In these great times

"In the beginning was the review copy, and a man received it from the publisher. Then he wrote a review. Then he wrote a book which the publisher accepted and sent on to someone else as a review copy. The man who received it did likewise. This is how modern literature came into being."

"Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authors write works which are by the critics who write critiques about them."

"A poem is good until one knows by whom it is."

"Most writers have no other quality than the reader: taste. But the latter has the better taste, because he does not write--and the best if he does not read."

-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936), tr. by Harry Zohn

*
I would argue that any amount of difficulty is justified in a poem: so too is any amount of simplicity, provided, in both cases, the poet is doing something sufficiently interesting and memorable with language. The problem with some accessible poetry is not its accessibility, but that it is verbally uninteresting. And some difficult post-modern poems are dull because they are de-personalised and samey, like Tolstoy's happy families. -- Carol Rumens; full article here

Pictured: Lesley Dill, Dress of Inwardness (2006), inspired by Emily Dickinson

There will always be an Angland

Since I noo mwore do zee your feace,
Up steairs or down below,
I’ll zit me in the lwonesome pleace,
Where flat-bough’d beech do grow;
Below the beeches’ bough, my love,
Where you did never come,
An’ I don’t look to meet ye now,
As I do look at hwome.



"I demanded to see the shop manager and, during a heated exchange, my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park."

Phantom Billstickers

Today would have been Janet Frame's 85th birthday.

Before the Man-Moth there was... the Time-Moth

Before the Man-Moth there was... the Time-Moth:

I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead

it lies upon the floor.

(O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul

and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!)

My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light

or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds.

(But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags —

tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!)

Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!

-- Benjamin De Casseres, aphorist, diarist, egotist, via Joshua Cohen, who presents this De Casseres Chrestomathy:

A practical man should have knuckles in his eyes; a poet should have them in his images.

To almost any American “thinker”: the feet of your thoughts are always asleep.

All summits are cemeteries.

Art can only influence artists.

If you have no ideas, beware of your tenses and your grammar.

An emotion has more reality than a nail.

Hope is the promise of a crucifixion.

Whatever we do is a remedy.

Beauty is distance.

Only the ugly are modest.

Identity is partisanship.

The difference between Science and Theology is that Science is evolving ignorance and Theology is static ignorance.

We used to say, “It is raining.” Now (1930) it would be more appropriate to say: “The bladders of the atoms have opened and torrents of electronic urine lave the asphalt.”

Symbol. — I live behind a statue of myself.

Esoteric.— If you swallow your jewels you will have to recover them in your excrement.

Things that intoxicate me. — Gardens; the sea; mountain solitudes; great poetry and great prose; abstract ideas; profound sleeps; twilight; music; God, the sense of Wonder and Mystery; Satan; amorous sports; Bio’s love; the peace of death; wine; fastflying automobiles when I am in one; the voice of little children; the word Shelley; the word Baudelaire; the words Victor Hugo; imaged coitions with ideal women of an impossible beauty; well-buttered lima-beans; spaghetti; the flash of a metaphor through my brain; praise from superior minds; the stars; checks, checks, checks.

Keep the masses happy. Unhappiness should be the privilege of the few.

To have written a book that no one has ever read is like having a face that no one has ever looked at.

Pleasure has no eyes.

All life aspires to mirrors.

On owning buildings, or not owning them

There must be a way to be human that neither crouches back of the door nor barges in with some overbearing pretension of significance. Anyone can have a world, so to speak, if he or she is willing to lop off little (or big) pieces of the existing one, so as to manage a convenience for the self. "It's himself!" cried the mother in those Irish families of my youth, as said person staggered up the steps, home again.

But this is no story, much as it might entertain, of anyone at all. You must know people in your own life, who don't so much stay put as be there, for all and any to witness. There is no overwhelming claim they make, nothing has to make room for them, nor do they come and go with some shy disclaimer of their significance. Not only can you trust them, but you can not trust them, equally, if it's funny business you have in mind. For lack of any other better word, or way of putting it clearly, they are literally alive and inexorably human, and they have all they seemingly require therefor. It has nothing to do with being hungry or well-fed, all of which is possible for any of us, but how it all then is lived with. -- Robert Creeley

*
Do not speak to me of economics; that is merely a question of how we arrange matters between us. -- Laura Riding

