Poetry in motion

At Home


Greetings to the red-eyed clouds
from this, the house that sits

on the mound and faces the corner
that marriage built, where wine

was drunk and semen flooded
the egg which lodged in the uterus

that built the daughter who greeted
the man and the woman here

in the mound at the corner in the house
that education built, and you

know from home-schooling
that the woman can be the teacher

and the man can be the tender child
and ditto the actual infant, depending

on her sex, dependent on love and
income; oh our dear dependent

is ruining the new chair in the house
that nested ambition built, along

with naked sense, and the beak
of god, the job of love, the hurt

of older homes, the hang
of it generally, the hands of pain,

the haze of Zoloft and the pudge
of Prozac, the twins of failed

marriages that manage to live on
in the ardor of our redone arbor

here in the house that books built,
that Yiddish and the Book of Common

Prayer built, that Presbyterian pride
built, that pogroms built, that blue

and white collars built, that Bildungs-
romans built, that the Biltmores built,

that mad dogs bayed at, that the baby
was born in that the cat bit and mouse

whispered within, over which, mortgaged,
the thunder caught its tongue and brought

great downpours upon while the coffee boiled,
while the paper, delivered late again, said:

We fight the terrorists abroad
so we don't have to fight them at home.


-- Don Share

Poetry Quiz!

OK, which famous poet whose name is never uttered by cool po-folks of the 21st cent. said the following:

"You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulas or cite cases which fall easily under formulae. But all the fun is outside, saying things that suggest formulae but won't formulate - that almost but don't quite formulate."

&

"The poem must have as good a point as an anecdote or a joke. It is the more effective if it has something analogous to the practical joke - an action - a 'put up job'..."

&

"Performance in poetry and in life is recognition and admission of the fact that things are not to be too well understood."

&

"The tone of plain statement is one tone and not to be despised. All the same it has been my great object in poetry to avoid the use of it."

No cheating by using Google!

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The truth is, one imagines, that the publishers—seeing their best and their least products received with a uniform equanimity—must be aware that the drama of the book world is being slowly, painlessly killed. Everything is somehow alike, whether it be a routine work of history by a respectable academic, a group of platitudes from the Pentagon, a volume of verse, a work of radical ideas, a work of conservative ideas. Simple “coverage” seems to have won out over the drama of opinion; “readability,” a cozy little word has taken the place of the old-fashioned requirement of good, clear prose style, which is something else. -- Elizabeth Hardwick, ca. 1959

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The enemy is nobody, the anger involves nobody. One goes from humility to anger, from anger to humility: to write as well as one can, not in order to be better than the others, but in order to contribute to the elaboration of a text the aim of which is to represent neither me nor the others; to advance unarmed across the paper, to lose oneself in the act of writing, to be nobody and oneself at the same time. -- Octavio Paz

Orange you glad you asked?

Don Share's favorite poetry-book covers, posted via the incomparable Phoebe Putnam on The Best American Poetry blog! (Click here or on the oranges.)

(If poetry is fifty years behind the visual arts, as everyone says these days, then I'm right up to the minute, as you'll see!)

One not listed there: the cover mock-up for my endlessly forthcoming critical ed. of Bunting:

Poet confesses: I sought protection in dramatic structures and irony!

The Between the Lines series of interviews with poets has been around for a long time, and in general the books are worth a look; I think of them now because some of the poets interviewed have recently passed away. (These books may be out of print; a few, however, were recently combined in a single volume, Seven American Poets in Conversation: John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Charles Simic, W.D. Snodgrass, Richard Wilbur.)

The BTL editors approvingly quote Flaubert’s Parrot’s Geoffrey Braithwaite: ‘if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him,’ then ‘it’s impossible to know too much.’ The late Michael Hamburger, subject, or perhaps I should say object, of a BTL volume, probably would have disagreed; he once wrote in PN Review that for a poet to spend most of his time doing readings of his poems, or talking about them in interviews, ‘calls for a mode of attention which, for me, makes the writing of a poem impossible.’ There is, if you look at it this way, a conflict of interest between poet and interviewer. Nevertheless, Hamburger answered initial questions by telephone, and those that required detailed answers were typed up and answered in writing. The resulting book consists of what questioner Peter Dale calls ‘part interview, part printerview.’ Since Hamburger chronicles in it his ‘traumatic translation from one country, one language, to another,’ perhaps this is yet another survivable translation. He agrees to undertake being interviewed ‘for the benefit of any potential undertaker or exhumer’ of his poetic corpus - sadly apt word choices, in retrospect. Insisting that the essence of his experience has gone into his poems, Hamburger generally avoids discussions of what the interviewer calls his ‘vast experience,’ explaining that these would be ‘mere elaborations’ of what he has already ‘written and implied.’ (Consistent with this view, Hamburger, speaking of Pound and Eliot, says that ‘good poetry is always more and other than the opinions that went into it or can be read out of it.’) He does let slip a few anecdotes about Celan, Enzensberger, and Graves (there’s even a funny story about Roethke!), as well as Lucien Freud and R.B. Kitaj. But he says of such recollections that ‘They are past history – for me. I was lucky enough to survive all my battles with publishers, editors and reviewers, and now want nothing but the peace I need for my last poems.’

