Good with ice cream on it!!

"The now ritual praise for the world (or microcosm) of the small press poetry pamphlet resembles the softly murmurous approbation that greets the arrival of a perfectly baked apple pie."

[Full text here; scroll down.]

You can't say what you don't know

Q: I have a new book I'm writing called, "No More Wire Hangers: Life Lessons from Mommy Dearest"? It's a book that features specific lines of dialog and scenes from the movie and what I learned from them, how they can be applied in real life. Do I have to have permission from the studio to do it? How can I get around the whole copyright issues and still do the book?

I sure hope it's ok to quote these words from the Galley Cat, where you (re)appropriators can read up on the potential legal pitfalls of your poetical technique!

*
Recently on Steven Fama's blog, Curtis Faville expressed the following about the excerpt from Ron Silliman's "Revelator" featured in the June issue of Poetry:

"The most troubling aspect of Ron's work over the last 30 years is its dogged sameness.

Here's a man who taught himself all the finer points of verse, tried them all out for size, and then wholeheartedly rejected all of them in favor of a poly-contextual prose style that no one without a degree in advanced literary criticism is likely to fully appreciate.

Why?

The new work in Poetry is exactly like all the rest of the work in The Alphabet. I can understand wanting to be consistent and being comfortable enough inside a familiar style to want to keep using it, but for someone with as perspicacious a mind as Ron possesses, it's really astonishing to me that he never strays from the narrow path.

It's almost as if he's now become shy of writing in any other form, for fear that someone might accuse him of capitulating to a tired formality. It's like a program of avoidance."

To which I replied:

"I'm surprised that Curtis finds a 'dogged sameness' in Ron's new work. (And I'm not defending it because we published it, honest!) For me, it's quite different from what's in The Alphabet. The structure of the five-word lines, tipping his hat to the excerpts from Zukofsky's "A" that first appeared in the magazine, for instance; and what seems to me a big-hearted, panoramic look back at the figures and landscapes of his life and work. When I saw "Revelator" - and as Steven has rightly pointed out, it's a far longer work than we ran in June - my eyes just lit up. For me, at least, it represents quite a development in Ron's work, even as much as it's continuous with what came before. Your mileage, of course, may vary."

And then... I stumbled upon a tweet from The Paris Review with the text, "All your poems are in a sense one poem." Hm, so did I speak too soon? The words emanate from The Ghost of Robert Lowell, and are from this famous interview; here's another bit of it:

INTERVIEWER, AKA FREDERICK SEIDEL:

You said that most of the writers you’ve known have been against the grain. What did you mean?

LOWELL:

When I began writing most of the great writers were quite unpopular. They hadn’t reached the universities yet, and their circulation was small. Even Eliot wasn’t very popular then. But life seemed to be there. It seemed to be one of those periods when the lid was still being blown. The great period of blowing the lid was the time of Schöenberg and Picasso and Joyce and the early Eliot, where a power came into the arts which we perhaps haven’t had since. These people were all rather traditional, yet they were stifled by what was being done, and they almost wrecked things to do their great works—even rather minor but very good writers such as Williams or Marianne Moore. Their kind of protest and queerness has hardly been repeated. They’re wonderful writers. You wouldn’t see anyone as strange as Marianne Moore again, not for a long while.

*
Before you go off on tired old confessional-poetry-yadda-yadda, let's think on this, instead: "Perhaps it is that certain languages are less ego-centric, linguistically speaking..." One hopes so; read more in this fascinating blogpost by Dr. Michael Shaughnessy, a professor of German who specializes in computer assisted language learning and visual representations of culture. He notes that -

Apparently, the only universal content in regards to spatial perception in language appears to be the direction 'up' since it is a function of the gravity that we all feel, regardless of our cultural or linguistic background.

Geography, culture, and even technology shape how we view space in our world. In addition to variance among cultures, there is constant change within languages. Additionally, it is not solely a function of this 'lens of language'; it is both a function of our language and our experiences. For example, the exposure to mathematics and science has an impact on how we perceive space.

