Off to the boat show!

The Laurel Review at AWP: Table G14

If you’re at AWP this week, please stop by The Laurel Review table: G14

See the new issue, with work from an array of most excellent writers, as well as our brand new chapbook, Whither Weather, by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. This is the very limited edition with a typo, get them while you can (before we fix it next week).  

As well, TLR subscriptions are cheap right now.  One year (two issues) for an insane $5.00.  Two years (four issues) for $10.00 plus a free chapbook. 

You can also stop by just to say hello.  It’s a lonely crowded west sometimes.  I promise I’m fever-free and non-contagious. 

Here are four poems from Whither Weather to get you in the AWP book-buying mood:

Elizabeth Clark Wessel

Brief on Brevity

The leaf-strewn pool emptying out, the ice

sculpture of the happy couple, and

the iceberg, England-size, drifting (Where

else?) northward. All of this and more. Or

more than all of this. The drink warms up,

waters down, a slice of lemon perched

on its rim, a cocktail napkin getting soaked.

When I try to understand the second law

of thermodynamics, I get stuck in metaphor.

When I try to understand metaphor I never

get stuck in the second law of thermo-

dynamics. Or I am always stuck. This is

why I talk too much. And you, you never

talk enough.

Kinesthesia

The mind is tired.

What seems like a fly flies by the corner of the eye.

Someone says toothbrush, but in another language.

The toothbrush has its own language.

Swoosh or woosh.

Something moved.

The walls speak or is it the neighbors.

The walls take everything of meaning.

They keep it for themselves.

My mind is a wall.

There’s no truth except from the senses, said the Romantics.

Beyond the senses are more senses.

And beyond that is the land of the toothbrush.

Where everyone is some kind of king.

Snowstorm

Is it the neutrino

that flies through everything

disrupting nothing

*

trudging through drifts

of uncleared snow
it occurs to me 

with no other recourse

the foot

*

neutrinos drift around

(this can be inserted

anywhere)

*

I like this work

I'm less fond of this work
I'm never neutral except passionately so

*

I want you to get me to get home to get out to get through

*

The snow came through the window

but that’s because
the window was open

You have a beautiful head, the captor said. 

spring arrives

crisp and literal

a drunk

asleep in
the warmth
of the sun

when

the center
of the universe
is penetrated
we find you in it

the likelihood

any of us
exist
is so small
anyway

a ripple and then

another ripple

Coded Messages

I’ve been sick. The one-week flu became a second week of coughing and etcetera. So here we are. I’ve been away.


And look at this week ahead of several thousand of us preparing to descend on Chicago for AWP.

I bought some new recording equipment, and here’s the first song. It’s a response to not feeling well, I suppose. Which can only mean: electric guitar.



Coded Messages

Spirituality and Sincerity (Yes, I'm Back on That Again)

Keep your lens clean.

When I was noticing something in poetry last year, something I was thinking of as “spirituality,” I wasn’t thinking of “religiosity.” I wasn’t thinking about people writing, necessarily, about God or faith directly. What I was noticing was that a lot of poetry I was noticing felt spiritual, which is, felt philosophically open to the spirit of transcendence.

Very few of the poems I found were directly religious or even directly spiritual. It was the openness I was noticing, that was interesting me.

I saw it as tied to ideas of sincerity, in that, rather than espousing direct belief or experience, to have an air of possibility, in much the way that sincerity (whether you call it The New Sincerity2 or something else) is being thought of by some poets in less directly, historically sincere, emotional, ways, and more a sincerity of intent, not necessarily a culturally sanctioned sincerity in the poem’s content. The question of sincerity is an important one to me, for it's the place where viewers makes assumptions about the state of the artist. "The artist is being ironic.  The artist doesn't mean this." That sort of thing. How am I to really know this?  How will they know this in the future?  What if Jeffrey Koons is sincere?  What does that mean for art?  We've tried blank irony.  OK, we've got that now.  But what about the same art objects as sincere?

What I mean is that the poem itself can become a spiritual opportunity or a moment of sincerity, not as a recounting of spirituality or sincerity. Spirituality in the way that the poem is not closed off to what isn’t there, what is silent, mysterious, corporally unknowable, and sincerity in the way that “I mean this,” or “I’m not just f-ing around.”

This morning on Poetry Daily I came across the following bit from David Bottoms, a poet from a different generation, who did a decent job of setting out the “spiritual” case, though he goes too far against organized religion for my taste. Looking at his positive points though, it’s about metaphor and silence. It's a good place to start.

Anyway, as I’m just now starting to feel better after a week of just about the worst flu I’ve ever had, it seems a good place to start.