*
It is good to publish those who cannot find some one to do it. You also have another task, even more significant, to print the works of those who will be of use to purblind souls. We are all Cimmerians, living in some subterranean bog in our souls, and when I glance through a volume, I don’t want to know whether this author cannot otherwise find someone like yourself to bring him out. What is most important is that, whatever age he is, he can be the viaticum for my own nature, and give me enough food so that my own spirit can soar for an afternoon or at least until dusk. In other words, despite the fact that it is very hard for young people, and also the older ones, to get somebody to place their sighs and constellations between boards, what is of imperial worth is what they can do for others. Otherwise, you are bringing out books by Narcissus. There is already too much self-love in the world. Don’t encourage a man to love himself more than he already does. Do what you can to impress upon him the necessity of caring for somebody else. Every page is either a vision or Circe’s sty. -- Edward Dahlberg (letter to the twenty-nine year old Jonathan Williams, dated September 23, 1958, via John Latta)

*
Doing something contrary to what everyone else does is almost as bad as doing something because everyone else does it. -- Fernando Pessoa (from a notebook that never was, tr. Richard Zenith, forthcoming in Poetry)

Memphis and the Paradox of Place, by Wanda Rushing

Scroll down. I am honored.

Blinking Don: tired of mini-reflections

Jordan Davis wrote in to say:

"I saw a quote used as an epigraph that reminded me of your bout of Johnsonism a while back:

'I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation and connection and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.' -- Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Almost immediately afterwards I was pointed to this article.

For some reason I thought you'd enjoy both of these."

I did enjoy them, and his message induced me to reflect thusly:

Before I left Harvard, my office there had been relocated for a time in the new and not-yet opened Samuel Johnson wing of the Houghton Library. There wasn't a curator yet for the recently acquired Donald and Mary Hyde Collection, so I got to work there alone with such things as Johnson's silver teapot (click here to see it), his mss., Boswell's, too. My desk sat beneath one of the famous portraits of Johnson, and his peering over my shoulder got me to reread, or read, everything I could pertaining to his life and work ... it almost took over my life. I'm far away from all that now, but Jordan's message reminds me that Johnson both predicted and would have hated things like Twitter; wouldn't you know it, there's a guy now tweeting Johnson quotes all day long.

You can't even imagine a writer or man like Samuel Johnson flourishing now - and most everyone reading this would think, Good! That's progress, I guess. But I'm increasingly tired of reading and trying to get anything out of all the spurts and blurts and mini-reflections I take in, online in general and in contemporary poems in particular that I look at. Worse, I'm definitely & unapologetically a big book guy. I still rankle at Simic's dismissal of poetry books that are... too big. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is my favorite book of prose, and I'd have no bookshelf without Boswell's Life, half of Dickens, Creeley's / Lowell's / Blake's / Dickinson's / Olson's / Prynne's collected poems and EP's Cantos. I've been reading every syllable of Silliman's the Alphabet. I read all of the essays in Geoffrey Hill's collected essays - no mean feat, that. I've got a copy of Wendy Doniger's book on the Hindus on my to-do list - the largest book I've seen in a while! I admire Mark Scroggins' project to read Ruskin - and his biography of Zukofsky, both big. For me, the internet and the big book actually work together, but I can't quite explain how that works. And I don't feel superior, not at all, reading large books - it's just an appetite, like any other. Big damn books are, for me, as addicting as Facebook or iPhones are for other people. I picked up the habit when I spent almost the whole of my senior year in college reading Gravity's Rainbow instead of doing any work - for no other reason than because it was there. Even now, I read and read till my eyeballs hurt. I admire and try to imagine what goes into the writing of big books - usually, it's big lives - yet suppose few have or want the time to read or write them anymore - excluding, say, the ones about Harry Potter and maybe (have you finished them yet?) the novels of Roberto Bolaño. After all, who needs to think long and hard (what Bunting called sharp study and long toil) when you can type away, fuelled by caffeine or the moist air of some hothouse mentality - then emote and opine instead on your gizmo - and be taken seriously?

David Shapiro says: If a poet bores you, just wake up and look for another voice. I'm awake and looking. In the spirit, then, of brevity, soul, and wit - and wakefu looking - I hope to concoct a periodic feature here or elsewhere consisting of short and thoughtless takes on books that cross my desk. Maybe I'll call it "Editor's Briefs" or "Little Giddings..."