*
Hm, well, what happens when languages jumble together? As Tony Judt says in the NYRB: "Cultural insecurity begets its linguistic doppelgänger." Yes.

An excerpt:

"I was seduced by the sheen of English prose at its evanescent apogee. This was the age of mass literacy whose decline Richard Hoggart anticipated in his elegiac essay The Uses of Literacy (1957). A literature of protest and revolt was rising through the culture. From Lucky Jim through Look Back in Anger, and on to the “kitchen sink” dramas of the end of the decade, the class-bound frontiers of suffocating respectability and “proper” speech were under attack. But the barbarians themselves, in their assaults on the heritage, resorted to the perfected cadences of received English: it never occurred to me, reading them, that in order to rebel one must dispense with good form...

Sheer rhetorical facility, whatever its appeal, need not denote originality and depth of content.

All the same, inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,” above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express their opinions freely and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded will favor independent thought...

When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else...

*
Words can lose their integrity in a big way if you suffer from a stroke, as Marie Ponsot recently did. Large chunks of memory, poetry, and erudition vanished for her, causing her to discover - in a terribly real sense - that "you can't say what you don't know." Her hunt for syntax is no poetry game. See what she does with it in this amazing NYT article, viz-

Some big memories, she thinks, are gone — “stones at the bottom of the river,” she called them — and certain categories of words throw her. She consistently swaps pronouns for men and women — which, she noted with delight, some people mistake as ironic commentary on gender identity.

“You’re talking about a guy and ‘she’ comes out,” Ms. Ponsot said. “People think, ‘That’s a fancy thought’ — and no, no I’m not thinking at all, I’m just talking.”

She also slips on units of time. “I’ll say, I haven’t eaten in three weeks,” Ms. Ponsot said. “I really mean three years.”

She paused. “I’m messing that up,” she said.

Speaking of heaven...

Please visit Todd Swift's blog, Eyewear, where the proprietor was kind enough to feature a new poem of mine, "Looking Over My Shoulder." Click here for my vision of the here-, there-, and everywhere after.

Omens, Amens, and Amends

On April Fool's Day I found myself in a hospital in Memphis at the side of my gravely ill father. From that day until last Thursday, my family and I were never quite certain whether or not he would recover; though the odds were slim, there was always, one thought, hope. Despite some reasonably good early strides, his health declined to the point where he had to be moved to a hospice. He wasn't there long.

I was probably more pessimistic, as is my bent, than my brothers or my mom; I attributed it not only to being a middle child and inheriting a few persistent dark genes, but to having been a devout reader of Beckett. Indeed, when my father emerged from the fog of anesthesia and pain, one of the first things he muttered was a gravelly "What's the point?" Not a literary guy himself, he already knew - being a scientist by profession - anything Beckett's work might have had to say to him, albeit in a different vocabulary; B. would have understood a man like my dad. In any case, when my father could, with much assistance, sit upright at last in his ICU bed, it really did feel like a defiant miracle. Perhaps it was, if only a brief one. Over the course of my two trips home to be with him, I felt that he and I had made our piece; but I also had a distinct impression - not quite a fear - that when I said goodbye to him after the second one I would not see him again. Like most pessimists, I told myself I was just being a pessimist.

When my brother called last weekend to tell me that it had become clear that there was no hope for my father's survival, I did, thought, and felt the things one does in such circumstances. And I struggled with my feelings about our past together, which was not placid. He and I had little in common, but there was one thing we shared - and we did because I got it directly from him: an insane love of music. One of my earliest memories happens to be of my dad's ritual of listening to folk music every Sunday morning. And one of the first things I ever laughed at was a recording of a Theodore Bikel concert which began with the introduction, "I'd like to begin with a song called 'Goodbye.'" The song was a Russian tune, "Proschai," which indeed means farewell. Late Wednesday night I downloaded the song as a kind of tribute to my dad, and listened to it a half dozen times before I went to bed.

