Is rubble the terminal sleep?

Coming up in Poetry...

A portfolio of flarf and conceptual poetry curated by Kenny Goldsmith with comix by Gary Sullivan.

Poems by Rae Armantrout, John Koethe, Kevin Young, Katia Kapovich, Donald Revell, Sandra Beasley, Dan Beachy-Quick, Sandra McPherson & Tim Dlugos.

Prose galore, including Daisy Fried on John Milton and breastfeeding; Donald Revell remembering Robert Creeley; Ange Mlinko notebook; Michael Hofmann on Frederick Seidel; and a "View From Here" by Ashbery/Hejinian-reading baseball player Fernando Perez. And: William T. Vollmann!

La meme chose

[40 years later, they're still pitting Creeley vs. Lowell!]

"Pound is the leader, at the very forefront. Yet because of that, paradoxically he is at the center too: so much - one is inclined to say everything - comes from him. We at the center have a difficult time, often enough; always defining and redefining our position, entering correctives to the debonair pronouncements of the extremes. Not rationalism, we say somewhat acidly, but let us at least be reasonable; not positivism, but not enigma either; and in the matter of fashion, yes, we are friends with Robert Lowell, but we are friends with Robert Creeley too. It is a difficult work. But we take comfort from knowing that Pound is one of us, a man of the center, and that the love of proportion and justice requires, not a baser passion, as some assert, but on the contrary, as in his writing, the strongest and purest passion of all."

-- Hayden Carruth, "On a Picture of Ezra Pound," Poetry, May 1967

Law and Order

From the episode titled "Anchors Away"
(Reading the list of Matson's defrauded investors)

Connie Rubirosa: What do you think? Catholic Children's Charitable Trust might have popped Decker and Prescott?

Michael Cutter: American Poetry Foundation. That's a cutthroat bunch.

Vor-texts: Another installment of Make It New, Already!

The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.

-- Pound's Fenollosa

*
Can I be honest? Your postmodernists have done for unaffected speech. Jokes and flashy effects, yes; but where's the beef? Dead and gone. When Sophocles and Euripides were working, beginners matched style with content. Update Homer? Pindar and company didn't dare. That was before Professor X and "Creative Writing." Never mind poets. Plato and Demosthenes: catch them taking courses! A great stylist never showboats; no purple patches, no polysyllables. Charm derives from fluency. An ill wind has pumped hot air into today's jargon. Blowing in from Athens and eastern colleges. The young fall for it like superstars. Bang goes decent speech, for good. Thucydides? Hyperides? Who needs it? Unpretentious poetry? Not us; unless it's sick, forget it. Mature mastery? To do what with? Fine art; same story: why learn drawing when you get awards for painting by numbers?

Encolpius, discovered in the porch of Agamemnon's Academy of Speech and Drama; from Petronius' Satyrica, translated by Frederic Raphael

Literary rejection and its discontents

Some poets, on hearing what editors think of their work, become dejected; some blog furious missives; some move on to big things (I was going to say greatness, but the term is discredited).

In 1916, Ezra Pound submitted Lustra to Elkin Mathews for possible publication. Below are some of the comments on poems in the ms. by Mathews' unknown reader:

Sorry stuff to begin with

An impudent piece

[On "A Pact"] Poor Walt Whitman. Let's hope he will survive it.

Silly nonsense

[On "Further Instructions"] Better keep his baser passions to himself. No one else wants them

[On "The New Cake of Soap"] Personal not funny

[On "Salvationists"] "We shall get ourselves rather disliked" (This is quite true)

[On "The Temperaments:] Beastly

[On "Phyllidula" or maybe "The Patterns"] What words of wisdom!

[On "The Seeing Eye"] Smelly like its subject

[On "Coitus"] Coitus What a simile!

Papyrus. How truly beautiful!

Foolish Zuutians would be better title

[On "Ancient Music"] Pitiful Parody of beautiful verse

The only poems worth reading are the translations

Pact! (save the mask!) is the only redeeming feature of most of the others, which with a few exceptions are more fitted for the Waste Paper Basket than the literary public

*
Addendum: When the book was eventually published, the printer refused to set some of the poems.

What I Know

"What I Know" / Patrick Dubost
- from the April issue of Poetry

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world.

