How to deal with poets

• Set boundaries. Set limits on the length of your interaction and on what you are willing to talk about. 
  
• Spell out your constraints. Be consistent. Don't break your rules by extending a conversation, spreading gossip, or inviting the poet out for coffee or a drink. 
  
• Stay calm. Avoid reacting dramatically yourself. Using adjectives tends to magnify emotions, so take Pound's advice and condense.
• Validate, and redirect. Some people like to talk through a situation, but analysis only intensifies emotions for poets. Acknowledge the poet's problem, then help him or her focus on the positive or, better still, on what can be done to improve his or her lot in life. Say, for example, “Well, of course you're upset, but how would [name trendy or award-winning poet] handle this?”
• Create a paper trail. If a poet disrupts your life, document each interaction, noting the date, time, and precise nature of the encounter. At some point, you might want to inform your therapist of the problem.  And remind yourself that some day your memoir could snag you a book deal - or at least your blog will get noticed.
• Consider cutting ties. If the relationship turns toxic despite your very best efforts, you might have to get out of it, even if doing so means finding another job, not getting published yourself, or separating from your S.O. You should consider visiting a counselor to understand how poetry is affecting you and whether there is any point in your continuing to indulge in it.   
  

Lovingly adapted from "Dangerous Liaisons: How to Deal with a Drama Queen,"by Ophelia Austin-Small in the November 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind

Death to the either/or proposition!

"I'm a serious composer, but I'm working at a time when audiences no longer assume strong and exclusive allegiances to one musical style.  The significant thing isn't what's happening to me, it's what's happening to audiences." -- Philip Glass, ca. 1979

"I think the dividing line between establishment and non-establishment is breaking down.... The underground or any movement is not going to succeed by not succeeding...  Korzybski pointed out that one of the basic errors of Western thought is the either/or proposition, which is implicit in our language.  'Are they broadcasting an anti-establishment message or are they -'  Well, they might be doing both at the same time quite well.  Or all sorts of variations.  Really it's not an either/or proposition." -- William Burroughs, ca. 1972

(Both in interviews with Robert Palmer, Blues & Chaos)

On being thankful...

To be or not to be... a modernist?

The big debate in Am Po at the moment is...  whether Edwin Arlington Robinson is a modernist or not??

What is American poetry?

The only definition of American poetry that will stick is that it's poetry by Americans.

*
All this baloney about the supposedly new, improved, more interesting National Book Awards has sent me back to my basement hole to read books and not hype (most good books don't win any prizes), listen to music, and tune it all out.  Lo and behold (as Dylan sang)...  there are other art forms that do not require ideological posturing to advance, and in which the heterogenous is welcome and fruitful.   Thank goodness for the cornucopia, say, of American music.  The late music writer and musician, Robert Palmer - no, not the 80s rock star guy, but the legendary Memphian, and now subject of an incredible film, The Hand of Fatima - wrote the following (in 1975) about American music and "the big picture."  My inclination is to find in it analogous ways of thinking about Am PO:

... the conversation naturally turned to what it is that makes American music ... American.  [Michael Tilson] Thomas suggested that "we have a musical culture forming now in this country which is made up like our social culture, of all these different elements."  Then he thought some more and added, "And there's this interesting sense of non-proprietariness."  American music is nonproprietary ... in that American composers (and performers) innovate and then move on.  They don't, as Thomas remarked, "ask themselves how much more mileage they can get" out of their creations.

Nonproprietary, imagine that!  Here's something Sun Ra once told Palmer:

"People have tried to build a better world, but they've failed because they don't have a blueprint.  You can't tear something down you know, unless you've got something better...  I'm not doing this on faith or on what I think.  I'm not even dealing with intellect.  You have to have this intuitive plan.  The whole thing is a wilderness and you've got to have some pioneers to go out there and discover and achieve."

*
These quotations come from a swell new sampler of Palmer's music writing, Blues & Chaos, which contains the following, so resonant with my Mid-South sense of American music, writing, art - and everything:

"Blues and trouble, that's the cliche.  The reality is: blues and chaos.  Blues is supposed to be - what? - nurtured by trouble?  So is most art that reaches deep inside and demands unflinching honesty.  Is blues about trouble?  No more than it is about good-time Saturday nights and murder most foul [wow, an allusion to Shakespeare!], sharecroppers' servitude, and sweet home Chicago.  Is blues a cause of trouble?  Not directly.  But what sort of thing almost inevitably causes trouble in our oppressively regimented world?  You guessed it: chaos."

