Do you think art changes anything?

BILL MOYERS: Do you think art changes anything? Can it rest — help us restore the social contract?

BILL T. JONES: Well, let me put it this way, I hope it's not too esoteric but after seeing this work, my, a family member, who is — sister-in-law came to me and she said she's practicing mindfulness because it's come to her belief that we can't expect peace in the world if we don't have peace in our mind. Is that new age? Well, yeah, but she was saying that after seeing this work. You know, you can't expect peace in the world unless you have peace in the mind. Now, art does have the ability to lull. It does have the ability to suggest hope. It does have the ability to do many things. So can art — that's your question — can art make a difference? Let's work on the micro level for now. Let's work on the micro level. That's what I'm saying to myself. Get the people in the theater. Get them something that's handsome, that's well-made, that's generous and maybe they'll leave the theatre with a little bit more freedom in their bodies, not so afraid of their bodies and afraid of other bodies, but also, ah, possibilities of how I might live. I don't dare assume that's going to happen. That is my faith.

BILL MOYERS: But I have to say that your art is laced with that underlying current of tragedy and reality.

BILL T. JONES: And hopefully, as I have been saying, that I want to make work that was encouraging to people. Now, with the tragedy, we acknowledge the tragedy. But do I believe, I hold out a hope, as Lincoln did, that ultimately providence would have its way and that we would be able to see our way. And it never stops the struggle. That's what that ghost train is — chik, chik, chik, chik, in "Fondly." That's the process, the democratic process. It seems to be in the toilet right now. It's being controlled by special interest, small-mindedness, divisiveness but it's the one we have. And that is almost the way I feel about art, you know. Stay on the train. Stay on the train. You know, it doesn't- maybe there is no destination. Maybe it is only the going. But this is the one I want to ride on.

A poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can't?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.

You won't get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I'd sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I'm on their side. I better be, after my brush with "infinitessimal."

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.
And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, "George..."

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
"Their their," I needed to hear them say, "their their."

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."

I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."

"Om?" they inquire. "No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you've got only two more guesses
And you only get one more hint there's an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a right answer doesn't count if it comes in late
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers' bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that's all the time extension you're going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don't be surprised if it's the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys."

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini's Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other "Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!" and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.

From our research department...

Excerpted from 5 Behaviors of Manipulative People, by Brett Blumenthal:

Many of us like to think the best of people.  We like to think that they shoot straight and are forthright in their intentions.  We also like to believe that they will ask for what they want and not resort to crazy tactics to get it.  Unfortunately, however, there are times when we come across those who will do whatever it takes to get what they want…

1. Buttering You Up: To get their way, manipulators will often make you feel good so that they can then ask you to do something that they want.  The person may first compliment you or tell you what a wonderful job you did on something.  Making you feel good will, in their mind, make it difficult for you to say no…after all, you wouldn’t want to disappoint them or give them reason to think you didn’t deserve the compliment in the first place.
   
2. Guilt: This doesn’t only pertain to Catholics and Jewish Mothers; guilt trips have been a successful manipulation tactic for centuries.  The saddest part of this strategy is that the victims of this tactic succumb to the manipulators’ demands because they feel they HAVE to, not because they WANT to.  
3. Broken Record: Probably the most obvious of formats is the broken record tactic.  If a person asks you enough or pushes their agenda enough…constantly repeating the question or request over and over again…in slightly different ways, the victim will inevitably give in and give them what they want.  Oye!  
4. Selective Memory: This one gets me the most.  You swear you have a conversation about a plan and everyone is on the same page, and then one day, the manipulator pretends to remember the conversation completely differently, if at all.  
5. Bullying: If a person doesn’t get their way, they make you out to look or feel like the bad guy…like you are the wrong one. 