At around 4 am Thursday, the phone rang, and my wife and I knew exactly what it was: my brother with the news that my dad had just died. "Proschai" was still in my head, bewildered and half-asleep as I was. It was a little eerie, but then something else happened: a stack of my poetry books down in my basement office collapsed with a thunderous thud. My dad was not a poetry fan, and once - concerned that I was turning into some kind of beatnik - said to me, "What do you want to do, sit around and write poetry all your life?" It was not a hurtful occasion, because my immediate thought was (for the very first time): yes.... that's exactly what I would like to do!

Within hours I was down in Memphis, sitting in a conference room of the "High Point Funeral Home," situated disconcertingly next to a Sonic Drive-In. For religious reasons, the funeral would have to take place before the Sabbath, which meant some time on Friday: the very next day. We left the place in a hot June heatwave haze, passing by sample tombstones inscribed with things like: "Passed into Jesus' Glory" and "He was a Faithful Friend." The latter struck me as quite a nice epitaph, though I only slowly realized that the home also arranged pet funerals: the monument had the features of a dog carved into it.

On Friday, the limousine to the cemetery was late: we were late to his own funeral. And the moment we arrived, the sky darkened, the wind whipped up furiously, and a tornado grazed by. The memorial service, hastily arranged to take place under a gazebo, could scarcely be heard for the crashing rain, Hamlet-like thunder, and sirens. I'm almost positive that every time the word "family" wafted through, particularly emphatic peals of thunder struck, and the rain picked up in intensity. But at the conclusion, when my family and I moved out to be at graveside.... the rain and wind ceased, the sun brightly emerged, and the sky turned blue.

*
My dad, as I say, was a scientist, but that doesn't mean he didn't believe in the inexplicable; and like Beckett, he could laugh both grimly and heartily at the turns things take, for inherent in everything is a kind of logic, even if it's not our logic. My brothers and my mom are convinced he would have found this very funny, but I'm not so sure. He had reasons for displeasure with some of us at the service, and perhaps was expressing it in the only vocabulary nature provides someone deprived of his own body.

I guess all these things are coincidental, though I have my doubts. Because one other happenstance is that I had just downloaded a free e-book of John Aubrey's unusual and disturbing Miscellanies upon Various Subjects, which has chapter titles like "Of Fatalities of Families and Places," "Ostenta; or Portents," "Omens," "Blows Invisible," and "Knockings." Aubrey guilelessly collected stories, and is better-known for the ones compiled in his Brief Lives - but the "various subjects" are no less fascinating than the lives of the poets and politicians. One paragraph leaped out at me:

Three or four days before my father died, as I was in my bed about
nine o'clock in the morning perfectly awake, I did hear three distinct
knocks on the beds-head, as if it had been with a ruler or ferula.

I'm not going to make too much of this, and you can read Aubrey yourself, so long as you keep your wits about you.

In the end, nothing could save my dad; but Aubrey collected miracle cures, and I read them too late to try them out. One is like an early visual poem, and it gets rid of ague:

A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
 A B R A
  A B R
   A B
    A

Aubrey is careful to add: "Write this following spell in parchment, and wear it about your neck. It must be writ triangularly."

I'm afraid that in the end medicine proved as dubious in its effectiveness as the cures described in the Miscellanies, though the latter are much, much less expensive. I mean, this is surely worth a try:

To cure a beast that is sprung, (that is) poisoned.

It lights mostly upon Sheep.

Take the little red spider, called a tentbob, (not so big as a great pins-head) the first you light upon in the spring of the year, and rub it in the palm of your hand all to pieces: and having so done, piss on it, and rub it in, and let it dry; then come to the beast and make water in your hand, and throw it in his mouth. It cures in a matter of an hour's time. This rubbing serves for a whole year, and it is no danger to the hand. The chiefest skill is to know whether the beast be poisoned or no.

