Meditations on a Grapefruit and Other Delights

I won't touch the poetry-blogging-is-dead meme again, I promise; maybe it was the churlishness and sourness in the comment boxes of AmPo blogs (not excluding this one) that made a change of pace so refreshing for me when I recently left the country for a while. A few weeks ago, skirting plumes of volcano ash, I was in the UK where among other things I gave a talk at Oxford, and participated in a reading in London that left a sweeter taste.

The London event was marvelously hosted by Roddy Lumsden, one of the best poets writing in English on the planet today. Roddy puts together themed multi-poet events that have warmth, spirit, and heart; the one to which I was invited was held in his Broadcast series, and took place upstairs at The Betsey Trotwood on Friday 14th May 2010. Titled Lardermania!, it featured over two dozen poets performing an alphabet of new poems on the subject of food, along with a reading by me in the middle that lasted about fifteen minutes, as well as readings from and in tribute to the work of food-loving poet and Poetry contributor Craig Arnold.

A poem each was read by:

Kirsten Irving / Charlotte Newman / Rowyda Amin / James Goodman / Angela Kirby / Claire Crowther / Samuel Prince / Tim Wells / Mark Waldron / Holly Hopkins / Diana Pooley / David Floyd / Samantha Jackson / Judy Brown / James Brookes / Katy Evans Bush / Dzifa Benson / Jack Underwood / Jon Stone / Swithun Cooper / Julia Bird / Roddy Lumsden / Jackey Smith.

My own commission was a poem on an item of food beginning with the letter "P" - the result was an unlikely homage to the late Alex Chilton and the late James Luther Dickinson - more-or-less-Memphians like me - called "Dixie Fried" (maybe someone'll publish the thing, who knows). I read some new poems from my nearly-finished manuscript, Cash for Clunkers, as well.

One salutary thing about UK readings is that poets read work by other people in addition to their own. Though not from Lardermania, here's a clip of Roddy in action:



At our event, Roddy read two poems composed for the occasion, one on short notice and in under an hour's time, and they were each terrific: "Cooking with the Saints" and "Yeast." I wish I had copies of them, and made a fool myself trying to ask after them. [Addendum: "Yeast" appears in the April 2011 issue of Poetry magazine.]

Though every single poet on the bill was a distinctive pleasure, I especially enjoyed seeing Tim Wells, who has absolutely no counterpart in the US - click here for proof!

And Katy Evans-Bush... well, even before seeing her in person for the first time that night, she has seemed like a long-lost sister to me! She read poignantly from Craig's first book, Shells, as well as a poem of her own relating to the queenly quince! Katy has a witty new chapbook called Oscar & Henry, that saucily mashes up Oscar Wilde and Henry James (among others, including Auden and Whitman). Here's "November 30, 1900" -

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
Oscar Wilde is laid to rest.

***
Oscar knew the price of everything.
Once in prison, once in exile,
once with his health, once with his family,
once in money, once with success,
he paid the price for wit and hubris.,
for having cake, for sowing oats, for sable-collared overcoats.

***
Wilde expired in a hotel room in Paris,
murmuring, either that wallpaper goes or I do -
having finally learned to do without the frills,
having learned at last that almost everything is frills -
the proof of the gentleman in the unpaid bills,
the garlanded rivalries, guarded shock of the master
never mattering more or less or ever after -
a-boom-di-a-da, boom-di-a-da, boom-di-a-da, boom-di-a-da,
and an unhealthy green haze evaporating over the hills.

--

I'll stop enthusing now, and end with a link to Craig Arnold's tart and bittersweet "Meditation on a Grapefruit," which we accepted for Poetry on the day he went missing, and which I read on the 14th - a night for which I'll always be grateful.

"From where I sit, poets look hyperactive in their engagement with politics."

Jessica Murray: Did you read David Biespel’s [sic] essay “This Land is Our Land” in the May 2010 issue of Poetry? In it, he has dire things to say about the navel-gazing of American poets and their refusal to engage politically, as poets and as citizens. I am curious whether you think there is a real dearth there or whether Biespel may be looking in the wrong places for his political poets/activists.

Jennifer Moxley: I did not read this essay, but I am familiar with the argument. It is made every few years or so. I imagine that Whitman may even have been accused of “navel-gazing” (which actually sounds like a rather pleasant activity, especially if the navel belongs to someone else . . . so yes, I am sure Whitman was accused!). But to return to my point, was the political implication of Whitman’s works visible at the time? And if Blake was, as Erdmann dubbed him, a “prophet against empire,” did anyone in his lifetime know? There are many ways to be political as a poet, and to be an activist. They don’t necessarily have to be connected. From where I sit, poets look hyperactive in their engagement with politics. Almost to the point where to demur from the caring and writing about every little nuance of mainstream politics is tantamount to poetic treason! So, perhaps Biespel and I are in dialogue with different communities. I wonder where he is looking? Or perhaps (at the risk of being very wrong about an essay I haven’t read) he is asking for his political poet to be cast in an outdated mold (for example, a populist mold, à la Ginsberg, when there’s no populist movement to celebrate such a voice—on the left anyway). Then again, ever since the sixties there has been an assumption that poets should be activists (why? is being a poet not sufficient?). There has also been, arguably, a way of being a political poet that is very self-serving. A quote from Matthew occurs: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.”