This sounds autumnal, as does Hamburger’s conclusion that ‘the best thing about old age and illness that could have killed one but didn’t is that it can bring one a little nearer to the always unattainable truth, by detracting from what one thought one knew, and so stripping one of vanity and ambition.’ Yet we learn that Christopher Middleton used to call Hamburger ‘Gloomburger' – ‘I can always be relied upon to moan about something’ – and far from constituting a swan song, the volume documents the poet’s lively, fighting spirit. In place of the anecdotal we are treated to salutary, memorable, and even revealing remarks: ‘What has gone out of critical debate is the notion of progress in the arts.’ ‘Haste, divisive pressures and overwork began in my adolescence and never abated before old age.’ ‘Reputations are part of the brand advertising that goes with our totalitarianism of commerce and finance.’ ‘A translation one has done behaves just like a poem of one’s own.’

The late and now forever-notoriously 'confessional' American poet, W.D. Snodgrass, seems to have been tape recorded rather than printerviewed for his volume. The book reads like the transcript of a casual dialogue in which Hoy does much of the talking; Hoy’s questions for Snodgrass are less well researched and provocative than those Dale put to Hamburger. At any rate, readers looking for stories about Snodgrass’s colleagues Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman will find them: Jarrell’s telling Snodgrass, ‘you’re writing some of the very best second-rate Lowell in the whole country,’ or Empson’s wife in response to Snodgrass’s saying at a party how much he’d wanted to meet the then-elderly Empson (‘You may have been in time’), or Snodgrass’s appearance on a panel with Amiri Baraka, who responded to the moderator’s asking what was so bad about American poetry by pointing to Snodgrass and saying, ‘He is.’

In yet another volume, Peter Dale and Ian Hamilton interview and printerview Anthony Thwaite, and this time the questioners and interviewee exchange quips and engage in shoptalk. One feels like an eavesdropper, but Thwaite’s remarks are fascinating. He discusses the ‘limiting judgements’ he’s had to make as editor and teacher about Hughes when he’s been too boringly shamanistic, Hill when he’s too densely cryptic, Harrison when he’s pushed the ‘class’ thing too hard, Heaney when he’s relied too much on the charmingly rural. He discusses ‘the Larkin business’ (‘I strongly feel that we did the right thing’), and has things to say about Geoffrey Hill (Thwaite describes how Hill, very early on, was ‘on to Lowell’), and, of course, his own work. Correlating his interest in archaeology with his work as a poet, he indicates a ‘strong sense of the past, and the way in which the past feeds itself into the present.’ I suppose this is why he can also be reticent. When asked if it is true that he once rang up Douglas Dunn and said ‘This is the London Literary Establishment’ -- and that Dunn believed him -- Thwaite understandably replies: ‘I don’t really want to get drawn into that, if you don’t mind.’ He's obviously aware of the limitations of the interview. Elsewhere, he talks about ‘the gaps, the exaggerations, the errors of memory, the lies, even when one’s trying to tell the truth. Just like this interview, in fact…’

Of the books I've seen, the most absorbing is the one devoted to Anthony Hecht (who died in 2004). Hecht took full advantage of the printerview format, crafting concise and valuable near-essays in response to a list of nearly one hundred questions posed by Philip Hoy, ‘some of them quite long and involved.’ Why Hecht was submitted to more detailed questioning than the others isn’t clear, but it is felicitous, and Hecht’s responses (the published text is a fourth draft of them) comprise a vividly composed autobiography that nicely outlines Hecht’s previously articulated views on matters of poetry. Paying back the interviewer in a sense, he simply quotes himself whenever there are questions he’s answered in the past, for instance: what Ransom’s classes were like, or how Ransom published Hecht’s first poem in The Kenyon Review by mistake (Ransom had written ‘Hecht’ for ‘Brecht’ in a list of future contributors). Hecht responds at length to a question about Auden’s complaint that there is an ‘excess of detail’ in Hecht’s work, which culminates in a discussion of the difficulty of counting large numbers of swans, as Yeats does in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole.’ Hecht’s mind was always engaged in points of detail; but he was also capable of witty, soulful brevity; when Hoy quotes Pascal’s ‘Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, sceptically of scepticism,’ Hecht replies, ‘How very sound; and how chastening.’ He is constantly illuminating - ‘Extravagance is a legitimate feature of poetry,’ ‘names in Eliot count for a lot,’ and so on. Impossible to summarise, this volume is an adjunct to Hecht’s fascinating On the Laws of the Poetic Art. Yet Hecht, like Hamburger, declined the possible gratifications of autobiography. Even in his poetry, Hecht poignantly confessed to his questioner, ‘I did not trust my own feelings enough to risk ... a cri du coeur, and I sought protection in dramatic structures and irony.’ As for his reflections on his life as a poet, he noted that memory plays tricks, that his life was ‘comparatively uneventful,’ and that ‘there are a number of things I simply don’t want to say, not least because they would cause pain to others.’ When's the last time you heard about a British or American poet who didn't want to cause anybody pain? John Ashbery, maybe, who's interviewed in the series by Mark Ford; I love Ashbery, yet this volume didn't do much for me. Stick with his selected prose and terrific Norton lectures. He's been interviewed all over the place - try this one, instead.