*
I hardly ever post anything about myself on Facebook, but I did update my status to say: "Back from my father's funeral. "Your chair is empty. You will be missed." The quoted bit comes from the the Bible: 1 Samuel 20:18. The eulogy for my father included the fact, which I had forgotten somehow, that in my family everybody has his or her own place at the dinner table, and that even when one is absent, nobody else must sit in that seat.

It's Father's Day now, and my dad, who was a king in our household, is not seated among us. I find that last bit of timing to be especially painful, of course. Yet having ventured that bit of confessional verse yielded rich comforts - I have received dozens of lovely messages from every corner of the poetry universe. The words of my fellow poets have provided me powerful comfort, reassuring me that words, our desires to work in them all day long, are worth a very great deal. The healing strength of words is as strangely unaccountable a fact of living as anything else under the sun. My father would have understood and appreciated that.

Farewell, Father. Proschai!

*
One last omen. This is from a message Katy Evans-Bush wrote to me:

"It might even have been because of your news; I had a dream this morning that the phone rang, and it was my dad, and he said, 'Look, I know you've got the best blog in the world! But I don't want to have to read it, I want the real you. When can we have lunch?'

So if that WAS because of you, thanks - it was good to hear from him."

Aubrey would have added that one to his collection.

(Written in haste and emotion, June 20, 2010. The poem for the day today on the Allhambra Poetry Calendar is, of all things, Tennyson's great funeral poem, "Crossing the Bar")

News That Doesn't Stay News, or: Suck a Little Out of Class Bias

I'm "rethinking poetics," too!

Any discussion of the role of poetry in American... culture... should take into account its uses therein, viz-

This news story,"Allure & Fox News: Beauty Magazine Celebrates 'Foxy News Channel' With Poems, Pics." Turns out Allure magazine is celebrating Fox News' anchorwomen in its July issue, explaining, "with its bevy of babes, the network should be called the Foxy News Channel." You get to see Martha MacCallum, Jamie Colby, Jane Skinner, Courtney Friel, Megyn Kelly, Alisyn Camerota and Gretchen Carlson "feted in poetry form." Here are a few examples of those fascinating feats of feting:

Their hair, it's clear, would hardly budge,
Nor would their makeup even smudge
If they were set upon a luge-- [sic]
They'd laugh and cry: "We're going rouge!"
Sure, Rachel Maddow has the smarts
But can she work her giggly parts?
The obvious, let it be said:
Their favorite power suits are red.

On Colby, the magazine bard rhapsodizes (warning - NSFW):

The dress so short, the smile so glad,
Is that her cohost or her dad?

And on Friel:

Fox cameras never miss a chance
To show that she's not wearing pants.

*
You didn't think I'd forget Bloomsday, did you? (File under Kneejerk Poetics!) Well, here's a little B'day story: on this day fifty-six years ago -

... a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a recession: “Happy Bloom’s Day.”

You know how everyone's discussing how valuable the humanities are, now that they're being slashed from the curriculum again? Check out Wes Davis's op-ed piece in the Times:

The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.

In 1952, Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee. Together with representatives of the university, Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education. There were lectures and seminars led by scholars from Penn and other colleges in the area — 550 hours of course work in total, and more reading, Baltzell reported, than the average graduate student was asked to do in a similar time frame.

At the same time, the institute’s curriculum provided for the sorts of experiences that were once the accidental concomitants of a liberal education: visits to museums and art galleries, orchestral concerts, day trips meant to foster thoughtful attention to the history and architecture of the city that surrounded the Penn campus, as well as that of New York and Washington.

Unfortunately, it didn't always take hold.

Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival.

When the students read “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark 1950 study of their own social milieu, they didn’t just discuss the book, they discussed it with its author, David Riesman. They tangled with a Harvard expert over the elusive poetry in Ezra Pound’s “Pisan Cantos,” which had sent one of the Bell students to bed with a headache and two aspirin.

