Lands of likeness

Recently, David Shapiro left this comment on a Facebook-thingy I posted:

"the lie rises to the top like the cherry on the martini
as Ponge said to Koch, You Americans have a mania
for cherries on the tops of things
Could we get a complete lie-dector set for all poets and
politicians Wouldn't much DNA match?
How would the NYSchool do--who believed nothing
would they be good enough to bluff their way through
oh of course philosophically this is naive don't I know it
but it was stunning in youth to meet those who were
all in campo and cant and cliches the dictionary of
I would speak on the telephone with the dictionary of cliches
open"

Huh. Well, I collect weird dictionaries, including dictionaries of cliches (which come in handy, in my line of work). But my favorite strange dictionary is the great classic Dictionary of Similies, edited by Frank Wilstach and published in 1916; it has the epigraph, "It's hard to find a simile when one is seeking for one," uttered by George Moore.

As the preface explains: "The simile is one of the most ancient forms of speech. It is the handmaid of all early word records. It has proved itself essential to every form of human utterance."

(And you thought it was only good for poetry, or bad poetry.)

Wilstach points out that even Father Adam and Mother Eve used similes in their Garden conversation. The simile was used by Ramses II of Egypt. From Homer, Virgil, Horace on down, poets have relied on similes. Yeah, yeah, I know you're thinking "my luve is like a red, red rose, zzzzz." But the simile is a powerful force in modern and contemporary American Poetry. Similes are in about 2/3rds of every poem I see in my daily work. And they come in two varieties: the red, red rose kind, and what I've called elsewhere the "false simile" - where the word "like" is followed by something that isn't at all like what precedes it.

The false simile is so commonplace it's as worn out as the regular kind, if you ask me. I'm guessing it got started by one of its very best practitioners, Frank O'Hara, who masterfully uses both the false and real simile in "Having a Coke with You" -

"in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian" (real, albeit twisted simile)

&

"...we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles"

Maybe one of the best pre-NY School modern similes is Langston Hughes's famous "Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" The whole of his poem "Harlem" is built upon similes - which he "explodes" in the final stanza. His extremely famous line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” however, is perhaps compelling because it’s so straightfaced. Even a good high-modernist like Hart Crane used similes in a mostly conventional way, e.g., these from The Bridge -

O, like the lizard in the furious noon,
That drops his legs and colors in the sun

But he does get pretty wiggy within just a few lines of the above: "... sprint up the hill groins like a tide," not to mention -

And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny
Like one white meteor, sacrosanct and blent
At last with all that’s consummate and free
There, where the first and last gods keep thy tent.

Anyhow, lest you think the plain-Jane variety of simile to be a primitive or unsophisticated device, check this out from Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "Sonata" -

Like nous detached from Anaxagoras,
Like cosmic fire glimmering without
A Heraclitus there to find it out,
Like square roots waiting for Pythagoras,
Like One-ness riven from Parmenides,
Like Nothing without Gorgias to detect it,
Like paradox sans Zeno to perfect it,
Like plural worlds lacking Empedocles,
Like Plato’s chairs and tables if you took
The furniture’s Eternal Forms away,
Objects abandoned by Reality
Still look the same...

Whoa!

A classic false-simile guy is John Ashbery, who's been working with them for years; here's a typical specimen, from "Like a Sentence," which is typical of what everybody in the country does these days (though as always, he does it better):

I was going to say I had squandered spring
when summer came along and took it from me
like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment
while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.

Nice!

And non-US poets often can do things better than we can; here's a wowie-zowie false-simile from Lorca:

the bulls of Guisando,
partly death and partly stone,
bellowed like two centuries
sated with treading the earth.

Jack Spicer can get you swooning, on the other hand, with a regular John Donne-like simile of discovery:

What are you thinking now?
I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap...

Still, it's manifestly true that even the most famous poets can really let you down in the simile department, e.g., Anne Sexton, in “All My Pretty Ones” (click here to see what I mean). Wordsworth, simultaneously the best and worst poet in the English language, can make you cringe with a simile:

Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave...

I wanted to read James Tate's "Like a Scarf" as one big weird red-herring simile, but no: it sports a great big conventional simile - "The psychopaths... were lumbering through the pines like inordinately sad moose." Shoot!

Could be that the last word on the subject, though in poetry there's never a last word, is Joel Brouwer's "Fish or Like Fish," which appeared recently in Poetry:

He startled to see a statue of blind
justice really did loom over the courtroom. But
remained determined to scorn symbolism.
She needed a quarter to call her lover—
the docket was full, she’d be late for lunch—
and he gave her one. It was not a taunt,
acquiescence, wager, or plea. It was
a quarter. The fact that they had done this—
even this!—together and cordially,
late nights at the dining room table with
a bottle of cabernet, sharp pencils,
A Love Supreme, and an “E-Z Workbook”
from the well-reviewed—the fact that they’d read
reviews!—Don’t Pay an Attorney! series,
as if they were learning Portuguese or
origami, was not “as if” or “like”
anything, but just that, a fact, and not
to be pressed for further significance. This
was part of the agreement. They filled out
the forms. Asked lawyer friends for language.
Made stacks of books and towels. Cooked dinner
together, said “excuse me” passing
in the hallway, and even remembered
each other’s mother’s birthdays. As if. Not
as if. Waiting for their case to be called,
they got hungry. The bailiff pointed toward
the snack bar in the basement, which was packed
with a class trip from the school for the blind.
In illo tempore such a gift would have
caused them to turn to each other in love
and wonder. Now, no. They didn’t even
look to see. She asked for fish sticks, and he
wondered if fish sticks were fish or like fish.
The children chewed their chicken fingers
with calm deliberation, staring out at what
they saw, then conveyed their limp paper plates
with startling grace to the hinged swinging mouths
of the trash cans which swallowed everything
offered saying THANK YOU THANK YOU.