The BTL editors endorse the fictitious Braithwaite’s obsessive pursuit of the writer, but Barnes’s novel is the story of just how Quixotic that search really is. Between the lines, yes; but beyond the book, well... maybe there's only so much to know.

"What Is a Poet?" Who needs to know?

Polemicists can lead us to believe that it is not possible or permissible, for example, to enjoy both Scalapino and oh, I don’t know, for rhyme’s sake let’s say Longfellow. That’s the bad thing about polemicists, because of course such is perfectly p and p. The good thing, though, is that polemicists’ provocations keep those of us who love poetry but aren’t dogmatists about any particular flavor of it–the Mutable Majority!–on our mental toes, by challenging our assumptions and driving us to better articulate why and how we like what we like and dislike what we don’t.

I would never want, or be able, to participate in a conference like the “What Is a Poet?” gathering, because I don’t have a clear answer for the question and don’t want to. I do value gatherings like these, though; from them I take a dram of this and a dram of that to add to my own continually bubbling private impure mess. It tastes a little different every day which is (for me) delicious.

-- Joel Brouwer, on Harriet, "What Is a Poet?"

Limits as a provocation to speak out

... unlike the scholarly essay which must justify itself by bringing out a new aspect of a writer's work or correcting the inadequate interpretation of earlier critics, reviews are bound by no such rules. The reviewer is not only free but expected to take the book at hand as a chance to direct attention to central issues. As a critic he may speak to large matters of a poet's achievement, comparing the writer with contemporaries and predecessors in an effort to capture his or her distinctness. Under the confines of a thousand-word limit - or in more spacious situations double or treble the length - he can embrace limits as a provocation to speak out, sometimes doubtless recklessly, in order to elicit something essential about his subject. The great reviewer Randall Jarrell put it most extravagantly in "The Age of Criticism" when he declared that "taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself - and sometimes, doing so - is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art."

-- William H. Pritchard, On Poets & Poetry (Swallow Press, 2009)

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To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries - this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.

-- T. S. Eliot

James Dickey: Falling... in and out of favor

As Marcus Aurelius meditated (and as the recent Oxford poetry professorship pooh match, among countless other poetry squabbles, demonstrates): All is ephemeral—fame and the famous as well.

Among the uncertainties of life, poetry in particular is subject to instability because the requirements of the present moment are perversely and disingenuously privileged, now that greatness and posterity have been very conveniently debunked. This allows folks to praise or condemn work categorically and in myopic bulk, at the expense of reading something generously and carefully, on its own terms... or even just reading something out of one's ordinary ken. The controlling idea, which flourishes in the service of doctrinaire narrow mindedness, is to view poetry from the perspective of what "kind" it is. This presupposes that actual categories of poetry exist, or would be meaningful if they did - and that poems by some people conforming to some conventions are written in self-delusion, and are therefore products of & in complicity with Hegemonic Evil and the "ghost of Robert Lowell," etc. Why are intelligent people drawn to the invidious notion that everything fits into some scorny (to use Jordan Davis's great word) taxonomy?

(I guess I'm coming from a wobbly place such as that articulated by Isaiah Berlin in his recently-published letters: "I have inveterate sympathy for traitors in both camps..." & "... my compromise-loving, accommodating, all too unromantical, juste milieu, soul..." Ah, well, sorry about that. I am a radically open-minded polyreader, and I mean this seriously and not smugly.)