*
The trouble with the new rethinking is that it resembles the old rethinking.

Yet here's a genuninely new idea from Metropolis magazine: don't waste former industrial spaces on artists, but use them for light industry, instead. We learn that "Rust Belt cities have reached out to the creative-class pied piper Richard Florida to teach them how to remake themselves as magnets for affluent professionals." But Metropolis's Karrie Jacobs muses:

Every time I see an old industrial building newly converted into artists’ studios or luxury condos, I wonder: Wouldn’t it be better to convert that old factory into a bunch of small, technologically adroit new factories? What if the Ford Foundation announced grants based on the notion that manufacturers can spur growth in their surrounding areas? Isn’t that how economic development used to happen?

... Maybe Richard Florida has promoted the wrong creative class. In his model, artists beget coffee bars that make formerly dreary neighborhoods attractive to real estate developers, who lure lawyers and accountants into luxury loft buildings with names like “the Shoe Factory.” Maybe there’s another model, one that sucks a little of the class bias out of the formula and privileges artisans over artists, blue-collar jobs over white-collar ones. Give enough people who are passionate about making things the stability to invest in equipment and hire workers, and you might slow, or even reverse, the death spiral.

*
There's no such thing as great poets or poetry, as we all know. In fact, as Katy-Evans Bush's dark-horse candidate for Oxford Professor of Poetry puts it, "there might be a mute and inglorious Milton living next door, so how can we say what’s best?" (Not next door to me, I assure you.)

Best thing about Katy's blog post, though is this clip:



It's from Peter Whitehead's landmark documentary of the Albert Hall Poetry Festival in 1965, Wholly Communion, which, Katie says, "sadly you can no longer get on Ubuweb, but happily you can get it on DVD as it has been reissued by the good old BFI." The Festival was the Monterey Pop or Woodstock of the poetry world, to be a little anachronistic. Well, why not be anachronistic - we're all taking the long view, & rethinking things.

*
But just plain thinking works best, and here's a great example: Ron Silliman's answers to ten questions on poets and technology. His responses are some of the clearest, most cant-free remarks I've seen made by an American poet in ages - chock full of fresh and good ideas. Reading it gives me heart.

And speaking of technology, here's an inevitable headline: "Poet Lands Publishing Deal after Posting on Twitter." Full story, albeit short one, here. Of course, the typewriter, as Ron points out, was a great workhorse of ingenious literary technology; collectors can bid on Jack Kerouac's last machine... click here for details.

History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

Pictured: Marjorie Perloff's shoes, from the Rethinking Poetics conference, via Ben Friedlander

Get LIT

This past weekend, I got to participate again in the annual Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest. Back in the days when print was more, as they say, viable, many book publishers and printing firms made their home in the impressively redbricked Printers Row; now, needless to say, publishing yields some of Chicago's greatest job losses. Indeed, the Lit Fest was rather smaller this year than it has been in the past, yet it was lively and extremely well-attended - even during the rainy hours, and despite so much energy already having been devoted on to all the Blackhawks festivities in town.

I was on a panel held at the Arts & Poetry Stage (i.e., the small venue in the corner next to the generator): “Chicago’s Multicultural Publishing Pioneers." We discussed what local publishers are doing to bring literature, news, and ideas from around the world to audiences in Chicago and beyond. On the panel with me were Fernando Diaz, an investigative reporter and Managing Director of Hoy, Chicago’s only daily Spanish-language newspaper; Jochy Herrera, essayist and founding member of contratiempo; Martin Riker, Associate Editor of Dalkey Archive Press, a premier publisher of international literature in the U.S.; and me. Danielle Chapman skilfully moderated. I think the audio from the panel will go online soon; if so, I'll post a link. We recently held a Poetry event in collaboration with contratiempo which Hoy helped us publicize - and there's no doubt much more to work together on.