You get the picture. Anyhow, now that the internet writes poems, I figure it's no use trying to make up similies anymore - that's where my musty old dictionary of similes comes in damn handy. Here's a pearl: A poet is like a cigar. The more you puff him, the smaller he gets. ANON. said that. Actually, I said that.

Seriously, here are a few lil' gems:

Alert as a chamois. - ANON.
Stand alone like a substantice. - Sir Henry Wotton
Altering, like one who waits for an ague fit. - Dryden
Amorous as an Arcadian. - George Colman, the Younger
Authority without wisdom is like an axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. - Anne Bradstreet
Blind as a bank director. - ANON.
Charity is like molasses, sweet and cheap. - Anna Chapin Ray
Chill as the Gryxabodill - James Whitcomb Riley
A cigar is like a wife... - Aleister Crowley
Clasped her like a lover. - Tennyson (!)
Conspicuous like a cathedral. - Robert Louis Stevenson
Convivial as a live trout in a lime-basket. - Dickens!
Coughed like a cow that finds feathers mixed with hay. - Balzac

... and on and on and on. I'll end with, who else.. Shakespeare?

Crow like chanticleer!

On how we find good friends and know which strangers to shoot on sight

As for blogs, again, they get a bad rap, even from those who write them. But it’s simply a form that many of us use to talk to one another, exchange ideas. Some of them are overtly self-y, while others seem more engaged with ideas. Forms are merely containers. And maybe promotion–self or otherwise–is too.
--  Susan M. Schultz on January 27, 2010

... poets – and experimental poets as much so as anyone else – seem deeply regressive or at least unimaginative on the idea of the commons, copyright, etc, very closely tied to authorship, ownership of their lines and stanzas, even to a chain of being that binds author and self as one. At the worst end of it are the author estates, but we shall not speak of them. There’s been a trend of collaboratively written volumes, but something about it often feels too self-conscious to me. Some poems claim to be “eco-poetry”, say they explore the nature of ecology or are ecological by virtue of being shaped on the page like a rock or a river, or perhaps because they’ve been written on a rock. Whatever. Almost entirely, avant garde or mainstream, quiet or loud, poems are not in their very process exchanges of gifts or energy but objects, acts of individual expression, you make it and serve it up for admiration. Readers participate, of course, but only to the extent of readers. I have no objection to any of this, I make lots of it myself, but my point is that so little else has been explored. And my point is, and has been, that poetry’s status on the margins of capitalism has *not* allowed it to be more progressive or exploratory or ecosystemical on these questions, in fact the opposite, the inability to turn poetry into a commodity has not been an opportunity but grounds for an often pathological fetishism. Whereas art’s inevitable commodification has perhaps led to many restless rebellions against the commodity within it. (Even if I wouldn’t justify the art world, mind you, it seems full of scoundrels, dictators, power mongers and complex military maneuvers, people who could run rings around even the most savvy writers, but I digress.)

... One last point, which is not much of a point, about place. As a locational ousider, I often find myself very envious of the communality of many US underground poetry scenes, but disturbed by how completely insular and inward looking they become, as if the world did not exist. There again I think things may work a little differently in the art world.
-- Vivek Narayanan on January 27, 2010


it’s hard for me to think of [editorial work] as “exclusion” when there’s never a pretense of “inclusion” in the first place.

what i mean is, if a person has an idea to start an all-women magazine, all that has happened is that the number of places for women to publish has increased. it does *not* mean that the number of places men have to publish has *decreased*, see? no one is losing out or being excluded. no loss occurs at all in the creation of a magazine. i think this is pretty easy to understand, yeah?
-- Matt on January 27, 2010

1) Does subjectivity, ie., what the world looks like when you walk around in a given body, a given life trajectory, a given context, shape a writer’s aesthetics and form in subtle, oblique, non-deterministic, but nevertheless profound ways? I’d say yes, of course it does, that’s the very reason to be inclusive in literature. You want to have the whole, the composite picture.

2) Are editors truly *aesthetically* and formally open, in addition to just wishing a more “diverse”-looking contributor’s list for their journal? Or is it that they want people of colour or women who write in exactly the same way, the same style as all their other preferred contributors, just say with a dab of local colour or a bit of appropriate politics inserted here and there?
-- Vivek Narayanan on January 28, 2010

"[Victor Segalen's] passion for 'the exotic' turns out to be a surprisingly contemporary-sounding call for an anticolonial, even antiglobalization aesthetic that would preserve the alterity of the Other.  Segalen's ["Essay on Exoticism"*] explicity opposes the logics of assimilation and appropriation now so often seen as homologous and perhaps complicit with colonialism."
-- Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism

The purpose of a review is to discriminate. Discrimination is how we find good friends and know which strangers to shoot on sight. [...]  I argue with the work. I take it on face value and see if it stands scrutiny and thumps on the skull. Is it a fine thing among fine things of its kind? Is it a terrible thing, or is it the kind of second-rate thing that Eliot commended as that lesser version of fine from which we may learn or crib something for ourselves.
-- Vanessa Place, at Lemon Hound's blog; wonder if she thinks editors should do the same?