The future of American poetry

A number of folks (Matthew Zapruder, Annie Finch, Ron Silliman, Rigoberto González, Marjorie Perloff, Brent Cunningham, Camille Dungy, Francisco Aragón, Eileen Myles), have been reflecting, over on the Poetry Foundation website, upon how American poetry has changed in the last decade.  Well, one change has been the introduction of a new form - by Charles Bernstein - the recantorium ("a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)".  And I myself had only just the other day concluded that there really is a "School of Quietude" and... well, here's an amazing statement from Ron Silliman (scroll down), posted on the Poetry Foundation website:

"Poets blogging is just a symptom. The decline of indie bookstores, including the closure of such stalwarts as Cody’s & Shaman Drum, is just a symptom. The slow, painful death of newspapers, most of which have already tossed their book review sections and literary critics overboard, is itself just a symptom. The collapse of academic literary journals—viz. TriQuarterly, Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest, three of my first publishers—is just a symptom. Trade publishers openly speculate that they may be next, and even universities are starting to fear that their turn may be coming. They’re right.

"Just as MFA programs have pumped the number of poets writing and publishing in the United States up from a few hundred a half-century ago to tens of thousands today, the major institutions that not only embodied all of this activity but served an important (if hotly contested) gate-keeping function are now all being undermined or transformed by the ongoing revolution in communications technology. The poet’s relationship to his or her audience is undergoing a profound transformation. The poet’s relationship to the institutions and even to the tools of her or his practice is doing likewise. Everything is up for grabs.

"Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this. They recall and sometimes reiterate the archaeologist’s maxim that ultimately, hard copy is truth. If you can’t dig it up in 5,000 years, did it ever exist? Ian Hamilton Finlay, with his stone-carved minimal texts, may outlast us all.

"What’s apparent is that (a) this joyride isn’t over, and (b) we’re all in this together. When I realize that any chapbook publisher with a Blogspot page and PayPal account can sell directly to readers worldwide, I feel hopeful. I just hope we can find time to read & enjoy this great bounty."

--
Dunno about you, but in all seriousness, I find this a hearteningly candid & constructive way to think about - and inaugurate - the real (and not merely rhetorical and posturing) past, present, and "future of American poetry."

And this is a good time of year to thank Ron for his blog; it's impossible to imagine American poetry right now or in the future without it.

Extra credit (or, the future of American poetry)

Write an essay showing how what you do is not part of the status quo.  Be specific!

For "Paris Hilton"

A snow job, from Ray DiPalma

Kindly sent to me in response to my earlier post -

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

--  Ralph Waldo Emerson

*
Ray DiPalma, whom I met years ago when we found that we had Geo. Starbuck in common, says: "a personal snowy fave I sometimes discuss it in my 19th Century Am Lit course. Possum'd aknowed it, but no doubt passed it by after graduatin' Harvard."


Photo credit: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, URL: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1134744

Making a list, checking it once

By now I'm sure that any Attention Span (ha!) for poetry lists has waned; there are so many of them.  But here's my listomania, after which you can cleanse your palette by reading Kent Johnson on the subject.  In spite of which, I hereby present... another pointless list!

Poetry book of the year:

The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, ed. by Mark Weiss.  A whole island of poetry, indeed: reading this book, you discover a new world. What could be more exciting than that?  On the Harriet end o' year list, guff was given about this & other selections being "acceptable," whatever that means, and over-40.  I doubt the dissenter has read this book, in that case;  there's deeply wild stuff in it which would be much lauded if it had been published by young small-pressed North Americans. 









Poetry crit kinda book o' the year:

Daniel Tiffany's Infidel Poetics.  John Latta says CROCK!  Calls it turgid, but who says books should go down easy?  And why shouldn't they be infuriating, as this one surely is (obscurity as a material substance! monads!!)?  It's part lit-crit, contemporary-style, part poem [I think John may be right to say "flarfish"], and... DT can correct me if wrong, but I find a cheek here and there with an infidel tongue in it.  I found it way less sluggeroonish than Sound of Poetry/Poetry of Sound - and hey, do you guys know of any other recent book that digs up, and digs, "cant" writing? I underlined and annotated the heck out of it: fun!





Poetry book list of the year:

Why, my list at Third Factory, natch.  OK, not really; see below.











Poetry blog of the year:

Steve Fellner, Pansy Poetics














Here are a few lists that are better than mine:

* Best Poetry Blogs, thanks to Joseph Hutchinson
* Poetry Foundation best poetry o' the year list
* Best good bad-poetry ever
* Important books of the 'oughties
* A better year for poetry books in the UK?
* A whole decade of Canadian poetry books!
* List of poetry books people are actually buying (= I now believe that a SoQ actually exists)
* List of poetry books SPD says people are actually buying 
* A very expansive list, via Anselm Berrigan
* List of the biggest big-deal writers of all time

And if X-mas is your thing, here's the best X-mas reading list I've found...