*
UPDATE: John Latta, on his sublime blog, happens to quote S.J. today:

"The greater part of readers, instead of blaming us for passing trifles, will wonder that on trifles so much labour is expended, with such importance of debate, and such solemnity of diction. To these I answer with confidence, that they are judging of an art which they do not understand; yet cannot much reproach them with their ignorance, nor promise that they would become in general, by learning criticism , more useful, happier or wiser."

To which John responds:

"Ah, for a pedagogy that admits up front its subject is a fool’s errand..."

(And it was bound to happen: a one-man show on Johnson.)

N.B. The funny-looking portrait you see above by Joshua Reynolds of my hero, Samuel Johnson, shows, as Wikipedia (which owes something to him) calls it "his intense concentration and the weakness of his eyes; he did not want to be depicted as 'Blinking Sam.'"

If you study to become a poet...

A Flag for Bunting

If you study to become a poet, study to be a Basil
Bunting: heckler of the vernacular (to no pay), last
real troubadour along any road you name—knocking
the door, a man of nations. Of all the Moderns he
was the only to wrestle Keats to the mat, nightingale
and all. If Briggflatts seems now keen to us as The
Waste Land and his Chomei at Toyama illustrated by
Hokusai, he would shrug that off as small potatoes,
a ruse of time. If we stayed heir, year by year, to
such lines as “I am agog for foam. Tumultuous come
/ with teeming sweetness to the bitter shore” . . .
no more. Study to be printed a ghost, those who hear
the Muses’ Siren song. There, Basil walks the wave.

-- Ronald Johnson

Via John Latta's superb blog; someday my edition of BB will emerge from Faber.
Photo by the late David James, via his son Jeremy's blog, Poet in a Lens.

General numbnose

What all this posturing and fake glamor results in is a vast detachment and cynicism on the part of the artists. Since it's impossible to have respect for an audience that'll take just about anything you care to dish out, and the impassive demeanor is so central to the role, a general numbnose is all that can be expected. -- Lester Bangs, "James Taylor Marked for Death" (1971)

Difference of lunacy

'Tis true that all here below is but diversified folly, and that the little things we laugh at children for, we do but act ourselves in great; yet is there difference of lunacy; and, of the two, I had much rather be made with him that (when he had nothing) thought all the ships that came into the haven his, than with you who (when you have so much coming in) think you have nothing. -- Sir John Suckling

Poetry equilibrium

Click here or on the pictures for some poetry equilibrium!

RIP Jim

Photo by Tav Falco

The trouble with poethics

I really have trouble with poethics. In fact, I think one of the most beautiful, free and expansive ideas about art is that it — unlike just about everything else in our culture — doesn’t have to partake in an ethical discourse. As a matter of fact, if it wants to, it can take an unethical stance and test what it means to be that without having to endure the consequences of real world investigations. I find this to be enormously powerful and liberating and worth fighting for. Where else can this exist in our culture? -- Kenny Goldsmith

*
Plainly the only problem is to avoid that love of lost-identity which drives so many clever people to hold difficult points of view - by difficult I mean big, hungry, religious points of view which absorb their personality. I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand... It is all indeed, I admit, rather horrible. But if I remain a person instead of becoming a point of view, I have no contact with horror. -- Laura Riding

*
I can't get rid of the idea that we demand less and less of poetry. Just a nudge or a sting to our imagination and thought. For this you don't need more than a few words. Sometimes entire long poems pass through us like air. We rush to the final pont, to the conclusion. All of it results from a shortening of the inner time of art, perhaps also of man. -- Anna Kamienska

[from her notebooks, in Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska, ed. and trans. Grazyna Drabik & David Curzon; more of her notebooks, translated by Clare Cavanagh, will appear in an upcoming issue of Poetry]

*
We can set our own standard for quality and stick to it. We can demand to know the true costs of what we buy, and refuse to allow them to be externalized, We can enforce sustainability, minimize disposability, and insist on transparency. We can rekindle our acquaintance with craftsmanship. We can choose to buy or not, choose to bargain or not, and choose to follow our hearts or not, unencumbered by the anxiety of that someone somewhere is getting a 'better deal." -- Ellen Ruppel Shell

[Shell is talking about cheap shoes, not about poetry, alas; from her book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, in which she asks, "What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?" The answer, as paraphrased on Boing Boing: a low-quality food supply, a ruined economy, a polluted environment, low wages, a shoddy educational system, deserted town centers, ballooning personal debt, and the loss of craftsmanship.]