In the long term - also disbelieved-in - the joke'll be on us. But for now, given the restless jostling for position among the inhabitants of Po-ville USA, it's no surprise that worthwhile poets have been temporarily discredited, disappeared, set aside for re-education, or forgotten. If your deal is to trash the past and its nefarious "institutions," then it's guilt by association all the way. Or: guilt regardless of association, Viz: the rubbishing of Hayden Carruth on Harriet by people who know little more than his name, and wouldn't bother with the poetry on a bet. It's more important to know whether somebody was a "quietist" or not; or if he somehow represents something you object to, like hugging the left margin, say, or being a crappy person - out they go, poems and all! It's a dustbin-of-history poetics. Thanks a lot for underestimating my intelligence as a reader!

One of numberless writers who have suffered under this rigid and revanchist regime, whose arsenal includes passive neglect as well as canon reformation via ad hominem attack, is James Dickey. Kneejerk poetics: he's an old-school white guy from the South (always requiring either condescension on the one hand, or Gothic culture fetishism on the other), he drank a lot, was a violent misogynist, and had a famous movie made of one of his novels, he's in big bad anthologies: end of story. All true. And it doesn't help that even among poets old enough to remember him, he'll be recalled as a feared book reviewer, and judge of the Yale Younger Poets series: a power-broker and macho man.

In spite of all this, I'm going to recommend his work, warts and all.

Dickey's 1967 book, Falling, was one of the most daring books produced by an American poet since Williams and Pound, though he sounds like neither. (Yeah, yeah: quietude, heh! - but anyone who thinks Dickey "quiet" never dealt with him when he was around.) Dickey started out in the early 1950's and '60's as a recognizably, though not typical, Southern male poet, penning smoky, booze- and war-damaged poems that were stained on the fringes with vivid religious hues. His religion was primordial, though, as if the Lord had made his way not through the desert but through the swamps and moth swarms of Georgia - only to be met by troubled men, some of whom were veterans, living in tin houses decorated by gaunt suffering women, where flowers were always on the mantel-piece, bought by somebody's death.

Dickey's early poems are inspirited with death and impending acts of criminality, e.g. "The Vegetable King," from which those Gothic details come. Fishing, foxhounds, tree houses, kudzu, old cars, and Civil War relics also fill these first poems, almost all worth reading. What thou lovest well, or hate, remains American in Dickey's writing. His war poems in particular are astonishing, and surely help us understand more about what life will be like for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, about whom we hear so little:

In the brown half-life of my beard
The hair stood up
Like the awed hair lifting the back
Of a dog that has eaten a swan.
Now light like this
Staring into my face
Was the first thing around me at birth.
Be no more killed, it said.

("Drinking from a Helmet")

Dickey, as veterans do inexorably, brought the war back home, and it's from this vantage point that he relentlessly articulated the fright people feel as combatants - or their kin:

All families lie together, though some are burned alive.
The others try to feel
For them. Some can, it is often said...

I did not think of my house
But think of my house now

Where the lawn mower rests on its laurels
Where the diet exists
For my own good ...
... where the Sunday
School text for the day has been put ...
where the payments
For everything under sun
Pile peacefully up...

Holding onto another man's walls,
My hat should crawl on my head...

another
Bomb finds a home
And clings to it like a child.

These excerpts are from "The Firebombing," once considered controversial: to us now, the monstrous horror of the poem sounds like a trope, a commonplace. Well, it wasn't, when he wrote it, which is the price he pays for being accurate. Eventually, Dickey fell out of favor with readers because in an era of apparent peace, bubbly prosperity, and expanding youth culture he was, as he put it in another poem, "forever at war news." But now that our bubble has been punctured and wounding war is with us yet again, I think of Dickey along with poets like Dunya Mikhail, who never forgets that bloody conflict is not something that takes place "over there," and Brian Turner, who found himself in the gristle of its immorality.

War, though it permanently marks and informs Dickey's work, was not his sole subject. Military conflict is only one dimension of human cruelty (even the good ole American backwoods in the movie version of Deliverance ominously resemble the jungles of Viet Nam). Another is the violence in domestic relations; and yet another takes place when the instruments of our convenience turn on us. The once-notorious poem "Falling" intertwines these things; it's about a flight attendant who plunges to her death after an emergency door bursts open on an airplane mid-flight. It's a creepy poem, unsparingly cruel in its unfolding:

One cannot just fall just tumble screaming all that time on must use
It she is now through with all through all clouds damp hair
Straightened the last wisp on fog pulled apart on her face like wool...

The poem is misogynist and dated, but it's a fantasia, after all, impressively ghoulish and self-serving as a session with a shrink; its spacey free fall opened the door to "May Day Sermon" - an astounding poem. A master-frickin'-piece and bellwether. Blogger won't let me format it correctly, so

CLICK TO READ IT HERE!