BUT - who needs a list?  Read yourself some good books, even if they weren't published in 2009.

My ideas ran away with themselves!

No love for Infidel Poetics?  Ok, one last excerpt, then.

Stéphane Mallarmé, as you many know and as Daniel Tiffany points out, "toiled as a young writer in one of poetry's frivolous underworlds, the topsy-turvy [and lyrically-obscure] realm of Mother Goose, converting 141 English nursery rhymes into veritable prose poems...  He produced these nursery rhymes for his day job as an English teacher..."

Thus -

Hey! diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport
While the dish ran after the spoon.

... becomes the following, in Tiffany's translation of Mallarmé's French prose version:

What a strange scene!  Look at the cat with his violin - and that's not all: there's the moon, and a cow jumping right over it!  I act like the little dog, laughing hard to see such foolishness.  And then it seemed to me, as I contemplated this spectacle, that my ideas ran away with themselves,  one after another just as - in the words of the song - the dish runs after the spoon.  Hey! diddle, diddle.

Verbal fetishism and its discontents

I hope Kent Johnson, Tom Clark, and Paris Hilton will continue to comment - and correct my typos and other lapses - here.  Till then, how 'bout some more from Daniel Tiffany's Infidel Poetics?

"A pragmatic consideration of obscurity - including its allure as a literary commodity - would seem to ignore, however, the natural phenomenon anchoring the trope of verbal obscurity: the material dark (a physical condition or substance, appearing to possess properties of an incorporeal entity).  Yet Marx's theory of commodity fetishism presumes and indeed articulates a theory of substance - a phantasmagorical substance capable of blinding us to the palpable and useful qualities of things.  More fundamentally, the curious ontology of the fetish, which expresses the social and economic implications of obscurity, accords as well with the incorporeal properties of metaphysical substance - that is to say, with the insensible and inscrutable substance of Being in the broadest sense.

"The innate obscurity of metaphysical substance (which the philosopher makes manifest, paradoxically, by seeking to define it) therefore possesses the curious immunity - and the telling secrecy - of vernacular speech.  Yet theorizing the transitivity, or sociability, of obscurity, which presumes an array of pragmatic 'obscurity effects' generated by the hermetic phenomenon, risks ignoring, in a more rigorous sense, the absolute conditions of lyric obscurity: the first, a matrix of counterfeit relations contingent on various obscurity effects (at once social, economic, and aesthetic) generated by the poetic enigma; the second, a constellation, or mass, of expressive relations between entities which are essentially solipsistic."

***

"Obscurity is a way of making things disappear with words.  At the same time, disappearance becomes a legible, material event through the verbal craft of obscurity.  Indeed, crafting obscurity in a poem perfects the palpable art of disappearance."

------------

Enough to make you go lie down?

Well, Charles Simic sez:

"As a rule, I read and write poetry in bed; philosophy and serious essays sitting down at my desk; newspapers and magazines while I eat breakfast or lunch, and novels while lying on the couch. It’s toughest to find a good place to read history, since what one is reading usually is a story of injustices and atrocities and wherever one does that, be it in the garden on a fine summer day or riding a bus in a city, one feels embarrassed to be so lucky. Perhaps the waiting room in a city morgue is the only suitable place to read about Stalin and Pol Pot?"

Pictured: Commodity fetishism

Poetry is perplexing and annoying: Infidel Poetics & Anguish Languish

I've been mulling over The Sound of Poetry /The Poetry of Sound, ed. by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, convincing myself that it's going to be a big-deal book, but couldn't help thinking how much more I enjoyed Charles Bernstein's Close Listening - an indispensable classic (though not the same kinda book exactly); so I turned listlessly instead to Infidel Poetics by Daniel Tiffany... and now, oboy, I'm excited!

I guess it's a book for poetry nerds like me, but even though it's an "academic" book, it's one that's lucid, timely, groundbreaking, and original.  And here I should add that the U. of C. Press is to be commended for publishing academic books like this in attractive and affordable paperback books (hello, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press).