What is the implicit (not declared) shape of the community being addressed by a journal and/or its writers? If women and people of colour etc. don’t submit to a given journal it may just be that it’s a club they’re not too interested in joining.
-- Vivek Narayanan on January 29, 2010

There’s just so much shit isn’t there? So much bollocks. People who’ve swallowed dictionaries. All that crap.
-- Damien Hirst on criticism

... Leopardi's Pensieri [1837], piquantly translated by W. S. Di Piero:

I say that the world is a league of scoundrels against men of generosity, of base men against men of good will. When two scoundrels meet for the first time, they recognize each other immediately, as if by signs, and manage to get along. Or if their interests preclude this, they at least feel a definite attraction and great mutual respect for each other. When one scoundrel has business dealings with another, he usually acts fairly, without trying to cheat the other. When dealing with honest men, however, the scoundrel is sure to act dishonestly whenever it serves his interests, and he will try to destroy them even if they are courageous and able to avenge their loss. For the scoundrel hopes that his tricks will triumph over their courage, and his hopes are almost always realized. I have often seen the most timid men, when caught between an even more timid scoundrel and brave, honest man, side with the scoundrel out of fear. This is bound to happen whenever ordinary people find themselves in such a situation, for the ways of a courageous and well-intentioned man are simple and open, whereas those of a scoundrel are mysterious and infinitely diverse--and we all know that the mysterious frightens us more than the familiar. We can easily deal with the vengeance of generous men; our own fear and cowardice rescue us. But no amount of fear or cowardice is enough to save us from the secret persecutions, intrigues, and open attacks made against us by cowardly enemies. Generally speaking, true courage isn't much feared in everyday life; lacking all false appearances, it lacks the machinery of imposture that makes things fearful, and so people refuse to believe it. Yet scoundrels are feared and though courageous because their pose, their imposture, often passes for courage.

[above via Joseph Hutchison's blog, The Perpetual Bird]

...if reshaping journalism is the new goal of "literary" magazines located on campus, I hope they just disappear instead.
-- Daniel Green, The Reading Experience

*SYNOPSIS (from site linked above): The "Other"—source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticised. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen's early attempt to theorise the exotic is a crucial reference point for all discussions of alterity, diversity, and ethnicity. Written over the course of 14 years between 1904 and 1918, at the height of the age of imperialism,  "Essay on Exoticism" encompasses Segalen's attempts to define "true Exoticism."  This concept, he hoped, would not only replace 19th-century notions of exoticism that he considered tawdry and romantic, but also redirect his contemporaries' propensity to reduce the exotic to the "colonial." His critique envisions a mechanism that appreciates cultural difference—which it posits as an aesthetic and ontological value—rather than assimilating it : Exoticism's power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise, he writes.

The 2-cent Skool - and "A more savage exercise than spearfishing”

You've heard of the 95-cent Skool?

Now there's a cheaper alternative.

Better yet: announcing the
Goldman Sachs Online Arts Grants Application


Also: how are writing and spearfishing related?
Click here.

Every Tree in Its Shadow

Every tree in its shadow
shelters a different god.
In its uplifted solitude
it rocks him, whispers to him,
confides its secrets in him.

Every tree in its shadow
makes foliage from a faith
that wasn't born with him
and won't come to an end.

Every tree in its shadow feels
the depth of the immaterial
that men also feel
when they watch children from a distance.

And every once in a while,
when it clouds up, they learn
that a deeper and vaster shadow
shelters them, too,
and rocks them, and whispers to them
as it rains.

-- Francisco Segovia, translated by Don Share with Cesar Perez

Originally published in Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, ed. Forrest Gander, Sarabande Books, 2006; reprinted in Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing (11th edition) and Introduction to Poetry (13th edition), both Pearson/Longman, 2010.

The avant-garde & the right not to die

Andrew Levy, "Biotopology with No Annual Fee," in ON: Contemporary Practice, 2008:

"The avant-garde has failed to pursue the more radical implications of its own manifestos and polemics - strengthening the internal life versus projecting or imposing it outward.  If we do not dismantle the prejudices integral to the idea and practice of social privilege, the declaration of the right not to die will forever go unfulfilled.  To advocate for social reform yet denigrate people because they don't play the piano (or haven't read Deleuze), and are thereby the less enlightened, does not help.  We should be able to hear all the voices coming in and going out.  The arts give us the mechanisms of that meaning.  The further the mechanisms of each field are shared in the formation of a commons, for example, in the arts and sciences, to alter the course of the present economic burdens and punishments placed upon the shoulders of the poor, the greater man's creativity becomes.  This creativity has been borne out by historical example over and over again throughout the entire history of mankind, in every society.  To act to conserve accomplished wealth, knowledge and power among the privileged has proven to be destructive to every person, and the global environment, in each instance.  Therein resides our current crisis and interregnum in biotopology and toward the right not to die, that which is impolite and full of grace...

