Categories got your tongue?

Artist refers to a person willfully enmeshed in the dilemma of categories who performs as if none of them existed... Contemporary artists are not out to supplant recent modern art with a better kind; they wonder what art might be. -- Allan Kaprow (inventor of the "happening")

Found poem based on name of famous poet; and EP the socialist (scroll down)!

Razed Upon
Azure Pond
Raze Pound
A Proud Zen
Razed On Up
Razed No Up
Daze Nor Up
Daze Pun Or
And Zero Up
Road Zen Up
Raze Don Up
Raze Nod Up
Raze Do Pun
Ran Doze Up
Oar Zed Pun
Pa Doze Urn
Pa Doze Run
Pa Dour Zen
Rap Doze Nu
Rap Duo Zen
Zap End Our
Zap Nude Or
Zap Dune Or
Zap Doe Urn
Zap Doe Run
Zap Ode Urn
Zap Ode Run
Zap Redo Nu
Zap Rude On
Zap Rude No
Zap Rued On
Zap Rued No
Zap Don Rue
Zap Nod Rue
Zap Undo Re
Zap Do Rune
A Zed Nor Up
A Zed Pun Or
A Zed Urn Op
A Zed Run Op
A Rod Zen Up
Ad Zen Or Up
Zap Do Re Nu

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Pound, the product of this new world, longed for the older one, and wrote as if he were in it, becoming shriller and shriller as time went by. (I wish I could remember the name of the critic who wrote that Pound "overestimated the relevance" of his kind of literary knowledge to the political crises of his time — this critic, whoever he is, is the perfect product of our world, where knowledge is rigidly categorized). Anyway: in this instance Pound's education isn't so much an influence on him as it is a symptom of a cultural condition he didn't fully recognize, and would never fully accept. And for all the talk of poetry and politics now, and of speaking truth to power, I think by and large most poets have, at some level, accepted. I mean, I can't imagine John Ashbery or Ted Kooser or Jorie Graham actually expecting that the world of power would take their ideas on social policy seriously. It'd be delusional if they did. And would we really want them to operate as if they did expect this? It could drive them as crazy as it drove Pound, and I don't think we want to see any of them locked away in St. Elizabeth's. -- Robert Archambeau, Samizdat blog

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When we lived we overestimated our forebears, and now our posterity esteems us more than our due, and quite rightly. I think the world would be very tedious if one saw it with perfect precision, for it is always the same. -- E.P. on overestimation.

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Hey, bet you didn't know that Pound actually had leftist leanings and even believed in guild socialism! It's all there in "The Seafarer." Click here for details.

The test of poetry: another installment of "Of Being Quiet"

One minor good thing about the Walcott/Oxford circus is that the debate over "greatness" in poetry has ebbed away. Which means it's a good time to bring it up again. A simple thought: it's not "greatness" but durability which is, to borrow a phrase of Zukofsky's well worth reviving, the test of poetry. Here's an example of a poet whose work has quietly emerged from long silence:

"Several hundred years ago, a frustrated question was penned on the flyleaf of the large leather-bound unidentified volume, now known to be the work of the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne. It read: 'Why is this soe long detaind in a dark Manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World and a Universal Blessing?' A light to the world, a universal blessing - these are bold, almost Christological, claims to make of an unnamed manuscript. How disheartened that anonymous reader might have been to know that this 'light to the world' manuscript was destined to remain in the dark for several centuries more. For Thomas Traherne is only now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, being rediscovered as a serious theologian, and the volume in question was not published until 2005. Being long detained in darkness seems an apt description for much of Traherne's work, most of which the author never lived to see published. After his death at the age of 37, his manuscripts, largely unnamed and sometimes untitled, lay for years in deep obscurity. The story of the discovery of Traherne's manuscripts reads like a novel with astonishing twists and surprises, moments of serendipity, hazard, happenstance, resolve. Volumes rescued from book barrows, from misattribution, from obscurity, from a burning rubbish heap, the flames batted out, the leather smouldering. He is a writer who, if luck were anything to go by, should have disappeared altogether. He so nearly did." -- Denise Inge, Happiness and Holiness: Thomas Traherne and His Writings

Forrest Gander had a fine essay on Traherne in Jacket not long ago that puts things in perspective; maybe because it didn't blather about so-called schools of poetry it didn't get the attention it deserves. Anyway, it concludes:

"Here, where Traherne demolishes time and his work pops out of its century just in time to be plucked from a burning heap of rubbish; here where we find it has something to offer to a 21st century philosophical dialogue; here in the clear mirror that he holds to the light of glory, it’s time to consider how Traherne’s presence, knotted into the lyric miracle of his writing, might be threaded to our own urgencies. Nor has Traherne stopped writing his way beyond us and into a future that, though it measures nothing, translates everything and so will no doubt find a place for him."