Dickey was a braggadocian, and so were some among his acolytes, all gone now. Yet he wrote in a time, unlike ours, of tough competition and stiff criticism, and so he donned the camouflage of willfulness and drink. In fact in the 1960's, Dickey's attitude, in his poems, toward war and its horrors was called into question by Robert Bly, who thought it manipulative, conservative, superior. Nobody bothers to vilify the poems now; these days, if Dickey or his work are discussed at all, it's his attitude toward and treatment of women that - rightly - are scrutinized; the chronicle of those things makes for depressing reading in the extreme (though his daughter, Bronwen, eloquently scolded his biographer, and his son Christopher disentangled things with great and poignant skill in a memoir). Meanwhile Deliverance will, I imagine, never die.

As everyone knows, Yeats said that the intellect is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work. Hard as it is to imagine Yeats or anybody perfecting his life, Dickey was a poet who chose the work option. He even may have realized that a certain kind of poetry lived and died with him. But refusing heavenly as well as earthly mansions, he raged in the hot, naked dark. There's no romanticising of this, but amid the bluster there was, after all, poetry worth reading, whatever "school" you're in or from. "Poetry is a matter of luck," Dickey's son recalls his father saying. "You can't teach it. You can point it out when it occurs." That's why I'm pointing out that Dickey's luckiest poems shouldn't be forgotten - even if you won't earn any brownie points for trendiness in the blogposphere for searching them out now.

P.S. Dickey once cleverly reviewed Randall Jarrell's selected poems by having a dialogue between two critics, A and B, one of whom liked and the other who hated Jarrell's work. A has the last word, though, saying that the poet "gives you, as all great or good writers do, a foothold in a realm where literature itself is inessential, where your own world is more yours than you could ever have thought, or even felt, but is one you have always known." Dickey's best poems awaken such feelings in me, even when those feelings are nightmarish.

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Remembering James Dickey from SC Center for the Book on Vimeo.

Me & Pete Townshend's nose, or: We are all coteries now!

Me & Pete Townshend's nose??!

What does that objet and Paul Blackburn, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Thomas Traherne, a Milton dictionary, W.S. Graham, Robert Burton, Delmore Schwartz, Samuel Johnson, Blake, Auden, Jules Supervielle, Janet Frame, Walter Benjamin’s “archives,” Lamb’s essays, tiny volumes of Thoreau & Marcus Aurelius, Michael Hofmann, & Basil Bunting have in common??? Click here or on the pic for the answer.

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Charles Bernstein says: "We are all coteries now (only some are in more denial about it than others and they are the ones that trouble my sleep).

My idea is not that we should all get along, and certainly not that the same things should be on our radar, but rather that we’d be better off not to cast our disagreements in terms of the ignorance of those with whom we disagree. This is harder than it may seem. Stigmatizing aesthetic or ideological disagreement as if it were the results of ignorance, fraudulence, or insignificance is too often the way both art (and poetry) business is conducted by those who fiercely police what they too often regard as their own turf.

No Trespassing!

Don’t get me wrong: I am ignorant, I make mistakes at every turn; it’s my awareness of that, to the degree I can be, that is my guide.

I am as partial and partisan as anyone. Preference and selection are a necessary part of aesthetic judgment. Yet, my radar might be the exact map of another person’s exclusions, just as another’s exclusions might begin to map my paradise. The relation of these two ideas (conviction in one’s aesthetic judgment and its inevitable limitations) is not irreconcilable but dialectical."

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The problem with hipsters seems to me the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be. Everything becomes just another signifier of personal identity. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster. But are there hipsters, actual hipsters, or just a pervasive fear of hipsters? Hipster hatred may actually precede hipsters themselves. Maybe that collective fear and contempt conjures them into being, just as the Red Scare saw communists everywhere, or how the Stasi made spies of everyone. Late capitalism makes us all fear being hipsters and thus makes us all into one, to some degree. -- Rob Horning

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All poets go to heaven, even the evil ones. -- Joseph Massey

The audience that never shows up

In an insipid poetry/literature scene, including one saturated with publicity, an inability to muster enough historical awareness, informed critique, ruthless honesty and close, complete reading means that we turn our hopes outward, in a wish for love and affirmation from an imaginary audience that never shows up. -- Vivek Narayanan (click here for full essay)

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Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages: and neglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms, and despise the resentments of every soul... - Thomas Traherne (taken out of context)

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There's a new movement born every minute, say Paul Hoover & Maxine Chernoff...

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Calling Dr. W.C. Williams... (your Orgasmic Toast is ready)

Pictured: The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven; click on link above or the photo to read her poems!

There's no such thing as a fish, there are only kinds of fish

Speaking of schools of poetry...