Anyway, the book looks deeply and unpredictably at how the obscurity of poetry is connected with social relationships and community.  I'm having a ball reading it.  Here's a sample:

"Obscurity in poetry is a matter disclosed upon reception - what G.W. Leibniz calls 'perception' - not something intrinsic to particular properties of the verbal artifact.  All verbal phenomena are simultaneously obscure and transparent, taking into account the range of possible responses - or the variability within a single response.  Obscurity, from this perspective, is native to the ontology of poetry.  More specifically, despite a recent 'bubble' in the accreditation of poetry, the art of poetry persists today - as perhaps it always has - in cultural obscurity.  Poetry, it's true, sustains a visible subculture, yet common resistance to poetry cannot be isolated from poetry's perceived resistance to communication.  Most readers, including many literate and scholarly readers, find poetry to be perplexing and annoying.  Indeed, even ordinary language in a poem strikes many readers as confusing, at once alienated and alienating.  By contrast, a small coterie of readers (mostly poets and students of poetry) is so thoroughly habituated to lyric obscurity that all poetry - from this perspective - appears to be immune to the conditions of obscurity.  Another segment of readers (and poets) advances a poetics of transparency, forgetting that even the most accessible poetry will be considered obscure by many readers.

"Given the fact of lyric obscurity - perhaps the only fact a poem yields to its readers - one wonders what sort of bond, if any, a poem establishes with its readers, with the sensory realm evoked by its words, or with the society in which it appears (if indeed it makes an appearance).  More to the point, after a century of programmatic obscurity, a great deal of serious poetry appears to have abandoned the task of communication, the will to directly influence common, public discourse and evolving conceptions of community.  Must we therefore presume that the obscurity of poetry, in comparison with other genres and media, bars it from overt social engagement and, even more radically, that no viable model of relational being can be deduced from the conditions of lyric obscurity?"

I love coming across phrases like "the pleasure of cruising the unknown in a text" and thoughts like this one: "in popular music today, there is a flourishing market in poetic obscurity."  (I'm reminded of Mick Jagger's recalling how he learned from Fats Domino records the value of literally obscuring lyrics in rock and roll songs!)  Tiffany quotes, as above, Leibniz, which is always great fun; and digs up such fascinatingly "quire whids" (literally "queer words") as these, ca. 1536:

Enow, enow.  With bousy cove maund nase,
   Tour the patrico in the darkman case,
Docked the dell for a copper make:
   His watch shall feng a prounce's nab-cheat.
Cyarum, by Solomon, thou shalt peck my jere
   In thy gan; for my watch it is ance gear;
Or the ben bouse my watch hath a wyn.

Put that in your coterie and smoke it out!

*
Or - via the Language Log - check out Howard L. Chace's Anguish Languish, whose introduction includes these perplexing words:

A visiting professor of Anguish, Dr. ____________, [This isn't his real name, nor is it intended to be the name of any other Anguish Languish professor, living or dead.] who, while learning to understand spoken English, was continually bewildered and embarrassed by the similarity of such expressions as boys and girls and poisoned gulls, used to exclaim: 

"Gracious! What a lot of words sound like each other! If it wasn't (sic) for the different situations in which we hear 'em, we'd have a terrible time saying which was which." 

Of course, these may not have been the professor's exact words, because he often did his exclaiming in Anguish rather than in English. In that case he would say: 

"Crashes! Water larders warts sunned lack itch udder! Egervescent further delerent saturations an witch way harem, wade hei[er haliver tam sang witch worse witch."

In no time you'll be singing:

O gummier hum warder buffer-lore rum
Enter dare enter envelopes ply,
Ware soiled'em assured adage cur-itching ward
An disguise earn it clotty oil die.

Harm, hormone derange,
Warder dare enter envelopes ply,
Ware soiled'em assured adage cur-itching ward
An disguise earn it clotty oil die.

Was Robert Bridges a modernist?

Was Robert Bridges a modernist?

Naw.  No comment box agitation here!  Was T.S. Eliot a modernist?  Oh, sure!  Modern all the way!

But as Christopher Ricks notes, much in a Dantesque (a word dating, by the way, from the 19th century) passage of Little Gidding II owes its verse movement, its (dare we call it) mastery, to the old master, Bridges - in particular to a poem of 1880 which comes to mind just now as a snowstorm rages here in the cityscape...