Amnesic-confabulatory syndrome

Now that Ruth Padel has stepped down, we won't get any Oxford lectures on poetry and science - so I thought I'd step in to fill the void, as usual. This is from Boing Boing:

On the Neurophilosophy blog, a fascinating look at confabulatory hypermnesia, a rare disorder in which people with various kinds of amnesia (including amnesia resulting from alcoholism and Vitamin B1 deficiencies) invent a continuous stream of detailed, fictitious events to fill in the gaps in their memory. The write up comes from a paper published in the journal Cortex:

Most strikingly, LM confabulated plausible answers to questions about both his personal life and public events, which would normally elicit from most people an answer of "I don't know". When the researchers asked him "Who won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980?" he replied "Fernandel"; when asked what he had for dinner on Tuesday two weeks ago, he answered "Steak with french fries"; and when asked "Do you remember what you did on March 13th, 1985?" he replied "We spent the day at the Senart Forest."

LM thus has a "pure" amnesic syndrome, in that his impairment is not associated with other cognitive deficits which might interfere with memory function. He scored normally on short-term memory tests, and the evaluation revealed mild, diffuse neurodegeneration, rather than damage in a specific part of the brain. False memories are not uncommon in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome - indeed the condition is also referred to as amnesic-confabulatory syndrome. However, the confabulations of such patients are sometimes extraordinary, bizarre and verging on being delusional. LM's confabulations, on the other hand, were always plausible, and therefore quite unlike those reported in other Korsakoff's patients.

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Now my question for you is: don't poets resemble patients suffering from "pure" amnesic syndrome?



Pictured: A topic map of science, no poetry included; Bruce Springsteen singing "I Wanna Be Sedated"

Salt and pepper, or the Woolf at the door

Pepper: Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected. -- Virginia Woolf

Salt: The Just One Book campaign

Anarchical Plutocracy

Until very recently I thought that I had invented the term plutocratic anarchy, but it appears to have originated with William Morris... Morris’s term, to be precise, is “anarchical Plutocracy”. Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention; it is the enemy of everything that is summoned before us in Bishop Butler’s great pronouncement of 1729; “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood. -- Geoffrey Hill

A good muse is hard to find!

We don't need no stinking muses! The Wall Street Journal, of all places, speculates on, though it doesn't necessarily illuminate, the subject. Go launch your own ships, mate!

Women still need a room of their own, though, we can all agree; here's an article on Elaine Showalter which, like the WSJ piece, tries to correlate the staus of women with how pop culture uses them and vice versa.

More to the point is Double X - a new blog/magazine from the folks at Slate which is "founded by women but not just for women" - the former including Meghan O'Rourke and Emily Bazelon - that asks questions like "What, some future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about the construction of women’s identity at this particular moment in time?" The New Yorker's "Book Bench" blogger Madeleine Elfenbein says XX's "attempts to grapple with big issues make me yearn for a lost era when feminist questions were viewed as universally compelling and worthy of exploration in the public arena." She misses debates that were "conducted in broad daylight by intellectual heavyweights who took their ideas and opponents seriously enough to present arguments carefully, with wit and gravitas." To wit: the New York Review of Books exchange between Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag, prompted by Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism." (Check out the NYRB, by the way, for a swell review essay about proto-feminist Madame de Staël.) The American Prospect, on the other hand, asks: "Is the niche-ification of the Internet amplifying or ghettoizing women's voices?"

Ruth Padel, everyone now knows, has become the first female Oxford Professor of Poetry, thanks, you could say, to Derek Walcott's behavior toward his women students, about which there has been much hemming and hawing - except, that is, at Deliroius Hem, which is more constructively asking questions of poets who are women, e.g.: "What branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge? Are there particular feminist tactics you employ? Do you consider yourself a feminist in many ways, but don't particularly involve it in the poetry?" Sounds kind of post-Gurlesque, maybe?