- from the Memorious blog

(I'm with Moxley, but... how can you be familiar with the argument of something you haven't read??)

*
Speaking of the mainstream, looks like they still have some work to do with regard to flarf, viz -

If the Catastrophe Goes On

IF THE CATASTROPHE GOES ON
April 20-May 22, 2010

by Franz Wright

(originally posted on Poets for Living Waters; reproduced by permission of the author)

-

Every dawn a fog of dead leaves, a wintriness of voices past, whispers along the wires of a deserted Midwest, the capital inexplicably deprived of electricity, all computers down, and at night the streets dark as a noble person’s chances on election day, I saw this; and a wind, like a mort darkly, endlessly sounded, I heard it, emanating from the world of dreams and death, place from which originates the impulse to rise from the bed, dress, leave the house or apartment, and face all that will happen as a consequence; the world we are so homesick for, so lost here, psychotic ward with-out end, halls of a wandering library of illiterates. Behold, on the thirtieth day I saw them, swarms of cockroaches innumerable as stars I saw, like some kind of rapidly replicating virus. I glimp- sed them, from that place where unendurable indignation can no longer stab me in the heart, from no more Please Sir may I have some more suffering, or Please Sir may I have some more psych meds, or Yeah but what difference would it make—yabitt yabbit have another bong hit dude, or I heard it was caused by a moon-quake you know or maybe it was the Minoan Multiphasic Personality Inventory gone berserk . . . Are they human, brutal slobs like Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Cheney and Palin the Wolfslayer, the sacrificial visible and known, and the one hundred or so others whose faces, whose very names no one would recognize . . . And look who’s writing, his words represented by pages and oil-colored oink-colored ink owned by people who picked up the ball from the father and son SS members who owned me back when they were the primary publishers of Hitlerian darkness . . . Yabitt rapt in a vision I saw them, scurrying across the floors of the White House, up and down the Washinton Monument, on the thirtieth day of death’s orgasm, I saw them; across the dome of the Capitol Building, even the unfinished addition at Rushmore of the mighty likeness of Crazy Horse, execrescence heresy and obamanation to many, not to mention the unguarded Tomb of theUnknown Blind Eighteen-Year-Old Asshole Sacker of Ancient Cities. I saw cockroaches crawling like magnified lice over the head of the great one, savior of our nation, enthroned in his shadowy hall, and leaving alas their trails of corrosive yellow slime in texture like unto snot all over his great copper face.

What if it goes on for another month? What if it goes on for a year? What if it goes on until the waters around the earth have been murdered by some normal sane hard working family man pink pig faced cocksucker of a businessman? Then will you get mad? Then will you wake up, all you medicated zombies in schools across the land? Then will you rise up in rage and horror and fight back finally? You don’t want to know my opinion on this; you don’t want to know what I think.

And what if I never finish writing this, that’s right, I am never going to stop, not until I fall at last, like one of those great an-cient fir trees in the middle of northern nowhere, one which big stupid men with big axes have been working away at for a long time.

–Franz Wright

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

STATEMENT

It’s weird, for me, to think that this piece started out one minute as a kind of parody of the prophetic/Whitman/Eliot/Ginsberg style and the next—about thirty hours later—had apparently supplied the flawed but momentarily satisfying means to express the little personal silent howl of horror, rage, and frustration I have been stiffling for over a month now. I was then almost immediately silenced by a sense of my own complicity in the current catastrophe, a sense of personal guilt I don’t know if I can ever fathom or express. The seemingly unstoppable nature of this event has reawakened the feelings I had as a teenager in the late sixties and early seventies as the Dow Chemical Corporation poisoned, perhaps for centuries to come, the farmlands of Vietnam, as well as my sense of helpless despair during the days following Chernobyl. My wife Elizabeth was involved for a while, here in Boston, in the selection and exhibition of art works by children born with various forms of cancer clearly related to the nuclear disaster, while they were being treated by physicians in the area; I was present one evening when some of those children filed, strangely, into the ballroom of some glittery hotel after their long flight to this country, and my memory of that moment is one I am still far from fully confronting. But the absolute absence of self-pity in these children is linked in my mind somehow with the pictures of birds affected by our Alaskan oil disaster. I am already losing the mental thread here, I simply cannot think straight in the face of these occurrences. I can say that a friend of mine recently referred to the current catastophe as merely a “once-in-a-lifetime event” and that the moment I read those words of his he ceased to be my friend. He can go to hell. And so can I.