Here’s the relevant bit from David Bottoms:

I think the best way to approach this question is to step to the side for a moment and say that I am a believer in the power and the necessity of myth. I count myself a yearner after significance, as Robert Penn Warren called himself. I've experienced that personal yearning for meaning—call it the divine, if you like—and I take that yearning to be evidence of the possibility of the existence of its object. Why should I yearn for something that isn't there? I believe pretty much what Huston Smith suggests in his book Why Religion Matters. This yearning for something greater, he says, is built into the human makeup and suggests the existence of its object—the way, say, the wings of birds point to the reality of air or the way sunflowers bend toward the light because light exists.

Organized religion is another matter. The biggest problem I've had with churches—in my case, Baptist and Episcopal—is their insistence on approaching scripture in a literal way. Even now in the twenty-first century, when science and scholarship have proven beyond a doubt any number of historical inaccuracies in the Bible, churches persist in basing the validity of Christian doctrine on historical fact. This is mind-boggling to me. Never have I heard anyone in any church I've attended speak of the Christ story as metaphor and how that story might enlighten our lives. I believe this is likely out of a fear that most people are simply too literal to understand scripture in any other way. This puts me in mind of "Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr" that great story by the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno. Here, you'll remember, the priest who has lost his faith continues to minister for the sake of his flock, which he fears will be unable to bear the truth he has discovered about life and death. We're speaking, of course, about literal truth, historical truth. And we're living in a time when the dangers of fundamentalism are readily apparent. I'm not just talking about Islam. There's an old song called "Broadminded" that the Louvin Brothers recorded in Nashville back in the early 1950s. The first line goes "That word 'broadminded' is spelled s-i-n." This is still what's being preached in a great number of Christian churches, perhaps even the majority. But there is another kind of truth, a figurative truth, a very useful mythology that may provide a path to enriched significance in our lives.

Your reference to negative capability is about as good a way as any to describe that state of yearning and unknowing that I live in. This reminds me of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, a priest in the Church of Wales, who, if he never lost his faith, at least understood God in a much different way than his parishioners. Nevertheless, like Unamuno's Saint Emmanuel, he never strayed in his ministry from church orthodoxy. For Thomas, though, one could never experience the presence of God—only the absence. In his little poem "In Church," he talks about "testing his faith / on emptiness." And in a poem called "Moorland," he describes a harrier searching for prey as "hovering over the incipient / scream, here a moment, then / not here, like my belief in God." However, he believed strongly in the human condition of yearning, I think, and the suggestive state of God's absence. You might say that for Thomas one could only see where God had been, or you might say that the absence of God pointed to His existence.

The Christ story is a wonderful way to talk about God, but there are many ways. What's important to see is that each of these points toward something ultimate. I think my stance is one of hopeful questioning, and it's not really a studied literary stance but more the condition I find myself living in—a sort of hopeful holding-out for the possibility of the ultimate thing these stories, or myths, point toward.

Who Gets the 2012 Pulitzer Prize?

I went and got sick this week. Such is the way of bodies. And, while talking gibberish to the walls with a 104.3 degree temperature, I wondered briefly who was going to get the Pulitzer tap this year. (It’s something like a spinal tap, I hear, only more painful, and with longer odds on a full recovery.)


The Story so far:

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1922) •

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1923) •

Robert Frost (1924) •

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1925) •

Amy Lowell (1926) •

Leonora Speyer (1927) •

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1928) •

Stephen Vincent Benét (1929) •

Conrad Aiken (1930) •

Robert Frost (1931) •

George Dillon (1932) •

Archibald MacLeish (1933) •

Robert Hillyer (1934) •

Audrey Wurdemann (1935) •

Robert P. T. Coffin (1936) •

Robert Frost (1937) •

Marya Zaturenska (1938) •

John Gould Fletcher (1939) •

Mark Van Doren (1940) •

Leonard Bacon (1941) •

William Rose Benét (1942) •

Robert Frost (1943) •

Stephen Vincent Benét (1944) •

Karl Shapiro (1945) •

Robert Lowell (1947) •

W. H. Auden (1948) •

Peter Viereck (1949) •

Gwendolyn Brooks (1950)

Carl Sandburg (1951) •

Marianne Moore (1952) •

Archibald MacLeish (1953) •

Theodore Roethke (1954) •

Wallace Stevens (1955) •

Elizabeth Bishop (1956) •

Richard Wilbur (1957) •

Robert Penn Warren (1958) •

Stanley Kunitz (1959) •

W. D. Snodgrass (1960) •

Phyllis McGinley (1961) •

Alan Dugan (1962) •

William Carlos Williams (1963) •

Louis Simpson (1964) •

John Berryman (1965) •

Richard Eberhart (1966) •

Anne Sexton (1967) •

Anthony Hecht (1968) •

George Oppen (1969) •

Richard Howard (1970) •

William S. Merwin (1971) •

James Wright (1972) •

Maxine Kumin (1973) •

Robert Lowell (1974) •

Gary Snyder (1975)