This year's fest (motto: GET LIT!) featured the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Colson Whitehead, Travis Nichols, Eula Biss, and other exciting literary, well, lights; but what was also lots of fun was browsing all the used book and other vendors, this year augmented by folks selling furniture, of all things, for instance a lounge chair with a massage thingy in it. Well, if print isn't dead I guess you still need a nice chair to read it in! There was also the Trib Living Room, a space decked out, yes, like a living room, in which you could meet your favorite Tribute writers. I didn't go, but the idea reminded me a little of the Marina Abramović's "The Artist at Present," in which you kinda sit around with an artist. But I browsed and browsed, and managed to pick up some nice pre-owned books (can't do that in the iBook store!).

My haul included a bound facsimile reprint of the first volume, ca. 1924, of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan's legendary American Mercury, published almost a hundred years ago (during the heyday of Printers Row, come to think of it.) When I was a kiddo, growing up in the Sahara of the Bozart, i.e., Tennessee, I worshiped these guys, and even thought that all writers had a kind of Smart Set tone; I guess it wasn't until I went to college that I learned otherwise. Anyway, what a treat this thing is. The very first thing that caught my eye was a swell full-page ad for something called AMMO - "ammonia in powdered form." It was "a refreshing bath aid for keen out-of-door fellows" that promised to make you "fit as a fiddle." You dump this "man's bath aid" into your bath and it "vanishes all odors" and gives your tired feet a "new lease of life." "Refreshing -- O'boy!" I don't suppose they make it anymore, and ammo means something rather different these days.

Obviously, the tome is full of literary treasure, as well. Mencken famously advocated the writing of Sherwood Anderson, and there's a terrific story of his in one issue called "Caught." Here's a strange little bit from it:

I was walking in the streets of the city, that evening of November. There was snow on the roofs of buildings, but it had all been scraped off the roadways. There is a thing happens to American men. It is pitiful. One walks along, going slowly in the streets, and when one looks sharply at one's fellows something dreadful comes into the mind. There is a thing happens to the backs of the necks of American men. There is this sense of something drying, getting old without having ripened. The skin does something. One becomes conscious of the back of one's own neck and is worried. "Might not all our lives ripen like fruit - drop at the end, full-skinned and rich with color, from the tree of life, eh?" When one is in the country one looks at a tree. "Can a tree be a dead dried-up thing while it is still young? Can a tree be a neurotic?" one asks.

And then there are things like the editors' swell "Clinical Notes," e.g., "Criticism in America has always suffered from ward politics."

All a bit laddish, to be sure. Well, it only cost me $6.50 - cheaper than an e-book.

*
It was extremely nice of Steven Fama to blog about Ron Silliman's return to the pages of Poetry. I would like to thank him - and want to add that our July/August issue will not feature, as Steven says, a portfolio of work by Robert Pinsky, but a libretto he wrote for a performance piece about, well, meat and machines. It is rather different from what you might expect. Oh, and I think Steven's being a bit hard on Coach Wooden. In any case, these are cavils, and I am always grateful for Steven's thoughts; he really keeps folks honest like nobody else!

Pictured: Destruction of the shed at Dearborn Station, near Printers Row, Chicago

Please don't encourage the afflatus!

If Keats is to be the ideal poet, ideal poetry too readily becomes a tissue of affectionate descriptions of nice things interrupted by occasional complaints that the real world is insufficiently productive of those nice things, and if any pupil should wonder what the dales of Arcardy have got to do with him, then the answer is that poetry deals with 'the world of the imagination', i.e. not with the real world.

[...]

To exalt into greatness one whose achievement was actually that of an often delightful, if often awkward, decorative poet may have, as was suggested above, harmful consequences. Any presumption that Keats might in time have become a major artist is cast in doubt by the fact that it is unpromising theories about poetry that derive from defects of character, quite as much as bad influences and the results of illness, which vitiate his existing work.

Click here to read the entire essay, and to discover who its author was!