–Franz Wright, 5/24/10

What you are thinking is the parrot in the cage of what you are doing

Did I mention contradicta? Very well, then. Here are some from Nick Piombino's new book, Contradicta: Aphorisms, published by Green Integer, and unforgettably illustrated by Toni Simon.

*
One by one the finest philosophers concluded they should no longer try to tell us how to live. Imperceptibly, yet gradually, an immense sadness fell upon the world and the sadists took over.

-

Don't be too nicey to those who are icy.

-

Little time to think about what you don't like or don't have when so much time is needed to think about what you can't understand.

-

The novice plays to the invited guests, the master plays to the gallery.

-

Words express meanings but their rhythms express their intentions.

-

The relentless critic hungers for your pride - not your excellence.

-

Truths about poetry are the keys that unlock the cages. You are there to watch the birds fly away and when they go you never think twice about the truth, the keys, or the cages.

-

What you are thinking is the parrot in the cage of what you are doing.

-

There can be a useful tradition of unconventionality but conventional unconventionality is a travesty that subverts its entire aim.

-

Artists and intellectuals bribe patrons and politicians with mirages of progress.

-

No one would credit anyone for anything if not for the compulsive craving for hierarchy.

-

People go to extremes in order to be different. But the remarkable differences are the subtle ones.

Contradicta and Shangri-Las

Some of us have been asking whether blogging is dead. We probably ought have been clearer; it could be that - to be more specific - poetry blogging is dead. It is chastening to read this, from "Cuba: A Way Forward," in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books:

"The prominent blogger Yoani Sánchez—whose posts comment on the daily indignities of life in Cuba—has three times been refused permission to leave the country, twice to accept international prizes and once, in March 2010, to attend a conference on the Spanish language. The emergence of a nascent blogosphere has been heralded as a sign that Cuba is opening up, yet the government systematically blocks critical websites and strictly controls access, forcing bloggers to upload their posts using thumb drives and illegal back channels. Because an hour’s use costs roughly one third of Cubans’ monthly wages, and since there are few connections outside of cities, the average Cuban has no access to the Internet. Although Yoani Sánchez was named one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people, most Cubans on the island have never even heard of her, let alone read her blog."

Blogging and comment-box hideola are luxuries for Anglo-American poetry folks, but there are those for whom this kind of writing involves great risk and takes incredible courage.

*
On a lighter note, see Katy Evans-Bush's vision of a poetry Shangri-La, in which she asks the musical question, "if you hate poetry that much why the flippin eck are you writing it?" Here's the heart of it, forgetting that Shangri-La is a place of forgetfulness -

"Less kvetching about “why no one reads poetry.” First of all, they DO, and second, just shuddupaboudit. It’s like having a party and buttonholing your guests about why nobody came.

A vast expanse of expansiveness. Why are poets, of all people, complaining that too much poetry is being published? Let’s have less of the hyenas round the dried-up old watering hole trope, and more of the old spirit of plenty. The kind of plenty that comes from within. Generosity.

More and better criticism! This is vital to distinguish what’s really good in all the hive of activity. Robert McCrum is right. Publish all you like – and then think it’s important enough to talk about. This is what keeps culture alive. Deep criticism. And lively, NOT boring, reviews. Criticism should be interesting to non-poets, too: it is how they find out about poetry. When I worked in bookselling, people – general readers – came in clutching wrinkled book reviews, or talking about a review they’d read on Sunday, and asking for the book. I used to read the reviews so I’d know what they were going to be on about.

Less gatekeeping. Less obsession with ‘power’. This goes both ways, by the way: I mean less obsession with gates, I suppose. Those poetry editors who go to publishing events and never smile or look at anyone, they would be made to smile and look. Talk about the poverty-stricken medieval king! A poetry fiefdom with starving serfs at the roadside.

But by the same token, the serfs would not be standing there obsessing about how the king never smiled, or only opened the gate every other Saturday. Come on, serfs! Are you men, or mice??

Manners. Poets would be nicer people. (No; this is just silly. Nicer people than what? Than they are now? Than other people? Sorry, I have no idea what I was thinking. I’m not even sure a Utopia full of nice people would even be very fun to be in. As you were.)

Less emphasis on categories. Women and men have more in common than not. The mainstream widens and narrows and incorporates different things within it at different times; it’s only a descriptive term, “mainstream,” and refers to factors that are peripheral to the poetry. Time passes: “young poets” grow old very quickly, and contemporary writing, in a flash, is the writing of the past. Who reads Stephen Spender now? There are too many excellent writers who don’t fit any of the trendy categories. It’s a small island and it’s feeling very parochial.