Is it true, as the soon-to-be-famous writer Sarah Palin says, "only dead fish go with the flow?"

Click here to find out!

("Don't know what the future holds. / I'm not gonna shut any door. / That -- who knows what doors open. / I can't predict what the next fish run's gonna look like / down on the Nushagak.")

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"... American critics and poet-critics and just plain poets (or not) attempt to confect silly sounding schools out of wan spats with the self and then tell us that if you didn’t get it the first time it’s because you didn’t fill in your own meaning..."

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When men talk of “the only valid position,” when old insistences of the true poet, or the genuine feeling, or the right way, the real meaning, arise, my heart shrinks against the assault; and it is unwillingly that I suspend the guarantee they protest and go on to follow their revelation. Altho it does not seem now to have been very heroic, it is perhaps a trace of the cost of my coming to recognize my weaknesses or my contradictions or my unrequited fumblings as quite genuine, that I wince at the efforts of an intense morality to hold out against the evident many other intense moralities however informd in the world. -- Robert Duncan

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Because I am an innovator in my field, some people keep on shouting that I'm a formalist. They do not find the old forms in my work, and worse, they find new ones, and then they infer that it is the forms that interest me, but I have discovered that I'm rather inclined to deprecate the formal element. I have studied the old forms of poetry, story-telling, drama and theatre at various times and only given them up when they stood in the way of what I wanted to say. -- Bertolt Brecht

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It is part of our cultural deprivation that whole ranges of human consciousness have fallen into a privatized self. The failure to know modern art and the current retreat from it further displace and sentimentalize the past. The contemporary artist, then, hasn't a chance of being understood by a large public, because his or hers is an imagination in dialogue with the triumphs and faults of modernism. -- Robin Blaser, ca. 1986

The Dictionary of Don Martin

AAAAGH! EEEEEOOOW ACK!
UGH UGH MMP AGH! AEEK Removal Of A Deep Rooted Tooth
AAAK AAK Busy City People Coughing
AAEEFWOFAAEE One Of Tarzan's Special Animal Calls
AAHT AAHHT BLOOOOT Busy City Horns
ACK Man choking
ACK GAK GARK! Man Having A Heart Attack
AGH! UGH! ARG! Man Struggling With A Fishing Pole
AHH- AHH- Ahh …. THOONOONN Iron Man Sneezing Inside His Iron Mask
AHHHHHHHHHH Frankenstein Inhaling
AHWEEEEEE-AK A Cow Horn...

Click here or on the picture for the full Dictionary!

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Your eyes dart left. Your fist suddenly goes boing! Sticks out. Head swivels. Whoa. Back arch. Leg. Sudden diaper squirt. Things are happening everywhere. And each one of the things that happen, the random little twitchy things, sends a message to central control that feels a certain way. So you begin to correlate. And your mouth turns out to be probably the most important piece of the pie. When you cry you get results, and when you suck you get milk, and when you go Nnnnnnng! The face above you smiles and goes "'Nnnning," what do you mean 'Nnng,' you funny little baby?" Reflecting it back.

And you start to see that all these sounds that you can make - ngo, merk, plort - that you begin to hear, can be classified in certain ways. You're a newborn brain, you've only recently come out of solitary confinement in the uterus, and you're already a cryptanalyst in Bletchley Park. You're already parsing though, looking for similarities and differences, looking for patterns, looking for beginnings and endings and hints of meaning..."

-- "Paul Chowder" on where rhyme comes from, in Nicholson Baker's forthcoming novel, The Anthologist

On the turndown (not the economic one)

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it's a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here, the magician will do his thing. Here's the guy who's going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spit it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton.

And you can read it for yourself on page sixty-seven. Of this New Yorker. Alice Quinn. The magnificent Alice. This was back in the day, when Alice was the poetry editor. God bless that hardworking cheerful nice woman. She left recently and now it's Paul Muldoon, and I hardly know Paul Muldoon. And really I hardly knew Alice Quinn, to be honest. But at least she actually accepted some of my own poems. Thank you, Alice! And rejected some of them - damn her! Things that just hurt me to have them come back saying, This isn't for us. This one didn't quite work for us, but we're glad to have something from you.

"We're glad." The crafting of these kind no-thank-you letters. I assume Paul Muldoon will do it well, too. The really good editors have the gift. And they hurt so bad when they're nice. You get a turndown and then you flip though the magazine and you say, Why? Why did Alice accept this firkin of flaccidness here on page 114 and not one of my poems? Why?

-- Nicholson Baker's character, "Paul Chowder," in the forthcoming novel The Anthologist

The NEA "money list" (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act)

FY 2009 Grant Awards: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

"The following nonprofit arts organizations are receiving grants to support the preservation of jobs that are threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn." (Click here for the full list.)