John Ashbery (1976) •

James Merrill (1977) •

Howard Nemerov (1978) •

Robert Penn Warren (1979) •

Donald Justice (1980) •

James Schuyler (1981) •

Sylvia Plath (1982) •

Galway Kinnell (1983) •

Mary Oliver (1984) •

Carolyn Kizer (1985) •

Henry S. Taylor (1986) •

Rita Dove (1987) •

William Meredith (1988) •

Richard Wilbur (1989) •

Charles Simic (1990) •

Mona Van Duyn (1991) •

James Tate (1992) •

Louise Glück (1993) •

Yusef Komunyakaa (1994) •

Philip Levine (1995) •

Jorie Graham (1996) •

Lisel Mueller (1997) •

Charles Wright (1998) •

Mark Strand (1999) •

C. K. Williams (2000)

Stephen Dunn (2001) •

Carl Dennis (2002) •

Paul Muldoon (2003) •

Franz Wright (2004) •

Ted Kooser (2005) •

Claudia Emerson (2006) •

Natasha Trethewey (2007) •

Robert Hass / Philip Schultz (2008) •

W. S. Merwin (2009) •

Rae Armantrout (2010) •

Kay Ryan (2011)

It’s always fun to be reminded of who gets the Pulitzer young, and who gets it old, and who gets it who we never hear from again (too numerous to mention) or don’t remember for long, or who never get it, but who should have. All that good stuff.

And, thinking of the books that were published in some of these years that have become huge in retrospect (T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems springs to mind, but there are others as well), and thinking of where the Pulitzer tunes in to what’s happening and where it goes way reactionary, who is it going to be this year? Who should win? What are the odds?

I don't have enough books from the past year in my head to make a guess, but looking at the ebb and flow of names, and the way they tend to shift back and forth, my guess is that it'll be someone young-ish this year. It's been older poets for quite some time now. (With a couple recent exceptions.) Seems like a possible Dean Young year, if so. Or, more probably, it'll stay older.  I'd put even odds on Robert Pinsky.

Talking Into Mirrors About Windows (Emotion / Sentiment / Sincerity)

Here, to keep us all on the same page, are the essays I’m thinking about/along with:

http://jacket2.org/article/something-stutters-sincerely

http://ucmo.edu/pleiades/current_issue/documents/SymposiumonSentiment.pdf

This is a long post. Apologies.

First off, let’s set the scene. What the writers in the Pleiades symposium are thinking about are the general tones and moves of our times. So they have to first define what those tones are, and they do. Here are a few observations/ questions that Joy Katz opens with:

“For a few years, I have sensed a growing resistance to sentiment among poets I know, including my graduate students. Once upon a time, a long time ago, poets didn’t fear Feeling; writing a poem that made someone cry was considered heroic, and “sentimental” was not a pejorative but a compliment.”

“Is there an emotional guardedness in the prevailing strategy of surrealism and in the lacquered, impenetrable irony of many poems we read in new books and little magazines?”

“Sally [Ball] and I were curious about what might be going on behind the feeling that feeling is best avoided. We sensed a longing for emotion in conversations about how “easy irony” and “mere cleverness” come at the expense of moving a reader (I wasn’t sure what poets meant when they said “easy irony” and “cleverness,” so I have asked the writers in these pages to clarify). I perceived a craving for fondness and endearment in the sudden ubiquity of the word “little” in poems. Has darlingness become a stand-in for love?”

+

Before I continue, I want to note that several of the writers in this symposium I consider to be friends, so I want this to be a friendly questioning that I’m doing here. I don’t disagree with these comments as much as I just want to query them. The first query takes me to the dictionary.

Sentiment –

1 a: an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling : predilection b: a specific view or notion : opinion

2 a: emotion b: refined feeling : delicate sensibility especially as expressed in a work of art c: emotional idealism d: a romantic or nostalgic feeling verging on sentimentality

3 a: an idea colored by emotion b: the emotional significance of a passage or expression as distinguished from its verbal context

Sentimentality -

1: the quality or state of being sentimental especially to excess or in affectation

2: a sentimental idea or its expression

And there we have the first problem. Sentiment is defined as a perfectly fine word for art, it even says “refined” in definition two. But then sentimentality comes up with a much more subjective “I know it when I see it” definition.

So sentiment and sentimentality are going to be squishy, difficult terms to pin down (as Kevin Prufer works with in his essay). The problem, part two, is that words like “emotion” often get tossed in as synonyms (and sometimes, in different contexts, sincerity). Emotion can be a synonym for sentiment, but not in all cases. Sentiment has the word “predilection” tossed in there. It’s a word best avoided for its lack of specificity. Emotion is a much better word.

The problem with a word like emotion, though, is that it’s a wider landscape and implicates ALL emotions, including the cool and cold emotions of Stevens in winter as well as Eliot walking through certain half-deserted streets.