What do hierarchical balancing acts, constructed upon categorial exclusions in bed with educational and class biases among other unanalyzed discriminatory identifications, mean in regard to the sustainability of any significant, i.e., socially and culturally transformative, collective action?  What, if anything, is the reestablishment of a cyclical status quo (e.g., in the avant-garde) changing?

Why should anyone believe what we say?

What might happen if we, that imaginary collective, equally applauded, attended to, promoted and valued every area of work of our colleagues, friends, lovers, peers and those we mentor?

... Which community do we want to dedicate our service to?  All communities, the ones we've imagined and the ones we do not know."

John Ashbery: Everyman!

When I initiated a project to digitize and preserve the audio poetry archive at Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room back when I was the curator, there were a lot of heavy-duty technical and funding obstacles - they said it couldn't be done!  Now, after years of work and thanks to my terrific (and patient) colleagues at Harvard College Library, treasures from that collection are finally being made available!  I'm especially delighted that a particularly rare WPR gem, a recording of the February 26, 1951, production of John Ashbery's one-act play, Everyman (or Everyman: a Masque), can now be heard thanks to a partnership with PennSound.   As described there, the performance -

was one of four that evening — the inaugural event for Cambridge's Poets' Theatre, organized by V. R. ("Bunny") Lang — alongside Frank O'Hara's Try! Try!, Richard Eberhart's The Apparition and Lyon Phelps' Words in No Time, and a collaborative spirit permeates the evening's events, with the poets' classmate (and O'Hara's dormmate) Edward Gorey providing costumes and sets, O'Hara composing the incidental music for Ashbery's play, Ashbery starring in O'Hara's play, and so forth. Directed by Mary Manning, Everyman's cast consisted of Connaught O'Connell as Columbine, David Bowen as Everyman and Jerry Kohn as Death. To date, the play has never appeared in print, though a brief except, "Song from a Play," was published in the Harvard Advocate in 1948, and later appeared in "Special Portfolio: John Ashbery Tribute," in Conjunctions #49 (2007).

Click here to hear it! 

And speaking of rare recordings... click here to hear James Schuyler, recorded at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1986, and at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, thanks to the Poetry Foundation.

P.S.  Yes, there is also a recording of Frank O'Hara's "Try! Try!" presented on the same occasion as the JA.

The "new math" of poetry

The number of Crayola crayon colors grows at an average rate of 2.56% annually (click on graph, above). Does anybody object? Do people say that there are too many art classes?

No! But there are always people who complain that too many poems are being written.

Now, I know from my own experience that there is considerable wastage of crayons: they break, get worn down to a nub, are easily misplaced, pile up in boxes... and by the time one reaches adulthood they simply disappear. But a decent poem will outlast even the best crayon.

Yet another symposium on... reviews and criticism

I remarked, the other day:

Is it not strange that we should regard a critic or editor who praises us as a very competent judge, while as soon as one finds fault with us we declare him or her to be incapable of passing judgment?

To which Lemon Hound replied:

My thoughts are more inline with Groucho Marx: I don't want to be in a group that would have me. Praise alone is suspicious, no? Makes all of my warning bells go off.

To which I replied:

Hardly any poet will dismiss a positive review or critical essay. Or turn down a prize, which should be the biggest warning bell of all.

To which LH replied:

Oh, I don't know. I hope you're not right in this instance Mr. Share.

To which I replied:

Well, if someone wants to test my own integrity with a prize.....  But seriously, maybe we can agree with Lichtenberg: "Honor is infinitely more valuable than positions of honor."

To which LH replied:

I am not sure that refusing a prize is necessarily a sign of integrity but I love it when Atwood gives her prize money to charity

To which Brooklyn Copeland replied:

I know I'm small potatoes, but I'm also suspicious of praise. I dread receiving anything that resembles it, usually because the person praising is dishing it out for something THEY've inferred through their "close reading," not something I intended and achieved. On the other hand, I get some satisfaction from knowing I've been read, and enjoyed. I get bigger satisfaction from knowing I've been read, hated, read again, and can remain friends with the hater. :-)

To which LH replied:

Well, I prefer neither the lover or the hater. A solid, generative reading will do quite nicely. One that asks questions and contextualizes, and pushes at the text.

To which BC replied:

For me, the lover and the hater make the dream of having any kind of audience worthwhile. Eggheads can push my text around and contextualize to their hearts' content once I'm dead. There's a .000005% chance they'd be interested in my work even then, so I'm not going to spend much time worrying about it while I'm alive. :-D

To which I sort of replied:

Could be, again pace Lichtenberg, that reviews are a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree: sometimes the soundest die of them, while the feeblest often pull through, and many don't catch them at all.

To which LH replied:

I do get your point. An early play of mine got a rather odd, and I thought, damning review in the Toronto Star. My older writer friends said, Oh, you've earned your badge! And I guess I had...

To which I sort of replied:

"For a Critic Who Tries to Write Poems," by Thomas McGrath:

Well, well, little poet!
Still looking for a dew drop
In the middle of a thunderstorm!

To which LH replied:

;-)

Steve Fellner then said:

No poet would dismiss a positive review, Don? I don't buy that. I think plenty of poets, at least the ones worth reading, might think about one of their positive reviews: they like me for the wrong reasons. Am I naive or you too cynical?

I said:

I'm not being cynical at all. It's just hard to think of a contemporary poet who has actually and publicly and sincerely abjured praise.