2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said”.

3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness.

4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death.

5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.

6. I know that I know nothing about love.

7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.

8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.

9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency.

10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.

11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little.

12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one.

13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time.

14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports.

15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay.

16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyse, is not necessarily “to understand”. At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorise opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming-pools fill up.

17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, mouldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded.

18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic – portraits eroded by time and light – I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.

19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse – it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death.

20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.

21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.

Translated from the French by Fiona Sampson

On Overdrafts

(Posted originally on the Best American Poetry blog)

There's been a lot of talk about Barack Obama being a President who reads and knows about poetry. Well, I've taken all this with a few grains of salt, but was quite interested to see that in his recent message to Iran, Obama quoted the 13th-century Persian poet Sa’di - who is, you might say, to Iranian culture what Shakespeare is to ours.

As it happens, Basil Bunting had an abiding interest in Sa'di and Persian poetry, starting when he found a French translation of Ferdowsī's epic, Shāh-nāma, in a book stall on the harbor quays of Genoa in the early 1930s:

"I found a book—tattered, incomplete—with a newspaper cover on it marked Oriental Tales. I bought it, in French. It turned out to be part of the early 19th century prose translation of Firdausi, and it was absolutely fascinating. I got into the middle of the story of the education of Zal and the birth of Rustam—and the story came to an end! It was quite impossible to leave it there, I was desperate to know what happened next. I read it, as far as it went, to Pound and Dorothy Pound, and they were in the same condition. We were yearning to find out, but we could think of no way. The title page was even missing. There seemed nothing to do but learn Persian and read Firdausi, so, I undertook that. Pound bought me the three volumes of Vullers and somebody, I forget who, bought me Steingass's dictionary, and I set to work. It didn't take long. It's an easy language if it's only for reading that you want it."

Bunting applied for a Guggenheim in 1932 to translate the poem (which tells the history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to about 628 A.D. in some sixty thousand couplets); he didn't get one. He even named his children for figures in the poem: daughters Roudaba (b. 1934) and Bourtai (b. 1932), and his son Rustam (b. 1937, d. 1953). Bunting went on to spend much of his long life reading, translating, or thinking about Persian poetry: at one point he lived in Iran (apparently working as a spy!), married an Iranian woman, and spent time "amongst the nomadic mountain-tribes, who taught me to ride & to shootmoufflon and ibex." Late in his life, wrote the foreword to Omar Pound's fascinating Arabic & Persian Poems in English.

One of Bunting's most poignant poems, written on the occasion of his son's death, is "A Song for Rustam," which begins:

Tears are for what can be mended,
not for a voyage ended
the day the schooner put out.
Short fear and sudden quiet
too deep for a diving thief.
Tears are for easy grief.

Much has been written about Pound's obsession with economics. Bunting was far subtler, to say the least. With no small wryness - given the depressed economy of the thirties, when he began to translate - Bunting called some of his translations "overdrafts;" as Richard Price sees it,

"By calling these works 'Overdrafts' Bunting publicly affirms that he has come to an understanding of indebtedness with the poets who, as it were, underwrite him. On that basis, he can only supply what is provisional—a draft—and must also in some sense obscure, write 'over,' the work of his poetic betters. But to take out an overdraft is usually to smoothen cash flow problems: in this case by translating these works, the poet keeps his own poetry moving, in currency, in credit."

Ah, cash flow problems! The poet is prescient.

I'll leave you with a snippet of Bunting's Sa'di:

Many well-known people have been packed away in cemeteries,
there is no longer any evidence that they ever existed.
That old corpse they shovelled under the dirt,
his dust's so devoured not a bone of him's left.

Naushervan's honourable name survives because he was open-handed,
though a lot has happened since Naushervan died.
— Better be open-handed, What's-your-name, (write it off: Depreciation)
before the gossip goes: 'What's-his-name's dead.'

If a few publishers give the go-ahead, a book on Bunting's Persia may soon be in the works.

The Schlock of the New

"It's no more use trying to be traditional than it is trying to be original. Nobody invents very much, but there is one thing to be said for contemporary poetry that can't be said in favour of any other, and that is that it is written by our contemporaries." -- T.S. Eliot

Spoken by Eliot on the only known film of him, which lasts about 8 seconds. Thanks to Jim McCue, who is working on the re-editing of Eliot's works.