Just don't expect any clarity on the gender thing, or hope for visitations from muses any time soon. Maybe we should all just go the the movies. I mean, even fairy tales, we now learn, are merely grist for the dark mills of "material culture — greeting cards, games, dolls, graphic novels, and other artifacts." Meanwhile, as Moloch recommends on Harriet: "keep writing on message boards cuz it's like dreaming right?" But stay tuned whatever you do for Daisy Fried's forthcoming essay in Poetry, "Sing, God-awful Muse!" Milton had troubles with his wives and daughters, but the Muses were still in touch with poets back in the day; Fried found Milton to be a "resource" following the birth of her daughter: "... I wasn’t reading Paradise Lost for pleasure (though it gave me pleasure). I was trying to remember, in those first weeks of motherhood, who I was. I needed to know if my brain still worked."

Why am I telling you things you already know? 'Cos this is a blog, silly! Duh. I mean, you gotta love 'em or hate 'em - or whatever! - right? Assuming our brains are still working...

P.S. This pertinent comment by Eileen Myles just arrived on Harriet:

"It isn’t about our genitals or our rights. It’s history. I think trying to fit women retrospectively into male art movements is a convenient idea but it doesn’t work. Women are often fellow travellers but the actual conditions of our lives and the nature of the kinds of economic and social supports we receive make us always in a parallel history even if we are reading in the same reading. Printed in the same book or not. Even when we’re far better writers than the men it still often falls upon the next men to decide whether we belong or not. I think we don’t and yet here we are. The challenge is always for men to find a way to have some grace about their position, rather than to endlessly reinscribe it."

Janet is on the Planet

Devoted readers of this blog (assuming there are any, that is) will know of my intense admiration of Janet Frame; I blogged about her here and here.

I've now discovered that her literary estate has done a most clever and useful thing: they've got a blog going about her: Janet on the Planet. Would that all literary estates kept blogs for their writers.

Here's some posthumously published prose from Frame's novel, Towards Last Summer:

"In the centre of the attic, piled high, were months and years of literary weeklies and other magazines already brown at the edges, with brown stains on the covers as if Damp (here they talk of him with dread: Damp has got into the house) had come to life and leaned his wet hand upon the paper.

- Now I know where literary weeklies go, Grace thought, with the interest of someone who has solved the problem of flies in winter, pins from a packet, and other such mysteries. A bookshelf near the magazines held Anne's Training College and University books and miscellaneous books belonging to Philip. In this house books had no boundaries; they over flowed, flooded; you had to stand on the roof waving for help, thinking regretfully of your best cherished furniture already ruined by the rising, seeping ideas . . ."

For more, click on my Harriet post about fiction and poetry writers.

Zen and the art of poetry writing

Practice does not overcome mediocrity and may even reinforce it. -- Sue Halperin

The disaster comes

The disaster comes when everything is defined as behavior or as an expression of society - art, literature, and religion - (the wonderful phrase "God is 'only society transfigured and symbolically expressed'" turns up - I think it's Durkheim). The difficulty is the word express. Art, literature, and religion are none of them expressions of either society or the self. They are activities of content - passion and thought - the relation of a man to the world as the world calls to him, and the activity is not simply relational. I will for this occasion stick to poetry. No serious poetry can be described as self-expression. This is to confuse the strictly private with what is defined as public and permanent. (I am not concerned here with bad art.) The strictly private can only be read in terms of behavior and generality. Otherwise the private is invisible. Behavior becomes a substitute for the public, knowledgeable "inter-est" - what is between us - and we wind up with problems in our cities.

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The reading of a poem is the re-enactment of the images of contact with the world.

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I am asked why I write - and the answer lies in the statement that the life process is not the highest good. Poets are men who have grasped the essential relationship between invisible passions and invisible thought to the real. They objectify in a form which is an activity.

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Words are instruments. The sounds are so important; it is as if something outside of oneself called. We loan our clothes to the World. We have clothed the world and god in our clothes.

-- Robin Blaser

Bumf Box deposits

Per my previous post, I shall now expound extemporaneously upon the following non-poetry-related subjects, having disqualified two suggestions for reasons explained in my reply to comments left on said post. Herewith:

1) Cats.