But the examples from the poets themselves are equally difficult to render into the sentiment [al] / emotion [al] nexus. For instance, there’s this, from Rachel Zucker:

“Recently I went back to Notley’s poem and saw, underlined in my own hand, two other lines I had completely forgotten, ‘Of two poems one sentimental and one not / I choose both,’ and I started to cry because that’s everything I’ve ever tried to do in my poetry.”

What first struck me is that these lines don’t make me cry. What’s affecting Zucker is her relationship to the poem and to these lines, not simply the lines themselves. The act of bringing the lines into her life, of connecting with them is what’s bringing her to tears. So emotion, or sentiment, in this way needs an active participation from the reader.

No poem has ever brought me to tears. Neither have paintings or dances. I don’t think music has either, but I could be wrong on that. This is not to say I haven’t been moved by them, my body just doesn’t register this kind of relationship as one that has tears as part of it. Is it the poetry that is doing this or is it me? I say it’s me. I’ve only cried in certain books (the end of The Lord of the Rings) and movies (the last quarter of Toy Story III really got me). Does this make novels and movies supreme? Only if I’m gauging worth by tears.

I find many poems of Stevens’s to be moving, as well as many poems of John Ashbery’s. But others consider them cold and distant (as Joy Katz gets to as well). I find some poems by Rae Armantrout or Zachary Schomburg to be moving, where others find them cryptic or ironic.

So what are we to do? (If we have to do something at all.) And yes, if we’re going to be responsible people talking about the art, we have to. Sarah Vap sees it from a slightly different angle:

“I don’t see sentimental poems as a problem. But there is something around the discussion of sentimentality in poems that does deeply unsettle me. It doesn’t have to do with sentimentality, or the risking of it. Rather it is the monitoring of sentimentality in poems, the naming of sentimentality in poems, the connection between this censorship and the belittling of certain life experiences and wisdoms, the diminishing of whole cultures or their ways of experiencing the world, the degrading or silencing or quieting or diminishing of whole subject matters or voices or ways in poetry simply by associating them with the term “sentimentality” that churns in my gut and gets up my fight.”

This is the second move of the emotion/ sentiment conversation. The question of subject. Are some subjects themselves sentimental? Or is sentimentality something that resides in the rendering of a subject? Well, there’s my answer, at any rate. Subjects are subjects. They all bring different baggage, but they are all available. Or they should be. And I think, generally, we would all kind of agree on this. What happens, though, often, when one is talking positively about something, the rendering of emotion, say, there is this tendency to say that something else is, therefore, negative. Joy Katz, in her introduction, describes Prufer’s essay this way: “I think Prufer tacitly implies that irony and surrealism, when leaned on too heavily as a substitute for emotion, are the new sentimentality.”

On the one hand, anything leaned on too heavily is going to be a problem for art. But when tossed out there, it takes on this other life, one where people can get all combative, thinking that their way of writing is under attack. There is nothing wrong with using irony in one’s art. There is also nothing wrong with writing from out of the surrealist tradition. But, singled out like this, things sound more combative than they actually are or need to be. Katz herself, in her essay, defends the poetry of John Ashbery and Mark Bibbins, for instance. Two poets who could easily be considered by people who wish to consider them this way, ironic and distant and/or surreal.

This is always going to be a problem when one is defending or arguing against something in art. If poet X is said, as one of the essays says, to write poetry that is “sliding easily into winking coyness, postmodern self-referentiality” etc, there is bound to be someone who finds that same work to be, not just wonderfully antic, but also emotion-using in a way that pairs itself with the way that person experiences the world. In short, emotional. What if that person, like Rachel Zucker, earlier, finds a poem of poet X’s that speaks within that reader, a poem that becomes personal? In the same way anything (just about) can become sentimental once we read it into our autobiographies, nearly anything written by a human (who will or has experienced pain and who will die) can be considered emotional to a reader receptive to that idiom. An example I like to use is Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. It’s the difficult line poetry like hers, as well as kitsch and other forms of playful and transgressive art operates on.

As one group is being said to, as Katz writes in the introduction, exhibit a “growing resistance to sentiment,” there is this other group of poets who exhibit a growing resistance to the growing resistance to sentiment. Is it a raw and cooked conversation in a new guise? A process of owning the definitions of what is and what isn’t? Or of privileging one mode over another?

Prufer writes:

“When contemporary poets retreat from strong emotion in order to avoid sentimentality, they misunderstand the term at the expense of a powerful force for their writing. Instead of retreating from emotion, we should retreat from emotional, ideological, political simplicity. That’s a better way to avoid sentimentality.”