More fun! An innate assumption that poetry is enjoyable. It is for pleasure. It comes to something when it’s the poets who are complaining because the Tories might ask kids to learn to memorise – er – poems. If taught right, they ARE fun – and not just silly-fun, either. There is such a thing as deep, serious fun. And if you hate poetry that much why the flippin eck are you writing it?

More adventurous writing – not gimmicky, I mean inwardly adventurous. Accurate, faithful, linguistically precise, minute. And technically adventurous. Instead of arguing about why they shouldn’t have to know certain things, poets would want to master their art.

Less anti-intellectualism. And on the same note, less intellectual snobbery. In reverse, this means more intellectual play (and rigour), and more non-intellectual play. This corresponds to less fear. Right now it strikes me there is a general atmosphere of fear. Fear of failure, fear of the things you think you’re not good enough for, fear of people who know more than you, fear of the gatekeepers, fear of looking silly, far of success. (This strikes me as the heart of the piece; no time to expand on it right now, but I think this is it. Mind you, this is existential fear, really. We all live by it.)

Less confusion of poetry and its technical elements with class war. Rhyme is not “heirarchical,” the past is not evil, dead white men were probably quite nice (since so many live ones are), and liking metre doth not a reactionary make.

A place in the general intellectual discourse of the day. Poets would be interested in other things besides poetry. They would stop ghettoising themselves in little poetry magazines that only poets read, similar to stamp-collecting or anorak-spotting. Then the general readers would be less afraid of a closed club. Poets would regain some of their place in the popular imagination – not all of us, to be sure – and the status would rise. There are some who aren’t poets who treat poetry in this way: Bryan Applyard on his blog, or the Guardian (for all its faults), or the 3 Quarks Daily blog, or the New Yorker, or the TLS or LRB. Poetry would smarten up. Hobbyism would turn to dilettantism, which is a far better thing.

Theatre; liveness. Why has poetry lost its immemorial connection with the theatre? Why do theatre people all know Shakespeare by heart, while many (even established, “successful”) poets admit to never really having read him? What’s THAT about? Theatre came from poetry. And theatre is more fun, more engaged and deeper than stand-up.

Better poetry readings. Poets would learn how to talk. Poetry reading would be about either the poem itself, in a compelling way – George Szirtes has said that a really good poetry reading is like listening to someone who really wants to tell you something – or about entertaining the audience, not necessarily by shouting or being like stand-up comedy. Lots of people hate stand-up comedy. And shouting."

Photo of Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, Havana, May 2008, by José Goitia/The New York Times/Redux

Whither the salon?

From a comment by Curtis Faville that caught my eye on John Gallaher's excellent blog, Nothing to Say and Saying It:

I'm wondering what--if anything--was wrong with the old "salon" system, or the friendship system, or the editorial system--all of which pre-date the workshop system.

The great thing about private philanthropy is that it isn't democratic. I mean, if some rich person gives you money, you have no responsibility but to your own conscience. The "taste" part is nobody's business but the philanthropist's.

The problem with "public art"--of which the workshop system is an integral part--is that there must be the appearance of "fairness" and objective quality. As everyone knows, there's no such thing as objectivity in the media, and no such thing as objectivity in workshops. That includes the choice of instructors, the choice of students, the judging of work, and the familiar system of recommendation and promotion which institutions are designed to facilitate.

Art isn't fair. It isn't objective. It isn't respectable. It doesn't exist to make some people famous, or rich, or proud, or dignified.

A letter from Paul Vangelisti

I was pleased and fascinated to receive this note from Paul Vangelisti, which is reproduced with his kind permission.

--

Dear Don:

I would like to thank you for your recent comments on Adriano Spatola’s Toward a Total Poetry, to which Ray DiPalma drew my attention. As you suggest in your comments, Spatola’s book is an important theoretical text for the international avant-gardes, as well as being a quite lucid guide to these various post-War movements. Your final sentence concerning the American “language poets” also struck me as having its share of ironies.

Though, of course, Spatola’s text was unavailable in English during the rise of this movement in the late seventies and eighties, Spatola’s work was rather well-known to the various purveyors of this form of “innovative writing.” I’ve sent (to your Poetry address) two issues of the magazine Invisible City, which, with John McBride, we published from 1971-1982, along with several books by Spatola (two Red Hill Press publications, from 1978 &1981; and his more recent Collected Poems (2008), from Green Integer). The issues of Invisible City, clearly a forerunner to the current mag. OR, contain a good deal of Spatola’s work (including an interview with him), and were certainly known to many “Language poets.”

In the second to the last issue of IC, the “1980” issue, there also appear, along with Spatola’s work, poems by Ray DiPalma, Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews. One of the Spatola books, his groundbreaking collection of visual poetry, Zeroglyphics (originally published in 1966, U.S. ed. 1978), was, in fact, reviewed in a 1978 issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. The other, Another You, is a 1981 collection of my work, in the middle of which is a documentation if a collaboration of visual & sound pieces Spotala, Giulia Niccolai & I did at the L.A. Louver Gallery here in Los Angeles in March 1978, during Spatola’s first trip to the U.S.