Someone who is now a well-known poet placed a cat in my reluctant arms back in 1993 and said something like, "Here's your new cat." The poet moved far away and I neither saw nor heard from her again until something like last year. I'd always hated and despised cats, for they are severe and judgmental and yet never speak up. The cat (I never named her) though hoary-looking, as am I, still thrives - despite my raising her as if she were a dog, which speaks volumes, albeit not ones I should wish to compose myself. After 16 years of cat poop and several wilfully ill-timed antics (e.g., emerging gleefully from under my bed with a bra between her teeth during a warmish conversation with a woman to whom said garment did not belong), I believe I have reconciled myself at last to feline ways. Quite possibly the cat has come to accept my own. Despite my continuing reluctance to have things in my house that do not speak, there is a peace between us. And something rather redolent.

2) Memphis.

I grew up there. And then I left. Sensual and descriptive details can be found in my doomed Zoo Press book, Union (which Publishers Weekly called "the promising next stage in so-called Southern narrative poetry," a stage I abandoned instantly.) Anyhow, I almost played bass guitar in The Scruffs - but being a guitar player my pride prevented this from working out, and so I failed to become so much as a footnote in the history of Memphis music.

3) Best/favorite new (to you) novel you've read this or last year.

Is it May already? I'll confess that I have not read a novel yet this year. I did read this, however.

4) Best new (to you) piece of music you've heard this month/week.

Um... The Blossom Toes live album?

5) Bono's "Elvis" "poem."

Haven't read it. Never will.

3) Leonard Nimoy vs. Zachary Quinto

I haven't seen the new movie yet, and must assume that this Zachary person is the "new" Spock. All I can say is that Leonard Nimoy is the Leonard Cohen of sci-fi TV, and would be hard to beat - yet at the same time, I'm always up for what F.R. Leavis used to call "revaluation."

Well, I don't know about you, but I feel slightly refreshed. Thanx and a tip o' the hat to one and all.

Not about Derek Walcott!

Lost in the Derek Walcott controversy are some interesting remarks by Arvind Mehrotra, one of the two remaining contenders for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry.

According to The Guardian, Mehotra "promised that if he were elected, 'not once during the lectures will the phrase "post-colonial" be uttered.'"

Mehrotra also said: "Contrary to general belief, the Indian poetic tradition is not all metaphysical waffle... In an anthology of secular poems dating from the 2nd century CE, a mother alerts her young daughter to the grief that is marriage. On nights she cannot find another man to sleep with, the mother says, the daughter will have to make do with her husband. It's a two-line poem; not much room for waffle there. And, like a good Poundian, she tells it slant, using metaphor."

He says that his lectures would be on "the multilingual imagination and on the poetic worlds of, among others, A.K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar, neither of whom, outside a limited circle, are known in Britain."

(I thought Ramanujan was actually very well-known - he's certainly one of the few Indian poets Anglo-Americans can name.)

According to the same report, Ruth Padel - the poet favored to win and Darwin's great-great-grandaughter - says that she would focus on the links between poetry and science: "I have close links with people in zoology and astrophysics there, and would love to get poetry combining with them."

If she wins, perhaps she can start by helping to revive the poems of Erasmus Darwin! Which Elizabeth Willis does - thanks, Lemon Hound, for reminding me - in her book, Meteoric Flowers...

Pictured: A waffle

On splinters (another installment of... Of Being Quiet)

The continuities are there, just as the discontinuities are unignorable. Only no critics to my knowledge have bothered to suggest the continuities, while the hobbyhorses about "confessionalism," "objectivism," and many other contending "isms" have been ridden into splinters. [...] And in the realm of poetry, no matter how often poets dismiss the work of other poets in the name of their politics, ideologies, jealousies masquerading as principles, these little autos-da-fe, or enactments of faith, fall prey to the same fallacy as the grand historical scheme that identifies history with a chosen people, class, or part of the world. -- Tom Sleigh

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I like you so much it embarrasses me. There are all sorts of good reasons not to like you, except that of not liking you, because I do. How fantastic to feel what we don't want to, and to have an independent heart. -- Fernando Pessoa (unpublished outtake from Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith)

The trouble with criticism

"The trouble with criticism is that it makes points." -- The Ghost of Robert Lowell

Bumf Box

OK, as Henry kindly suggested in a comment to a dour post of mine the other day, I apparently need a break from digging up and oh-so-cleverly juxtaposing the stuff you find here; someone even just called me a high-falutin' egghead! (Shouldn't that be... high-faluting?) Cat-pisss and porcupines, as Pound once said!