Out of $29,775,000, here's what went to poetry, more or less (i.e., including organizations and publishers that are not exclusively devoted to poetry): Copper Canyon and Hudson Review ($50K each), and Alice James, Cave Canem, Milkweed Editions, Coffee House Press and Graywolf ($25K ea.). The Poetry Society of America, the CLMP and AWP got $50K each; Richard Hugo House, 25K.

Monkeys as Judges of Art

It’s not like there aren’t interesting things to say about criticism today, when disciplinary forms of expertise are so much in question. Art reviews by people with PhDs sit alongside amateur and fan reviews of all sorts. Coverage is shallow (750 words and falling) and nearly ubiquitous. Reviewers are often invested participants in the culture, rather than neutral and critical observers. Reading criticism becomes a game of triangulation, between multiple descriptive reviews with little individual weight (the “metacritic” problem). In this anti-intellectual yet critico-philic universe, “poetic” and subjective criticism is one style among many. -- Julian Myers on art criticism!

Pictured: "Monkeys as Judges of Art," ca. 1889, Gabriel von Max.

The Great Order of the Universe

(Click above to see a larger version)

Kenneth Goldsmith, comment on Ron Silliman's blog, 7/7/09: "... if it all sounds familiar, it is. Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos."

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Kenneth Goldsmith (Harriet, 9/9/09): "The identity politics battles of the past twenty years have done wonders and have given voice to many that have been denied. And there is still so much work to be done: so many voices are still marginalized and ignored. It's a long road ahead and every effort must be made to be made to ensure that those who have something to say have a place to say it and an audience to hear it. The importance of this work cannot be underestimated.

Identity is a slippery thing and no single approach can nail it. Also, citing the need for difference, we're never going to feel the same way on anything -- a good thing. We all come from different places and circumstances, which is something to be celebrated. To be prescriptive or to make generalizations regarding circumstances of economies, classes, religions and races is counterproductive.

I really don't think that there's a stable or essential me. I am an amalgamation of so many things: books I've read, movies I've seen, televisions shows I've watched, all the exchange and sharing of thoughts during conversations with people -- the melding of our minds, the song lyrics I've heard, the lovers I've loved. The discussion that we're having right now is changing and challenging who I thought I was profoundly. And for that I'm grateful.

In fact, I'm a creation of many people and many ideas to the point where I feel that I've actually had very few original thoughts and ideas; to think that any of this was original would be blindingly egotistical. Sometimes I'll think that I've had an original thought or feeling and then, at 2 a.m. while watching an old movie on TV that I hadn't seen in many years, the protagonist will spout something that I had previously claimed as my own. In other words, I took his words (which, of course, weren't really "his words" at all), internalized them and made them my own. This happens all the time.

Often -- mostly unconsciously -- I'll model my identity of myself on some image that I've been pitched to by an advertisement. When I'm trying on clothes in a store, I will bring forth that image that I've seen in an ad and mentally insert myself and my image into it. It's all fantasy. I would say that an enormous part of my identity has been adopted from advertising. I very much live in this culture; how could I possibly ignore such powerful forces? Is it ideal? Probably not. Would I like not to be so swayed by the forces of advertising and consumerism? Of course, but I would be kidding myself if I didn't admit that this was a huge part of who I am as a member of this culture.

As a previous commenter mentioned, transgendered persons are deeply committed to not being what they were born into. So many people who are not thrilled with the way they were born courageously labor their whole lives to adopt new and fluid identities. Others, such as transsexual persons are in a constant state of remaking themselves. I feel inspired by such fluid and changeable notions of identity.

On the internet, these tendencies move in different directions. With much less commitment than it takes in meatspace, we can project various personas with mere stokes of a keyboard. In this chatroom, I'm a woman; on this blog, I'm a political conservative; in this forum, I'm a middle-aged golfer. And I never get called out for not being authentic or real. On the contrary, I am addressed as "madam," or "you right-wing asshole." In fact, Mr. Khan, I wouldn't be surprised if you were writing under a pseudonym right now. Not only would I forgive you, I've come to expect that the person I think I'm addressing on the internet isn't really "that person." Fascinating, no?

If my identity is really up for grabs and changeable by the minute -- as I believe it is -- it's important that my writing reflect this state of ever-shifting identity and subjectivity. That can mean adopting voices that aren't "mine," subjectivities that aren't "mine," political positions that aren't "mine," opinions that aren't "mine," words that aren't "mine," because in the end, I don't think that I can possibly define what's "mine" and what isn't.