Any aesthetic position can, therefore, fall into sentimentality as well as rise above it. But when we’re privileging “strong emotion” we’re saying that’s the proper, best way to use emotion. I want to be clear, here, I’m not arguing with Prufer (he’s actually a good friend of mine, I want to stress), but what he sees as a “retreat from strong emotion in order to avoid sentimentality” might well be seen by another reader as a “retreat from emotional, ideological, political simplicity.” Or, if not that, as a fairly random example, what is it that Joe Wenderoth is arguing for or against in his poem “Twentieth Century Pleasures”?

Twentieth-Century Pleasures

A woman has two children:
one is seven, a girl with Down syndrome,
and one is five, a deaf-mute boy.
Every day, the woman’s husband beats her
and calls her a lazy whore.
After a few years
the woman moves back into her mother’s house.
She locks the doors when her mother is at work,
but her husband, having promised to kill her,
gets in through a basement window.
When she hears and meets him in the basement,
pleading for her life,
he breaks her spine with a hammer.
As the two children watch from the steps,
he shoots her in the back of the head,
then turns the gun on himself.
The seven-year old, the girl with Down syndrome,
runs four blocks to the police station.
When the police arrive at the house,
the five-year old,
the poet,
a deaf-mute boy,
is kneeling by his mother’s head,
pressing the pool of blood back toward her.
They pull him away and he doesn’t resist.
They think he has been playing there
in a pool of his mother’s blood.
That is truly what they think:
he was playing in a pool of his dead mother’s blood.
Later, with his bloody hands
he says things they cannot understand,
and they know then, at least,
that he was not playing.

Whatever it is, it’s highly problematic, isn’t it? So what is this poem doing? It’s the question I continue to go back to. Irony? This is a pretty extreme example of something like sentimentality turned on its ironic head. It’s outliers like this that make conversations that generalize what does or doesn’t work well in a poem problematic. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them, though. And this symposium is as good a place to start as any. But it’s certainly not the place to stop either.

In Joy Katz’s essay she writes about (as I alluded to earlier) some poets she’s liked from the past who her friends have called “chilly and remote,” most notably, John Ashbery. The gesture of her essay is one I like, for it lays open the relationship between the work and the way the work is read. If one thinks Ashbery is going to be “chilly and remote” then his work might well seem so, but what if, as Katz does, his poems seem to “hunger for the world,” and exhibit “tenderness”? So where are our terms now?

This is, in the end, the difficulty in what we’re trying to talk about: We all want pleasurable experiences from art, and we find pleasurable the art that pleases us. So far, so tautologically good. All’s well. But then when we find some work that doesn’t please us, we want to say why. So we do. But what happens when these things that don’t please us please others? Mary Oliver’s poetry has never moved me, for example. But, as well, what am I to say to the legions of Little Monsters out there hanging on every nuance of Lady Gaga? Yet we must make distinctions (knowing they’re largely personal and provisional). I think Lady Gaga’s work is about as bland as bland can get. Well? I could go on, but you get the point. One must make one’s distinctions knowing full well they are not everyone’s distinctions. One must hold one’s ground while being aware that the ground is always shifting.

Katz writes:

“We don’t want to be naive, and we want to write in our time. So how can sentiment work now? The dis-ease many contemporary poets continue to feel about narrative, epiphany, and the one-to-one correspondence between cities, landscapes, and physics in the real world and cities, landscapes, and physics in poems—all the old trappings of poetry—accounts for a pretty ubiquitous distrust of sentiment. Sentiment is feeling, and we feel with our real bodies in real time. Sentiment is sincere. That’s one reason for the mass of poems on the ironic end of the irony-sincerity continuum, many of which feature surrealism. Surrealism distances the world. It is as compelling a strategy as any in poetry, but it’s easier, right now, to write poems with dance floors full of water torturers wearing lingerie than it is to find a non-icky way to feeling.”

For her, what saves a surreal poem is where it can be said to break out of surrealism and “[signal] to us that the . . . reference is real, even if the poem is surreal.” It’s a distrust that surrealism can go it alone, to mean, to engage on its own turf; the real has to unmask itself if the poem is to succeed. It’s a winning strategy, and I like the way she talks about it, but it’s by no means the only way to go about it.

Here’s a poem by Zachary Schomburg:

Falling Life

You are in a very high tree.

If you jump
you will live a full life
while falling.

You will get married
to a hummingbird

and raise beautiful part-
hummingbirds.

You will die of cancer
in mid-air.

I will not lie.
It will be painful.

You are a brave little boy
or girl.

I suppose one can say this poem works (if you think it works, which I do) because of the intrusion of the world, the real world revealing itself. But I think it works mostly through tone and the nuances of the stories of help we give each other over and over amid the generic ubiquity of pain.

How do any of us cope with alienation? With dislocation?