All of which to say that much of this work was familiar to the “English-language poetry world” and I, and others certainly, find it unfortunate that there has been a good deal of revisionism around the notions of “innovative” work then and now. History has certainly never been a strong suit of mainstream American writing, but one tends to expect more of poets, critics and movements who claim to be radical and groundbreaking in their approaches.

In any case, thanks for your interest in our publishing ventures. Hope all’s well & best… Paul

--

I'm grateful to Paul for allowing me to post this letter, and as ever to Ray Di Palma.

"Blogging is dead. Can we go back to real thinking and reading now?"

To which Gary Sullivan responds: "You mean the kind of thinking and reading that led us to blogging in the first place?

:-) [as we used to say!]

Has the blogging moment, in other words, passed? I raised the subject - where else but on Facebook! - and was pleased to get these responses from Gary and Seth Abramson, with a late appearance by Jennifer Lowe:

Seth:
Near as I can tell, the blogs are just about the only thing keeping the thinkers honest -- at least in the poetry blogosphere. I've got a bunch of doctoral students over here in Madison who I think would _love_ to engage Christian B. on the notion that the new unit of measure in poetry is the database (or archive). They might want to ask him, for instance, how using the archive as the fundamental unit of measure erases the critical questions we have traditionally asked about how individual archives are constituted, and replicates not just the degraded language but degraded enterprise of the traditional archive; they might want to ask whether these and other critical inquiries push back against blithely stacking archives vertically (What's closest to hand? The degraded language of journalism, cf. The New York Times! Let's "write" "The Day"!) in some benighted, masculinist Babel-project which (paradoxically) is entirely deductive in its conception, making impossible the sort of radically inductive ethical paradigm-shift *most* of the best thinkers of our generation have been advising since the late 1970s.

Alas, that sort of interaction will never happen -- but for blogs.

Don:
What think you all of this quote from Robert Darnton? - "Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip."

Seth:
Has this person read Swift? Pope? Butler? Jeez -- I think a sense of history is needed. Some of our greatest writers not only _hit below the belt repeatedly_ as a means of agitating the Powers That Be but also did so at great and _careful_ length in prose and a couple hundred years (or more) before the Internet. The notion that critical inquiry has been _fundamentally_ changed by the advent of the blog is not entirely implausible, but certainly has to be approached with more care than Darnton shows in that one-off -- there _is_ a history to provocative literature. And that history illustrates that quite often there is significant substance beneath and behind the provocations, and that the forms of such provocations may change but the need for them does _not_.

Gary:
I would suggest Robert Darnton read blogs by Ron Silliman, Nada Gordon, Nick Piombino, Josh Corey, Rodney Koeneke, Juliana Spahr, Peter Culley, Heriberto Yepez, Lemon Hound, Johannes Göransson, Brian Kim Stefans, Brandon Brown, Linh Dinh, Anne Boyer, Laura Moriarty, or any of the other genuinely engaged poet bloggers out there and see if this idea holds up.

It may be generally true of blogs. But I've also noticed that people who make their living in print tend to "be suspicious" of the medium, more suspicious than is probably warranted.

Don:
Provocations aren't quite the same as "critical inquiry" are they?

Seth:
No, definitely not -- I meant intellectual provocations, the agitation of critical inquiry. My reading of history is that institutions and those empowered by them always "read" critical inquiry as a "provocation."

In fact I just found the full Darnton article, and (to his credit) it looks like his inclination is the same one as mine, above -- to go right to 18th c. England:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/18/blogging-now-and-then/

Don:

I adore almost all the folks Gary mentions, but am struck by how what they write wouldn't stand up very well in print. Just my 2 cents, and it's no put-down of what they do so very well, or of blogging. I'd say, still, that these things are different. And I bet if RD read those blogs, he'd come away feeling justified in his opinion. One look at the pigeonholing, and at the stuff in the comment boxes (on the blogs of those courageous enough, that is, to have them enabled)... Me, I love blogging, but find it different in kind from written forms of crit inq. Empirically, however, one could ask whether blogging is exhausting and as a form: exhausted.

"Institutions" = shorthand for... what, exactly??!!