BUT -- and here's where subjectivity enters -- it's my choices that make the work "mine." I have chosen -- for some specific reason -- a certain text to appropriate or to reframe. For example, in a recent piece of mine, I have appropriated the entire interrogation session between Senator Larry Craig and the policeman who arrested him. I haven't done a thing to the text, I've just reprinted the whole thing. Why? I thought it was such a revealing text, full of prejudice and hypocrisy from both sides. It was something much more profound -- even surreal -- than anything I could ever have invented. In the end, it's a beautiful piece of writing.

Sometimes, by reproducing texts in a non-interventionist way, we can shed light on political issues in a more profound and illuminating way than we can by conventional critique. If we wished to critique globalism, for example, I can imagine that reproducing / framing the transcript as from yesterday's G8 summit meeting where they refused to ratify climate control threats would reveal much more about the truth of the situation than I could possibly say. Often, I feel it's better to let the text be what it is -- generally, as in the case of the G8, they'll incriminate and hang themselves with their own stupidity. I call this poetry.

I feel as writers we try too hard. No matter what we do with language, it will be expressive. How could it be otherwise? In fact, I feel it is impossible working with language not to express oneself. If we back off and let the material do it's work, we might even in the end be able to surprise and delight ourselves with the results.

Peace."

[Click here to listen to an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith about the portfolio.]

We do things funny over here...

About which I've blogged today at Harriet; click the photo for my interviews with the Iraqi poet Vera Pavlova (pictured here, on the left) and Russian poet Dunya Mikhail.

I talk with these two fascinating writers about exile, women poets, translation, and... getting pigeonholed!

A really perfect poem

A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary. -- Jack Spicer

Form as rest; no rest for the weary

So many are devoted to form as rest. -- Robin Blaser

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To understand the "art" in art is always essential. But it is even more essential today, for we have clearly entered an "era of suspicion" in which art seems arty to the artist himself. The artist, indeed, is often the severest critic of his own medium, which turns against itself in his relentless drive for self-criticism. Artistic form and aesthetic illusion are today treated as ideologies to be exposed and demystified... If literary history is to provide a new defense of art it must now defend the artist against himself as well as his other detractors. It must help to restore his faith in two things: in form, and in his historical vocation. -- Geoffrey Hartman, ca. 1970, Beyond Formalism

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The Hobo ethical code

An ethical code was created by Tourist Union #63 during its 1889 National Hobo Convention in St. Louis Missouri. This code was voted upon as a concrete set of laws to govern the Nation-wide Hobo Body; it reads this way:

1. Decide your own life, don't let another person run or rule you.
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don't take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals treatment of other hobos.
7. When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as bad, if not worse than you.
8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
12. Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children, expose to authorities all molesters, they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
16. If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it, whether for or against the accused, your voice counts!

To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with

Cass Sunstein — co-author of the hugely influential Nudge and an adviser to President Obama — unveils his new theory of "group polarization," and explains why, when like-minded people spend time with each other, their views become not only more confident but more extreme. (Read full article here.)

Naturally, we wonder how this can be applied to po-biz, right? Here's the incomparable David Shapiro on this very subject:

Apply this to poetry, poets and the clique, cabal, club, style. Advantages to authoritarianism. The group in Durkheim. "On a certain blindness in human beings." Why receptivity and love are wider than hate. "Do not commit an aesthetic bonfire." Noa: Human beings will give up a lot to attain security, only a few horrible ("literary dictators) want power. The Tiwi... Read More we the people eat you when one can't claim relationship. The cannibalism in most criticism. etc.

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Lots of bloggoblather yet again about MFA programs, pro or con, stimulated by Mark McGurl's book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing - and the review of it in The New Yorker by Louis Menand. Click here, if you must, for another account - from the Chronicle of Higher Education - by the always-lucid Jennifer Howard.

It's a debate that's never held any interest for me, and I've only one very naive observation to make. I just spent a solid week at the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam, meeting day and night with poets from countries other than the USA, and heard - literally - not a single word about writing programs. (Nor about avant-gardes, post-avant gardes, flarf, or conceptual writing, speaking of group polarization....) I know that writing programs exist outside of the US (particularly in the UK now), and yet... we sure seem to do things very differently over here. The relative lack of toadying and jockeying for position I found among poets from other countries - and I know that a single week is nothing conclusive - leads me to wonder how and why things seemed so different. I have no answer. But among all the poets, editors, and attendees of poetry events I met or saw ... most very keenly wanted to read and learn about everybody they could. There was an impressive urgency among poets to encounter the work of people who were different. Sure, we had a few passionate and even heated discussions - but never about the kind of pecking-order stuff one must take for granted day in and day out over here. We're a big country, but our literary culture seemed quite small over there. . .

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On a lighter note, here's a video of nimble critic James Wood in action:

What is Poetry really about?

Click the pic!