*
"A man can not only smell roses...but he can and does and ought to pluck roses and he can predicate of roses such and such. He can make a signum of roses. He can make attar of roses. He can garland them and make anathemata of them."

--David Jones, Epoch and Artist

Pictured: A flatus. (Wikipedia on afflatus: "not to be confused with flatulence.")

The husband is an arcade

Bolaño says it is more important to read than to write. It is important to stop writing and read Madame Bovary and Trois Contes. It's less important to take our a comma and replace it than to cut blocks without air for pyramids.

In reading Emma, as in Don Quixote, don't become superior to heroine and hero.

Trilling was right to say an unflawed hero means a fairy tale--and that is the glory of Sentimental Education and Salammbô, the Goncourt brothers are flawless and for the court; Emma takes her poison as the very flawed victim of her self.

Don Quixote didn't read enough. Dulcinea NEVER appears on stage, except in a dunning dream. Dulcinea is irresistible poison like a book. The husband is an arcade.

-- David Shapiro

***

Robert Creeley, on being sentimental:


*
In the world of the Zohar, dolls were not permitted. The Child plays with the letters of an alphabet and Logos is the creator of the world. Man is to take his reality from, to express his unity in, the letter. But this letter is, like the doll, alive to the mind.

-- Robert Duncan from “The H.D. Book,” soon to be published in its entirety as volume one in The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan, University of California Press; excerpt here

Action, Not Really

Action, Not Really = Complaining about oil spills while driving. iPhone and iPad excitement despite "hell factory." Fake poetry "wars" whilst real ones fester. AmPo egos & ageist crap whilst the planet glugs. So it goes...

*

From Aram Saryoyan's "Letter to the New York School" -

What I have to say is simple, but I think it's true. In my opinion, the work being done right now by many of you who are my contemporaries is of a high quality in almost every dimension but one. Perhaps two - at least two words come to mind, but perhaps the two words are one. The two words I'm thinking of are honesty and sincerity. It seems to me that these are the two qualities most subject to abuse in the work of the New York School. I realize immediately of course that my very mention of these two words constitutes and abuse of the aesthetic with which you have now so completely identified yourselves, but I do so without really fearing the consequence. To be considered a crackpot or a cornball by the New York School would only place me with the mass of humankind in the eye of its aesthetic, and I don't mind the association at all. I only hope I'm worthy of it. At the age of thirty, the whole question of uniqueness becomes a little absurd - if one is alive at this age, one is inescapably among one's brothers and sisters, dependent on them for help in one form or another in simply getting through.

The point is the work I'm referring to was simply not written for humankind. It's like a machine constructed with absolutely no purpose in mind for it and immediately released on the world at large as if it were the gift of the ages, all rewards in itself, etc... I find it harder and harder to see the point of it all...

As one who once considered himself in the vanguard of writing as writing, it is difficult for me to describe my feelings when confronted by a new generation of writers who are dedicated not to an exploration of any particular literary dimension I can identify beyond a snotty tone of voice. I know this isn't something I ever had in mind.

Beyond that, there are a number of other identifiable trends, which I would characterize briefly as: 1) Poems that prove how smart I am; 2) Poems that prove what a master of rhetoric I am; 3) Poems that prove I am a dope addict; and 4) Poems that just generally prove how hard I am to understand in any way...

I am a writer because I desire to communicate with my fellow man and woman and child and writing is one avenue open to me to do this. As I experience more of life, my respect for it grows, and it is impossible for me to regard it, and anyone else in it, as the subject or object of any kind of literary exercise. It is an experience that is bigger and more profound that any telling turn of phrase or immaculate run-on sentence. It is quite simply real. Not brilliant, not arcane, not sarcastic - but alive, and in just being alive more meaning than we could ever hope to fathom. The most we could hope for, I believe, is an honest and sincere accounting of our experiences as members of this miracle of being alive in time.

-- ca. 1974

Reprinted in Door to the River: Essays & Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age (Black Sparrow/David R. Godine, 2010) - which also includes Aram's notorious review, first published in Poetry, of Zuk's A 1-12 and A 13-21.