Though I added:

"He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery..." - Lichtenberg, again

Phil Metres said:

I had to go through all the reviews and blurbs for various books I'd done, and my feeling remains: I'd rather have an engaged and serious review that criticizes the book than a puff piece that says nothing. But you're right, there is this sense of begging, of ego-wallowing, that seems to be a particular illness of ours (our poetry tribe, not just you and me).

CODA:

There can hardly be stranger wares in the world than books: printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; bound, reviewed and read by people who do not understand them; and now even written by people who do not understand them. - Lichtenberg, "waste-book" entry ca. 1793-1796

Litmags are dead, ekphrasis is dead, etc.

The Cherry Tree

When I first asked the groundskeeper about picking fruit, a lascivious grin crossed his face. I noticed that many of his teeth were missing, and wondered about his wife and children. I knew he had recently buried his mother and a still-born with his own hands; I'd expected grief to lend him more dignity. All the same, he seemed harmless, and even carried the ladder to the tree. I pointed the way, and he sweated and grunted, grinning all the while. He whistled through his airy mouth and set the ladder against the tree. As I began to climb, my dress pulled up a little; I had to strain to keep my composure. I looked at him sternly, then he disappeared. As I rose to the lowest bough and tried to grasp a gleaming cherry, the sun bewildered my eye. Everything beautiful seemed suddenly out of reach. I don't know why or how long I watched the light pass over the hill.

--after a painting by Balthus, ca. 1940

*

I wrote the above as a green, fledgling poet.  Cringeworthy, true; but the world was young and reverie was still possible.  Reverie is dead, however.  (No more navel-gazing, just the facts, as Jack Webb or Mister Gradgrind would say.)  The poem, written in meditation on a painting, was a bit of ekphrasis, also now dead.  I eventually published a version of it (with line-breaks, now dead) in a literary magazine (called The Literary Review!)... and guess what?  Literary magazines are... according to a fellow who edits one... dead!

*
They complain at the frightful quantity of bad writing that appears at every Easter fair.  I cannot see why they should.  Why do the critics say we ought to imitate nature?  These writers imitate nature, they follow their instincts just as the great writers do.  And I would like to know what more can be asked of any organic being than that it follows its instincts.  Look at the trees, I say, for example the cherry-tree, and say how many of the green cherries on it will become ripe: not a fiftieth of them; the rest will fall and decay.  But if the cherry-trees produce waste, who shall deny it to men to do so, who are better than the trees?  Indeed, why do I talk about trees?  Know ye not that of the human beings the procreative public produces every year more than a third die before they are two years old?  As with men, so with the books they write.  Thus instead of bewailing the rising quantity of scribbling I do reverence rather to the exalted order of nature, whose will it is that of all that is born a greater part shall become manure and waste-paper, which is a kind of manure... -- G.C. Lichtenberg, ca. 1789-1793

(Ekphrasis is dead.  Here are some of the monuments in its graveyard.) (Oh, here are some more.)

*

Poems on the moon!

 

From typicallyspanish.com

Spanish poet's verses to go to the moon
By m.p., Jan 14, 2010 - 12:05 PM

The verses of the Orihuela poet, Miguel Hernández, are to be sent to the moon as part of the celebrations which are taking place this year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. It’s his book of poems, ‘Perito en Lunas’ – ‘Lunar Expert’ which is to make the trip, in a capsule to be sent to the moon by a U.S. company, Celestis, the EFE news agency reports.

The announcement was made on Wednesday at the presentation in Madrid of more than 500 events to be held in Orihuela, where Miguel Hernández was born on 30th October 1910, to celebrate his centenary. The presentation came on the 80th anniversary of the day the poet’s verses were first published in the press, in the 99th edition of the publication ‘Pueblo de Orihuela’.

Miguel Hernández fought on the Republican side during the Civil War and wrote his last poetry from prison, dying there from tuberculosis in March 1942.

***
I don't often put in a plug for myself, but... You can read my translations of Miguel Hernández (which were awarded the TLS Translation Prize, and the Premio Valle Inclán Prize from the UK Society of Authors) here.  For a few sample poems, click here.

Can you really live off of it?

Durs Grünbein:

Money sets standards and settles issues. It’s money that measures the worth of each individual, whoever or whatever he or she may be: a pole dancer at a night club, an auto-mechanic, a seasonal laborer in the asparagus field, a military spy hollowing out an enemy dictatorship, or – out of whatever frivolity of youth or deformation of personality – a poet. Can you live off it? It’s the quest for a common denominator, the slightly sneering imputation of a low motive that even the poet-fantasist daren’t go too far away from without risking a stumble. Whoever holds forth unpaid is like someone preaching on one leg: he won’t be doing it for long. The question is a conscious and malicious comment on that flamingo or ostrich position. Live off it is a way of saying: these fruitless verbal stunts, prestidigitations, aptitudes must surely lack in market value what they claim to have in terms of significance. To sensitive poets’ ears it will sound like a threat, a tactless reminder of a bad habit, a warning against something that will surely end up as parasitism...