Seth:
Don, we could take The New York Times as an example. It turns out -- this is just coincidence, I just noticed it -- that the subtitle of Darnton's own blog is "Roving thoughts and provocations from our writers." The Times is a journalistic institution -- it seeks to provoke, through thinking and inquiry, reaction by and discussion of larger institutions, like the White House, the United Nations, the CIA, and so on. But who's going to think through, and provoke discussion consequent to, the "thoughts and provocations" of Times journos [sic] like Darnton? There must always be a smaller fish -- just as we commonly say there must always be a larger one. If Darnton decries blogs I wonder if it isn't because he doesn't like having to look behind himself for a smaller fish, though as a member in good standing of The Grey Lady I can hardly see him being surprised that the ocean of criticism is vast and his reef is one of many. Don, we measure the depth of our belief in principles by setting them against the most trying examples -- like free speech for neo-Nazis. But we measure the depth of our commitment to an _Art_, like the Art of criticism, in the opposite way, by looking to our _best_ exemplars. Satire has both Pope and MAD Magazine; we look to Pope for value in the sub-genre, not Alfred E. Neuman. Likewise, as to blogging it would be fallacious to consider primarily or even largely those who comment in comment boxes -- which is not, actually, blogging -- instead of those, like Silliman, who have (however unevenly) kept discussions alive which weren't and aren't being had with sufficient regularity in the larger educational (wait for it!) institutions. :-)

P.S. And I think the "smallest" fora for critique always end up being those which are the most generally accessible -- printing a libel in 1710 was much easier than finding a bookseller. And yes, many of those libels were, well, libelous -- but as a form (and merely thinking of the form) they were also necessary to the operation of British culture and society during the Restoration, the Georgian Era and after. Without blogs print would be our only recourse, but there's the rub -- it would only be a recourse for a very small and select few, as print (like most mass media) is run in large part by conglomerates-cum-institutions.

Gary:
I think it's a complex situation and difficult to answer. For me, blogging is not exhausted as a form, but it has mutated into writing specifically for the format:

http://autretalk.blogspot.com/

http://bodegapop.blogspot.com

But Nick Piombino, for instance, published the first three months or so of his blog, Fait Accompli, which turns out to be a pretty great read in print. Some adjustments had to be made for print, but it holds up well.

He also just published Contradicta, which was a series that he originally was doing on his blog, and which I don't think he necessarily thought of as a print publication. It's actually better in print, I think.

I think as video, sound, picture, and other links become a regular feature of blogging--a phenomenon of the last few years--the writing has warped more towards writing-for-the-web. Which is of course very different from writing for print.

I don't think as a form it has exhausted itself; but I do see it evolving. As a form of social media, it does seem be getting outpaced, though.

I can think of lots of other web-to-print projects that were successful, not all of them originating as blogs (e.g., Aleksandar Zograf's Bulletins from Serbia, which were email blasts, but had they been written a few years later, probably would have been a blog--a great book, btw.)

Nada has put together a really terrific manuscript from her blog posts and I have always thought Ron would have put out a book of essays built from his blog by now.

Oh I forgot to mention Mike Kelleher's blog. He's doing a brilliant project on it, going through all of his books one at a time in alpha order and writing a memoir through that process. It's usually hilarious and very moving. I would totally buy the book version, should it ever be published.

Don:
Sina Queryas has also published a print version of her blog - on which she herself recently asked the very question of whether the blogging moment has passed: her answer is here.

J.S.A. Lowe:
Late to the party, don't add this in any event, but, my two pixels: when the medium is so fundamentally different, so is the artifact of its use—the trace left behind by its creation. I refer you to the idea of "online disinhibition," AKA why some of us behave so badly on comment threads (http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html).

Then there's my own agenda-free personal experience that writing and reading online are nothing like writing and reading print. Writing a blogpost isn't the same experience as writing a nonfiction essay; and I would even argue that different brain receptors are involved in its production—much in the same way that "Internet porn" bears no relation to having to leave one's home and interact with another human being in order to procure an actual magazine or for that matter even video (however much free-speech liberals would like to think all these instantiations of "porn" are the same). In other words, we're using "writing" to mean two fundamentally different activities (in terms of process/brain function) which happen to look very similar (perhaps because they both result in some accrual of text).

Not only would I not buy the book version of most blogs, I don't even read most blog posts completely and neither do most of you, because the hand-eye experience of reading online is qualitatively different, and forces us into a particular kind of skimming. It's just like any other superstimuli—we assume based on prior experiences that we have free choice in our consumption of it and participation in it, but it's like nothing we've ever encountered before, and we are ill-prepared to interrogate (much less combat) its pushes and pulls. Poetry blogging = giant painted cardboard female butterfly = bacon double-cheeseburger. And with that happy metaphor I hush up.

Seth:

I have to say I find that view hard to credit, as I, like many poets whose work some have read in print, write my poems on the same computer and using the same application and under the same environmental conditions that I write my blog-posts. Nor would I say that I read printed texts all the way through; what stands for blogs stands also for how most people read the printed word. In an age where, in fact, everything I've ever written that appeared in print--including prose journalism--was written in the same general manner as I write blog entries, I think it's an illusion to believe that when you read something in print you are somehow escaping the nefarious influence of online composition and arrangement of thought. The medium is different; to say it is "fundamentally" different is an impossibility so long as we are discussing transcendent language using as-ever perishable semantic marks, and a reading process that involves both the eyes and hands and human qualities like attention and patience.