Chaos and a bit of an intuitive plan.  No pigeonholes.  No name-calling.  No choosing sides, because art is not one-sided.

Lumpy Gravy and Neglectorinos

A sprawling recent thread on Digital Emunction about neglected American poets of the twentieth-century recently culminated in the establishment of a wiki-anthology - The Lumpy Corral - of same.  Some of the furrows there, fertile as they are, have been ploughed on other occasions, though.  I hope they also lasso some of the fascinating neglected British poets of the twentieth-century, while they're at it: Rosemary Tonks, the late Ric Caddel, Gael Turnbull, Nicholas Moore, to name just a very few (some of whom can be [re]-discovered in anthologies by Keith Tuma (Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry) and Caddel with Peter Quartermain (OTHER British and Irish Poetry Since 1970).

There are two British poets I never, ever hear about.  One is Jonathan Price, whose book Everything Must Go is very difficult to find and ought to be reprinted (more in an upcoming blog post); another is Alexander Trocchi.  I'll start with the latter, because you can now read his poems again, introduced by William S. Burroughs, in a new edition featuring a preface by the legendary John Calder - who got hold of the poems "by obtaining unauthorized entry to [Trocchi's] flat and desk drawers" in order to publish them the first time around.

Burroughs met Trocchi, who was Scottish, at a 1962 writer's conference in Edinburgh, where the poet described himself as "a cosmonaut of inner space" and claimed sodomy as the basis for his work.  (He was famously attacked there by Hugh MacDiarmid, who dismissed him as "cosmopolitan scum," though they eventually became friends.)  Trocchi is best known now as a novelist - many of his books published by the infamous Olympia Press - who crashed on the planet Heroin.  (The Situationists International, of which he had been a founding member, had to weigh in on one of his imprisonments.)  That journey was chronicled, more or less, in his best-known work, Cain's Book, which outlined an almost Spicerian poetics:

"When I write I have trouble with my tenses. Where I was tomorrow is where I am today, where I would be yesterday. I have a horror of committing fraud. It is all very difficult, the past even more than the future, for the latter is at least probable, calculable, while the former is beyond the range of experiment. The past is always a lie clung to by an odour of ancestors." 

Calder collected the purloined poems for an edition, Man at Leisure, that he published in 1972.  Trocchi died in 1984 and remains a cult figure, but not for his poems.  In his introduction, however, Burroughs clairvoyantly speculated that perhaps "writers are actually readers from hidden books," books that are "carefully concealed and surrounded by deadly snares."

Well, if neglect is a deadly snare, then we are lucky to have the brilliantly useful Oneworld Classics (publisher, too, of Mike Stocks' translations of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, about which I've blogged) to thank for bringing the beast howling back to life.  What a great press - Man at Leisure is back in print at a cost of less than 13 bucks!

Here are a few samples...

- from "Wind from the Bosphorus"

a young man
stalking a butterfly
found a flare-red skirt, a high-cheeked
gypsywoman
and lay with her behind a bush in adultery
caught
still supine, the winds of the East
and of Roumanian Anna

later
he carried with him
more than a gypsy's fading heat, but was not
much concerned
desire being international, of more significance
than the incidental cum multis aliis
he carried to the clinic
where
he was treated
by more civilised persons who showed
little interest
in what they called (with an utter lack of
sensibility)
"the source of infection"
as though
nothing else had been carried to him from the East
on the wind of her body.


- from "He Tasted History with a Yellow Tooth"

eggs again.
my aunt laid an egg once, all smooth and creamy
you wanted to stroke it as you want to stroke a woman
but she was ashamed of it
and took it away from me.
I think she buried it in the garden -
anyway, there's a patch of violets there
ten yards from the stair
that goes to the loft where my uncle kept the saddles
and they bleed each spring,
in spring there is a bleeding.


- from "Letters to Contemporaries"

And so, my letter
as we know, no better
artefact
all systems "go"
a futique today
is an antique tomorrow.