London Snow

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,

In large white flakes falling on the city brown,

Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,

Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;

Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;

Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:

Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;

Hiding difference, making unevenness even,

Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.

All night it fell, and when full inches seven

It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,

The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;

And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness

Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:

The eye marvelled - marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;

The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;

No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,

And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.

Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,

They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze

Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;

Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;

Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder!'

'O look at the trees!' they cried, 'O look at the trees!'

With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,

Following along the white deserted way,

A country company long dispersed asunder:

When now already the sun, in pale display

Standing by Paul's high dome, spread forth below

His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.

For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;

And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,

Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:

But even for them awhile no cares encumber

Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,

The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber

At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

Ooh, nasty-quiet!  Yet Eliot, Ricks notes, "may have found the example something to hearken to. Eliot's first five lines end with 'morning,' 'night,' 'unending,' 'tongue,' 'homing;' Bridges's with 'flying,' 'brown,' 'lying,' town,' 'failing.' True, what came flying in Little Gidding was not the snow but enemy aircraft. Little Gidding: 'First Complete Draft 7 July 1941.' This was the year in which Eliot became Bridges's publisher, when Faber and Faber issued Selected Poems by Robert Bridges, within their series Sesame Books. 'London Snow' is there."

And when Bridges died, Eliot wrote: "It is certain that his experimentation has served a valuable purpose.  It has helped to accustom readers of verse to a more liberal conception of verse technique, and to the notion that the development of technique is a serious and unceasing subject of study among verse writers; it has helped to protect other verse writers of less prestige, against the charge of being just 'rebels' or 'freaks'..."

Even if you are weary of it at last, the past is a bridge to the future.

Orange you glad I posted this?

What is rhyme?  What rhymes with orange?  Click here to find out!  Orange you glad I posted this?

On opposition: sharp or... dull?

... for what is freedom if we do not, in winning it, discover both the limit of our own nature and what lies beyond it?  We need only indulge ourselves to be free within our own limit - but that's no problem, no freedom, and no morality.  The problem is rather, how shall we be free without self-indulgence?  Then we must transcend our limit.  But how shall we transcend it? for the limit is real.  Here cuts the double-edge of freedom with its terrible, excellent sharpness: one edge toward ourselves - how sharp the limit is! - and the other, more terrible, away from us - what a deep cut we have taken of the impossible!  Sheathe either edge and you are defeated.  Without the wound of the limit, you would cut without blood; it is idealism, in the disgraceful sense, to believe in a freedom without limit, it is unreality and cowardice.  Sheathe the outer edge and you have a worse cowardice, called determinism, but actually, contentment with things as they are, smugness, the amoral convention.  Sheathe both edges and you have dullness on your hands.  -- Isaac Rosenfeld

*
The expert on dullness: not you or me, but Alexander Pope; see the Dunciad (and variora).  To call me or what I do dull, quiet, anything ending in -ist, is something you do at your own peril, for accusers exemplify, as Pope's mock history shows, what they profess to disdain.  Perhaps it's projection?  Is there such a thing?  If you mean to be in opposition, then souls are to be searched, if souls are still to be found.

Opposition is familiar in our small Am-po world, all too familiar: it breeds familiarity.  But what is "opposition?"

Opposition is true Friendship.

So believed Blake - or, as Christopher Ricks recently added, "at any rate hoped."  True, other sayings of Blake might better, Ricks points out in his new book True Friendship, fit the case of the poet's opposition to, say, Sir Joshua Reynolds: Damn braces: Bless relaxes, or Without Contraries is no progression.  This is from Blake's famously cutting marginalia:

Reynolds: I found myself in the midst of works executed upon principles with which I was unacquainted: I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed.

Blake: A Liar [!] he never was Abashed in his Life & never felt his ignorance.

Reynolds: ... enthusiastick admiration seldom promotes knowledge

Blake: Enthusiastic Admiration is the first principle of Knowledge & its last.