Cf. Zuk on sincerity & objectification, Poetry., v. 37, no. 5.

The Great Scorer; and On Being Questioned about a Poetry Book

Even the most casual sports fan will know the name John Wooden - but not many sports fans will necessarily know how much the Coach loved poetry and felt that it contributed to his outlook on - and success in - life. His players knew about it, that's for sure - many of his exhortations to them took the form of verse, and he always emphasized his love for the English language. Well, he passed away on June 4th. As it happens, he was a writer himself, and one of his last pieces was about loving poetry; look for it in the July/August issue of Poetry, but you can preview the piece by clicking here.

RIP, Coach.

*
One of the things I did in the UK was visit Paul Keegan at Faber & Faber to talk about my critical edition of Bunting, now scheduled to be published next year. Paul loaded me up with some wonderful books to carry home - there's nothing I love more than carrying lotsa poetry books, and so even though he offered to ship them to me, I lugged 'em back to the US with pleasure and gratitude. One book was gigantic - the letters of Louis MacNeice, which will not, apparently, be published in the States; here's a pretty accurate review of it.

Funny story about this. At Heathrow Airport on my way back home, two security agents pulled me out of the line and sent me off to be searched and questioned. The reason? The MacNeice book was so large that it didn't fit into my backpack, so I'd hand-carried it. The security folks thought it was odd that I was holding onto a book as if it were so precious. So, they took it from me, turned it upside-down and shook it... removed the dust-jacket and held it up to the light... flipped back and forth through its many hundreds of dense pages... and finding nothing alarming, politely returned it to me. A poet's letters were the object of suspicion - unread! Good thing, too, or they'd have discovered how close Louis was with the infamous art historian and Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt! (They also looked through my other stuff, of course, but not nearly as thoroughly.) After about fifteen minutes of this, I was allowed to go to the boarding area. Who knew?!

Anyway, that's a photo of MacNeice at Oxford, where I lectured on how the history of poetry editing has inflected the ways in which we think of modernism. As far as I know, no secret agents were in attendance there at St. John's!

Pan without Cake: On Not Being a Writer "Under-40" Worth Watching

Pan without Cake

The talking birds dance backwards without showing off.
I can remember old Fred by his cough.
(Fred Dupee, wise in his age, definitely worth watching at 60.
Merce at the end better than anybody to watch.
Pablo at the end none such and almost never a botch.
Hugh MacDiarmid drinking in Scots his Scotch.
Rodin scampering to Cambodia at seventy.
Be kind to the old dog whose name is whiskey.)

-- David Shapiro, to Don Share

Why does poetry suck?

"So why is poetry such a magnet for suck? Perhaps it is something inherent to the genre, which therefore dooms the practice to wherever the Macarena went. Let’s try to muster a definition then, despite Samuel Johnson’s famous warning, 'To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the definer to be a real asshole for trying.'”

Read more: http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/books/86061/why-everyone-hates-poetry#ixzz0pnb68sFr

Pictured: The River Suck

Even more irritable reaching...

Some time ago, I invented the rubric "Kneejerk Poetics" to cover all the obligatory platitudes and shibboleths that we automatically receive as wisdom relating to poetry; examples by the score can be found in the comment stream to my early Harriet post on the subject (as well as here and here).

Though much additional investigation remains to be done, I'm pleased to see Michael Theune's demolition of our rote obssession with "negative capability" and Katherine Duncan-Jones's weariness with "sunny invitations" to explicate sonnets.

And here's a lovely bit of irritability:

"Because I am old, I can see how little publication in a particular place actually means in terms of endorsing the quality of the work. And it would be dreadful if a small number of editors and publishers (who can be very lazy) engrossed all the excellent writing.

" (Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin)

&

This, from Alice Notley: "Everybody tries to pin everything down right now. It seems to be more important to pin things down than to write the poems."