Science and poetry

Speaking of science and poetry (see discussion of how lots of poets make extensive use of the sciences) here's a found - well, not exactly found - poem that was, er, thrust upon me in a spam e-mail touting... what else?... a swell bit of scientific progress, Viagra; I quote it in its entirety:

Oman. "Day before yesterday in the morning. He went away about half-past eight as he usually does," she replied. And then she added a question of her own: "Was he here day before yesterday?" The merchant nodded and pressed an electric bell. Then he rose from his seat and pulled up a chair for his visitor. "Sit down here. This thing has frig

Rhyme For Your Life/For Whom The Bell Tolls

ARTHUR: Episode Number: 608:

While struggling to write a poem for his mom, Binky falls asleep and gets trapped in Verseberg... where it's a crime not to rhyme [Get it? Heh.]! After tangling with the big purple orange and meeting poet William Carlos Williams, Binky finally escapes this curse - but will he be able to stop speaking in verse?? D.W. lost her voice! For Arthur it's a dream come true... until Mom asks Arthur to take care of D.W., and he finds himself at the mercy of a bad mime with a cowbell. Will Arthur spend the rest of his life at D.W.'s beck and call, endlessly fetching ginger ale and playing Crazy-eights?

See WCW in prison, screaming, "FREE VERSE! FREE VERSE!!"

(Click to view episode) - & even more info here...

The melancholy of the possible text

Illusion Come to Naught

For the text I'm pursuing firs and enchanted trees for the text, as also for the text the subtle, ironical smile of a frozen void. But this, this work, would only become tangible if I were able, I, to reach the surface of a sibylline verbal cunning.

But, in truth, I haven't taken my weariness into account. Because of which, given my present situation, I won't head for my desk, I'll keep traveling with the real dew, among these firs and real trees I've come upon in this evening's walk. So it's about how tired I am and although the melancholy of the possible text keeps pursuing me, I seriously doubt that I can reach, with words, this that's like light sparks, this that illusion come to naught consists of.

-- Lorenzo García Vega, translated by Christopher Winks, in the new anthology, The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, edited by Mark Weiss

The antinomian pie is cut

"Most of XXXXXXX's confusions are due to his attempt to correlate his political system with his taste. His political system is consistent with itself; we agree with it unreservedly or we agree with it not at all. His taste is inconsistent with itself wherever it has been made to conform with his political system: it becomes a nagging, expedient right, lacking the proper indifference of taste and the proper consistency of a political attitude. It is therefore obviously futile to treat with XXXXXXXX on matters of taste."

Space is the place

Keeping things straight is important for the writing of poems. So is fucking things up. Some people are good, in a given poem, at keeping things straight, but not so good at fucking things up; that poem isn't so good. Some people are good, in a given poem, at fucking things up, but not so good at keeping things straight; that poem isn't so good, either.

Plastic Bouquets-Man on the Moon from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

All literature

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves....

People will think you brilliant only if you tell them what they know. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid knowing what they know... People will think you brilliant if you seem to be enjoying yourself, since they are not enjoying themselves. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid pretending to be enjoying yourself. Make it clear that you know that they know that nothing is really enjoyable except pretending to be enjoying yourself. -- Laura Riding

Oprah sued for a trillion dollars, for stealing... poetry!

LOS ANGELES: Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey is being sued for a whopping $1 trillion by author Damon Lloyd Goffe for plagiarism, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton
has claimed on his website. Goffe is suing Winfrey and her production company, Harpo, for allegedly stealing material from his work, 'A Tome of Poetry' and publishing it under her name with the title 'Pieces of My Soul', according to Hilton. Full story here. [UPDATE: suit, not pictured, tossed outta court]

In other news...

New York Times:
C
of
the
took
after
saying
Panetta
Congress
president
activities
Concealment
brainstormed
waterboarding
Representative
countermeasures
counterterrorism

Times of India:
P
an
the
that
along
impact
reasons
incident
inspected
providence
supervision
Commonwealth

National Enquirer:
a
to
you
went
sperm
mental
learned
choosing
potential
biological
exclusively
artificially
painstakingly

Reader’s Digest:
a
to
and
when
jeans
moving
workout
exercise
Swimsuits
enthusiasm

"My code this week started with the idea of newspapers having different reading levels. Using lists, I was able to group words of different lengths. At first, I wrote out how many words of each length were in the article. Once I had a word length without any matches, I had to test to make sure I had at least one word in the list before choosing a random one to print..." -- nope, not Kenny Goldsmith!