Visual poetry... once again!

"The future," wrote Mallarmé," is never more than the bursting forth of what ought to have occured earlier, or near the origin."

What we now call visual poetry first came to the attention of many in the US thanks to a special issue of Chicago Review devoted to it in 1967, edited by Emmett Williams and reprinted by the legendary Something Else Press; also in work by the late Mary Ellen Solt. Back then it was called "concrete poetry." The good old days!

To my amazement, the kindred 1968 book that created even more widespread interest in contemporary visual poetry is still in print, thanks to New Directions: Once Again, by Jean-Francois Bory. Bory was extremely interesting, as you can see from this fascinating essay on him by Richard Kostelanetz. Anyone else out there have or remember this book, which opens with the quote above? Among the American poets and artists represented in it are Jonathan Williams, Mary Ellen Solt, Aram Aroyan, Ad Reinhardt, D.A. Levy, Kostelantez, Ronald Johnson, and Jeff Berner. Great stuff! Whatever happened to Bory - anyone know?


Anyway, the argyle graph you see here can be found in the Danish journal Spring: Tidsskrift for moderne dansk litteratur, number 18, 2002. The whole issue is devoted to the late Inger Christensen; the article from which the image is taken is by Rikke Toft Nørgård: "Mirakler for realister: En analyse af 'Brev i april.'" The graph (labelled Fig. 1) is on p.146. You can access that issue online by clicking here.

In May, Poetry magazine will feature a special section of previously untranslated work by Christensen, introduced by Suri Hustvedt.

Happy Friday!

I'm the urban spaceman, baby!

Given all the recent blather about "erasures," I thought I'd mention that believe it or not, the word spaceman originally meant "writer" - you know, someone who actually goes to the trouble of filling up space! (The sense we have for the word today only goes back to about 1933.) Well, here are a few more curious terms for you scribblers out there:

murdermongeress
authorling
fragmentist
ink-jerker
demonographer
paper-stainer
anonymuncle

Surely some of these can be revived! To learn the stories behind them, click on this OUP blog post from Mark Peters, the genius behind the blog Wordlustitude and Contributing Editor for Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, not to mention language columnist for Good, and the author of Yada, Yada, Doh!: 111 TV Words That Made the Leap from the Screen to Society.

And may no learned or unlearned calf write against your knowledge and wit, and no brother paper-stainer pilfer your pages, and then call you a general thief!

"Poetry was never meant to be quiet"

OK, pop quiz!

Who said "Poetry was never meant to be quiet"?

A. Ron Silliman
B. W.W. Norton & Co.
C. Robert Pinsky
D. This is a trick question!
E. No, it isn't!!
F. All of the above
G. None of the above

(Click on the pic for the answer.)

Novel gazing

Joshua Corey recently blogged his "trouble with fiction," saying:

"It's boring to read and twice as boring to write. Here is a character, here is a situation and setting for that character, here is that character's desire, here is another character who can gratify that desire but has contrary desires of her own. Wind up the monkeys and watch them dance. Beautiful or accurate prose is an accessory, a garnish; if the author's done his job correctly we'll hurry by all that stuff so we can get to What Happens Next."

Well, here's Brian Phillips, in an essay about poets who write fiction - coming soon to the pages of Poetry:

"The difference between poets and novelists is this," writes the poet Randolph Henry Ash to the poet Christabel LaMotte in A.S. Byatt's novel Possession, "that the former write for the life of the language - and the latter write for the betterment of the world." In Byatt's novel this has the glint of irony: a fictional poet contemplating his independence from the medium in which, unbeknown to himself, he exists. But it also contains the germ of a modern stereotype. The idea that poets and novelists possess separate and incompatible temperaments, like fortune-tellers and pharmacists, and that poets are preoccupied with language ("for the life of the language") while novelists are engrossed by society ("for the betterment of the world"), is a commonplace - perhaps also a consequence - of the paced battlements of the contemporary literary world.

In this account, poets and novelists are not merely working at different kinds of writing. Their minds also work differently. Poets are introspective, miniature, and self-fascinating ("I am the personal," Stevens declares in "Bantams in Pine-Woods"). Novelists are expansive, systematic, prone to looking through other people's mail. The poet "looks out her own window," Billy Collins has written, while the novelist "looks in other people's windows." Novelists are hardy gossips, bred to realism. Poets are post-Romantic waifs of imagination. Poets' thoughts move cyclically, in rich depths of metaphor, while novelists' thought accumulate in a straight line. The two are unsuited to each other's work, because - as a commenter writes on the literary blog "Ward Six" - poets "don't think in terms of story, they think in rhythmic images and symbols, just as novelists, when they try to write poetry, are plodding and linear."

Is there any reason to believe that this is true?

[snip]

... Why do we go on thinking that poetry and fiction require different temperaments? The answer probably has something to do with recent literary history. In English, the list of writers who have attained real prominence in both forms is brief, barely extending beyond Poe, Hardy, and perhaps D.H. Lawrence in 170 years. To these we might add a number of writers who vibrantly supplemented their major work with work in a different form (Melville, Robert Creeley, possibly Randall Jarrell) as well as a few contemporaries (Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje) who have managed something like parallel careers, though in most cases - Paul Auster is another example - they are better known for their fiction. The list of failures (Yeats's novels, Joyce's poems, Hemingway's poems) is of course considerable. Partly as a result of this, and partly as a result of the greater commercial prospects of fiction over the last century, poetry and fiction have evolved divergent professional structures that tacitly encourage writers to specialize.

It's also the case, however, that the period of time since the emergence of the novel as a reliably popular form - barely 200 years - is a relative trifle, a sliver, in the history of poetry. It coincides almost exactly with the rise of lyric as the predominant poetic form. (Jane Austen was at work on a draft of Sense and Sensibility in 1798, the year Lyrical Ballads was published.) Before that dual occurrence, poetry was a vital receptacle of narrative art, of storytelling - literally so in early oral cultures, where one of poetry's functions was to serve as a kind of jar for carrying stories around in. The novel, which extended and revised fictional narrative, nevertheless began by inheriting a narrative grammar that had been developed in the epic, the romance, the ballad, and the verse drama, among other sources, in the hundreds of years when linear imaginative storytelling was seen as belonging to the poet's powers, not departing from them.

By the early twentieth century, the embouchure of poetry had contracted, and its sense of itself had shifted, in a way that turned narrative storytelling largely over to prose. Narrative poetry is still written, of course, but culturally it's an adjunct phenomenon; adjunct to lyric, adjunct to the novel. The mainstream conception of a poem, which certainly affects the way poems are written and read, is of a brief personal effluence, an icon of experience rather than a brocade of events.

-- Stay tuned for more!

The Eureka Machine

A century and a half before the Flarfists learned to Google there was the Eureka Machine, which composed Latin hexameters. Here's a story on the thing from The Illustrated London News of July 19, 1845:

It was designed and constructed at Bridgewater, in Somersetshire; was begun in 1830, and completed in 1843; and it has lately been brought to the metropolis, to contribute to the "sights of the season."

The exterior of the machine resembles, in form, a small bureau book-case; in the frontispiece of which, through an aperture, the verses appear in succession as they are composed.

The machine is described by the Inventor as neither more nor lees than a practical illustration of the law of evolution. The process of composition is not by words already formed, but from separate letters. This fact is obvious; although some spectators may, probably, have mistaken the effect for the cause — the result for the principle, which is that of Kaleidoscopic evolution; and, as an illustration of this principle it is that the machine is interesting — a principle affording a far greater scope of extension than has hitherto been attempted. The machine contains letters in alphabetical arrangement. Out of these, through the medium of numbers, rendered tangible by being expressed by Indentures on wheel-work, the instrument selects such as are requisite to form the verse conceived; the components of words suited to form hexameters being alone previously calculated, the harmonious combination of which will be found to practically interminable.

The rate of composition is about one verse per minute, or sixty in an hour. "Each verse remains stationary and visible a sufficient time for a copy of it to be taken; after which the machine gives an audible notice that the Line is about to be decomposed. Each Letter of the verse is then slowly and separately removed into its former alphabetical arrangement; on which the machine stops, until another verse be required. Or, by withdrawing the stop, it may be made to go on continually, producing in one day and night, or twenty-four hours, about 1440 Latin verses; or, in a whole week (Sundays included), about 10,000.

"During the composition of each line, a cylinder in the interior of the machine performs the National Anthem. As soon as the verse is complete, a short pause of silence ensues.

"On the announcement that the line is about to be broken up, the cylinder performs the air of "Fly not yet," until every letter is returned into its proper place in the alphabet. There is on the frontispiece of the machine, above the line of verse, a tablet, bearing the following Inscription:

" 'Full many a gem, of purest ray serene,
The dark, unfathom'd caves of ocean bear.
And many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its fragrance on the desert air."

Full many a thought, of character sublime,
Conceived in darkness, here shall be unrolled.
The mystery of number and of time
is here displayed in characters of gold.
Transcribe each line composed by this machine,
'Record the fleeting thoughts as they arise;'
A line, once lost, may ne'er again be seen,
'A thought, once flown, perhaps for ever flies.' "

The primum mobile, or first moving power of the machine, is a leaden weight of about twenty pounds, with an auxiliary weight of ten pounds, applied to another part of the movement: these are occasionally wound up, and the velocity is regulated in the usual manner, by a worm and fly.

"The entire machine contains about 86 wheels, giving motion to cylinders, cranks, spirals, pullies, levers, springs, ratchets, quadrants, tractors, snails, worm and fly, heart-wheels, eccentric-wheels, and star-wheels — all of which are in essential and effective motion, with various degrees of velocity, each performing its part in proper time and place. And in the front of the interior is a large Kaleidoscope, which regularly constructs a splendid geometric figure. This action is performed at the commencement of the operation, and at the precise time when the line of verse is conceived, previous to its mechanical composition."

You can see the Eurkea machine as it looks today, and read more about it here.

Jack Spicer's secret

"1999: Peter Gizzi turns up evidence of the high school friendship between two boys at Fairfax High School, Los Angeles County, early 1940s. One was Jack Spicer, later to invent a new kind of poetry in Boston, San Francisco and Vancouver in the late 1950s and 60s. The other, Allan Sherman, chose a different career, first creating the significant 50’s TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret” and then releasing a series of LPs of comedy material in the 1960s, which made him one of the top recording stars in the US, beginning with My Son the Folksinger and culminating as the single, “A Letter from Camp/Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” becomes the #1 record in America during the winter of 1963. In supplying Yiddish and Borscht-Belt lyrics to ‘America’s best-loved melodies,’ Sherman seemed to be insisting, to the point of subversion, that everything American is at bottom a Jewish invention of the Jews — the real Americans after all.

I see a kinship between the two entertainers...." -- excerpt, Kevin Killian, "Jack Spicer's Secret"

Lack of sympathy from our assassins

I find myself over­awed by the lack of sym­pa­thy from our assas­sins. Couldn’t they do it with style or panache? Is there no sol­i­dar­ity among liars and poets! Must their knives be so blunt, as when, Kent, they go after you for strate­gies of fic­tive dia­logues that I thought the Greeks had called golden… the lost dia­logues of Aris­to­tle. Hic sunt lacu­nae. Would they be angry if we tried to write the lost speech of Agave over every part of her son’s body? And if we signed it falsely, is poetry a check­book? Anony­mous, port­man­teau, Lewis Car­roll, Mark Twain ― should all our par­adises be true or found, and wasted? Made up. I thought they must be lost. Are all masks to be thrown away before the dance? Is there a syn­onym for syn­onym? I tried. I heard the ques­tion before I loved the form of a question. -- David Shapiro, interview w/Kent Johnson (click here for the full interview)

*
An organized school of art, like an academy or a university, tends to disintegrate into pedantry and sterile rules. The great exponent of these modes of art usually stands outside the officially titular school... In fact, the greatest artists have been claimed by both the romantics and the classicists, and now, since the advent of surrealism, are claimed by the surrealists. -- Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism

The Grammar Reaper

I suppose you think we sit around all day at Poetry yakking it up about, well, poetry. Yes, in fact, we do. But we also do down-and-dirty editorial work, such as looking things up in such standard reference sources as the Chicago Manual of Style and the Oxford English Dictionary and Wikipedia and stuff. Oh, sure, typos get past us now and then, and matters of grammar and style are as debatable as the merits of, say, flarf and conceptual poetry. But we try our best. And so, as a public service, I am instituting a new feature of this blog which I will call The Grammar Reaper. (Wait, that should read: which I shall call....) There are many blogs devoted to the proper use of the English language - but the distinction of this feature will be that it's one of the very few composed by an actual working poet. Granted, very few poets are actually working, but you take my point.

In this inaugural post, I will answer two questions submitted in person while I was riding the train this morning. Oops: I shall answer them.

Q1.) I notice that the CTA pre-recorded announcements include one asking riders not to leave their belongings on the seat next to them... "so that others may sit down." Is this correct? Shouldn't it be "so that others can sit down?"

A.) There can be no doubt that can is and sounds better. Others may - or may not - sit down if a seat is unoccupied, but they will if they can. In fact, I think that an even better construction of the phrase would be "so that others will sit down." If riders will only sit down, then they won't be clogging up the aisles making it hard for others to get on and off the train, and there'd be fewer people bumping into each other.... or should I say less people? Topic for a later discussion!

Q2.) I was looking out the window of the train while we were "waiting for signal clearance," and noticed a sign on a storefront that read: "WE MOVED." Shouldn't that be "WE HAVE MOVED?"

A.) "Have" is one of those "helper words" you may dimly remember having heard about in school. So I would need additional information to answer this question, namely: Did they have any help moving? If so, you're right - "WE HAVE MOVED" would be better; if not, well, who can blame anyone for feeling proud of moving all by him or herself. Wait: should that just be himself? Topic for a later discussion!

Well, I certainly hope you have enjoyed this new feature, and that you have found it to be helpful. I know I have. If you have any questions or comments, you have an opportunity to have me respond in the comment box to this post. Have a nice day!

THSRS: brevity is, as always, the soul of wit

preposterous
kiss
accommodate
copulation
request
carnivorous
wonder
plethora
establish
husband
movement
find
appointment
silly
advantage
transport
terrible
like
uninterrupted
constantinople
recognize
mirror
explanation
discovery
immediately
criticize
exquisite
trustworthy
face
splendid

*
What's that, you ask? A list of search results from Thsrs, the online thesaurus that only gives results shorter than the word you look up. The top searches are pretty obvious fare, so the creator of Thsrs, David Friedman - the genius behind Ironic Sans - decided to check his logs and jumped ahead in the list to number 500. At that point, these are the next 30 most popular search terms.

Alas, Thrsrs doesn't find any shorter words for "soul" or "wit."

But speaking of brevity, Germaine Greer says she can think of a shorter name for D.H. Lawrence's "heaviest ore of the body." Hint: it rhymes with "wit."

Poetry and the bottom line

South Florida's Digestive CARE(TM) is Offering a $500 Prize For Best New Original Poem About Colonoscopies

Digestive CARE(TM), a medical group of 46 gastroenterologists in Broward and Palm Beach County, today launched the "Bottom Line Poetry Contest" in honor of National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month (March 2009).

Digestive CARE(TM) is offering a $500 cash prize (or the option of a free colonoscopy) to the poet who submits the best new original poem about colonoscopies.

The original submission can be a simple verse like Joyce Kilmer: "I don't think I'll ever see a useless colonoscopy..."

Or an epic stanza in the style of Alfred Lord Tennyson: "Half an inch, half an inch, half an inch upward..."

Or even a basic limerick: "There once was a lass from Nantucket, who was irked by a bothersome bucket..."

"By launching this Bottom Line Poetry Contest, we hope to bring more attention to the life-saving value of regular colonoscopies as part of a person's ongoing professional medical care," says Kenneth Rosenthal, M.D., the Boca Raton-based gastroenterologist who chairs Digestive Care's PR Committee.

"The original new poems can be heartfelt or humorous," adds Dr. Rosenthal. "We hope Digestive CARE's Bottom Line Poetry Contest will help publicize the deadly serious message of National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month - and that's the real bottom line."

Original poems about colonoscopies should be submitted directly to info@digestivarecareonline.com. Please write "COLON POEM" in the subject line. The deadline for submission is April 30, 2009, the last day of National Poetry Month.

To view submitted poems or for a complete list of rules, please visit www.digestivecareonline.com.

The winning poem will be selected by the 46 gastroenterologists of Digestive CARE(TM) and be announced in May.

About Digestive CARE(TM):

Since its inception as an organization, Digestive CARE(TM) has grown to more than 50 providers, 46 of which are physicians, providing gastroenterology services at 25 locations throughout Broward and Palm Beach counties, covering 17 hospitals and 13 Outpatient Surgery Centers. All Digestive CARE(TM) office and surgical locations are centers of excellence, designed with the comfort and care of the patient in mind, delivering services in a friendly, convenient and compassionate environment. For more information, please call 954. 344.2522 or visit www.digestivecareonline.com.

Copyright Business Wire 2009

Remarks

Remarks aren't poetry but necklaces are bridges, at night... -- David Shapiro

Coming soon: An interview with David Shapiro by Kent Johnson, introduced by me!

Twa Corbies

Time has run out, sadly, if you missed "A Strong Song Tows Us - Another History of English Poetry."

"Lee Hall, writer of Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, uncovers a hidden history of English poetry. Stretching back to the Dark Ages and emerging in 1960s Newcastle, Lee reveals an alternative tradition of English poetry as the preserve of ordinary working people. Sunderland cork cutters, shipyard workers and pit men encounter Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and Ezra Pound. And how a meeting between a 16-year-old schoolboy [Tom Pickard] and one of the great modernists of English literature, Basil Bunting, contributed to the flowering of the north east as an international destination for the whole Beatnik generation."

For those who've been asking, yes, my critical edition of Bunting's poems is in Faber and Faber's new 2010 catalogue.... but then it was also in last year's. Another proposed volume, Bunting's Persia, is hung up in a permission hassle... There's always something, when it comes to publishing Basil's work!

Pictured: The Twa Corbies

Finally, a USEFUL book meme!

In the US, there's a silly "20 poetry books" meme going round like a late-winter flu; everyone's catching it - 20 books that made you fall in love with poetry... 20 books by women that made you fall in love with poetry by women... 20 books that made you want to hate poetry. Yikes. At least in the UK there's a more useful meme, namely one relating to books people lie about having read! The top ten:

1. 1984 - George Orwell (42%)

2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (31%)

3. Ulysses - James Joyce (25%)

4. The Bible (24%)

5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (16%)

6. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (15%)

7. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (14%)

8. In Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (9%)

9. Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (6%)

10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (6%)

*
The good and evil, the beautiful and ugly, have been assumed under the rubric of the interesting. Non sequitur rendered lyric by a retrospective act of will. Tongue worries tooth. Repetition worries referent. Non sequitur rendered will by a retrospective act of lyric.

-- Ben Lerner

Noun pile heds

Is this yet another new poetry art form? The Language Log notices great noun strings in UK news reporting such as "Blast Kelly" (a girl named Kelly involved in an explosion), "George row doc" (a brain surgeon who tried to get the dying George Harrison to sign a guitar), and "Kid porn shame councillor." A bit of searching in the "journalistic Britosphere" will turn up dozens of things like "Man guilty of Potter actor murder", "Pedestrian death driver jailed", "Canada bus beheading verdict due", "Student fling teacher dodges jail", "Dancing black hole twins spotted," and so on. Here are some of my faves:

Dentist fear girl
Texting death crash peer jailed
Safari death crash Britons
Family death crash father
Death blast girl
Radioactive teacher
Fling teacher
Black hole twins
Pregnant frying pan attack teen surrenders
Excrement curry wife admonished

Nostalgia and its discontents: party like it's 1962!

Ron misses Henry Rago. (Who doesn't!) Poetry, he says, hasn't gotten past 1962 (though his own "20 poetry books meme" list is redolent of that very epoch). Whence all this nostalgia? There's a kind of "Grand Piano" syndrome thing going on. Make it new, already!

If you're weary at last of that old world, why not check out some actual avant-garde poetry - click on the picture! (Being, in Ron's comparison, a Sarah Palin to Rago's Obama... I can see Russia from my window!)

Or... party like it's 1909!

I can read you my best poem I ever wrote...