No, Ricks - who is good on opposition - says:

... Blake's proverb would have told more truth (but would not have been as telling) if it had reduced itself to the thought that opposition may on occasion be true friendship.  Then the matter is further complicated by there being no simple opposition to friendship.  What would friendship's antonym be?  An enemy is in opposition to a friend, true, but despite Roget's Thesaurus, which heads its boldly controntational columns "Friendship" and "Enmity," enmity declines to be simply the opposite of friendship, any more than would be animosity or hostility.  Enmity is "the disposition or the feelings characteristic of an enemy: ill-will, hatred" (Oxford English Dictionary).  Friendship is not limited to - though it is pleased to accommodate - "Friendly feeling or disposition felt or shown by one person for or towards another" (OED 2), for friendship is also OED 1: "The state or relation of being a friend."  So an enmity will never be exactly the counterpart to a friendship.  Friendship is mutual by definition; a mutual enmity has to say that it is such.  The English language has done without - might even be thought to have wished to do without - an abstract noun from enemy that would be to it what friendship is to friend.  Tom Paine had a go at this in 1776: "The nearest an only true way of proving enemyship, if I may so call it."  No, you may not, for it is against common sense.

But Ricks has perhaps not yet had a go at the word frenemy.

It doesn't matter...  Wait, here's how it can matter:

"It would not matter, I think, if we did not altogether agree, so long as we made our differences conspicuous and interesting." So Eliot to his frenemy, John Middleton Murry.

Opposition is not the basis of knowledge.  Something can be learned, though, from differences, if they are made "conspicuous and interesting" - they can be sharp or... dull.

(For more on the illusio that is the root of the competition which pits Am-po-folk against each other - the illusio as the condition for the functioning of a game of which it is also, at least partially, the product . . . see Kent Johnson's post here.  Canadian readers may wish to view "The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry," featuring Christian Bök "versus" Carmine Starnino.)

Pictured: cheese board and mousetrap combo, by Tom Parker

Art isn't democratic

"Two decades ago I heard the novelist David Slavitt suggest to a stunned panel of regional experts that the way to support art was to give the money to one man and let him pick the winner(s). Period. No screwing with paperwork, no task forces or committees. No accounting measures based on how politicians misspend taxpayer money and designed to dog the way artists spend theirs. Pick somebody who knows what’s what this year and hand over the checkbook. Give him or her a deadline and vanish.

The crowd was amused until they realized Slavitt was serious. Then they were mostly appalled at the idea that artists be treated like members of a meritocracy they imagine themselves to constitute anyway. But it made and makes glorious sense and would lead to the elimination of a problem faced by every writer who enters a grant competition or seeks a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts: the empanelling of 'blind judges,' i.e., people in the arts hired to judge other people in the arts.

Since the arts community is small, however, blind judging is more like blind dating. Rule #1: There is no such thing as blind judging in arts competitions. Just because you blindfold a dog doesn’t mean it can’t smell you coming.

In the arts pool there are not only fewer people but also a higher percentage of the needful. More to the point, there is no art competition that a conscientious artist won’t attempt to fix, and to think otherwise is like believing that the five hungriest dogs in the neighborhood won’t fight viciously for the same bone.

Writers and artists generally know that democracy may be an equal playing field but that art is a palace run by tyrants and situated, Vatican-like, in the midst of that field. Beliefs and voting records hardly matter. Artists pursue their own idiosyncratic and openly secular vision, and art itself has no politics. It is the fullest expression of a need for total creative control— an impulse that’s anything but social or democratic.

Poets and painters know that society will never owe them anything but its traditional damning indifference. If you scratch an artist you’ll find a fascist, as Dante astutely perceived when he situated the palace of the seven liberal arts outside the gates of Hell.

Even if a competition isn’t brokered in advance, an artist will want it to be— in his favor.  Blind judging is a great idea as long as you’re pulling numbered ping-pong balls out of a tube. Artists are always perpetual students as well as born thieves. They see style in details like a cadence or a brushstroke. They look at the world for style and nuance, not plot points. Yeats’s inner music was so strong that when he tried to read Wordsworth aloud it came out, his friend the American poet Ezra Pound said, sounding like Yeats." -- J.T. Barbarese, Broad Street Review 

Pictured: Cincinnatus

On the death of print and... too many poetry books?