Would you rather "generate" something more Whitmanesque? Click here. (All of which goes to show that there's no such thing as {generated} poetry... only kinds of {generated} poetry.)

The Paper Ladies speak! (Nick Twemlow tries)

Paper Dresses at Printers Ball from Amy Guth on Vimeo.

We are fooled by nearly random processes that look random

A child said: what is poetry, running towards me with empty arms. How could I answer the child, since I am the child, the kaleidoscope the farms. Is it two women near an ocean and they erase the world? The anti-aesthetic and its aniconoclasm is the puritanism of fools. These critics who wanted to be umpires forgot: Art is not a game These philosophers who proscribed so much and finally proscribed themselves . -- David Shapiro, Facebook status update

*
The only productive design is designed waste. Designed creation results in nothing but the destruction of the designer; it is impossible to add to what is; all is and is made. Energy that attempts to make in the sense of making a numerical increase in the sum of made things is spitefully returned to itself unused. It is a would-be-happy-ness ending in unanticipated and disordered unhappiness. Energy that is aware of the impossibility of positive construction devotes itself to an order using-up and waste of itself: to an anticipated unhappiness which, because it has design, foreknowledge, is the nearest approach to happiness. Undesigned unhappiness and designed happiness both mean anarchism. Anarchism is not enough. -- Laura Riding, on flarf

*
The latest research on the so-called random may have some impact on aleatory poetic techniques; even coin tosses, it turns out, are not random:

The true laws of coin tosses show yet again the inadequacy of our intuition (as well as the flawed metaphors favored by economists). We are indeed fooled by randomness. But we are also fooled by nearly random processes that look random, even if they aren't, because the differences are too subtle for us to notice.

*
"moot court, be mute.
Some split, some lump, and you know what kind I am.
art show to come: enemies placed next to each other.

My enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.

A true scientist is filled with thoughts about possible errors.
Think of say three powerful critics wondering whether their arguments and
choices are right.
The sky would...rise.
One doesn't step into the same argument twice.
Imagine the small library from which books of blind dogma are deleted.
There's the reason we all deserve defense attorneys.
Job';s Cry: I demand a defense attorney!
His wife: What a specious nonargument, your defense
attorney will look exactly like your prosecutor! Curse law and die. Were you there when they laid the foundation of all
argument, marriage, and working dogmas! Splitter!
Now you get the lump you deserve, you...fragment!"

-- David Shapiro, private/public communication to the author

Real life; or, puppies for sale

Oh: blogging on Harriet today. Click on the beautiful puppies.

The Heffalump trap!

Craig Raine recalls that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin's poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was "incredulous." To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was "ludicrous." "He had fallen," Raine comments, "for the propaganda - Larkin's bluff insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature." [...] Much of our response not just to Larkin but to Movement writers more generally turns on the question of how we construe the process of "self-caricature." There is much about their writing and behavior, that of Larkin and his close friend Kingsley Amis in particular, which contemporary sensibility finds parochial, conservative and sometimes offensive. For some years now, condemning these writers has been a means of affirming one's credentials as progressive and internationalist, as pro or post but definitely not anti-modernist, of being right-on in one way or another. But there is always the suspicion that to respond this way is to fall into a cunningly designed heffalump trap, a spectacle witnessed with rowdy delight by the shades of Larkin and Amis, drinks in hand. For it could be said that the critics had, like Monteith, "fallen for the propaganda" and failed to recognize the elements of "self-caricature." Or - the question swings back - is this to credit Larkin and company with too much self-awareness and too much choice? -- Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books



Collini: “good criticism makes us wary of underestimating writing with which we thought ourselves familiar.”

The video above is a bit fustian, but don't be fooled into letting it reinforce your prejudices. About the only thing I love more than hearing Christian Bök and Ezra Pound read is... Larkin reading "The Old Fools."

Get rhythm! My recipes for summer fun...

1.) Get movin' to some rent party cards from the Langston Hughes papers!

2.) Rock out with some Stan Brakhage and Jane Wodening scrapbooks!!

3.) Hum along to T.S. Eliot's Faber reading report on Djuna Barnes's Nightwood!!!

3A.) A lotta folks purloined my Facebook posting of the above, so... don't burn yourself on the grill as you watch the smoke rise from a Faber wartime Firewatchers' log (including a stint by TSE).

4.) Get schnockered to H.L. Mencken's boozy inscription in a book for Carl Van Vechten!!!!

5.) For pudding, mix up some Sarah Palin with Garrison Keillor!!!!!