To address this, in any case, I'm introducing what I'll call the Bumf Box. You suggest a topic, and I'll merrily bloviate upon it. I mean, it's either that or talk about Carrie Prejean... and I don't even know who that is!

Howzat?

The poets talk only among themselves

"He writes for a coterie, the poets talk only among themselves. They live in a world of flattery and selfhood." It is my belief that it is somewhere in this messy denial of the thought of poetry that an explanation can be found for the importance of community. That poets do band together. I am demonstrably bad at the kind of communism one dreams of, yet I have repeatedly worked in and added to a community of this sort. The reason is that only in such communities is the necessary talk of this high, serious realm possible. Such communities tend to build a structure for men who wish to keep, hold, and record the passionate relation with the outside that the world, the nation, need. This is the only place where such talk goes on. That we have reached a point now here where such discourse must include the nation, our politics, the scholarship in which we tend to lay down the images of poetic thought - is obvious. This is a kind of memory theater in which the poet with his craft is after not some thing or place remembered, but present. Nothing would be more painful or more costly to the mind, and ugly in a sense that great poetry may be very ugly, than a poetry in which the present war was present, held in sight and sound and intellect. Not opinion or reflection or dialectic about the presence. Few poets have caught the terror, which is the other side of the world. -- Robin Blaser, 1967

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In Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, Lytle Shaw’s ostensive subject is how “coterie” works in the poetry and poetics of Frank O’Hara. The opening chapters provide a cogent discussion of the role of proper names in O’Hara’s poetry within the context of a linguistics-inflected examination of naming and reference. Shaw notes the different levels of proper naming in O’Hara’s work – figures of popular culture, political and social figures, as well as different levels of his personal circle (from identifiable artists and poets to obscure names).

For Shaw, coterie is not a closed world of intimates but an interlocking, open-ended set of associations and affiliations. He links coterie to the socio-historically self-conscious poetics of the local, community, and other collective formations. The poetics of coterie is presented by Shaw as an alternative to universalizing conceptions of poetry. O’Hara’s location of himself not in an homogenous elite but rather in intersecting constellations of persons (real and imagined affiliations), together with his famous time-stamping of his poems (it’s 12:18 in New York as I rewrite this sentence) both work against the Romantic Ideology of timeless poems by great individuals.

Still, no discussion of coterie can completely free itself from the negative connotations of clique and scene. For best effect, the first chapters of Shaw’s book should be read beside Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry. Epstein offers exemplary Emersonian readings of the intricate web connecting individual talent and collective investment in the poetry and poetics of John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, and O’Hara. Averting the Cold War myth of the individual voice in the wilderness of conformity, Epstein gives us voices in conversation and conflict, suggesting that resistance to agreement is at the heart of a pragmatist understanding of literary community. -- Charles Bernstein, "Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?"

On entering the Holy Forest: RIP Craig Arnold and Robin Blaser

... I am arguing not for my pretensions as a poet, but for what the poetry reflects, if it is entered. That the poet does the job of entering this world and continues through his life to record that entrance is a fact, not pretense - that it is personal, original, and singular is also a fact. And here I want to quote the ethnologist Frank Speck on the Naskapi Indians (Labrador). He says that among them the form of the earth is like a hill and floats upon the water. He calls this a general concept, which is not true; it is a well-known image among them, and his informant, Charley Metowe'cic, said that the earth's form comes to be known only from the testimony of a man about to die. "In the vision that comes at this time the mind can view the universe and sees all around the earth as it rises above the water. And he feels it rocking." This is a statement which draws my attention because it is my own belief that any vision of the world is not complete until a man dies. I mean here that imagination is more a power to take in and hold than it is a power of making up, though it must in its activity take responsibility for the uncreated. -- Robin Blaser

Craig Arnold

Via Find Craig Arnold:

Our dear friends and family,

Though Craig himself has not been recovered, the amazing expert trackers of 1SRG have been able to make themselves and us certain of what has become of Craig. His trail indicates that after sustaining a leg injury, Craig fell from a very high and very dangerous cliff and there is virtually no possibility that Craig could have survived that fall. Chris will pursue what he can about getting specialists to go down into the place we know Craig is so we can bring him home, but it is very, very dangerous and we are not yet completely certain what that will require. The only relief in this news is that we do know exactly what befell Craig, and we can be fairly certain that it was very quick, and that he did not wait or wonder or suffer.