I think about this issue from a different direction. Not necessarily a better or worse direction, but the only one I have. As Jenny Browne writes in her essay, “[A] poem’s way of mattering should come at least in part from how it gets complexity of feeling right; it should not avoid emotionally loaded content entirely.” My reply is that it’s pretty difficult to avoid emotionally loaded content entirely. Even the language poets couldn’t’ do it, and I think they were trying to.

Irony is the dirty word here. And if I were to put together a symposium, I feel it might be fun to put one together around it. A Symposium on Irony. That would be nice. As Sally Ball writes:

“A reader drawn, as I am, to directness—to a relinquishment, however temporary, of self-protective irony—may wonder: is it mere openness that attracts? Do we crave restless or unfettered emotion because self-consciousness has often come to seem defensive (about the self) and judgmental (about oneself and others)? Self-conscious language can shift a poem from intellectual or emotional curiosity and candor to evasion and refusal. Instead of exploring sentiment, a poem is inclined to say: See how I register this situation and myself from multiple angles! or: You can’t keep up with me or make sense of the multiplicity of my attention, nah nah nah boo boo.

In such a climate, what incarnation(s) of sentiment would I want to praise? Those that allow for the expression or investigation of emotion—not necessarily without irony or self-consciousness, but without the presumption that strong feeling is necessarily false, silly, or mistaken. I so often feel poets avoid emotion.”

So my questions remain. Is irony, or what people are pointing at in contemporary poetry that they name irony, self-protective? Are intellectual and emotional curiosity and candor the opposite of, or the corrective to, evasion and refusal? How does “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” figure into this? Does it? How does Kate Greenstreet figure into this:


221

They’re so tired. Of everything.
That’s when he asks her when they’ve been happiest.

She’s wearing a red wool dress, like Clara.
And it’s so beautiful. Even with the ratty aqua blanket.

What is the happiest thing you remember about us?
Each part like the whole, but smaller.

He’s come home for the funeral.
They try to manage in the dark.

He’s the oldest, he’s carrying the diagram.
They call it “the mystery.”

This was a long time ago.
There weren’t really that many people on earth.

I heard your footsteps sinking in the gravel.
There was always hope.

Emotion, as I see it in art, is a social act. It’s a social act when it’s exhibited. In this way, by exhibition, it becomes socially understood (or not). And just as aesthetic positions evolve as familiarity with them grows, so to do the ways we exhibit emotion. Is “The Snow Man” emotional? Is Heather Christle? Tao Lin?

This is where I make the conceptual leap to Jennifer Moore’s piece in Jacket2 talking about “an acknowledgment of atrophied artistic possibility and a concern for what poets can (or can’t) do with this critical sense of impasse.”

Perhaps we are at something of an impasse when it comes to Emotion, Sincerity, Truth, Sentiment, and Beauty, as we no longer share much of a common identity on what, conceptually, is what. So, for one person, Tao Lin is the poster-child for nihilistic role-playing, while for another, Tao Lin points to a possibility of renewed investigation of the possible to say, to think, to behave. It’s no small coincidence that Sylvia Plath found the writing of “Daddy” to be hilarious. If it were written now, it would be called flarf.

So, in closing, these essays were very interesting to read together, as we try to read each other, as one version of what is gets replaced by another.

Your Sincerity / Sentimentality Reading List or Mine?

Thought for the week.

I’m trying to reconcile these two pieces:

http://jacket2.org/article/something-stutters-sincerely

http://ucmo.edu/pleiades/current_issue/documents/SymposiumonSentiment.pdf

It will take me a few days to work something up, as I’m very busy these days.

Anyway.

The Conversation I'm SO Done With . . .

. . . but I keep coming back to anyway.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephanie-vanderslice/creative-writing-can-be-taught_b_1254504.html

The conversation regarding the teaching of creative writing (can it or can’t it be taught/ should it or shouldn’t it be taught) comes and goes. I was thinking we were in a fallow period, but then I came across this, and it reminded me how this conversation is always back at square one.

Still and all, I’m continually surprised that this conversation has to keep happening. But it does. As long as people keep giving platforms to those who argue against the teaching of creative writing, then articles like this will continue to be necessary.

Must we, though, have this conversation again? Really, must we? It reminds me of the wonderful exchange between Frank O’Hara and Jack Kerouac that John Ashbery read from a letter O’Hara wrote him in the early 60s. It was recounting a reading, where O’Hara was at the podium. It was a raucous event. And there was Jack Kerouac being Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac: O’Hara! You’re killing poetry!

O’Hara: That’s more than you ever did for it, Jack Kerouac.

Yes. That’s my metaphor of the day, and probably my favorite come-back of all time. Whatever creative writing teachers are doing that’s messing up art is more than those who argue against them have done for it.