- from "Man at Leisure"

The first duty of a
    young man
without private means
is, as soon as he can
be paid for heart loved leisure
his can of beans
and walk with his head
in the posture of queens

Men who work
in the conventional sense
of the word
are bad at furk
& fr purposes of identity
might wear rings in
    thr noses
might have been born
at the time of Moses

Stewart Home's intriguing afterword quotes Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life: "Poetry is... 'making' but 'making' restored to the purity of its moment of genesis - seen, in other words, from the point of view of the totality."  Home compares this to one of the most famous Situationist slogans: "Never Work," adding that the Situationists, like Trocchi, "gave themselves over to an art of living that was in itself poetic."  I'm pretty dubious about things like "totality" (if there is revolution in everyday life, why, indeed, work... write... teach?) and find, reading about the likes of Trocchi and Spicer, something not so "poetic" about their lives.  In any case, with all their foibles and tragedies, poets like Spicer and Trocchi are certainly among the very few who can make you question just what it is you're doing.  Even at the risk of neglect.

The clip above is from Jamie Wadhawam's 1969 documentary, Cain's Film, which opens with Trocchi trying to talk his publisher into taking a collection of his poems - only to be told by Marion Boyars that poetry doesn't sell.

* This just in! A correlation has been discovered between economic development and a strong belief in Hell.  Talk about "totality!"  Click here for more.

The assault is remorseless

In watching, I understand how better to write a poetry of resistance that will declare the necessity of preserving this region.  Can it operate without me shouting out my poems against the shooters, the shires?  Whatever the answer is, I do know that every act of resistance adds together, and remaining non-aggressive but resolute in response is what slows the assault against the environment.  The assault is remorseless.  -- John Kinsella, December issue of Poetry

The Hubbert Peak Theory of Poetry, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Poems

The decline in U.S. oil production is explained by the Hubbert Peak Theory, which states that “the amount of oil under the ground in any region is finite, therefore the rate of discovery which initially increases quickly must reach a maximum and decline.”  Makes sense, right?  The same theory can apply to anything of a finite quantity that is discovered and quickly exploited with maximum effort. Including, it would seem, rock & roll.  -- Overthinkingit.com

-
Lemon Hound is "very, very tired of people confusing their personal aesthetic preferences with good poetry and anything that doesn't fit as bad poetry."  Most of us are!  So... Maybe what we can do is correlate the production of poems with that of both oil production and rock music to get some mathematical certainty about where poetry's headed!  

William Carlos Williams and book burning

Of William Carlos Williams’ debut slim volume, Poems, which the young and popular physician of Paterson, NJ published privately in 1909, only two copies are known to exist. Of the second state, which differs from the first in only a few respects, a hundred copies were published in 1910 by a local printer Howell at 25 cents a copy. Dr. Williams took a dozen of these to the local stationery store and after a month four had been sold, so he brought home the remainder and after distributing a few copies to members of his family, returned the rest of the edition to his printer. At some point Howell, as Williams recalled in his Autobiography, then wrapped them in a neat bundle and put them away for "safe keeping."  After they had "reposed ten years or more on a rafter under the eaves" of his old chicken coop they were, Williams recorded ruefully, "inadvertently burnt."

Apparently only 9 copies survived from the inferno, by which time (it would have been sometime after 1920) Williams had published with greater success and presumably received back what was left of the edition. Or did the egregious and highly embarrassed Howell retain them? What I want to know is why, for all that Williams regarded the contents of Poems as "bad Keats…bad Whitman too" and felt that there was "not one thing of the slightest value in the whole thin booklet," could he not have given the ninety-odd pamphlets house (or surgery) room?  Today, each copy of this first book by one of the most important innovators in American poetry commands around $25,000, with or without scorch marks!!  -- via Bookride

(There was a reprint of the book a few years ago; bad Keats far more than bad Whitman, I'd say.  Hardly anybody I know seems to have seen these poems, however, even given the reprint.  It's extraordinary, and chastening, to reflect on how Williams rocketed forward from such incredibly unpromising work...  I'll try to give a specimen here soon.)

Popularity or unpopularity

I have never heard or read any statement regarding poetry’s popularity or unpopularity in the United States that wasn’t backed up by anything more than subjective, anecdotal evidence. I have never heard or read any claim for poetry being more popular in one era or period that was backed up by any concrete evidence, any statistical study, any kind of reporting or research. And that’s not even taking into account thinking through the real differences in historical periods regarding population scale, technological developments with specific regards to media, educational approaches to teaching poetry, availability of the means of publication, and attention to every conceivable community of people that might be reading and producing the work, among other factors. I see absolutely no reason to believe any statement that anyone makes regarding poetry being more popular “then” as opposed to “now”, and I simply do not believe that anyone is currently capable of quantitatively assessing the degree to which poetry is or ever has been read and written in the United States.  -- Anselm Berrigan

[But see also this.]