I cannot express again the profound gratitude I feel to everyone who has loved and honored Craig with their goodwill, their immense efforts and energy, and their overwhelming generosity. I believe that where he is, Craig knows.

There will be further occasion to celebrate Craig, and when I know more I will post it.

For my part, I love Craig beyond the telling of it and will always love him as immeasurably, as enduringly, as steadfastly and as unconditionally as I do now and have done these past six years. In leaving our family Craig, in a manner absolutely characteristic of his own vast generosity and capacity to inspire, brought us all closer together than we perhaps have ever been. I feel his presence, loving and understanding and funny and deeply feeling, at all times. I hope you do, too.

With love,
Rebecca Lindenberg

Straws in the wind...

Poetry is not a means to an end, but an end first... then a means.

You know you're getting old when you are no longer articulate about your own anguish.

All philosophy is fatalism.

The trivium has been superceded by the trivial.

If I had a spiritual life, it wouldn't be worth anything.

Sonnet based on first lines by Fulke Greville

Was ever man so overmatch'd with boy,
What is the cause, why states, that war and win,
What mean these mortal children of mine own,
When all this All doth pass from age to age,
When as man's life, the light of human lust,
When gentle beauty's over-wanton kindness,
While that my heart an altar I did make,
Who grace, for zenith had, from whom no shadows grow,
Who trusts for trust, or hopes of love for love,
Who worships Cupid, doth adore a boy,
Whoever sails near to Bermuda coast,
Why how now Cupid, do you covet change,
Why how now reason, how are you amazed,
Wrapp'd up, O Lord, in man's degeneration.

OK, that was silly. But check out the recently reissued
Selected Poems of Fulke Greville,
edited and with an introduction by Thom Gunn

Criticism: a sure and simple method

Whenever I am about to publish a book, I feel an impatient desire to know what kind of a book it is. Of course I can find this out only by waiting until the critics shall have printed their reviews. I do know, beforehand, what the verdict of the general public will be, because I have a sure and simple method of ascertaining that. Which is this - if you care to know. I always read the manuscript to a private group of friends, composed as follows:

1. Man and woman with no sense of humor.
2. Man and woman with medium sense of humor.
3. Man and woman with prodigious sense of humor.
4. An intensely practical person.
5. A sentimental person.
6. Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.
7. Hypercritical person - natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.
8. Enthusiast - person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.
9. Person who watches the others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.
10. Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.
11. Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.
12. Person who detests them.
13. Person of evenly-balanced judicial mind.
14. Man who always goes to sleep.

These people accurately represent the general public.

-- Mark Twain, "Whenever I Am About to Publish a Book," from Who Is Mark Twain? (Harper Studio)

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Click on hairy, scary Friedrich Engels to read "Poets Classed by Beard Weight," via A Journey Round My Skull (sadly, it omits heavyweights John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and W.D. Snodgrass, observes the bearded Michael Marcinkowski)

And click here to rediscover the pleasures of hating. THE GHOST OF ROBERT LOWELL SAYS: BOO!

Poetry, eugenics, and... doing the dishes!

I like Joel Brouwer's comment on my earlier post about reviews and criticism so much that I'm highlighting it here; I'd said that critics, like doctors, ought to know about the pathological as well as the healthful if their role is to help sustain well-being.

"I find the medical analogy creepy, Don; it has the potential to lead to a conception of criticism as a form of eugenics. I prefer the idea of criticism as jury duty. Everyone who publishes a book in a given year should be required to review five others published that year. And, as with jury duty, they should hate having to do it. Doing loathsome scut work for the greater good is just another way of saying civil society.