Here we are, 2012, the apocalypse year, still defending what shouldn’t need any defending. What interests me in this conversation is what people who are arguing against the teaching of creative writing really want, because they’re not against advice to writers. They’re full of it. So what is it then? I keep going back to the notion that there’s a large measure of sour grapes in arguments against creative writing classes. And such solipsistic divergences need redirecting.

Here’s a helpful redirection from Anna Leahy: “That’s what novelist John Irving said to John Stewart on The Daily Show, namely that a creative writing program and his mentor Kurt Vonnegut showed him, ‘You do these things better than those things. Why don’t you do more of these things and fewer of those?’”

That’s succinct and persuasive enough, I should think. (But I’ll go on a bit longer, because it’s a Saturday, and the kids are watching a movie.)

And what is the strong argument against creative writing classes anyway? That it fosters sameness? That it will lead to generations of writers who write the kinds of poems that “go over well” in creative writing classes?

I should think, then, that doing a quantitative study of everyone who went through creative writing classes and then who taught creative writing classes of their own would show that people are being normalized into writing very similar things over time. And, of course, that’s not true.

As Dinty Moore writes: “Critics of creative writing as an academic pursuit take a small, small part of the whole and attempt to paint the entire enterprise in one, inaccurate color.”

And that’s the point people who argue against creative writing classes can’t seem to get. Yes, there are terrible classes and terrible teachers out there. But those we will always have with us.

I’ve been in many creative writing classes, and, at the undergraduate level, I’ve lead a good many as well, and even across the classes I’ve lead, they’ve been radically different over time. So much of a discussion-based class, as creative writing classes tend to be, is contingent upon the whole of the group, that generalizations across classes are close to worthless.

But these are old arguments. The fact that the conversation is still at this stage is depressing. As Vanderslice and Leahy say, there are more interesting, “more important, more complex questions” we should be spending our time on.

I’ll leave with this bit from Anna Leahy:

“In a book called The Creating Brain, Nancy Andreasen (who is a professor of psychology and a former professor of Renaissance literature) argues, ‘creative people are likely to be more productive and more original if surrounded by other creative people. This too produces an environment in which the creative brain is stimulated to form novel connections and novel ideas.’

A creative writing program is this sort of environment. Students in a workshop learn from writing, which is usually done in isolation, but they also learn from interactions over time, whether that's brainstorming ideas, receiving feedback from the instructor and peers, or offering critiques. In fact, my students comment that they learn how to revise from responding to others’ work even more than from direct feedback they receive. This process leads each student toward distinguishing her voice. The interactions nudge innovation because, as Andreasen says, ‘creative people are individualistic and confident.’ They don’t want to be just like everybody else.”


[JG: Side note: I’ve seen way too many creative people who are not confident to completely sign on to this, but I agree with the general point.]

The Difficulty of Aesthetic Positions

Why are you always so serious? Why are you always acting like a fool? Ah, we're so different, you and I.

I’ve long thought aesthetic positions were beside the point of art objects. Put another way, art objects bedevil aesthetic positions. They bedevil criteria. They continually render proclamations about good, bad, and value, moot.


I’m rereading, browsing mostly, Paul Hoover’s seminal Postmodern American Poetry this week. I don’t have much money to buy books these days, so I’m using my circumstances to go back to books from my collection as I unpack them. So, Postmodern American Poetry it is.

What’s striking me this time through is how often I agree with, and find persuasive, aesthetic positions put forward by divergent, often oppositional, groups.

What I mean by “aesthetic positions” here is the intentionality of the poet, what the poet is attempting in language. Most poets say generally that they are attempting through language to get at something that is other than language. Often this “something” will be called “the unconscious” or even “the truth,” where the poem itself isn’t simply “about” this unconscious or truth but instead is a manifestation of that sur-language the poet is imagining.

With this in mind, I get similar stories from a wide variety of poets, where, asked what a poem means, they are tempted to simply read the poem again.

Seen that way, from a distance, there’s great unity in the art of poetry.

There are also raw and cooked rock climbers.  The mountain, on the other hand, remains the mountain.

In a semi-related way, here are a few things I came across in Hoover’s introduction that interested me, in a reminding us of things we know way:

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The critic Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism represents a break with nineteenth-century romanticism and early twentieth-century modernism. . . . An opposing argument to Jameson’s is that postmodernism is an extension of romanticism and modernism, both of which still thrive. Thus what Jameson calls pastiche is simply a further development of modernist collage—today’s cultural pluralism can be identified in The Waste Land, The Cantos, and Picasso’s cubist appropriation of the ceremonial masks of Benin; the self-reflexiveness of postmodern art can be found in Finnegan’s Wake and as far back as Tristram Shandy; performance poetry is simply the most recent of many attempts, including those of Wordsworth and William Carlos Williams, to renew poetry through the vernacular. The poetry of John Ashbery is quintessentially postmodern, yet it is influenced by the modernist romantic Wallace Stevens and the modernist Augustan W.H. Auden. John Cage’s use of the “prepared piano” and his emphasis on indeterminacy in language represent high postmodernism, yet they can also be situated, along with the Aeolian harp, in the history of romanticism.