On America's still-living poets

Q: There seems to be an idea that even if poetry itself is alive and well, con­tem­po­rary poetry is rel­e­gated to near obscu­rity, and that argu­ment draws its weight simply from a visit to the local Barnes and Noble, where the poetry sec­tion is minis­cule and more or less entirely com­posed of dead writ­ers. How would you respond to this idea, and what can con­tem­po­rary poets do to enhance the status of America’s still-​living poets?

A: The dead writ­ers are great. They have passed the test of time. They rep­re­sent cen­turies to choose from, not a few decades like us living writ­ers. So it makes sense that the more excel­lent the shelves, the more books by dead writ­ers on them. Viva the dead! Let the living “enhance their status” by trying to write well.

-- http://southeastreview.org/2009/11/robert-pinsky.html

[Actually, those shelves are not mostly composed of dead writers, from what I've seen; your mileage may vary.  The selection of living poets to be found there is worth discussing - booksellers and buyers for stores, weigh in on how you stock your poetry books! ]

Who am I to argue with cultural forces?

Kent Johnson said this over on Digital Emunction the other day:

"Cul­tural forces are to large extent imper­sonal in their ide­o­log­i­cal oper­a­tions, in any case, the choices and ambi­tions of actors in the field more like indexes or effects of the flows and con­tra­dic­tions of those forces than any­thing else, much as it feels (hap­pily so) like we’re totally in con­trol. (I sup­pose that makes me sound like Lacan, who went bonkers in the end.) And canons and cul­tural hier­ar­chies have their pro­duc­tive func­tions, to be sure, one of which is that they pro­vide some­thing to con­test, which keeps things moving, for­wards, side­ways, and back­wards. So there is no point in being against them in 'principle.' Some people end up on the inside, or in the orbit of their pull; others end up on the out­side, to con­test. (Some­times people on the inside pre­tend they are on the out­side. This is a strat­egy and also a symp­tom, clas­si­cally emerg­ing in peri­ods of rapid recu­per­a­tion and 'avant-garde' crisis. Like the present.)"

Except for the part about "'avant-garde' crisis," which I don't get - crisis, what crisis? - what he's saying is perfectly familiar, and intelligent, warm, decent, and fun people have been making such a case for yonks; but (and this is not an attack on Kent)... being myself a "symptom" and/or bit of flotsam carried here and there by forces way larger than myself, etc. etc., this kinda stuff makes me bonkers.  Right, so who am I to argue with "cultural forces" and "ideological operations" and "canons" and "hierarchies?"  In theory, and this is the apparently delicious appeal of such things, their existence and operation is inarguable.  Nevertheless, and maybe I was raised on too many episodes of The Prisoner (a must-see, regarding inside vs. outside) I absolutely resist this formulation.  If I did not, I wouldn't read or try to write poems, which could by law have neither distinction nor hold any interest; I'd simply let the forces, the laws work on as, no doubt, they must.

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

(Speaking of Auden, the inexorable, and the relationship of individuals to poetry and society, see my swell new Harriet post here.)

I'll tell you what I think, with no qualifications whatsoever to make the case (and who knows, I might just change my "mind"):  I think that, as Thomas Nagel describes Galen Strawson's view, "all conscious experience is experience for a subject," that "there cannot be thinking without a subject. The character of an experience or conscious thought is what it is like subjectively for someone or something to have it, and this is as true for sea-snails, if they have experience, as it is for humans."  As a subject, I have existed approximately since I was born, and have the lovely and no doubt short-lived illusion that I am a "self" reading and writing equally illusory verse.  Call me a snail, if you like, call me an "I," or call me an Elizabeth.

--
The following bits are from Isaac Rosenfeld, "The Party" (ca. 1947)

*
I can laugh myself blue in the face, for all the good self-irony does me.

*
Failing to attain a worldly goal, they turn inward, retreating to their own idealism, and think that they have thereby conquered the world.  They do not suspect it is the world which has conquered them.  Therefore one may say that it is the young who are corrupted, they are spoiled by the comfort they take in their own disillusionment.

*
How is it that the mimic so relieves our terror?  The only answer I can think of is that these faces and these poses confront us with our own divided attitude toward the party, and we escape through the division.

*
... in a group so small as our own, where not only the obvious traits but also the innermost secrets of the members are at once found out, a certain discretion must be exercised, even in the use of faculties which it is otherwise our right to use freely.  Let me not look too closely; let me shut my ears, not to the truth, but to the bad name which the truth can acquire in a circle so close as ours.