Debra Pickett

Her new book, Break, Blow, Burn (Vintage, 242 pages, $12.95), is, despite its seductive title (the phrase is from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV"), a deeply old-fashioned kind of work. It is a collection of 43 poems (many, but not all, written by dead white guys), arranged mostly in chronological order and each accompanied by a comprehensive essay -- a "close reading" or "explication of text," for those inclined toward academic jargon -- that explains, in dazzlingly clear language, exactly what the poem says, what it means and how it works.

This is generally perceived as a hopelessly unhip way of looking at poetry -- modern literary criticism holding that concepts like meaning are far too weighted down with cultural baggage to ever really be useful -- but, in practice, it is almost thrillingly engaging.

It's a surprising offering from Paglia, who made her name as a cultural critic, challenging the politically correct tenets of liberal academic feminism, in the early '90s. But she says it's the logical continuation of her radical critique of the entrenched academic elite.

'Trying to rescue poetry'

I joined Paglia for a late-morning meal in the Geneva restaurant, downstairs at the Swissotel, with some trepidation. I was a diligent liberal college student in Paglia's heyday and, as far as most of my professors were concerned, she was pretty much the devil, battling all that was civilized and right.

However, I did learn more about poetry by reading Paglia's book than I did while earning a graduate degree in English literature. So it seemed at least possible that Paglia was on to something about the futility of modern literary theory.

This book, she says, was "a risk because my agent would have preferred something on politics. ... But I wanted to use my name in the interest of the humanities."

Still, whenever she reads from this book, as she did the previous night at the Harold Washington Library, she gets questions about her other, more obviously political, work. Scanning the audience, she says she spotted "the dour faces of academics there checking me out."

"I was on the public scene for three years, from 1991 to 1994," she says. "That means people have been waiting for 11 years to continue the argument."

Paglia generally does a fine job of continuing her own arguments -- she is still ticked off that feminists had the nerve to take Anita Hill at her word, while brushing off Paula Jones -- but she makes a fair point about her critics. The New York Times Book Review essay on Break, Blow, Burn spent two pages mostly praising the book and a half a page slamming Paglia, calling her "madly glamorous" and glibly opining that she "has a taste" for bitchiness, "but no touch."

Paglia, who frequently posed for vamp-ish and scary-sexy photos in the '90s, is not projecting anything even remotely glamorous this morning. Her short hair is messy and slightly damp. She grabs eggs, bacon, potatoes and pancakes from the breakfast buffet and slips on a pair of granny-ish glasses -- "Now I can see my bacon with greater clarity," she jokes -- before eating.

She is also surprisingly good-natured. Though she takes plenty of swings at the academy and particularly at her favorite target, the Ivy League (Paglia completed her dissertation at Yale but has spent most of her career at the far less prestigious University of the Arts in Philadelphia), her tone is mostly jocular.

She is, she says, "trying to rescue poetry from the professoriat" who would label certain works as too difficult for the general reader -- "there is no poem that is too hard," she says, "only too pretentious" -- and would praise hip-hop and "slam" poetry for their real-ness, without acknowledging their limitations.

'An infant doesn't want a man'

Modern writers have, Paglia feels, largely lost the "practical and concrete ability to craft a poem." And this, she says, is a real cultural and artistic failing. As her own books -- this one, and her smash hit Sexual Personae even more so -- demonstrate, Paglia is a proponent of the no-shortcuts school of writing.

She is getting ready to leave -- catching a plane to the next stop on her book tour -- when she remarks, almost in passing, that "Sexual Personae could never have been written by a woman with a child."

Suddenly we're back to 1991 and Paglia's famous assertion that "nature is the greater oppressor, not society."

"All this feminist stuff about men doing more infant care," sniffs Paglia, whose partner of 13 years, Alison Maddex, gave birth to their only child three years ago. "An infant doesn't want a man. The whole realm of pregnancy and child rearing -- there is no equality there."

So the feminist dream -- my dream, actually, since we seem to be getting personal here -- of sharing familial responsibilities so both partners can achieve things in the professional sphere, that's all just bunk?

"The idea that it can just be managed like that!" she declares, letting out a laugh that shouts, "preposterous!"

'That's just reality'

Paglia holds to a world view that says women can be like Condoleezza Rice, forgoing family concerns for career success, or they can be stay-at-home mothers (a choice, she says, that needs to be "re-valorized"), but there's little room in between, at least not while the years when people are expected to complete their studies and launch their careers continue to so closely overlap the years of women's peak fertility.

"That's just reality," she says abruptly and gathers her bags so she can head to the airport.

I am at a loss for words.

We were supposed to be talking about poetry, I remind myself, as I suddenly recall why my professors hated Paglia so much: Fighting nature is even more infuriating than fighting society.