I'll say again: comment threads are not blog-posts; analyzing comment threads through sociology is indeed wise, but to use flame-wars as a rhetorical fetish for analysis of online journalism, critique, and editorials (many of which appear on blogs and in a blog format) is a straw man at best.

I really think we're having multiple conversations here -- if the question is, is a blog-thread the same as a bar conversation, well obviously no; if the question is as I've stated it above, and as I think it was intended given the original quote Don offered, matters stand very differently I think. "Writing" as two different activities? -- well, it's been a long time since the majority of writers, or any class of persons, spent the _greater_ part of their writing time holding a pencil. Distinctions are being made here which simply don't withstand much scrutiny, unless we imagine ourselves in a different time and place, like 1978.

Gary:

I think, Jennifer, that there is some truth in what you say, particularly regarding the difference around the two media (print/web), but Seth is right, we have all (except for Clark Coolidge, perhaps) been writing on computer since the 80s.

Which greatly complicates your conclusions.

Also, my own agenda-free experience :) is that if I read someone's blog, I read it. I don't tend to visit blogs that I would just skim, unless it's because the person is foaming at the mouth about flarf, in which case I am there to grab the foam flecks to add it to future versions of this:

http://garysullivan.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-problems-with-flarf-after-david.html

:)

Are people completely unaware of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book?

Don:
Of course, we're aware of the Pillow Book, thanks to, um, Orientalism!

---
Further reading: José Saramago's blog - and Toby Lichtig's review, in the TLS of April 16, 2010, of the book derived from it, e.g., "This does does... prompt a wider question about the 'book of the blog' phenomenon, which risks forcing coherence on a body of writing that was never intended to be digested in this way."

See also: My previous post on "angry scatological" bloggolalia here and here.

Additional puny irony: my inclination to cut/paste this back/forth into my blog.

Pictured: drawings of the dodo.

Flannery O'Connor and the only chicken in the world that walks backwards

DO YOU REVERSE? (Click the pic to view the film!)

"When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

Rosemary M. Magee, Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Atlanta, 1987, p. 38.

A Love Note for Aram Saroyan, Artie Shaw, and my father

In 1967, my father brought home three LPs: Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, an Artie Shaw record, and an oddball disc by the Japan Self-Defense Force Marching Band (which he played for giggles, though he wasn't a big giggler). I remember being surprised at this mellow turn in his musical tastes, which had previously included The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and other reasonably hip (for his generation) stuff; when he was chipper, his aural pleasures included the Clancy Brothers, Theodore Bikel, Allan Sherman, Mickey Katz, and Gilbert & Sullivan. I was deeply impressed that my dad bought an Elektra sampler, "What's Shakin'?", that had the likes of Eric Clapton, the Lovin' Spoonful, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and Tom Rush, on it. (My older brother, by contrast, listened to the Tijuana Brass, aka The Square Beatles, and Enoch Light; when a friend of his brought the recently-released Revolver over for a spin, it had the effect of alienating my bro forever from rock music.)

My dad was not only of the folk music generation, but of the one that - in order to hear music - built its own audio equipment. This was not an audiophile activity; on the contrary, it was probably because he didn't have any money. One of my earliest memories was of the months my mom and dad spent building a Heathkit amplifier, to which was connected, eventually a huge black Gerrard record changer. What fascinated me about this rig was the speaker. Everybody listened to mono in those days - stereo was exotic, and audiophile - and so my dad somehow obtained an enormous metal speaker. It had to be mounted in something, so out of nails and wood he built a gigantic box. His friend Clarence came over and we all marvelled as the connections were soldered and completed, and he was at long last able to fire the whole thing up. The speaker bounded and bounced and it was the biggest, richest sound I heard until years later, in a Memphis recording studio, I heard playbacks of the master tape of a Jeff Beck album being produced there (the so-called "Orange" album, produced by Steve Cropper, for those who care).

Anyway, one day I faked being sick in order to stay home from school. My parents both worked, so I had the house pretty much to myself. I did two things. First, I took down a box of Betty Crocker cake mix from the pantry and tried to bake a cake. This was a disaster, and I had a lot of cleaning and disposing to do before my mom came home from work at lunch to check on me. Second, I put the S&G album on the record player (by now a newly-purchased KLH... stereo!). I hated the rewrite of "Scarborough Fair" - such was the folk more-or-less purist in me - but the weird sad pastiche of "Silent Night/The Seven O'Clock News" grabbed me, particularly the part about Lenny Bruce, whom I was secretly discovering, and what sixties kid could resist fluff like "Cloudy" or "The 59th Street Bridge Song?" The clumsy rock/Dylan satires I skipped completely. Oddly enough, today I really like PSR&T, but on that morning I thought the whole proceedings dire and fey. So, I put on the Artie Shaw. And my mind was, as everybody liked to say back then, blown!