*
[Poets these days] are back in the real world, no longer treading astral paths. More skeptical than most rocket scientists, they look about their immediate vicinity, registering the tiniest quiver of a needle, the puff of quartz-dust on their instruments. Still with that fresh, animal gaze – albeit as the natives of language – they escort each new flight and describe things the experts miss. Their task is no longer metaphysics and contemplation of the Pleiades. Even if love and death remain their pre-eminent assignments (because who else is there who would accept them), their radius in the last few centuries has steadily expanded. No philosophical, geopolitical or moral problem has escaped their sensitive soundings. No crisis zone on the globe or in the mind where you don’t run into poets. No dirty work for which they consider themselves too fine or too romantic.

But by the same token, they will no longer stand for all the reproaches that are leveled against them. Someone who is spared nothing in what he does, who has no protection and no esthetic privilege, such a person will at least lay claim to his constitutionally guaranteed space, as part of a properly constituted minority. So one shouldn’t be surprised if these incessantly questioned parties start shooting a few questions back. Trained in self-doubt as they are, they know where the adversary’s weak spots are. It takes them a while to launch into a counter-question, but then they do it enthusiastically, and, as we will see, quite unscrupulously.

The representative question is the why. If you approach the matter unsentimentally enough, a meditation on the subject will surprise you. I don’t want to frighten you, but have you thought about what happens to people who aren’t artists? E. E. Cummings once gave a particularly blunt answer. His barrack-room tone was probably in imitation of some raw recruit. In the introduction to his novel The Enormous Room, he comes up to the reader with a pally “Don’t be afraid” and gets a merry little dialog going. In the course of it, the encouraged reader lets the fearless author talk him into the question: “What do you think happens to people who aren’t artists? What do you think people who aren’t artists become?” – only to be triumphantly shot back at by the author: “I feel they don’t become: I feel nothing happens to them; I feel negation becomes of them.” After that triple salvo – according to the author anyway – the reader has no more questions. At best, it’s a whispered echo of the poet’s final threat: “Negation?”

Well, one could probably be gentler about it. Delicate sensibilities may be hurt by a poet, of all people, arguing so ruthlessly and self-righteously. But why should he spare you a peek into his own box of prejudices, when he is compelled on a daily basis to inspect those of others? Moreover, everything with Cummings has to do with this one, ambivalent concept, negation, which signifies both the process of negating and its effect, the result of disappearance, namely: nothing. And it is precisely this annulling, this deletion, this causing to disappear that is at issue. Are those non-artists, always terribly busy but finally disappearing without a trace, are they not the ones who are condemned to negate everything that doesn’t press itself on them in the form of reality? They are the ones who have no possibility of returning, who spend their lives in the service of their own removal, all for the sake of banality and materialism.

Anyway, they don’t contribute much to spiritual variety. If it were up to them, there would only be the world as is, which means rough and ready, drearily underexposed, a place of torment and tedium, a global Golgotha without witnesses – and not because they are entirely devoid of imagination and playfulness themselves so much as because all their activities are essentially negative, a sopping up of resources, a clearing away of what existed previously, a destruction of terrestrial substance without a chance of any revision, let alone irregularity. In truth, it is they who are holding negation, the philosophers’ rattly old machine gun, in their hands, and it is they, not the bearded wise men of stoa and academy, that have most frequent recourse to it. They don’t have to be ill-intentioned, it’s enough that they continue to do what non-artists do when they are bored. Which means behaving like normal consumers of the universe, always busy, always on their treadmill, a.k.a. ‘the real world’, or ‘commonsense’ or ‘business as usual’.

Oh, that’s just resentment speaking ... In fact, artists and non-artists have a wonderful symbiosis. Each side profits from the weakness of the other and receives its legitimization from it, see above. Only, the one side seems always to have known why as a minority it always had a modicum of modesty, while the other was able to ignore it in its nihilistic philistinism. The wonderful thing about this little argument is the way it sharpens the issue of why. Instead of proclamations as to the function and purpose of their respective activities, it’s an argument about who, bluntly speaking, is responsible for more of the current schlimazel. Probably that’s why the exchange is so satisfactory. Be warned: most artists, frustrated or otherwise, approve of this sort of thing.

-- from "Why Live Without Writing," translated by Michael Hofmann, February 2010 issue of Poetry

Harper's Index and poetry

You can now search the famous Harper's Index!  Here are the results for a search on the word "poetry."

11/93  Number of poems included in The Best American Poetry 1993 that rhyme: 1

-- Harper’s research

9/95  Number of California library books of modern American poetry from which pages have been reported stolen this year: 250

-- Karen Gillette, Foothill College (Los Altos, Calif.)

8/96  Minimum price of a line of Al Kracht’s custom poetry, from Limerick Lane Poetryworks of Chappaqua, New York: $7

-- Limerick Lane Poetryworks (Chappaqua, N.Y.)

7/97  Lines of Walt Whitman poetry entered as evidence last year in New York’s dispute with New Jersey over Ellis Island: 37

-- Attorney General’s Office (Trenton, N.J.)

8/97   Letters of complaint the show received about an episode in which her son goes camping with Walt Whitman: 94

-- Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (Agoura, Calif.)

10/07  Number of copies a book of poems must sell per week to make the Poetry Foundation’s bestseller list: 50

Pictured: Cover from a hundred years ago; not sure if it's legal to post an image of the current incarnation

Daybooks and the reaches of the page

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an eighteenth-century scientist who, among other things, discovered the electron tree, these days called the Lichtenberg figure (pictured above). What's remarkable is that he's remembered today not so much as a scientist but as a writer - even though he never intended to publish the things he's best known for now. The writing for which he is celebrated consists of what we would probably call aphorisms, collected in private notebooks from 1765 through 1799. His own term for these notebooks was Sudelbücher - "waste books." Waste books were what English accountants, at the time, called scrap ledgers in which transactions were entered before being copied out more neatly in formal account books.