Despite their differences, experimentalists in the postwar period have valued writing-as-process over writing as product. They have elevated the pluralistic . . . . Method and intuition replace intention.

Quoting Charles Olson, [Robert] Creeley continues, “’That which exists through itself is what is called the meaning.’”

In general, postmodern poetry opposes the centrist values of unity, significance, linearity, expressiveness, and a heightened, even heroic, portrayal of the bourgeois self and its concerns.

In short, since 1950, the year Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” appeared, innovative poetry in the United States has flourished.

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Then Paul Hoover goes into a brief discussion of the competing anthologies New Poets of England and America (1962), edited by Donald Hall and Robert Pack, and The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960), edited by Donald M. Allen.

Hoover observes:

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To use Robert Lowell’s terminology, the poetry of the Hall/Pack anthology was more “cooked” than “uncooked.” Trusting in tradition, its contributors were not eager to reject the influence of British letters in favor of a home-grown idiom. Yeats was preferred to Williams, the mythical to the personal, the rational to the irrational, the historical to the contemporary, learnedness to spontaneity, elitism to populism. However, the early confessional poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were included in the Hall/Pack volume, an indication that New Criticism’s demand for objectivity and critical distance was already under question. Robert Pack’s introduction . . . shows his distaste for spontaneous poetry:

“The idea of raw, unaffected, or spontaneous poetry misleads the reader as to what is expected of him. It encourages laziness and passivity. He too can be spontaneous, just sit back and respond. A good poem, rather, is one that deepens upon familiarity. . . . It is not enough to let a poem echo through your being, to play mystical chords upon your soul. The poem must be understood and felt in its details; it asks for attention before transport.”

Pack sides here with the formalism of the New Criticism, which required consistency of structure and poetic detail.

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So I’m hoping you’re already seeing the joke time is playing on us. How these issues that Hoover is practicing in his introduction have been around a long time and continue to this day. The joke is, of course, that as they continue to play on, the players and the examples of the poem that “must be understood and felt in its details” keeps changing in ways that would be abhorrent to those making the same argument in the past. All these contending NEWs.

And it continues. Hoover again:

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If Robert Pack’s model poet “deepens upon familiarity,” Donald Allen’s model deepens upon strangeness, preferring the irrational and spontaneous to the decorous and well-made. In the tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, the poets in Allen’s anthology also emphasized the American idiom and landscape.

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For all the violence of their aesthetic differences (“RAW! COOKED! Spontaneous! Understandable!”) there is still this common gesture, this common idea that something will in fact, or may in fact, deepen. All these poets are wanting, though the act of creating art, a deepening of experience.

So the fight is, as it’s always been, manner. And, after manner, the differences of how people experience the world.

And it’s not the easy either /or that Pack vs Allen would make it seem. Take the above description of the Pack anthology, for instance:

“If Robert Pack’s model poet ‘deepens upon familiarity,’ Donald Allen’s model deepens upon strangeness, preferring the irrational and spontaneous to the decorous and well-made.”

I would posit this: How about the irrational and well-made? (Wallace Stevens springs to mind. There are all manner of mixings that occur as we all have slightly different attitudes toward what it is that language transports us to, and the best way to get there. And, of course, as it’s a personal journey for both the artist and the person in the presence of art, there is no particular way that is the one way.

So the Pack anthology unravels when it gets to the confessional poets (and the free-verse generation after them), just as the Allen anthology unravels when it gets to the language poets, where spontaneity of effect or practice is not part of the endeavor.

Nice house.  A decorative splash of red on the upper left. They thought about that.

Two sides are always pulling the flag back and forth across a pool of mud. That’s a given. But when one looks up from the task, one finds there are an equal number of people watching the clowns, playing darts, and riding the roller-coaster in the church parking lot.

And also ice cream.

I Tried Something Different

OK, so anyway, I tried something different.



Because Thought Is Not Prayer

The poem first appeared in Salt Hill 28:

http://www.salthilljournal.net/

If you go there, you can read a selection from the issue through the ISSUU interface, one I like very much. It gives you that page-turning feel. I'm a sucker for pages that turn.

About the clip:

Bob Boilen, one of the NPR music hosts and bloggers, distributed a rhythm track and encouraged people to do something with it. So there it is.

I might make a video for it this weekend (Or maybe I'll move to another town and change my name.). But anyway, Boilen suggested people upload their tracks to Soundcloud, so I did. While I was at it, I went ahead and uploaded the tracks I recorded several years ago now with Brian Bonhomme, as The Renos.

They’re all downloadable for free:

http://soundcloud.com/jjgallaher

And then I made the video, because, well, here goes.