliable in this case, and the facts are plainly wrong. So I deleted the sentence. I worked very closely with Dick Poirier for more than 8 years. He was not "closeted" at all. Everyone who knew him personally knew not only that he was gay, but who his long-time lovers were. He was a relatively private man, but this applied to all things about him, and was a matter of temperament, and it in no way warrants referring to him as "closeted" in the sense in which we now use the term. He had fully come to terms with himself, as to sexuality and most other things, decades before he died. Some fuller discussion of his life is absolutely necessary, and I know a good many folk who can do this properly, all of whom worked closely with Dick, and were his friends. Instead of suggesting that he was "closeted" it will be better, perhaps, to mention his long-time partner(s), one of whom designed the logo for Raritan, and was the dedicatee of one of Dick's books. There is also much else that needs work here: details about his service in WW2, his having met Gertrude Stein in Paris at the war's end, his work on the course called "HUM 6" at Harvard, which launched a style of close reading utterly distinct from the New Criticism, and many another thing. But this will take some time to do properly. Please be patient.

Regarding your links in the article
I removed your links to wordpress, as Wikipeda is not a collection of links, and as a wordpress blog, the link did not meet the standards for external links. If you can demonstrate that Mark Richardson is a authority in the field (easy way to do this would be to point to an already existing Wikipedia article), then the link would be appropriate. Ian.thomson (talk) 12:11, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

As for whether Mark Richardson is an authority in the field of American literary study, and on Poirier's contrribution, I can reply as follows. Mark Richardson co-edited, with Richard Poirier, the Library of American edition of Frost's "Collected Poms, Prose, & Plays." He is editor of "The Collected Prose of Robert Frost" (Harvard 2007), author of "The Ordeal of Robert Frost" (University of Illinois Press, 1997), co-editor of a forthcoming edition of Frost's letters (from Harvard UP), and author of 20 or so essays in literary criticism, ranging from Frost to W.E.B. DuBois. In short, he is an established scholar in the field of American literature, and was also a personal friend of Richard Poirier, with whom he worked for 12 years, as a grad student, employee of the Library of America, etc.

For these reasons I removed the reference derived from Edmund White's book, and will continue to monitor this. Dick Poirier was never closeted, White's book is by turns pernicious & misleading, and Dick anyway preferred the word "gay" to "homosexual." But it remains unclear why Ian Thomson insists on emphasizing this aspect of Dick's life. Please explain that so I can better understand. Poirier wasn't especially interested in writing about his sexuality. Pointing out, without any requisite context, that he was "a homosexual" makes no more sense than pointing out, in the Wikipedia entry on Lincoln (say) that he was "heterosexual." So I am again deleting the sentence, until such time as I and others who knew Dick personally, professionally, and as students of American literary history, can fill the entry out.

The entry is so scandalously short that adding the mere statement "He was a homosexual" gives that fact a salience, and puts it in a phrasing, that Dick never himself insisted on, nor preferred. He was open about his sexuality; he dedicated books to his partner. But his work was not a part of what we now know as the highly valuable and valued school of Queer Theory, which I myself find quite interesting, but which Dick did not. Also, he was not a practitioner or advocate of "identity"-based styles of criticism & theory; this was not because he was "closeted" or in any way uneasy w/ his sexuality, so far as I ever observed. Instead, it was because he preferred, and advocated, a style of "close reading" informed by American pragmatism; and he did this consummately well.

So I would ask Ian.thomson to demonstrate why it is necessary at this stage in the meagre development of the entry on Richard Poirier to bring Dick's sexuality in, with no context whatsoever, and with no regard for the writing Dick did do on sexuality in "Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing," & elsewhere.


 * Hi, sorry, you need reliable sources showing he is notable.  Basically, since Mark Richardson doesn't have an article on Wikipedia, as far as Wikipedia knows, he just someone else with a blog.  Wikipedia is not what is true, it is just a summary of sources.  I'm honestly not interested in anything other than the guidelines being followed.  Ian.thomson (talk) 12:40, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Regarding the statement you deleted from the Richard Poirier article
If a statement has a reliable source, please do not delete it. It may be countered with another reliable source, it may be altered (you could have just removed the word "closeted"), but it is a bit unconstructive to remove a sourced piece of information. Ian.thomson (talk) 12:11, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Compensations replies
The entry is so scandalously short that adding the mere statement "He was a homosexual" gives that fact a salience, and puts it in a phrasing, that Dick never himself insisted on, nor preferred. He was open about his sexuality; he dedicated books to his partner. But his work was not a part of what we now know as the highly valuable and valued school of Queer Theory, which I myself find quite interesting, but which Dick did not. Also, he was not a practitioner or advocate of "identity"-based styles of criticism & theory; this was not because he was "closeted" or in any way uneasy w/ his sexuality, so far as I ever observed. Instead, it was because he preferred, and advocated, a style of "close reading" informed by American pragmatism; and he did this consummately well.

So I would ask Ian.thomson to demonstrate why it is necessary 'at this stage in the meagre development of the entry on Richard Poirier to bring Dick's sexuality in, with no context whatsoever, and with no regard for the writing Dick did do on sexuality in "Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing," & elsewhere.

Quit adding links to Wordpress blogs
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page Robert Frost do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Wikipedia is not a collection of links; nor should it be used as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Ian.thomson (talk) 11:56, 19 April 2010 (UTC)