Here's one of Lichtenberg's jottings - unpublished like the rest until after his death:

"What concerns me, alone, I only think; what concerns my friends, I tell them; what would be of interest only to a few I write down; and what the world needs to know I publish."

It's an odd thing when private writing gains a public audience, but how we adore writers who - literally - think for themselves!

Anyway, I came to Lichtenberg - as well as the mysterious Joseph Joubert, whose thoughts were also only published posthumously - after reading George Oppen's daybooks, which are such a trove that I started looking around for similar collections. I made my way through daybooks by Edward Weston and Tina Modotti... Carl Van Vechten... Anne Truitt and Tillie Olsen... and of course, there's Whitman's, Emerson's, and Woolf's, among others. (Marilyn Hacker even published a poem in Poetry made from hers.)

But perhaps the most curious - and beautifully produced - specimen I've found so far is Ray DiPalma's marvelous The Ancient Use of Stone. Other folks have already blogged about this book, e.g. John Latta, Michael Lally, Nick Piombino, and the Best American Poetry folks. So here's my own small compendium from Ray's journals and daybooks.

But first... let me digress about the book's publisher, the estimable Seismicity Editions, at the Otis College of Art and Design, which along with its journal OR: A Literary Tabloid, is the result of poet/editor Paul Vangelisti's and Guy Bennett's extraordinary generosity and genius. OR is free-of-charge and distributed nationally to bookstores and individuals, and is an extremely important development in the world of American literary print culture. Issue 3 has a terrific interview with Ezra Pound's daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz (whose previously unpublished poems we recently featured in Poetry), and other gems such as Bill Mohr's thoughtful review of Ron Silliman's the Alphabet (which I was pleased to see, having met Bill recently and chatted w/him about why Ron's book hadn't gotten more reviews), some translations of Marinetti - and poems by Ray! The books are magnificent. TAUS, as Ray calls it in his emails, is in every way an engrossing pleasure. It collects more than jottings, quotations, reflections, poems; it also includes an amazing and amusing assortment of graphic images which the Otis folks have managed to reproduce meticulously and artfully. And I don't know when I've held a recently-published book printed on such exquisite paper! I keep running my fingers across the weave as I read. In fact "read" isn't even quite the right verb for what I do with the book, because I find myself staring... gazing... at the images and lines on each page the way I used, as a kid, to do with things like the Whole Earth Catalog or head comix and album cover artwork. It's a splendid experience. Whatever were the ancient uses of stone, this is a brilliant contemporary use of the page. Both the press and journal belie blather about the supposed death of print and death of the editor. The editorial and production values of what Vangelisti publishes are simply unexcelled at the moment, and convey things you are never going to get on your tablet, computer, iPhone, or Kindle.

And let me digress, too, about Ray DiPalma. I only know rudimentary things about the ancient use of stone, but what I know about Ray is that he's a miraculous living... artifact! An experimentalist, he is at the same time AmPo's greatest rememberer. When I blogged about Robert Bridges and snow, he wrote to me with Emerson (connecting him with Eliot and Frost!), Whittier (whom he connected with the naturalist Gilbert White), and William Vaughn Moody - complete with transcriptions of poems, adding that he was putting together a course on "the transformative nature of myth" that would discuss bird poems by Hopkins, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Poe, and Whitman. On another recent snowy morning, he wrote to me of Basho, and a search for allusions to snow in Mallarme, enclosing this wintery image of the Eiffel Tower (by Henri Rivière) that Ray had been given by a former wife:

And when I blogged a tiny bit of an essay by Durs Grünbein, Ray responded "to his rather solipsistic set of posings" with a quotation from Beckett's Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit:

D: What other plane can there be for the maker?

B: Logically none. Yet I speak from an art turning from it in disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be ble, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

D: And preferring what?

B: The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express.

... and then Ray apologized in case he was being precipitous!

Of the poets I was fortunate to meet during close to a decade of hosting poetry readings, Ray was the most interesting and lively by far. Even the sound of his voice is unforgettable, but what really sticks with me is how he's an intellectual alchemist, taking the stuff of books and refining and transmuting it into the vigorous sinews of his everyday living. His mind is a distillery, an alembic, and that's why his quotidian pluckings and gatherings are so musical - and so fascinating. What follows is a miniscule sampling, and without the texture of the material book itself and the images that are embedded in its aware and civilized landscape.

MARBLE SHOES

'I have not brought

the message. I came

with the message.

I am a part of what

is said to have

happened.'

MARCH 10

Home life with tea leaves and a dog. Where bowls of blossoms and stacks of books meet the blue and green mountains and every conversation begins "I've been meaning to tell you." A fragile, ingratiating life. Its occulted goal a minor achievement.

JANUARY 20

...

Distracted to the point = another method for finding one's way. Lost part of the initial draft of today's entries while working on the visuals. Juxta-'pose'. Leaving with exactly what you need.

JANUARY 25

...

Reductio ad Inflection

JANUARY 30

...