The whole negative/positive reviews conversation is so played. Orwell said everything that needed saying in "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" more than half a century ago. It's funny how everyone needs to re-agonize over it for themselves; I suspect people are just trying to avoid doing the dishes. Because we all already know the answer(s): Some reviews are useful and some aren't, and so shall it always be. No one with any sense would wish for all negative reviews, or all positive, or all "fair and balanced," or all partisan, or all highbrow or lowbrow or professional or amateur or etc. The usefulness/lessness is in the scrum. Anyone taking the time to say that reviews oughta x or or reviews oughta y is wasting time that could be spent writing one, or, perhaps even better, not."

To which I replied, "Well put, Joel: thank you. (Though the doing dishes analogy is creepy. Just kidding.) My only cavil is that I do think things need to be played and replayed, and see little harm in that. And I like the Orwell, but it's not necessarily the definitive statement (ignoring most books, as he proposes, is silly), and not everyone will have stumbled upon it."

Here's a link to the Orwell piece; his conclusion:

"The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews--1,000 words is a bare minimum--to the few that seem to matter. Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review of about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely wants to write it. Normally he doesn't want to write it, and the week-in, week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed figure in a dressing-gown whom I described at the beginning of this article. However, everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down on, and I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry."

Eugenics is a loaded word; to be clear, I'm not advocating weeding out the bad from the good in poetry or in anything else; my good is your bad, and vice versa. But one has to know the physiology nonetheless. That's my point, and in fact I've argued elsewhere for the great and enduring value of very bad poetry (which I read in enormous quantities). But I think there's much to assent to in Joel's remarks, particularly with regard to "civil society," which does seem to be vanishing (like sherry-drinking and dressing gowns)... assuming it ever existed, that is.

PICTURED: Pertinent entries from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

Dr. Feelgood & the Muse of Criticism

Responding to the Mayday roundtable on negative reviews (and/or "criticism"), a number of people have started to latch onto and reiterate Steve Burt's (generous) view that "it's not worth writing a negative review of a book that will sink without a trace, which most poetry books do." Another formulation is that "If a review is going to be wholly negative, why give it the journal space? Why not use it for a book that deserves recognition?"

I respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree. This is like saying that doctors should only see healthy patients, and not waste time on sick people. I think that the well-being of poetry, in a larger and very general sense, depends on a critical comprehension of pathology, and not just good health: each state is a function of the other.

Maybe the distinction here is really between "reviewing" and "criticism;" in the roundtable, I argue that ours is an age of blogs, reviews, interviews (about which click here), chatter, publicity and social networking, but not criticism. Nothing wrong with these various other modes except that it crowds out critical thinking, which is more demanding as well as less rewarding.

Sing, ye Muse of Criticism . . .

"The Age Demanded"

The age demanded that we sing

And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow

And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.

*
Decline and Fall of Reading, part II (Pt. I here)

Grave reports on the decline of literary reading notwithstanding (and here's where I wholeheartedly agree with Steve), I saw the following books read by apparently normal people on public transportation this past week:

Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot - in the Faber edition!

Fable of the Bees by Mandeville!! [Timely, too.]

The Dance Most of All by Jack Gilbert

(Now that's a positive use of space...)

FINE PRINT: Note that I am not saying we need criticism to read with our own eyes (on the contrary, we need it to read with others'), or that I care more for criticism than poetry (I don't), or that I'm only interested in "negative" reviews (I'm not). Thank you.

ADDENDUM: Seth Abramson on Steve's Mayday response.

Some Darker Bouquets: a Roundtable

A letter by Kent Johnson, responding to an editorial comment and three reviews by Jason Guriel, published in the March 2009 issue of Poetry, resulted in a roundtable of responses at MAYDAY magazine featuring:

V. Joshua Adams : : Joe Amato : : Robert Archambeau : : Tim Atkins : : Robert Baird : : John Beer :: John Bradley : : Stephen Burt : : Scott Esposito : : Annie Finch : : Bill Freind : : Daisy Fried :: Johannes Göransson : : Mark Halliday : : John Latta : : David Lau : : Eric Lorberer : : Maureen McLane :: Ange Mlinko : : Murat Nemet-Nejat : : Tom Orange : : David Orr : : Richard Owens : : Rebecca Porte :: Kristin Prevallet : : Michael Robbins : : Michael Theune : : Barry Schwabsky : : Don Share : : Dale Smith :: Rodrigo Toscano : : Mark Wallace