Neil Astley, of the estimable Bloodaxe Books, in answer to a question posted on the Magma Poetry blog about whether there are too many poetry books being published, gives us some perspective:

"[The following] figures are largely based on sales through bookshops, but they do cover everything published over the period; but to what I’ve noted you need to add website sales, direct mail and sales at readings.

I only have figures for 2005 but they won’t have changed to any great extent. In that year 63 per cent of Britons aged 12 to 74 bought any kind of book, with 34 per cent buying fiction, and only 1% bought a poetry book. Previous research has shown that of that 1%, only around 5% will have been books by living writers, 95% of the poetry books sold in our bookshops being the poetry classics. A research report from 1998 showed then that the top 5% of buyers – 2.5% of the population – bought 28% of books, by value. The average bookshop stocks 96,000 different titles (which compares with 20,000 different “product lines” in a Tesco superstore), but only 5000 of those titles account for 53% of all sales; 23% of titles sell 100 copies or more, and these account for 94% of all retail book sales revenue. Most publishers publish books in order to make profits on their investment, but only 1 in 10 books is successful – so that’s the commercial pattern, not the less “successful” non-profit poetry press one!

Here are some figures from the Publishers Association. 787 million books were sold in 2005 and 756 million books in 2004. BookScan figures (sales tracked through bookshops) for 2004 show 459,075 poetry books were sold. So poetry accounted for 0.06% of all book sales in that year: only one in every 10,000 books sold is a poetry book. In 2004 there were only 5172 different poetry titles listed by Bookscan. 751 of those were anthologies and 4421 were collections. Is that too many? If so, in whose terms? Every book has its particular readership, however small or specialised or locally based.

80% of the total poetry sales in 2004 were made by 227 titles (52 anthologies and 175 collections). The top 10 books accounted for 22% of all sales (2 anthologies and 8 collections). However, 3721 books listed sold less than 10 copies through the bookshops. 1978 books sold no copies at all through the bookshops. There were 639 different imprints listed which publish poetry, but over half the sales were made by Faber, Bloodaxe, Penguin and Picador. The rest of the publishers accounted for the other half but with only 28 imprints achieving at least 1% of the sales.

Who’d be a poetry publisher!"

But surely there's nothing new here, no death-of-print following on the heels of the death-of-the-author.  Anyhow, is there a problem?  As George Gissing (he of New Grub Street fame) put it in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft:

"And why should any man who writes, even if he write things immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? If my shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots and I, in some mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just cause of complaint. But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?"

*
Well, films - nobody says there are too many of those.  I blogged my resistance to Bright Star a while ago, and can now add even more about what Christopher Ricks, whose love of Keats and movies is profound, feels about the thing:  "The film is mistaken to the point of perversity about the nature of imagination when it comes to a poet and especially to this poet." He makes quite a case for this in the New York Review of Books, exploring the difference between showing pictures (which is what films do) and visualization:

"To visualize is not the same as to see; more, it is incompatible with seeing.  It is to form a mental picture of something not visible, perhaps not present, perhaps not even possible.  There isn't a counterpart to the word 'visualize' for any of the other sense, for hearing or touching or tasting or smelling.  Though we can perfectly well imagine hearing something, touching something, tasting something, or smelling something, we don't have a word for doing so: we don't audibilize, tactilize, gustatize, or olfactorize, any more than we have a counterpart in the other sense for what it is to picture something."

And he wonderfully quotes Ruskin -

"It might be at first thought that the whole kingdom of imagination was one of deception also.  Not so: the action of the imagination is a voluntary summoning of the conceptions of things absent or impossible; and the pleasure and nobility of the imagination partly consist in its knowledge and contemplation of them as such, i.e. in the knowledge of their actual absence or impossibility at the moment of their apparent presence or reality....  It is necessary to our rank as spiritual creatures, that we should be able to invent and to behold what is not; and to our rank as moral creatures, that we should know and confess at the same time that it is not."

I'm heartened that Ruskin can be quoted and valued in the twenty first century - not just by Ricks, but by the formidable Mark Scroggins!  Anyway, the sentences above, from "The Lamp of Truth" (one of the Seven Lamps of Architecture) contain what could constitute a devastating critique of contemporary American poetics.  But maybe we're all just too busy trying to get published, or going to the movies, to behave as spiritual or moral creatures.