"The dog pants - but the camel carries the load." Also Sprach Meatball Fulton

FEBRUARY 7

...

Genealogy articulates stranger convictions.

Application of resource =

Strangest convictions

The strategies of convictions

The convictions of strategies

FEBRUARY 12

...

A letter at a time a word at a time a time at a time

...

It's a metaphor so there's no real emergency - ever

MARCH 9

...

Red rover, red rover,

Let Ludwig take over

MARCH 15

...

"Poetry, according to Hindu metaphysics, is language that no longer consists of mere phonemes and socially accepted meanings, but emphasizes their resonance. The Sanskrit word is dhvani. Commentators are careful to stress that it is neither the sound nor the meaning of the word, but rather its suffusion, the vibrating psychic halo around it, which is the effect of convergence and context. 5355 ways of making mere words resonate were listed by Vendantic metaphysicians." - Ellemire Zolla

AUGUST 2, 2005

...

Fuck the posthumous! We want to sit down, eat, and drink sometime today!

AUGUST 3, 2005

...

Dollar bills folded into the shroud - whims of pious ennui

...

DESCENDENTS DESTROY VALUE

I will feed you, I will clothe you, I will provide temporary shelter for you - and even give you money. But I will no longer negotiate these letters and lettershapes in the conventional way you suggest. And no you can't take them away and do with them as you please. I don't have a gun, but I do have a knife, or, even better - a bottle of ink to pour over the pages of the whole enterprise. All this was done in the way it was done because it was meant to confound the validity of anything freehand - so your memory will do you no good. Only I know how these things came to be exactly as they now are.

AUGUST 5, 2005

The Chinese believe it's bad form to give someone a clock as a gift - reminder that it is of one's mortality. In the past month my former wife has given me 2 clocks that once belonged to her recently deceased mother. [Finocchio, finocchio, / Non dami il mal occhio.] [Schiatta mal occhio / E non piu avanti.]

...

AUGUST 11, 2005

...

What are the reaches of the page -

Their original purpose now forgotten after so much revision

Intent upon such accuracy of address -

First testing the new pen on a scrap of paper

Before making an initial entry in the new notebook -

The imagined face around the eyes

As though something were diminished by being

Brought into sharper focus - the four dimensional object

That casts a three dimensional shadow

I failed to sleep soundly and had a very uneasy dream. I thought my wife lay on my right arm and somebody took her away from my side which made me wake up very unhappy. I thought as I awoke somebody said 'Bess' but nobody was near. I stretched out again with my head towards the north to show myself the steering point in the morning -

...

Fruitless

"Contemporary Indian poetry in English has come in for a lot of fruitless attack and defence: it needs neither. What it needs is a good critic - it has now only log-rolling cliques, patrons, and enemies." -- A.K. Ramanujan, from an interview circa 1970 (via Vivek Narayanan)

And contemporary AmPo?

Fragment of an Agon

"Most poets are involved in listing their public achievements. They don't say anything about how they have grown or how they have learned.  I don't feel intimidated, because I look down on them. Their priorities are wrong. They are competitive, and I don't believe in competition in the arts. Competition belongs in sports and business.'' -- Kirby Congdon

Leland Hickman: Against Taxonomies

There may come a time when our cultural provincialisms will be seen with a wider lens.  In the world of poetry, what urgently seemed the product of one or another region, of this or that school of thought or MFA program or social network or journal, will be seen as threads of a whole fabric, American perhaps, perhaps European.  That we haven't yet arrived at that moment does nothing if not cement our notions of boundaries, categories, organizations, and the specificities, but also the limitations that go with them.

Leland Hickman would have none of that, at least not when it came to poetry.  In his work as editor and in his vocation as poet, he resisted such limitations, he rejected orthodox taxonomies.

-- Dennis Phillips, introduction to Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman, ed. Stephen Motika, Nightboat Books/Otis Books, 2009

*

o my offence is rank     it smells to high heaven   try what repentance can   what can it not?    o wretched state    o bosom black as death    which means mainly England and the United States    forever since birth alone hometown hero    used to scream at his blue apartment walls because he was    I wish I had an excuse to really hate you    after I got the money    I prepared myself dinner    I have become inordinately fond of chicken livers    you gave me a very important gift    loneliness    you could listen to my Peter Paul and Mary records    I could cook you lots of roast beef and potato salad    what without love we touched pronouncing good    a master of comic timing    bene dick of insolent charm    and grace enjoys every minute of it

-- excerpt from Leland Hickman, "rhapsody Macaulay not historian his story," ca. 1964?

Portrait of Flossie

The William Carlos Williams Papers have recently been reorganized and fully described and are open for research at Yale's Beinecke Library!  Click here to find out more - including a link to twenty pages of digitized photos, manuscripts, and other fascinating stuff.

And here's some WCW audio I helped digitize at Harvard.

Pictured: WCW's pencil portrait of his wife, Flossie, ca. 1919, from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; URL link to image: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1048367

Surprise

I'm not surprised that I have sympathies with such a broad range of poetry: I'm surprised that everybody doesn't. -- Thom Gunn

*

The truth. They make it consist of nothing they cannot prove. The greatest happiness they find in it is being able to put forward incontestable assertions. This is what they like, and they consider it a sign of prestige, a prerogative, a power, a dignity, etc., a liberation from error. -- Joubert