The intricate arrangements, Shaw's heroic soloing, and (on some tracks) Buddy Rich's out-of-control drumming, complete with shouting, astounded me. We actually already had someplace an old 45 of Shaw's milestone (and, he would later complain, millstone) hit, "Begin the Beguine," a classic, still played on the radio all the time. But hearing track after track of Artie Shaw made me understand music in, let's say, three dimensions. All my life from that day onward, I adored the music of Artie Shaw, and when I read about him - war hero, celebrity who renounced all his fame at its very peak, philosopher, ladies' man, and a kid who rose from a poor Jewish slum (he was born Avraham Ben-Yitzhak Arshawsky) - I found even more to admire. Not only that: he was a writer, penning several spirited, frank, and rueful memoirs. There's a new bio of him, as hit happens, about which there's a swell write-up at the New York Times. (A digression within a digression: according to the Times piece, and this is salutary stuff for poets, "A musician he identified only as 'a well-known clarinet player' once asked if he was ever afraid he’d miss that fiendish altissimo high C that ended his showpiece 'Concerto for Clarinet,' always the climax of his live sets. 'I said, "Put your hand on the table." He did, and I said, "Raise your index finger." He did. I said, "Were you afraid you’d miss?" "Well, no," he said, and then, "You mean, it’s like that?" "If it isn’t," I said, "don’t mess with it.”'")

Well, in this day and age you don't, I guess, go around blathering about Artie Shaw to be cool, so I never do. I built my own musical tastes on my dad's enormous record collection and moved into my own direction - playing Memphis power pop in half-baked bands was the culmination and end of it all - seldom looking back. My father wasn't the most attentive father one could wish for, but he gave me a roof over my head and a love of music; we didn't much get along, I'm sorry to say. Sorry because not long ago he suffered a pretty catastrophic health problem; visiting him in the ICU, I had to go through some classic Iron John emotional acrobatics to get straight in my mind and heart what I felt and thought about our long estrangement. Unable to speak, drifting in and out of consciousness, he was spared such belated self-reflectiveness - but time passes slow at someone's hospital bedside, so I had plenty to contemplate, believe me.

You've read all this goop so far and you're asking: what's this got to do with poetry, or Aram Saroyan, right?

Well, two things happened back on April 1st. One was I got a call at work to come home fast to say goodbye to my father: it didn't look like he was going to make it, though as of this writing, he's hanging onto his life. And the other was that, having been in a brief but very gratifying email correspondence with Aram Saroyan about various things - including Artie Shaw! - I received a lovely inscribed copy of his fabulous book, Artie Shaw Talking. As I tossed things frantically together for my flight, I took it with me - the only reading material I had the presence of mind to gather. And as I sat in the airport, I read it with joy and admiration.

Of this little book, Saroyan recently wrote:

"It recently dawned on me that the volumes of collected poems popular these days in trade publishing are often a literary auto-da-fe. Are there a dozen people who have read The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara or The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg from cover to cover? On the other hand, there’s no doubt that Lunch Poems and Howl, first and still published by San Francisco’s City Lights Books, have been prized and pored over by throngs of happy readers for decades.

For more than ten years I’ve had a small manuscript in my files called ‘Artie Shaw Talking’ – stories I transcribed from recordings of conversations with Shaw made two decades ago when we were neighbours in Southern California. The other night I decided to publish it. I uploaded everything to lulu.com, checked over the formatting and clicked ‘publish’. I then ordered three copies of the 64-page paperback. The price, including shipping and handling, came to less than thirty dollars. It took about an hour, all told.

A month earlier I’d done the same thing with a chapter from an unpublished memoir, and sent it out instead of a Christmas card. I received an unusually high number of thank-you notes surprisingly quickly. And a prime reason for that response, I’m certain, is that the piece could be read in under an hour, making it a comfortable fit between a blog entry or news story on the one hand and a normal-length book on the other."

To which he added, quoting Jack Kerouac: A book should be good companionship.

My trip home was very, very sad. But Saroyan's book afforded me the best possible companionship there could be, under the circumstances. I've written this blog post as a love letter to Aram Saroyan - whose gentle humanity and whose poems buoyed me up at this important moment of my life - and to Artie Shaw - and, of course, to my father; I hope my dad and I might someday be able to talk, for the first time, about the music we had in common all these years, about how music led me to poetry - but maybe that's just a fantasy. For now, and for my dad, for Aram (one poet helping the soul of another), and for you, my reader.... here's some Artie Shaw:

And here's a preview of Aram's book: