Nothing to Say & Saying It

Saturday Soundtrack: New Neil Young & Crazy Horse Studio Tour?

2012-01-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

Very cool:

http://www.neilyoung.com/

Neil Young’s recording with Crazy Horse after a very long hiatus (the last full NY & CH album was 1996). It appears they’re streaming some of it, along with a fly-eye studio tour.

Reports are that NY & CH have recorded a full album already, and have started on a second. But you know how reports go, especially in relation to the mercurial Neil Young.

And a possible track listing of what they're working on:

Oh Susanna

Love + Wall
Ontario
This Land Is Your Land
She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain
Gallows Tree (Gallows Pole)
Oh My Darling, Clementine
I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger

And maybe Oh, Susanna will sound something like this?

Life, Friends . . .

2012-01-27T19:22:00.000-08:00

John Berryman

Dream Song 51

Our wounds to time, from all the other times,
sea-times slow, the times of galaxies
fleeing, the dwarfs' dead times,
lessen so little that if here in his crude rimes
Henry them mentions, do not hold it, please,
for a putting of man down.

Ol' Marster, being bound you do your best
versus we coons, spare now a cagey John
a whilom bits that whip:
who'll tell your fortune, when you have confessed
whose & whose woundings—against the innocent stars
& remorseless seas—

—Are you radioactive, pal? —Pal, radioactive.
—Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal?
—Pal, I do.
—Did your gal leave you? —What do you think, pal?
—Is that thing on the front of your head what it seems to be, pal?
—Yes, pal.

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Where They Feed Their Children to Kings

2012-01-27T15:44:00.001-08:00

Poem Video Friday!

Where They Feed Their Children to Kings

Boston Review: All Together Now (Siobhan Phillips on Four New Books)

2012-01-26T11:45:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting bit from one of our most interesting journals, one that thankfully still takes poetry seriously:

All Together Now

How Description Fosters Connection
Siobhan Phillips

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.1/siobhan_phillips_carr_kocot_mlinko_osman_poetry.php

It’s a review of four books of poetry, but one of the things that interests me, is where it gets general. Here’s how it opens:

What kinds of connection can poetry make? It’s an unexpected question, perhaps, because verse has often been thought of as the genre of isolation or wholeness: a well-wrought urn stood in timeless completion, an overheard speaker murmuring of himself to himself.

But much of today’s most arresting poetry spurns the dream of self-sufficiency for the drama of relation. Scan even the titles of the works under consideration here—The Network, The Bigger World, Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, Shoulder Season—which speak of webs, expansions, pieces, and interstices. These books live in transition, they manifest its links and gaps. Their art seeks on-leading ends rather than in-looking bounds, shunning causality and sublimity alike as they instead associate among words, thoughts, people, political agents. Managing connection, for these writers, is at once a formal task and a thematic statement.

Indeed, the first question is a version of the “what is poetry for” question that comes up now and then. Has poetry been thought of as the genre of “isolation or wholeness”? I’m unsure what Phillips is specifically referring to here, but I agree that, though either /or divides are reductive, there are many people out there who fall roughly into the camps of “a well-wrought urn stood in timeless completion” vs “an overheard speaker murmuring of” him/herself to him/herself. Isolation or wholeness. It’s an interesting parlor game. Where do you fit?

And then, in a turn to four books that mess with this economy, Phillips gives examples of the “drama of relation,” where “[m]anaging connection, for these writers, is at once a formal task and a thematic statement.” Such assertions can be easily backed up by cherry-picking examples (there are thousands of books of poetry published every year), but still, the question intrigues me. Might there be a wave of books, a zeitgeist, that is less interested in either the urn or the cry of the isolato, and more interested in something more interactive?

Well, interactive texts have a lineage as well, which “show how contingency unravels even the best plans or explanations.” It’s not a brand new movement, but it might be a new focus, and any new focus can bring about a new alignment. If this were to become The New New Thing, for instance, we might start talking about projects like WCW’s Paterson again, or Jorie Graham’s Materialism, or Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God, in perhaps new, helpful ways.

I’m a good audience for this idea, as I like when people highlight relations, which is one of the things I’ve always looked for (listened for) in poetry, and the examples in this review sound intriguing. Here are a few of the ways Phillips describes these books: “lively anxiety” “stricken care” “unexpected connection can complicate our most intimate roles” “connections begin and end with language” “description can foster the very associations it would report” “the metaphoric echoes in what we say can emphasize the ethical affiliations in what we do” “The depth of a word might be the breadth of a world.”

A lot of poetry could be described in these ways, true, but these are ways of being in the world that are well worth attending to. So are other things, but that doesn’t make these less important.

The full text of Ange Mlinko’s poem “Squill” is linked to, so I’ll post it here in full, to give an example of what Phillips is highlighting, in various ways:

Squill

Half asleep, I heard a pin drop.

The quality of light was strong,
it was changing weekly, but on top
of every new change was a lung-
like cloud with a violet
or oysterish froth burnished to pearl
by an untucked ray. Sleep debt
would only let me half-unfurl
from what I could not be prised from.
At the far end of the hall, behind a door,
I heard a pin drop. In another room
on the unpolyurethaned wooden floor
where gaps were growing between slats—
I could distinguish the sound from
that of a screw. I knew it from a thumbtack.
What was that dream,
that brain candy cottoned to, the flight
from a battalion, a mane slipping my grip
—as my ear divined a button’s bakelite
from a Lego—leaving page-worn fingertips,
the vita nuova every night rejuvenated
and dashed to bits by a baby’s complaint,
my aural monitoring of his lonely play syncopated
with forays back into the dreamscape?
From its no-backstory,
to my daylit past in waking, to recordless
and unknown history,
back again to what I knew: the sound of a dangerous
small object falling from his pincer grip
to the floor. I knew a crayon from a ballpoint pen.
A ballpoint pen from a felt-tip.
I knew the sound of his noggin
hitting the floor from the rattle
of a coffee mug. Jewelbox, toolbox,
my ears’ spindles chimed and tattled
out of dreamland, the dice in their cups
little movie screens on each side
playing different scenarios. A joke,
the child too quiet. What it belied
was that he might choke,
but I could hear what his digits dallied
and knew he was still gambling.
This is what it means to rally
for the future, as my father lambing
on all fours with him madly
termed “answering the call of life”
never knowing whence I came
or what dirt was made flesh on my behalf.
I grew the ears of a cat, tuft-flames.
I could have heard a seed growing.
A seed growing in their mirroring labyrinths.
Twin vegetal wombs in Eustachian tubes sown
with squill, which when the moss is absinthe-
green in the brownscape, is alone
the smallest simplest flower in the cold.
First flower of the year, Easterish
and yet it could be a bold
spy device, an earpiece.
Its cells assembled from history
outside my own window, as the light
stepped up—threw down—in mystery.
And though you say it is right
that no one descended from Uralic
language speakers
has Uralic
language structures
pre-determining the cast of thought until
badly retrofitted in English,
I could not see this Siberian squill,
this earpiece, Easterish,
and not think of the cells of a language
in my sleep, growing out of the frost,
assembled from history, a burned bridge,
as the first division, from which I was lost.

Kudos and a Sadness

2012-01-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

Well, maybe that’s a little over the top. But, maybe not. But kudos to The New Yorker for publishing Leonard Cohen’s “Going Home.”

The album, Old Ideas, is streaming here:

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/22/145340430/first-listen-leonard-cohen-old-ideas

Why kudos? Well, I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen’s for about 30 years now. It’s great that he’s coming out with a new album, and it’s even better that the new album is good. Dear Heather, his last, was not among my favorites. So here I am, cruising through The New Yorker, and there he is. Nice.

Now for the sadness. First, it’s a song lyric. For that, it’s an excellent song lyric.

I love to speak with Leonard

He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit

It’s a clever approach, and, when it’s surrounded by the light treatment of the song, it’s quite effective. But here, as simply the lyrics, I feel myself wanting to sing it, not speak it. I look at it imagining the music, and without the music, it deflates. Still and all, I’m happy to see it.

The sadness is that there are only two poems in this issue, and one of them is a song lyric. So this is what poetry has come to. Publications like The New Yorker bring poetry to people who might well have this as their only poetry contact. Leonard Cohen, as few albums as he will probably sell, and as worthy of wider notice as he is, no matter how few albums he sells, he will sell many times as many albums as the most widely distributed book of poetry.

We have these conversations now and then, about song lyrics and poetry, and I’m not interested in starting that conversation back up. What I’m interested in is a wider readership for poetry, and publishing Leonard Cohen (whom I admire very much) in the place of a poem that needs the readership much more, saddens me.

This is what I wish. I wish The New Yorker had published the lyrics to “Going Home” as an extra, a plus, to the regular poems. There are so few opportunities out there for poetry to get in the hands of a wider audience, that to lose even one is a pretty heavy loss.

That said, I also want to say that I’m pleased that publications like The New Yorker continue to publish poetry at all, and I’m doubly pleased to see that there is a new spirit of inclusiveness these days.

So there we are.

Somebody That I Used to Know

2012-01-22T07:03:00.000-08:00

OK, so as viral things go, this is still pretty cool. A cover of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

I was the 33,478,459th person to watch it.

Gotye's album comes out January 31st. This band doing the cover is called "Walk off the Earth."

Are we the Richard Hugo generation?

2012-01-19T18:18:00.000-08:00

That’s a question I’ve never heard anyone ask, but I feel it could well be asked. The generation of poets who grew up with The Triggering Town as an early influence, who are now in their early 50s or so and younger, who constitute most of the poets often referred to as “skittery” or what-have-you might well have Richard Hugo to thank as much or more than Lyn Hejinian or John Ashbery. Here’s a snippet of what I mean:

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A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or "causes" the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing. That's not quite right because it suggests that the poet recognizes the real subject. The poet may not be aware of what the real subject is but only have some instinctive feeling that the poem is done.

Young poets find it difficult to free themselves from the initiating subject. The poet puts down the title: "Autumn Rain." He finds two or three good lines about Autumn Rain. Then things start to break down. He cannot find anything more to say about Autumn Rain so he starts making up things, he strains, he goes abstract, he starts telling us the meaning of what he has already said. The mistake he is making, of course, is that he feels obligated to go on talking about Autumn Rain, because that, he feels, is the subject. Well, it isn't the subject. You don't know what the subject is, and the moment you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain start talking about something else. In fact, it's a good idea to talk about something else before you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain.

Don't be afraid to jump ahead. There are a few people who become more interesting the longer they stay on a single subject. But most people are like me, I find. The longer they talk about one subject, the duller they get. Make the subject of the next sentence different from the subject of the sentence you just put down. Depend on rhythm, tonality, and the music of language to hold things together. It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs. In the world of imagination, all things belong. If you take that on faith, you may be foolish, but foolish like a trout.

Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good. Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance, not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write. By arrogance I mean that when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.

The question is: how to get off the subject, I mean the triggering subject. One way is to use words for the sake of their sounds. Later, I'll demonstrate this idea. The initiating subject should trigger the imagination as well as the poem. If it doesn't, it may not be a valid subject but only something you feel you should write a poem about. Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me. Not bad advice but not quite right. The point is, the triggering subject should not carry with it moral or social obligations to feel or claim you feel certain ways. If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don't have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up. But the advice is still well taken. Subjects that ought to have poems have a bad habit of wanting lots of other things at the same time. And you provide those things at the expense of your imagination.

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A lot of people have been thinking about poetic “hybridity” or third way or whatever phrase is current for the poetry written over the last decade or so, and when talking about it, they usually talk about it as something like the melding of language writing with the more conservative poetry of post-confessional, pseudo-autobiographical, mainstream poetry (again, or whatever terms you want for these general tendencies). But I think that Hugo’s general thesis in The Triggering Town, that poets should allow themselves to “get off the subject,” to leave the “triggering” image for the more allusive ground of emotional and irrational sympathy has had at least as much impact as language writing, or any other single force, in causing the “post-avant” tendency to occur. Even for those poets who didn't have the direct influence of reading The Triggering Town, the idea, the idea of the trigger and jump (which was around already a long time, yes), Hugo's version, helped set the stage for acceptance of wilder associations. The Triggering Town was a way in and a way out.

I say this because it is The Triggering Town that became the book that otherwise “conservative” creative writing teachers assigned to their creative writing classes, and, because it quickly became popular, it was also the book that people not in creative writing classes might pick up. This book was the foot in the door that allowed the examples of poets like Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, and others to suddenly “make sense” as examples.

To tell the truth, I’m not sure if I’m right about this or not, but back in the mid-1980s this book performed that function for me. After reading it, the poetry of John Ashbery and others didn’t seem so daunting, it was no longer foreign. True, his poetry was (and remains) elusive, but that elusiveness became part of how to read it as a form of moving away from a triggering idea, phrase, or image.

I’m certain, from the examples in the book, that Richard Hugo didn’t foresee how far his point could be taken. This is probably why it’s not talked about as much as I feel it should. It’s not cool. Certainly it’s not as cool as rediscovering Gertrude Stein, but what it was (and still is in many ways) is an important part of the shift in contemporary poetry away from the way metaphor and scene and subject were conceived by a majority of poets in the 60s and 70s to what a lot of poets are doing today. We talk a lot about the move of innovative poetry (everyone wants to claim that) into their work, but the move from mainstream poetry through The Triggering Town, I believe, was (and is) just as strong.

[You can read the full text of two of the essays from The Triggering Town here:

http://ualr.edu/rmburns/RB/hugo1.html]

Here's a poem of Hugo's, to close, that hopefully also illustrates a bit of what I mean.

In Your Bad Dream

Morning at nine, seven ultra-masculine men
explain the bars of your cage are silver
in honor of our emperor. They finger the bars
and hum. Two animals, too far to name,
are fighting. One, you are certain, is destined
to win, the yellow one, the one who from here
seems shaped like a man. Your breakfast
is snake but the guard insists eel. You say hell
I've done nothing. Surely that's not a crime.
You say it and say it. When men leave, their him
hangs thick in the air as scorn. Your car's
locked in reverse and running. The ignition
is frozen, accelerator stuck, brake shot.
You go faster and faster back. You wait for the crash.
On a bleak beach you find a piano the tide
has stranded. You hit it with a hatchet.
You crack it. You hit it again and music
rolls dissonant over the sand. You hit it
and hit it driving the weird music from it.
A dolphin is romping. He doesn't approve.
On a clean street you join the parade. Women
line the streets and applaud, but only the band.
You ask to borrow a horn and join in.
The bandmaster says we know you can't play.
You are embarrassed. You pound your chest
and yell meat. The women weave into the dark
that is forming, each to her home. You know
they don't hear your sobbing crawling the street
of this medieval town. You promise money
if they'll fire the king. You scream a last promise—
Anything. Anything. Ridicule my arm.

The internet goes on strike

2012-01-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

On strike.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Kathleen Edwards / The Flaming Lips

2012-01-17T11:21:00.000-08:00

http://pitchfork.com/tv/pitchfork-classic/1885-the-flaming-lips-the-soft-bulletin/

Just in case you were asking yourself, “Self, what is John Gallaher watching this afternoon?”

It’s a very nicely done series of eight videos on the creation of The Flaming Lips’s great album The Soft Bulletin, which is one of my favorite things in teh universe. It says there’s an embed option, but I can’t get it to work. You should go there than watch it right now. The Flaming Lips are an unusually forthcoming crowd. You never know what they’ll say next, but you can be certain it’ll be interesting. Like what Wayne Coyne has to say about "meaning things" and where he found the image for the cover. (Not to mention the true spiderbite story.)

And then this, from Paste, on Kathleen Edwards, on her excellent new album out today:

http://mplayer.pastemagazine.com/issues/week-28/articles#article=/issues/week-28/articles/kathleen-edwards-making-a-left-turn-at-the-crossroads

Edwards is suggesting that there are two kinds of premeditated change: change that repudiates a mistaken past and change that breaks from a successful past before it curdles. She was looking for the second kind of change but wasn’t sure how to go about it.

. . .

If narrative songs rely on the forward movement of time—first this happened, then that happened—reinforced by the forward movement of rhythm, metaphoric songs deemphasize time. The latter approach tries to capture one particular moment or feeling by encircling the target with layers of images and similes—and also with layers of harmony. So it’s not surprising that her two co-writes with Roderick replaced the twangy, clippety-clop canter of her early songs with more atmospheric resonance.

So today it’s The Flaming Lips and Kathleen Edwards. What an interesting painting.

I meant to write "pairing" above, but sometimes you just have to go with the typo.

And as long as I’m just talking, here are a few more things I’ve come across today:

D.A. Powell is judging The Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry. Submissions accepted January 1 - March 31 http://www.fourwaybooks.com/contest.php

Territory Ahead is telling me to “Remember What You're Best At‏.” Yikes. Well, whatever sells shirts, I guess.

And then there’s this:

Poets & Writers is telling me that there are “Over 770 Literary Magazines Looking for Your Work‏.” That sounds like an obscene number of literary magazines. Could the English-speaking poetry world really be large enough for that? And really, I hate the visual of that many literary magazines out there looking for my work. Double yikes. Yikes yikes. Seriously.

Teicher's 2012 Poetry Preview

2012-01-16T06:32:00.000-08:00

This looks helpful:

Not Your Parents' Poems: A 2012 Poetry Preview
by Craig Morgan Teicher

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/144924564/not-your-parents-poems-a-2012-poetry-preview

Here’s his list of some promising upcoming titles:

Lucille Clifton - The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton

D. A. Powell – Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys

Jorie Graham – Place / New Poems

Dante Alighieri, Mary Jo Bang and Henrik Drescher – Inferno / A New Translation

Jack Gilbert - Collected Poems

Lyn Hejinian - The Book of a Thousand Eyes

James Tate – The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990 - 2010

Lucia Perillo – On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

Oni Buchanan – Must A Violence

Cathy Park Hong – Engine Empire

Paisley Rekdal – Animal Eye

Hayden Carruth – Last Poems

I like lists. And what I like especially about this list is that it’s one of the more aesthetically inclusive lists I’ve seen. From Clifton to Powell to Hejinian to Perillo and Carruth. I wish all of our lists (mine included) were so wide-ranging. And the fact that this appears on the NPR website is a healthy sign for poetry.

Of these poets, a couple notes from me:

I’ve seen bits of the Mary Jo Bang translation, and I’m as excited about seeing the whole thing as I’ve ever been to see a new book. It’s going to have some people very upset. It’s going to be condemned in some circles for its “looseness,” but from what I’ve seen so far (three cantos, one of which I’m publishing in The Laurel Review with the accompanying illustration from Henrik Drescher), I’m going to like it a lot.

Lucille Clifton – I didn’t pay all that much attention to her work until after her death. All I was aware of was her most accessible, or popular work, but after her death I heard a poem of hers read that I liked, so I looked her work up to find there was more to find in it than I previously had found.

Powell and Hejinian and Buchanan are always interesting, so I’m looking forward to them.

Graham and Tate. I used to read them and talk about them as much as any other poetry, but I’ve gone back to their new books less often than their older ones (The Rolling Stones Syndrome, it’s called). I’m always hopeful that this will be the book where Graham gets it back, so I’m going to buy it, as I’ve bought all the others. And Tate. Mostly what I’ve thought and heard is that Tate just needed to edit his collections (and story-poems) down. As a selected, this should do the first. Maybe that will be enough to make this the definitive collection of his recent work.

Side note:

One of the issues that came up several times last year on this blog (and other places) is the issue of trying to describe the “period style.” I’m continually interested in what people see as our common currency. Here’s how Teicher describes it, or a part of it:

“Today's average poem (if there is such a thing) takes us to the frontiers of language, borrowing from Twitter memes to overheard conversation, from the classics to bad movies.”

I’m more of the opinion that there isn’t such a thing as “today’s average poem,” but this bit from Teicher does nod to a kind of jumpy (SKITTERY!) attitude that a lot of poems share. It’s true, a lot of poems are more interested in juxtaposition to create meaning than they are direct, focused meditation, from more centrist poets like Albert Goldbarth and Bob Hicok to the innovative or experimental poets like Hejinian, but again, that’s not a complete, across the board, description. It’s interesting to note, though, as we’re all wanting glimpses of how the future will describe us, because if we can imagine how the future will describe us, that means the future will remember us, and it’s comforting to imagine we’ll be remembered.

A Few January (Mostly) Music Releases

2012-01-15T07:18:00.000-08:00

Albert Goldbarth's new collection out this month, Everyday People, has a perfect cover. I'm looking forward to it.

I’m pretty sure with the way my life is going so far (very busy; very, very busy), I’ll most likely not stay on top of new music releases as well as I was in 2011. [Final tally: 2011 – 272 hours of music on my windows media player]

Be that as it may, there are a few upcoming (late January) releases that I’m interested in checking out:

Damien Jurado – Maraqopa: He’s going for a fuller band this time around, it seems, from the only song from it I’ve heard so far. The drawback, on this song at least, is that the vocals sound buried to me, and vocals have been his strength in the past. We’ll see.

Dr. Dog – I’ve missed the title on this one. I could look it up, but that would take effort. Sounds, so far, pretty much in line with their previous work.

Kathleen Edwards – Voyageur: Another fine, well-crafted album to add to her list of fine, well-crafted albums. I like it. And there’s Bon Iver in the background, which is nice. She has a light touch, even on her more aggressive songs. It makes her work both refreshing and easy to miss.

Lana Del Rey – Born to Die: I don’t know what to make of Lana Del Rey. She said (I’m paraphrasing) that she wants to be the Nancy Sinatra of the Hip Hop generation, and that’s kind of what she sounds like. There are moments of something quite interesting (“Video Games”), interspersed with moments of easy melodrama (“Baby we were born to die!”).

Leonard Cohen – Old Ideas: His first record since the uneven Dear Heather in the early 2000s (2003? 05? I forget). I’ve heard two songs so far, and they’re both right down the middle Leonard Cohen. The band sounds a bit more like it’s real people this time around, and the background singers are a little less overbearing. I’m crossing my fingers.

Sharon Van Etten – Tramp: Neither of the two songs I’ve heard from this so far can live up to Epic, her first release, so I’m crossing my fingers.

I’m a sucker for time-lapse photography. What can I say.

Who Were We? What Did We Want? Where Were We Going?

2012-01-11T11:46:00.000-08:00

So the 20^th Century is firmly behind us now, and I’m interested in what it will turn out we’ll say it was, over time. I thought a good place to start would be the Academy of American Poets, as I just came across the anthology Fifty Years of American Poetry a couple weeks ago. I was thinking it would be something of a baseline of the popular poets of the time. That might be something to work with. What I came up with was a radically different view of the 20^th Century than the one I would write. I wasn’t surprised, really, but it’s interesting to see just how many of the names I don’t recognize, even as the dates get more contemporary. And, of course, the sometimes glaring names that do not appear (The Beat poets? Black Mountain poets? The Objectivists? for example). And when the names appear, it’s interesting to see which young poets (award winners, usually, which make up the majority of names I don't recognize) are directly brought in and which poets only appear late in their careers.

The introduction to the volume is from Robert Penn Warren, and what interests me most in it is how he goes to great pains to stress the diversity of aesthetic positions represented in the anthology of “the Chancellors, Fellows, and Award Winners since 1934.” He writes:

“A glance at the table of contents will show that no one school, bailiwick, method, or category of poetry has dominated the interest of the Academy. The Academy has been interested in poetry, not in cults of schools, in helping, as best it could, though no doubt with some human failing, serious poets of whatever persuasion.”

It’s all very interesting to see, as I would now characterize this list as a mostly very like-minded group. Funny how time does that, making what at one point seems divergent into a unity. And then to see the next ten years after the 1984 edition, how the Academy navigated its way into the 90s. Was there a next edition after that one? I can’t seem to locate it. Maybe I used bad search terms. Maybe they stopped making anthologies.

But, whatever the future holds, this is how The Academy of American Poets remembers the 20^th Century. From a quick glance, it seems we loved our children, and that time rolls along, even if no one remembers us.

Fifty Years of American Poetry

Anniversary Volume for
The Academy of American Poets (1984)
Wood engravings by Barry Moser
Introduction by Robert Penn Warren

(1910) / E. A. Robinson

(1915) / Edgar Lee Masters
(1915) / Ezra Pound
(1916) / Padraic Colum
(1917) / Witter Bynner
(1918) / Conrad Aiken
(1924) / Joseph Auslander
(1924) / John Crowe Ransom
(1927) / William Rose Benet
(1928) / Robinson Jeffers
(1928) / Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1929) / Oliver St. John Gogarty
(1930) / Archibald MacLeish
(1932) / Allen Tate
(1932) / Edwin Markham
(1934) / Audrey Wurdemann
(1935) / Marianne Moore
(1935) / Muriel Rukeyser
(1936) / Carl Sandburg
(1937) / Dudley Fitts
(1938-40) / Percy MacKaye
(1939) / Leonora Speyer
(1940) / E. E. Cummings
(1940) / Max Eastman
(1941) / John Neihardt
(1941) / Ridgely Torrence
(1942) / Robert Frost
(1942) / Randall Jarrell
(1943) / Leonard Bacon
(1944) / Richard Eberhart
(1944) / Kenneth Rexroth
(1944) / Jesse Stuart
(1944) / Mark Van Doren
(1948) / W. H. Auden
(1949) / Rolfe Humphries
(1950) / Robert Francis
(1950) / Robert Nathan
(1953) / Louise Bogan
(1953) / Louise Townsend Nicholl
(1954) / Leonie Adams
(1954) / William Carlos Williams
(1956) / Robert Fitzgerald
(1957) / Daniel Berrigan
(1957) / Babette Deutsch
(1957) / Robert Hillyer
(1959) / Ned O'Gorman
(1959) / Richard Wilbur
(1961) / X. J. Kennedy
(1961) / John Hall Wheelock
(1963) / John Updike
(1964) / John Berryman
(1964) / Robert Lowell
(1964) / Adrien Stoutenberg
(1966) / David Wagoner
(1967) / Donald Justice
(1967) / May Swenson
(1968) / James Wright
(1969) / James Schuyler
(1970) / John Ashbery
(1970) / Robert Hayden
(1971) / Sylvia Plath
(1971) / Stanley Kunitz
(1972) / Peter Everwine
(1972) / Richmond Lattimore
(1973) / Constance Carrier
(1974) / John Balaban
(1974) / Josephine Miles
(1975) / Richard Hugo
(1975) / Stan Rice
(1976) / Elizabeth Bishop
(1976) / Philip Booth
(1976) / Horace Gregory
(1976) / James Merrill
(1977) / Jane Cooper
(1977) / Laura Gilpin
(1977) / Robert Mezey
(1978) / Edward Field
(1978) / Donald Hall
(1978) / Robert Penn Warren
(1979) / Ai
(1979) / W. D. Snodgrass
(1980) / Galway Kinnell
(1980) / Jared Carter
(1980) / Stephen Dobyns
(1980) / Anthony Hecht
(1980) / Howard Nemerov
(1980) / Marilyn Hacker
(1980) / William Meredith
(1980) / Mark Strand
(1981) / Marvin, Bell
(1981) / Christopher Gilbert
(1981) / Edward Hirsch
(1981) / Philip Levine
(1981) / Larry Levis
(1981) / Gerald Stern
(1981) / Michael Van Walleghen
(1982) / Peter Davison
(1982) / Carolyn Forche
(1982) / Brad Leithauser
(1982) / Margaret Gibson
(1982) / William Harmon
(1982) / Lisel Mueller
(1982) / John Frederick Nims
(1982) / Lauren Shakely
(1982) / Alberto Rios
(1982) / Gjertrud Schnackenberg
(1982) / Charles Simic
(1982) / George Starbuck
(1982) / Mona Van Duyn
(1983) / David Bottoms
(1983) / Henri Coulette
(1983) / Louis Coxe
(1983) / J. V. Cunningham
(1983) / Kenneth O. Hanson
(1983) / Rika Lesser
(1983) / Anthony Petrosky
(1983) / J. D. MacClatchy
(1983) / W. S. Merwin
(1983) / Reg Saner
(1983) / Sharon Olds
(1983) / James Scully
(1983) / Karen Snow
(1983) / Frederick Seidel
(1984) / Charles Wright

Poems added for the 60^th anniversary edition

Introduction by Richard Wilbur

(1976) / Howard Moss

(1981) / Josephine Jacobsen
(1983) / David Ferry
(1983) / Vicki Hearne
(1984) / Stephen Mitchell
(1985) / Norman Williams
(1986) / Mark Anderson
(1986) / William Arrowsmith
(1986) / Cornelius Eady
(1986) / Peter Hargitai
(1986) / Li-Young Lee
(1986) / Jane Shore
(1987) / Michael Blumenthal
(1987) / Melissa Green
(1987) / Rosmarie Waldrop
(1988) / Judith Baumel
(1988) / John Hollander
(1988) / Garrett Hongo
(1988) / Richard Lyons
(1988) / Katha Pollitt
(1989) / Thomas Bolt
(1989) / Maxine Kumin
(1989) / Christopher Merrill
(1989) / Minnie Bruce Pratt
(1989) / Peter Schmitt
(1990) / John Duval
(1990) / Robert Fagles
(1990) / Martha Hollander
(1991) / Diane Ackerman
(1991) / Allen Grossman
(1991) / Eric Pankey
(1991) / Elaine Terranova
(1991) / Susan Wood
(1992) / Kathryn Stripling Byer
(1992) / Nicholas Christopher
(1992) / Greg Glazner
(1992) / Jeffrey Harrison
(1992) / Daniel Hoffman
(1992) / William Logan
(1992) / J. Allyn Rosser
(1993) / April Bernard
(1993) / Chris Llewellyn
(1993) / Barton Sutter
(1993) / Rosanna Warren
(1993) / Cynthia Zarin
(1994) / Cyrus Cassells
(1994) / Amy Clampitt
(1994) / David Clewell
(1994) / Alison Deming
(1994) / Irving Feldman
(1994) / Peter Gizzi
(1994) / Richard Howard
(1994) / Marie Howe
(1994) / Carolyn Kizer
(1994) / Mary Jo Salter
(1994) / Timothy Steele
(1995) / Christianne Balk
(1995) / Rita Dove
(1995) / Brigit Pegeen Kelly
(1995) / Cleopatra Mathis
(1995) / Naomi Shihab Nye
(1995) / Adrienne Rich
(1995) / Jan Richman
(1995) / Andrew Schelling
(1995) / Edward Snow
(1995) / John Yau
(1996) / George Bradley
(1996) / Alfred Corn
(1996) / Michael Cuddihy
(1996) / Jon Davis
(1996) / Jorie Graham
(1996) / Martin Greenberg
(1996) / Debora Greger
(1996) / Rodney Jones
(1996) / Richard Kenney
(1996) / Philip Schultz
(1996) / Stephen Yenser

Box? What box? There are no boxes here!

The things you choose and the things that just happen.

2012-01-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

I came upon this little essay yesterday back at the lab, and revised it a bit. I feel I might have posted it at some point, but, as with magazines, a little repetition is expected. So here goes.

It’s one thing to say something along the lines of, “The best poems continue opening up to some point of mystery,” and another to turn that statement into something useful, even if not actually specific. One doesn’t have to be specific to be useful in art, but one should try. For me, using a term like “mystery” is similar to the way a lot of poets talk about “giving voice to the voiceless.” “Huh?” one might well say in response, “How can you tell?” And, “What does that even mean?”

The art that most interests me, that in my reading continues to draw me back, the art that inhabits, that comes from out of, a position of unknowing, not from a position of knowing. Uncertainty, or between uncertainties, as Keats would have it (if Keats ever really said that at all). Certainty in art comes off feeling reductive to me, and not fully open to the weight of experience. It’s a tone thing. When I’m reading a poem that feels certain of what it’s talking about, I get all fidgety. Simply said, and so agreed upon it’s something of a contemporary cliché, but how can we talk about it past the polite nod? Past the jacket blurb? Mystery! Woo woo!

And, that said, I’m also interested in strong assertions, and assertions would seem to be anything but mystery, anything but uncertain. It’s the tone, again, I’m thinking of. I’m thinking of assertions that feel more like working hypotheses than laws. The assertions one makes to oneself walking through a graveyard past midnight. I’ve never been good with laws anyway, they’re mostly wishes, not facts. The way asserting an act of faith, “There are trees there,” or an assertion of emotion, “That sure was something,” can be both assertive and uncertain. Tone. “We may have discoveries next year and maybe not,” as Joseph Lykken, a particle physicist says, “We don’t know. This is discovery science.” Meanwhile there are colorful auroras as far south as Arkansas.

Out, for me, then, as a metaphor, is the machine made of words and its performative air (tone) of understandability, of practicality (no matter how William Carlos Williams meant it when he used the phrase) and in is the dance of veils, the seven veils of ambiguity. That’s what it feels like to me when I’m walking through Maryville, or wherever. When people talk about “knowing” their place, really all they know is the thinnest veil of that place, the sensory presence of that place. And then past that veil, another. The closer we look at it the more it spreads out. We know so little about how things really work (though we’re awfully good at pretending).

Questions. Unanswerable questions (always the more beautiful question): Why is the center of the earth hot? What killed the dinosaurs, while leaving so many other species? Where is the Higgs Boson? Why do we not all despair?

One way out of this knowing/unknowing, is the move into irony, which, for many, was the signature move around the turn of the century (pick one). Irony, though, for the sole sake of enacting irony, is the hollowest of gestures. But the air of desperate unknowing often behind irony, paired with the playful unknowing at the forefront of irony, is the salvation of many contemporary poets. “Desperate, but not serious,” as Adam Ant popularized it 20-something years ago. Many of my favorite poets inhabit a space infused by this. Perhaps all I’m really saying is that they’re using irony well, by creating a secondary tone that makes me feel something is honestly at stake (irony, done well, is at the heart of the artistic response, from Milton to tomorrow). The way such things are always elemental, tonally complex, debatable.

In this way, or because of this, John Ashbery and James Tate are the two poets that so many other poets get compared to these days. There’s a way that Ashbery and Tate inhabit mystery (with irony, humor, fractured sensibility, etc) that does seem to be emblematic, or an overview, perhaps, of what a lot of poets are up to these days. But the tendency is much wider, I think, and includes poets as diverse as Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Lyn Hejinian, Russell Edson, Michael Palmer, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and the list goes on, of poets who foreground mystery, not just as subject matter (mystery [unknowing] as subject matter is common for all poets), but in their process.

I think this is why Wallace Stevens has become the poet so many poets are now talking about (much more so than in the 1980s and earlier, it seems to me), as his poetry can be seen to, within his constant investigation of imagination as subject, but also as process, contain a primer on this stance (Suppose we call it Projection A). But one could just as easily trace it back (if we’re concentrating on only the twentieth century) to William Carlos Williams, and the “so much depends upon” that hovers over the wheel barrow, or Gertrude Stein, who, when you look at the arc from Three Lives to Tender Buttons, you can get something of a feel for the gamut of the stance of knowing/unknowingness.

Mystery’s not really the best word for what I’m thinking about. It contains too much a feel for a kind of schlocky trickery. “Unknowingness,” or “Process Unknowingness,” seems more descriptive, if perhaps a bit too academic. Or, as those critical of this move would term it, a sort of muddy, non-specific, generalness. Unresolvable tenor. Or perhaps it can be thought of as embracing the idea of “Necessary Fiction.” We might be tired of grand narratives, but we still need grand narratives. Maybe that has something to do with it.

What I’m interested in, here, is poets who do the dance of the veils with subject and stance, not specifically how they react to language itself (although it often feels something like a distinction without a difference as I’m looking at how poets achieve this “Process Unknowingness”). And it’s not a problem of how the poets use “things” for me, as things (images) are often leaned on and asserted by poets who foreground mystery in their process. One can believe in, and assert, the veil, while knowing, and admitting, it’s veils all the way down. Unknowing, or mystery, doesn’t mean everything is unknown and/or mysterious.

There are, of course, many ways that poets can negotiate something as fundamentally large as unknowableness, as poets as different as Lucie Brock Broido and Martha Ronk attest, but I think there is something useful in the attempt, as both of them have much more in common with each other than either does with, say, Sharon Olds, or Philip Levine. And poets don’t fit neatly into categories usually, as they tend to mix and match ways of doing things in their own personal ways, as well, some poets move into and out of the tendency. Jorie Graham, for instance, is foregrounding this much less in her recent work than say, in the late 80s and early 90s. But, even with that, there are two (there are more, of course) general tendencies through this stance that are interesting me right now:

Situational Unknowingness (which is an enacting of mystery through fractured scene or narrative) – Which comes from John Ashbery and James Tate (among others), through Martha Ronk and Dara Wier (among others), to Matthew Zapruder and Cate Marvin (among others).

Philosophical Unknowingness (which is an assertion of belief or philosophy into a vacant or unknowable sphere) – Which comes from Charles Wright and Jorie Graham (and others), through Donald Revell and Bin Ramke (among others), to Reginald Shepherd, Dana Levin, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson (among others).

What is a fragment, if not a leap through mystery? And what is grammar, then, if not the same? In that way, all poets deal with this stance in some manner, but what I’m thinking about is poets who foreground this stance, who hit it head on. One can look at The Waste Land as a created ruin, or an assemblage shored against the ruins (yada yada y puis nada), but one can also look at it as an enactment of how perception really works, privately, associationally. One can look at Dickinson this way. One can look at Shakespeare this way.

Lists like this quickly break down (where does Dean Young fit? Should Cole Swensen be thought of in this way?), but might still be useful in starting a conversation.

Anyway, I’ve thought of this tendency in the past as Poetry of the Irrational Imagination, but I’ve become less fond of the word “irrational.” Maybe I should just embrace it again. As well, Interesting anti-stances to this might be a poet like Albert Goldbarth, who uses leaps of association and sensibility not to foreground mystery, but to reveal connections. Maybe? I’ll keep working on it. My thinking is still a bit rough. Perhaps it will always be so, necessarily. And I wouldn’t want to describe it too well. That would take all the fun out of it.

Stevens - So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch

2012-01-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

I’m back now from a delay I should have expected, but didn’t, and now I’m wireless to boot. So, in that spirit, I’m posting one of my favorite poems from Stevens. I hope it fares better than did poor old Lowell. And, at no extra charge, himself reading it, though I’ve never really cared all that much for his reading voice.

So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch

Wallace Stevens

On her side, reclining on her elbow.

This mechanism, this apparition,

Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of

The eye, completely anonymous,

Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only

The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,

Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her head there hung,

Suspended in air, the slightest crown

Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,

The suspending hand withdrawn, would be

An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing

Without gestures is to get at it as

Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and

The idea as thing. She is half who made her.

This is the final Projection C.

The arrangement contains the desire of

The artist. But one confides in what has no

Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world

As anything but sculpture. Good-bye

Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

The Material of a Life, or, The Little Boy Who cried Epiphany

2012-01-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

In the midst of dust, boxes, dogs, cats, kids, and not knowing where the outlets are, I’ve had a bit of time to think about things. Not having Internet, TV, and a landline also helped.

I’m thinking a lot this week about how artists use the facts of life, autobiography, real names, etc., in their art. Whenever I think of this, my thinking turns to the confessional poets and how I feel, as important as their individual achievements might be, the conversations around big C confessional poetry did a lot to damage, or pervert, the way poets think of autobiography in their art.

I don’t blame Lowell and Plath and Berryman and Sexton, etc, for this, but instead, the way that after them, poets tended to think of the heightened application of their autobiographies, or pseudo-autobiographies, so that, after Lowell’s “I myself am Hell,” many poets felt they had a lot to live up to, a level of disclosure or proportion or epiphany that is unsustainable.

Things didn’t have to go this way with our common lives. Think of William Carlos Williams’s use or autobiography, or Frank O’Hara’s, or Lyn Hejinian’s, or A.R. Ammons’s.

I’m thinking about this because I recently finished a very long poem in 70 sections that I composed as an excursion into the alien territory of extreme non-fiction. After writing the thing, which was one thing, I now have to sit with it and wonder what it is. This has taken me back to previous uses of non-fiction in poetry and how it’s been wandering in and out of style and favor for a long time (think Wordsworth, for example).

Things seemed to have been doing fine with non-fiction in poetry until thinking about it went all haywire in the 60s. At least this is my tentative thought. After the 70s and 80s, when a version of heightened autobiography became the norm, and then in the 90s and 2000s when, though still the most common poetry, there was a substantial backlash against it, where are we now?

WCW and O’Hara aren’t talked about as much as they were a decade or two ago, and Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery are talked about more than they have been in (it seems to me). Lowell is now out, and though Plath is holding on, her place seems to be greatly diminished from what it was twenty years ago. Does anyone talk about Ammons anymore? How is Elizabeth Bishop doing?

So, anyway, today I’m wanting to forget the conversation we’ve been having about autobiography in poetry since the 1960s, and to erase the term “confessional” from the canon. In my new conversation I’m imagining, instead of Life Studies and Ariel as the first things one thinks of when thinking of “autobiographical” works of poetry, it would be Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. Granted that Hejinian’s My Life is difficult to teach, and resists quotability, and Ammons’s Tape is, well, long and just as resistant to quoting from and teaching, both twist the autobiographical in ways that I see as correctives to the overblown, self-aggrandizing way that misreads the best parts of Lowell and Plath. Really, there needn’t be an instead about this. There’s easily room for all four texts on the syllabus, and more. Maybe O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, for example.

A lot of it, the problem I think “confessional” brings to the conversation of autobiography in poetry, is in how we are introduced to these poets, what the book jackets and classes and Wikipedia entries say about them. I was lucky in my introduction to Plath and Lowell back in the mid-80s. It was a creative writing class conducted by Miles Wilson, a rather direct, no-nonsense literature and creative writing teacher who didn’t go in for all the myth of the writer business. So I read Life Studies and Ariel with little apparatus. I’ve been rather against apparatus ever since.

I read Life Studies less as the heightened “poet as house of history” going back and forth with mental illness, and more the “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” where the focus isn’t the heightened personal, but how the personal—near quotidian—is placed in a context of memory and association where a relationship to time is demonstrated.

But that’s not where we usually go when thinking of Lowell:

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming

in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston’s
“hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is “a young Republican.”
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.

I hear the perfect ear of his line. His restructuring of form from within form. And his autobiographical material isn’t there to wear itself as a badge, but rather to work with what actually happens in the act of perception and memory. Since then, though, even in much of Lowell’s work, when the self becomes the subject matter, poets try to universalize by generalizing, making themselves the emblematic human, or, worse, by heightening some sentimental object—a button on their mother’s coat or something—and then forcing it into a resonant, forced epiphany. We all live! We all die!

Life is mostly not epiphanies of mutability, and leaning on that, making that the primary conversation of the autobiographical impulse and subject matter, makes for an art that starts to take on something of the position of the little boy who cried wolf.

There are many ways non-fiction, and/ or autobiography can go wrong.

I’ll give the last word to Robert Lowell:

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

New for 2012: The Volta

2012-01-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

Here is something new and enjoyable for 2012:

The Volta

http://www.thevolta.org/

THE VOLTA is a multimedia project of poetry, criticism, poetics, video, and interview.

***

As of January 1, 2012, THE VOLTA is home to the following:

EVENING WILL COME is a journal of prose writing, often by poets on the how, what, and why of their writings. Founded in 2010, new issues appear on the first day of each month.

FRIDAY FEATURE presents new reviews of poetry each week. More information about our Friday Feature can be found here.

MEDIUM is our video column and journal, where new videos of writers appear each Friday.

If you have NEWS items of interest (e.g., new books, chapbooks, journals, reading tours, etc.), please write to thevoltanews | at | gmail | dot | com for consideration.

THEY WILL SEW THE BLUE SAIL is a monthly journal of poetry, featuring a single poem by each of three poets per issue.

TREMOLO features a single interview with a poet, with new issues also appearing on the first day of each month.

***

THE VOLTA was founded in Tucson, Arizona on December 11, 2011 by Sara Renee Marshall and Joshua Marie Wilkinson. It went live on Sunday January 1st, 2012.

The site was designed by JMW.

If you are interested in contributing in some way to THE VOLTA, you may contact us at thevoltaeditors | at | gmail | dot | com

(You get two lives to live, kid: your second and your first.)

In the Presence of Art

2011-12-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

The future's always bright for someone.

When I started this blog, I thought of it as something of a vacation spot. It’s been good this last week or so to turn the tables, and take a vacation from it. And, as with most vacations, I arrive back neither refreshed nor with new perspective, but, like with most vacations, I’ll fake it in the name of narrative coherence.

I suppose it’s inevitable at this time of year to think of the future: New Year’s Resolutions, and all that. This year, however, we have the added bonus of entering 2012, the apocalypse year for Hollywood and various other sales forces.

So here I am in central Texas, in what will, apparently, soon be ocean-front property, and I’m wondering if I should make some sort of resolutions of some kind. Not much is arriving. But it does leave me thinking about my personal relationship to art. As with personal relationships in general, our relationship with art is at its core irrational. But just because our personal relationship with art is based in the irrational, doesn’t mean we can’t have productive conversations about art with others, we just have to remember that at some point our conversations will get absurd if we press them.

What's not to love about the future?

It is through our need and desire that we participate with art, and as our needs are not solely aesthetic, we will fall upon various rocky shores when talking about art with others. Two of these shores, these irrational stances toward art that I come across often are easy to fall into:

1.The new’s the only thing. This is the much talked about “Cult of the New” stance, and it’s especially easy to fall into, as every year a new group of poets comes out with their first books. Look! Ah, that new poet smell! Publishers make most of their money off books in their first year of publication, so it’s in their best interest to push the new line. AWP is another great mover of the new. Buzz is the word. “Relevance” the obfuscation, as what’s relevant is a social construction, one that feeds on what it tells itself to feed on. Nothing is relevant by itself, and everything is potentially relevant.

I come across this often in music criticism. Sometimes I get myself so interested in finding the newest exciting band, that I find myself in a constant state of downloading, without actually listening to most of what I accumulate. The poetry world can get like that. How many nickels would each of us have if we got one for every time we were in a conversation where people are talking about poets they haven’t read?

That will be my first resolution then, to remember that NEW is a social act, bound in time, and that it isn’t itself a sign of artistic value. It seems like such an obvious thing, but “The Next Big Thing” is a seductive brew, and to be the first one on your block to have it is a special thrill that lasts close to fifteen minutes, until the chase begins again. But in the chasing, we’re new too. And to be new is to be relevant and free and young. Who wouldn’t’ want that?

2.One of the flip sides to this, that is a devastating over-reaction, is the “Cult of the Old,” where nothing new or recent is of any value in the face of an older, pure order. This is a self-congratulatory, nostalgic stance that allows the person who holds it to dismiss anything and everything current or made after some date where everything stopped having meaning.

The joke is that we all get to this point at some time. In music it happens usually just after high school, where we suddenly stop listening to new music, and our tastes keep getting reinforced by repetition of the old and further remove from everything else.

This stance can take several forms. In music, as above, it takes an autobiographical form. Music was great when I was young and full of potential, but now . . . . Sometimes in art it follows a similar path: “When I was young I read ________, and all was excellent, and now that I’m older . . . .” This stance often comes masked under the standard of “standards,” where the passing of time has dulled cultural, aesthetic, political, and etc, values. It’s a cry against change, because change means we disappear, and it’s not fun to disappear.

Both of these stances are apocalyptic, in my view, as they chase the ever-receding new or balkanize the ever-receding old. But then again, as the future is coming at each of us with a use-by date, they’re both understandable stances, and two of many, equally (in the abstract) apocalyptic stances. Perhaps all stances are apocalyptic?

There’s stance three, for instance, that I come across more often that I would think from artists themselves. This is the “The Only People Who Make Good Art Are My friends” stance. It’s a very limiting stance, depending on how many friends one has, both in its narrowness and in its weird aesthetic inclusions and exclusions. And then come stances four and five, the critical stances of “Everyone Who Writes Well Writes Well All of the Time” and “People Who Don’t Write Well Never Write Well” that can make book reviewers and apologists get all pretzel logic in unintentionally humorous ways.

So is there a New Year’s Resolution in any of this? To continue to value what has come before, and to also remain open to the new? To continue to experience art in two directions? To not just read my friends? To read honestly and critically? Don’t we all try to do that already?

The problem for me is that I have a pretty large bookshelf (and music catalogue) and I like to hear from my friends, so most of my energy, my energy for finding things, is going to be directed at the new, and what people (my friends) tell me about. I feel that’s probably the case for most of us? So maybe here’s my New Year’s Resolution: For every couple new books or albums I read or listen to, I will read or listen to something old. And I will continue to look again at books from poets I, in the past, haven’t cared for. I’ll start with my favorite Frank Sinatra tune that I haven’t listened to in some time, as a token of my sincerity.

Frank Sinatra
That’s Life

All the Art that Fits

2011-12-18T06:58:00.000-08:00

All boxed up and ready for the future?

All my books are packed up. Actually, most all of the house is packed up. So I don’t have many texts left to hand. I saved out a few books for travel purposes. But not John Cage, and it’s suddenly John Cage I’m wanting to look up. That’s how it works, right? I remember (In either SILENCE or A Year from Monday) him writing about one of the necessary aspects of an art, that it fits the sound of its time. That you can place it next to an open window, the sounds from the street, and the two blend together as a concordance.

I’ve always liked that. The sound of the context. But that’s just the first push. The art must fit its time, yes, but it must also push it, move it along into the future. The way The Beatles “fit” 1963, but then pushed into 1967. Or how Picasso pushed the 20th Century forward, after first, fitting into it. Anyhow, it’s a pleasant idea, as I’m sitting here surrounded with boxes wanting pleasant ideas. So many boxes.

I was thinking about this while reading John Ashbery’s “Grand Galop” this morning over coffee. Or actually, I was thinking about wanting to find the John Cage, and then picked up Ashbery’s Selected Poems, and there was a bookmark on page 172. It’s all chance operations.

And here’s what I read:

Better the months—
They are almost persons—than these abstractions
That sift like marble dust across the unfinished works of the studio
Aging everything into a characterization of itself,
Better the cleanup committee concern itself with
Some item that is now little more than a feature
Of some obsolete style—cornice or spandrel
Out of the dimly remembered whole
Which probably lacks true distinction. But if one may pick it up,
Carry it over there, set it down,
Then the work is redeemed at the end
Under the smiling expanse of the sky
That plays no favorites but in the same way
Is honor only to those who have sought it.

And I’m thinking right now that this is why critics (us) can never truly see the work that will continue to be present in the future. Because our knowing is always outdated. We can only pick up what we’re going to pick up. We can’t know what the future will pick up, will, literally, hold. In regards to art, we are always chasing it as it runs away from us. As critics (each of us is an art critic [lucky us]), we can only speak from experience, which is, we can only speak from out of the past.

Some work speaks well with its present but doesn’t help carry the present forward. It reflects the present upon itself, or as its real or imagined past. That’s one thing. A thing of comfort or value to the present, but not of much value (necessarily) to the future. Poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay or Archibald MacLeish seem to be falling into that category, perhaps, while others mirrored their time while also mirroring a consciousness that will be. The plays of Shakespeare are good examples of this.

In the current conception of things, there’s little doubt that Wallace Stevens is this type of poet—but there’s no guarantee that this will continue to be the case. We’re still so close to the 20th Century. In my lifetime I’ve already seen the rising and lowering of several poets (Robert Lowell!).

Back to the “Grand Galop”:

As long as one has some sense that each thing knows its place
All is well, but with the arrival and departure
Of each new one overlapping so intensely in the semi-darkness
It’s a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second
Must be replaced by imperfect knowledge of the featureless whole,
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail unrelated
To any attempt at definition. And the minor eras
Take on an importance out of all proportion to the story
For it can no longer unwind, but must be kept on hand
Indefinitely, like a first-aid kit no one ever uses
Or a word in the dictionary that no one will ever look up.
The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.

Still other artists speak less to their own time than they speak to a future time. Surely Gertrude Stein is more talked about now as an important writer than she was when she was alive (and maybe our present will become her end point, or maybe she’ll go one), while Pound has less and less to say to us each year, and seems—so far at least—to be staying that way for some time. Melville is perhaps the most recent famous example of this, much more major in the 20th Century than he was in the 19th. Or the transformations Emily Dickinson’s poetry went through in the 20th Century.

The great machine of our listening continues. Who is the Ezra Pound of the future? The Gertrude Stein? We’ll never know. So we play at guessing, for in guessing we imagine we’re making the future, and in guessing, we don’t have to continually feel ourselves and our age ending. We ruffle the hair of our children. We see them on their way.

I’ll give Ashbery, as these are questions people are asking of his work often,the last word. Back to the “Grand Galop” one last time:

It is this
That takes us back into what really is, it seems, history—
The lackluster, disorganized kind without dates
That speaks out of the hollow trunk of a tree
To warn away the merely polite, or those whose destiny
Leaves them no time to quibble about the means,
Which are not ends, and yet . . . What precisely is it
About the time of day it is, the weather, that causes people to note it painstakingly in their diaries
For them to read who shall come after?
Surely it is because the ray of light
Or gloom striking you this moment is hope
In all its mature, matronly form, taking all things into account
And reappropriating them according to size
So that if one can’t say that this is the natural way
It should have happened, at least one can have no cause for complaint
Which is the same as having reached the end, wise
In that expectation and enhanced by its fulfillment, or the absence of it.
But we say, it cannot come to any such end
As long as we are left around with no place to go.
And yet it has ended, and the thing we have fulfilled we have become.

There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going.

2011-12-16T07:41:00.000-08:00

Today’s Specials: e.e. cummings / Megafaun / Eleanor Friedberger

“You’re going to love this. You’re going to just love it.” –Willy Wonka

This conversation with a silent man, this continual conversion of principles, of what we think doesn’t make any sense . . . of what we say is brand new and what we say is the same old thing and what we say is not as good as what was done in the past and what we say is better than ever before. One person’s inscrutability is another’s, well, something else. Such has always been the case. It’s why I keep going back to this issue. The reception of e.e. cummings is a great example.

Here are a few negative things written about his poetry, circa the 1930s:

Harriet Monroe, while editor of Poetry, wrote of his poetry: “Mr. Cummings has an eccentric system of typography which, in our opinion, has nothing to do with the poem, but intrudes itself irritatingly, like scratched or blurred spectacles, between it and the reader’s mind.”

Another reviewer went further: “His typography is so perverse that the reader is scared off before he has gone very far. The puzzle of his punctuation is not even an amusing one; it certainly is not worth solving.”

So there we have it, right? Such run the lessons of the past.

And then, revisiting one’s decisions, I instantly want to change my mind about my favorite albums from 2011. Over the last few days, looking at the lists of others, I’ve really been enjoying the albums from Megafaun and Eleanor Friedberger.

Here are a few songs, to give you something of a feel for them:

Megafaun by Crammed Discs

06. Eleanor friedberger - My Mistakes by Republic of Music

Eleanor Friedberger - Owl's Head Park by MergeRecords

[concise outline of some reflections concerning fire]

Radiohead 'Rehearsing New Songs' for 2012 Tour

2011-12-15T08:36:00.000-08:00

What is this man thinking?

Radiohead’s The King of Limbs ranks up there with some of the biggest “how to mess up a great album so that it's only a good album” examples of all time for me. First, the album is short, eight songs. Second, the first few songs are exercises in song deconstruction, which is fine, and I like them, but they are wearisome compared to the second half of the album, which contains some very fine songs: “Lotus Flower,” “Codex,” “Give Up the Ghost,” and “Separator” are top-shelf Radiohead.

These two things are not deal breakers, it’s still a good album and all, but once they started shelling out more songs, the songs that didn’t, I suppose, make the cut, I really had to wonder what they were possibly thinking. What was it that kept “Supercollider,” “The Butcher,” “Staircase,” and “The Daily Mail” from the album (all of which are better songs than the opening four tracks of the official album, in fact, “The Daily Mail” is one of their finest of all time, in my opinion), and had them put “Feral” on?

So, as a 12 song album, this is one of Radiohead’s finest, but it’s officially an eight-song album. I have the twelve songs on my media player, and I’ve called them The King of Limbs. I’m happy now, but still with a shake of the head at what it could have been if they’d’ve just gone ahead and put it all out as a regular album and not had me go through all this trouble.

And then now, as it always is with me and Radiohead, all is forgiven, as I’ll be seeing them perform some new songs this spring when their tour stops in Kansas City:

from SPIN

http://www.spin.com/articles/radiohead-rehearsing-new-songs-2012-tour?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=121511

Radiohead plan to preview some fresh material on their upcoming tour. "We've been rehearsing about four or five new songs this week," guitarist Ed O'Brien told XFM's Mary Anne Hobbs today (via Consequence of Sound). "So we're going to try to take those on the road."

O'Brien offered additional details in an interview with BBC 6, and hinted at a potential 2012 studio release. "We haven't got anymore stuff left over but we are rehearsing at the moment and we are rehearsing new songs because we want the tour to be creative," he said. "So if that means at the end of the year we might have nipped into the studio for a couple of weeks and done an EP or something else then it could be, but the thing is to keep it as fluid and flexible as possible." Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has previously said the band would hit the studio this month and next.

The U.S. portion of the tour kicks off on February 27 in Miami and is currently scheduled through March 15 in the Phoenix area, after which Radiohead will head to Mexico City and then Europe. In the BBC interview, O'Brien acknowledged the band will also be playing some British dates but said he couldn't share the details just yet. He did say the band would prefer to play arenas rather than festivals, citing the "quite detailed" sonics of The King of Limbs.

In the meantime, Radiohead will release a pair of outtakes from Limbs, "The Daily Mail" and "Staircase," as a digital single on December 19. That's also the digital release date for the band's The King of Limbs: Live From the Basement performance video, which will also be out on DVD and Blu-Ray.

The 20s Generation at the End of the 60s

2011-12-14T05:37:00.000-08:00

Far and wee.

I enjoy reading old books of criticism. It’s illuminating to see the ways that poets were talked about then versus how they’re talked about now. Who gets mentioned when. How some are dismissed or lauded. That sort of thing.

This week I’ve been reading the Twentieth Century Views collection of critical essays on E.E. Cummings, edited by Norman Friedman. It’s fascinating reading to see how they’re dealing with the 20s generation by mid-century. Cummings is the poet under discussion, but the side comments on others of his generation and the general comments on his generation as a whole make for an interesting narrative of how the 20th Century was seeing itself as it was just past the midway point.

Here’s a bit from Barbara Watson’s essay (first published in 1956):

The post-war (WWI) artists accepted this liberation [of artistic means] without necessarily realizing that it was itself a part of the past to which, in its own language, they were saying good-bye. They spoke as though the Victorian and Georgian ways had been the last efforts of a moribund society to hamper the free development of each human being. I would argue that, in fact, they were the posthumous children of that era.

World War I, which rebellious men claimed as their cradle, was not the beginning of the upheaval, although it was the bloodiest and most destructive stage. The causes of the war, whether analyzed according to Marxist, patriotic, or more inclusive theories, had already been the causes of a revolution in the arts, long before cracks appeared in the surface world . . . to the sheltered children of these “good” families, as part of a pre-ordained scheme of the universe.

[. . . .]

Their response to the war and to France was probably heightened by the fact that these young intellectuals went to war conscious of their own ripeness for rebellion. These clever adolescents had by no means invented themselves. Already at hand was the whole machinery of modernism, so complete that, even for their exceptionally inventive work, they would never really have to retool. The new painting and the new music were no longer new. And every old literary convention had been mined, if not already blown sky-high.

Even the jazz age, which seems to be so tidily explained as a reaction to the war experience . . ., began before the war.

Then they had come through the war, with suffering that was real and disillusionment that was real, but neither of the most damaging kind, and none of it unselfconscious. Cowley has pointed out that what these writers called “disillusionment” was really a rebellion which “implies faith in one’s ability to do things better than those in power,” a quite different feeling from the disillusionment of the Fifties. Full of what now seems like optimism, and a characteristic product of the time called “pep,” they came home to protest against a world of hypocrisy and brutality. They set themselves up as a new kind of coroner’s jury, to declare the past dead and thus to kill it.

[. . . .]

Why is it not possible, at least in theory, to produce excellence by the conventions of the past? Perhaps it is that the writer is then paying tribute to literature, not to life, admitting an inability to be moved to creation without the aid of a printed go-between, and that initial dependence mars the performance in some mysterious but deadly fashion. . . . [T]hese same lyric emotions, having come . . . unsolicited on Eight Street, neither need nor could be cast from an antique mold.

If lyric impulses are found alive in the modern world, though naked, toothless, and illegitimate, it must be possible to render them by a new validity in modern forms.

[. . . .]

[I]f you are speaking, as William Carlos Williams suggested in the Harvard Wake issue, “a Christian language—addressing the private conscience of each of us in turn,” you do not try to be “readable,” because then you can say only those things which are already so well known they will be dead upon arrival. If you want to say something new or forgotten, you must demand attention.

[. . . .]

Kenneth Burke says, “An art may be of value purely through preventing society from becoming too hopelessly, too assertively, itself.”

[. . . .]

The more rigid the external order, the more complex and deep a resistance style must convey.

The most extreme form of such resistance will seem at first glance to have been Dada. This movement which desired not to make sense did make sense in one sense: it pointed to the meaninglessness of the meaningless. And Dada sanctions play, absurdity, and exuberant free association for their own sake. . . . One way to mock the meaningless is to be still more meaningless. Once done that is done.

[. . . .]

The individual must not demand for himself what seems like a manageable or systematic world. He must take his chances on the broad directions of flow, willing to endure the confusion of myriads of idiosyncratic beings and events, which are absolutely necessary if we are not to press toward conformity and sameness. “You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming.”

[. . . .]

If, that is, the criteria given us by Tate and Brooks are important ones, we must admit that Cummings has some of the attributes of greatness which best balance each other in the formation of a major talent. If he nevertheless falls short of that kind of achievement, it may mean that this time and this place do not permit it. Perhaps all such large accomplishments have sprung from a ripe society and a literary tradition matured in long and careful use. On this question, it may be wise to take refuge in Cummings’s formula for continuity with the unknown:

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question”

+

Isn’t that lovely in its way? I’m glad to have stumbled back upon it.

A few things that crossed my mind while reading through the collection as a whole.

Wallace Stevens is almost completely absent from the conversation of the 20s generation, as is Robert Frost.

In making the case for Cummings, which is the goal of the collection, Cummings doesn’t come off all that well, in total, but is seen as an energetic humanistic force against the distance of Eliot and Pound, who are continually brought up as the poets with whom everyone has to deal. But they seem to be little more than an idea by this point. As well, the poet who seems to get the most air time is William Carlos Williams. He's all over the thinking of the time, it seems. There's a mention or two of other poets (Hart Crane, Marianne Moore).

At mid-century they were still very interested in who was the major poet of the age, and the Pound assertion of Make It New is still hard at work. They're starting to see cracks in Tate and Brooks, though.

The collection itself was published in 1972, which doesn’t feel all that long ago. And several of the questions raised in it about Cummings and the other poets of his generation seem to still be in the air now regarding poets of more recent generations. The sense of belatedness. The question of how to revolt against a strict order without folding into meaninglessness (“Once done that is done.” Indeed.). The problems of complexity and simplicity. The question of if our time allows for greatness or not. How no movement or spirit of the times ever seems to have an agreed upon point of origin. And the call of the past: how we are not new, but instead, how we’re always at the end of the old. The continual feeling each generation seems to have of the innocent past and the disillusions of the present . . . How every time we say the past is gone we seem to sentence ourselves to repeat it.

Such were the joys.

Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place

2011-12-10T06:34:00.001-08:00

Julianna Barwick - Vow by Artur Smejalsja

Every year, there’s always something I miss. This year, it seems to have been Julianna Barwick’s transcendent The Magic Place.

From the record label: Asthmatic Kitty Records debut, The Magic Place, a nine-piece full-length album of magic and solace, bursting joy and healing tones. Julianna's mostly-a-capella music is built from her voice multi-tracked through a loop station. There's more backing instrumentation than on previous albums but it's the vocals—soaring high in reverb-drenched, wordless harmonies—that matter most here. It's the layered fragments and pieces that become an intricate pattern through technology; it's the sound of a rising thing, a big group harmony as a splash of sunlight through a car window, a sound that feels like hope and ascendance and patience and intimacy. (Pitchfork called her 2009 self-release, Florine, “bracingly intimate” as well as a runner-up for “album of the year,” giving it a glowing rating of 8.2. Her 2007 debut, Sanguine, is more of the same. Her sound, it appears, was born fully realized.)

Here’s a link to hear more full tracks from the album:

http://soundcloud.com/goldstarpr/sets/julianna-barwick-the-magic

Albums I liked from 2011

2011-12-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

In 2011, I ended up with 213 hours worth of music. Here is my list of the 20 albums I listened to most. There were other albums I liked a lot, but usually for only a song or two. It was a good year for music.

In alphabetical order, then, I give you my 2011:

A.A. Bondy – Believers

A.A. Bondy - Believers (Album Preview) by PIASGermany

Blind Pilot – We Are the Tide

We Are The Tide by Blind Pilot Music

Bon Iver – Bon Iver

Bon Iver, Bon Iver by boniver

Caveman – Coco Beware

Caveman -Old Friend by emn2

David Bazan – Strange Negotiations

davidbazan.com by David Bazan

Destroyer – Kaputt

Destroyer - Kaputt by The Line Of Best Fit

East River Pipe – We Live in Rented Rooms

East River Pipe - Cold Ground by fearurself

Elbow – Build a Rocket Boys

Elbow - Lippy Kids by gwehen

EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

EMA: California by -gaga

Feist – Metals

Feist - Graveyard by Arts & Crafts

Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost

vomit // girls by sexmusic

Lindsey Buckingham – Seeds We Sew

Lindsey Buckingham - Seeds We Sow by ronnierocket

The Middle East – I Want That You Are Always Happy

13 Deep Water by themiddleeast

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

Pj Harvey Let England Shake 2011 by gaia-clerici

R.E.M. – Collapse Into Now

R.E.M. "Oh My Heart" by Warner Music Group DE

Radiohead – The King of Limbs /
Radiohead – The King of Limbs (Live from the Basement)

Radiohead - The Daily Mail (From The Basement) by amomentofclarity

St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

St. Vincent - Cruel by Posh Magazine

Viva Voce – The Future Will Destroy You

Viva Voce - The Future Will Destroy You by LANDSHARKPromotion

The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient

The War on Drugs by NYLONmag

Wye Oak – Civilian

Wye Oak by -gaga

Row Row Row Your Boat

2011-12-05T04:19:00.000-08:00

Call it whatever you want, but don't call it Fight Club. That would be easy. And we so hate easy.

There’s a fascinating conversation going on around post-modern New Orleans trumpet player Nicholas Payton’s blog post “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore . . .” circulating. I’ve never been much interested in the term “Jazz,” because when I’m talking about music with someone and I say I like Jazz, they will get a very wrong idea of what I like. What I like in “Jazz” is instrumental bebop from almost exclusively the 1950s. That’s a pretty narrow slice. I pretty much am ambivalent to actively disliking the most of the rest of what is called Jazz. So I’m pretty fine with Payton’s manifesto of freeing ourselves from the constraints of terms. The jazz part of this for me, then, ends there.

Why I’m thinking about it this morning is the possibility of overlap into the problems and fights surrounding contemporary American poetry. A lot of the problem Payton has with “Jazz,” and the reactions to such problems, is something of a cognate for contemporary American poetry.

Here’s Payton’s post:

http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/

Here’s a reaction to his post, talking about race in jazz:

http://iancareyjazz.com/blog/2011/12/how-not-to-become-a-bitter-white-jazz-musician.html

And here’s the NPR aggregation:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2011/12/02/143059425/someone-said-something-negative-about-jazz-as-a-whole-again?ft=3&f=126134671&sc=nl&cc=jn-20111204

OK, so now, the link to poetry.

First off, to echo Payton, something has happened to make poetry no longer hip in the way it was for people who carried around copies of Howl or Ariel or something by Robert Lowell or Charles Bukowski. And what it is isn’t about the quality of contemporary writing, or what poets are writing about, but instead about what’s hip to do. In some circles, it’s hip to carry around something by Tao Lin or Zachary Schomburg or Heather Christle, true, but these poets aren’t as culturally noticed as Ginsberg/Plath/Bukowski were. What’s hip is now hip on a much smaller stage. Why? How?

Should we talk about that, or should we pick up our horns and blow? Yes, that’s what we should do. But as soon as we do, we begin setting something down. What is it we’re setting down? Does it reflect the loss of possibility that the past has closed off? Are we limited by what has happened before? Or are we trying to preserve and extend the past? Because the past was so grand, right? Where do we remain? Where do we attempt to go? Where can we attempt to go? Are we to attempt ignore the past, or to better it, perfect it, extend it? Do we believe there is such a thing as the future? Are we being culturally relevant? Should we be worried about being culturally relevant? Whow decides what’s culturally relevant anyway?

And what do we call what we’re doing?

So here are a few of Payton’s points (I’ve collaged them into an order that best [in my mind] reflects the cognate problems in contemporary American poetry. To get the flavor of his intention, I direct you to the link above.):

A glaring example of what’s wrong with Jazz is how people fight over it.

Jazz was a limited idea to begin with. Jazz is a label that was forced upon the musicians. The musicians should’ve never accepted that idea.

Jazz is incestuous.

Jazz is only cool if you don’t actually play it for a living.
The very fact that so many people are holding on to this idea of what Jazz is supposed to be is exactly what makes it not cool. People are holding on to an idea that died long ago. Jazz ain’t cool, it’s cold, like necrophilia.

Jazz worries way too much about itself for it to be cool. You can be martyrs for an idea that died over a half a century if y’all want. Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt from looking back. Playing Jazz is like using the rear-view mirror to drive your car on the freeway.

Jazz is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.

People are too afraid to let go of a name that is killing the spirit of the music.

Some people may say we are defined by our limitations. I don’t believe in limitations, but yes, if you believe you are limited that will define you. Some people may say we are limited. I say, we are as limited as we think. I am not limited.

Jazz has nothing to do with music or being cool. It’s a marketing idea.

Jazz is a marketing ploy that serves an elite few. The elite make all the money while they tell the true artists it’s cool to be broke.

People are fickle and follow the pack. People follow trends and brands. So do musicians, sadly. Jazz is a brand. Jazz ain’t music, it’s marketing, and bad marketing at that. It has never been, nor will it ever be, music.

Our whole purpose on this planet is to evolve. Jazz has proven itself to be limited, and therefore, not cool. Existence is not contingent upon thought. Life isn’t linear, it’s concentric. When you’re truly creating you don’t have time to think about what to call it.

Definitions are retrospective.

Too many musicians and not enough artists. Not enough artists willing to soldier for their shit.

I am not speaking of so-called Jazz’s improvisational aspects. Improvisation by its very nature can never be passé, but mindsets are invariably deadly. Not knowing is the most you can ever know.

I believe music to be more of a medium than a brand.

You can’t practice art.

I create music for the heart and the head, for the beauty and the booty.

Silence is music, too. It’s where you choose to put silence that makes sound music. Sound and silence equals music. Sometimes when I’m soloing, I don’t play shit. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought. Silence is what makes music sexy. Silence is cool.

- Nicholas Payton

[JG: I’ve taken several important things to consider out of his post. One strand I’ve taken out is the topic of race, and the history of race in Jazz. Race is also an important topic in contemporary American poetry, but it’s different enough from that of the Jazz conversation, that I thought it could be left out. A good question that is asked now and then is how race plays into the cultural practice and reception of poetry in general, and in what is termed Post-Avant and Experimental poetry, as well. And there’s the empty space Payton doesn’t approach, the problem of gender and sexuality in Jazz . . . ]

+

Incestuous . . .

It’s only cool if you don’t’ read it . . .

What he’s striking out at the most is the problematic nature of the term, and the power and aesthetic economies that term sets up. And then, how the fight about the term itself (what we’re doing and what we should be doing) is sucking the life out of what could be a better conversation on the art. I think of it as passengers on a leaking lifeboat. Some are pointing, blaming the sinking of the ship on each other, while others are consumed with deciding on a name for their new vessel, and still others are saying a different boat would have been better, and yet others are complaining about the paintjob. Who’s rowing?

I’ve felt uncomfortable calling myself a poet in something of a similar way that Payton would feel uncomfortable being called a Jazz musician. I rather dislike what that term sets up. I’d rather call myself a “Word Artist” but that sounds pretentious, so I don’t. I’m OK saying I write poetry, so that’s what I try to say when I can. Fewer people think of black berets and finger snaps or Romantic visages of standing on the Alps. It’s the same problem Payton has. But what use can he possibly get out of saying he's a Post-Modern New Orleans Trumpet Player? That jsut sounds silly. Like walking around saying "I'm a Hybrid, pleased to meet you." There are cultural expectations of Genre, and those expectations, if we let them, make us do things. Nothing should make us do things but the art itself. Not the names or the sub names of the art. And then the aesthetic camps and all the blah blah about what’s this or that about styles and groups. If you just ignore all that and do what you do it'll at least makes sense to you. All this hoard mentality and then anti-hoard hoard mentality. Bah and fie.

And then there are some people who are still saying prose poetry isn't poetry? Really? And on. Whatever is done will become the past that will become the problem with which the future will have to deal. And to go forward, it’s important to go back, but it’s impossible to stay there, no matter how beautiful, for in the end, what strength an artist has is that artist’s alone.

Enter Prospero in his magic robes:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

William Logan on Third (or Fourth) Generation American Surrealism

2011-12-03T13:23:00.000-08:00

Off to a sleepover at William Logan's house!

Well, it’s not very much he says about Contemporary American Surrealism, really, but it was enough to get me all up and stomping around the room this morning. It comes in one of his New Criterion reviews. Logan’s not always wrong about poetry, but he often is. (This time I think he’s being too hard on Michael Dickman and too easy on Henri Cole and about right on Billy Collins, but that’s beside the point of what bothered me this morning.)

Here is a bit from Logan on what he sees going on in Surrealism these days. He’s using Dickman as the example, but he could be talking about any number of people, from Zapruder to Schomburg to Christle to Doxsee, or anyone even lightly (me and you?) inspired by Surrealism.

“Dickman represents the third, possibly the fourth, generation of American Surrealism, a style (or perhaps a sect) that has always seemed rather mushheaded in a hardboiled, go-ahead country addicted to facts, facts, facts. With its whiff of anti-religious sentiment, Surrealism may look revolutionary in France or eastern Europe—what better threat to Christians than visions that aren’t Christian? In America, it’s more like middle-class self-indulgence.

Dickman has little to add to the droopy watches of Surrealists gone before, but, now that the movement has grown ever more attenuated, he sees its possibility as a manner without a lick of necessity. If he says, “I was just whispering// into my glass// pillow” . . . you don’t think, “Oh, the young Apollinaire!” You think, “Cinderella!”

With his rabbity enjambment and insistent double-spacing, the poet tries a little too hard to be outrageous.”

First of all, Logan says this tendency “has always seemed rather mushheaded in a hardboiled, go-ahead country addicted to facts, facts, facts.” I agree with that assessment of its reception. It’s that mushheadedness that stands against the American tendency to “facts”, that throws that addiction back in the face of American culture, and does it with a healthy dose of absurdity in the context of the American fact fantasy complex. This alone, this “mushheadedness,” seems to me reason enough to investigate its power to reveal. It’s one way, there are others, of course, but it’s also a way.

Logan takes this notion in two equally simplistic directions. The first, the “revolutionary” look of Surrealism in “France or eastern Europe” because its “visions” aren’t “Christian.” I missed that memo that said Surrealism necessarily had this whiff of an anti- or other than Christian vision. I wonder what Max Jacob would have to say about that. Maybe it does have such a whiff, but if so, it could be said that American Realism also has that whiff in its anti-transcendent assumptions. Surrealism can, of course, be a contrary vision to the vision of Christianity, just as it can be a contrary vision to Capitalism or Socialism or the Moonies. But it isn’t necessarily so. Where one person sees “oppositions” another could say “complexity” or “complications of,” so that Surrealism could easily be defended as a complication of Christianity rather than an anti-Christian posture.

This leads me to my next point. Logan doesn’t allow this opposition into America: “In America, it’s more like middle-class self-indulgence,” he writes. OK, but isn’t that’s just another version of saying that people who write in this manner are rather mushheaded? This is the kind of accusation that’s been leveled at everyone from Eliot and Stevens to the language poets and everyone who does anything outside of the “facts, facts, facts” addiction that Logan first pointed to. Leisure-class fiddling. La la. If I had a dime, that sort of thing. Some poets, of any aesthetic flavor, could be described as writing from a position of self-indulgence. But this is “middle-class self-indulgence.” There could also, then, I suppose, be such a things as “high-class self-indulgence” or “low-class self-indulgence,” but no one ever seems to mention them. Why toss the class issue into it? Is self-indulgence at the middle-class level something especially ripe for Surrealism, or for critique, or for being tagged as a class issue at all? Ah, the poor maligned, shrinking middle class. It was such a good idea, to have one, and now look what we’ve done with it!

But say that Contemporary American Surrealism does have such an air. It would seem, then, if Surrealism can be seen as oppositional, as parable, satire, psychological enactment, then it would seem to be that Surrealism would be a useful and valid a way to talk about the psychological issues of the middle class. Or is Surrealism only to enact the self interest of the more (I suppose?) officially validated issues of the upper and lower classes? This is a tangent from what Logan was speaking about, but it’s in such moments, such transitory moments in reviews and essays and blurbs on books where biases and positions are reinforced, and there is also, often, a kind of sneering directed at the middle class while at the same time a kind of valorization of some abstract idea of a “real” American. The middle class is a cultural straw dog, draped with kitsch and narcissism.

“All my problems are meaningless. That doesn’t make them go away,” Neil Young sang, back in the 1970s, which was his version of whispering into his glass pillow. Which reminds me, Logan would have had a better case, but less of a Surreal one, by sticking with Dickman’s bit on Dickinson, for when he goes to the “Whispering into glass pillows,” it, for me at least, rather unmade his point. “I was just whispering// into my glass// pillow” is a good send up of what it means to disclose, to be a teller, of fact, fact, fact. I was thinking about that when reading it, not about Apollinaire or Cinderella. (I also apparently missed the memo that said Cinderella was now unsuitable landscape. I live and I learn.)

Just my two cents.

Heather Christle - The Difficult Farm

2011-12-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

“I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately.” I wish I would be walking down the street and overhear that sentence, and have it sound common. Oh well and anyway, we’re moving this month, from one side of town to the other. This is going to be a good thing, we know, but right now, it’s mostly just daunting.

So I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately. New (to me) things that I bought but didn’t get to or finish. Old things I’m finding again as I clean off my shelves . . .

A prize was finding my copy of WCW’s Spring & All right after it was mentioned in the comments on a post on this blog. It was great sitting with it awhile. If you haven’t seen it, and your version of WCW is just from anthologies or his selected poems, reading Spring & All will be a revelation (or maybe a disambiguation).

The most depressing thing I found by far was The Achievement of Richard Eberhart. I had not thought of him in years. And here was a book on his achievement. A salute to the dust bin to which we are all destined, I thought, which was quickly reinforced by the numerous volumes of poetry I came across from poets I really liked and of whom I’ve not heard again. Where do they all go? (Where we all go.)

Yikes, and all that. But it’s a good project, going back through one’s bookshelves. It’s a lot like going through one’s High School yearbook. But it’s better than that, mostly, as I was pleased to open some of these books at random and find good things there once again.

One of the books I read this week is Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm. Being enjoyable and likeable was one of the goals of The New York School poets, in my reading of the way they used the voice, the speaker, to move the reader through the poem. It was not a Poetry of Wisdom they were interested in, though there was plenty of wisdom and intelligence, but a poetry of friendliness. That means a lot to me now as it did when I first came across Ashbery and then O’Hara, and later, the rest (and then the second generation of Ron Padgett, et al).

Heather Christle uses that chatty, friendly voice, that charming voice, but often (or even usually) connected to more problematic content. Hers is a poetry of constant, unrelenting cleverness, wit piled on wit. It makes for an exhilarating ride, which at times, feels devastatingly satirical. Her poems accelerate, so just picking one or two to read is not going to give one the experience that is the best way (to my reading) of encountering her work. Just as every sentence is a turn, every poem is also.

FIVE POEMS FOR AMERICA

Can-can dancing just won’t stop
hurting its women. France
is full of stories and women.
Once in Calais three women
lost their money and had
lunch later. Dancing the can-can
shows resilience more clearly
than ever because women have
less money and less strength.
This sounds ugly but my legs
don’t want much, except
for clean pants and stuff.

II.

No way is that cowpoke
bringing me home. He wants
someone to fix his religion.
Believe me, I love religion
but he’s too quiet when
he’s praying. Look, he left
and the bar left and the jukebox
fixed everything. I love this
music and I love this land,
so empty of real trees and hymnals.

III.

Charge! I said, but nobody
heard me, because they were all
listening to their mother, the iPod.
Their mother said a lot of stuff
I didn’t hear. Magnificence comes
in a small car, but we all fit.

IV.

Democracy stinks. My classmates
elected the hamster. Teacher
doesn’t vote and can’t change
anything. Hamsters die all the time
for good reasons. Once I was
a hamster who loved waterparks
but nobody ever knew. Secrets
are also for presidents.
Teacher knows very little.

Northern states. Eastern states.
Where are the armies?
One soldier means trouble.
Five soldiers make a party.
War never means much.
Let’s bring the soldiers
somewhere they might like.
Let’s go to Pizzeria Uno
and not eat anything.

Difficulty! Accessibility!

2011-11-28T05:02:00.000-08:00

When I walk to my bookcase to pick up a book of poetry, I don’t ask myself how challenged I want to be today. When I decide between two books of poems to take on a trip, I don’t weight their difficulty.

I’m tired of the term “difficulty.” It was a terrible word for art. It does nothing for readers, except to make some people feel smug. “I like difficult art!”

Yes, most of the poetry I like is called “difficult.” But I don’t find it difficult. I don’t’ find it challenging. I find it variable and shifty. I like variable and shifty art. Why not think of it that way, rather than as some sort of fight or homework problem?

“Difficult poetry” sounds like something you have to work hard on. Right? Well, all poetry needs to be worked with, so “difficult” poetry must be the best, most important poetry. And if you don’t torture yourself with it, you just must not be good enough for the best stuff. Bah and fie. That’s a terrible use of terms.

What would the last 30 years of poetry be like if instead of “Difficulty” we used the term “Twisty”? Would people not have taken the art so seriously? Well, have they taken it seriously as it is? (No, not really.) What has “difficulty” done for anyone? (Very little.)

Liking “difficult” poetry is like saying you like to date “difficult” people. It’s just simply the wrong word, unless you’re either a masochist or you just like fighting. Maybe some people do like fighting with their art. Maybe for them “difficulty” is a perfectly good word for how to describe it then. But it’s not for me.

On the flipside, I find the term “accessible” to be so flatly obvious as to make me wonder what value anyone could ever get from it. For me, “Accessibility” is a term for building access: all people, no matter their physical abilities, can get into this building. When applied to poetry, I find this term to be highly patronizing. Demeaning, even. “Even my secretary can read it,” to paraphrase Ted Kooser.

I imagine someone at a bookstore, browsing the poetry section (do people even do that?), and thinking “I hope I can find a book that’s accessible to a reader like me.” I feel that person is in need of a hug. These are just terrible terms.

Someone please invent a new economy. One based on positive experiences of art. Please.

PS. Literary criticism is just another form of fan fiction. Pass it on.

Thanksgiving Break!

2011-11-23T05:57:00.001-08:00

I’m off on a little trip!

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

Overture

The End Is Near (Bring Out Your Dead!)

2011-11-21T17:21:00.000-08:00

Reports of the death of poetry, both regarding its quality and its very existence, have been with us a long time now. Fifty years? Seventy-five? And one of the things that Frank O’Hara alludes to as a counter-force, or available mass alternative, to poetry in his “Personism: A Manifesto” is the movies. So it is with a large dose of humor that I read A.O. Scott’s, “Film Is Dead? What Else Is New?” in the NYT the other day, in which the decline of film is rehearsed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/movies/film-technology-advances-inspiring-a-sense-of-loss.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28&pagewanted=all

What strikes me as funny, hilarious even, is that as critics are talking the death of film, movies are everywhere a, if not the, shared language. Everyone I know seems to have a lot of shared text, shared ready conversation, regarding movies. It’s the only art form that still retains this position. If film were to die, what they’re really talking about, is that it would no longer be a big theater spectacle (is this necessarily a bad thing?). It’s the spectacle they’re talking about, not that films will be replaced by a different thing entirely, a different genre. This is Scott’s summation of the situation:

“Anthony Lane of The New Yorker laments the impending eclipse of moviegoing, a collective ritual ostensibly threatened by the ascendance of home viewing. ‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ he concludes, offering (by way of a quotation from ‘Melancholia’) a pre-emptive epitaph for a form of cultural consumption, built around ‘compulsion’ and ‘communion,’ with roots in ancient Athens and, apparently, no future to speak of.”

There’s a blurring of the medium (theater vs Netflix [etc]) and value of the object itself that goes on in the discussion of the decline of film (Film vs Movies, maybe) that muddies the argument, as the arguments tend to flip-flop between the quality of the art object (as an artistic experience) and the technology (move to video and digital, etc).

But even with that, there is a lot of crossover I see in this conversation, this anxiety, to the other, more minor arts. Here are the bits that most ramified with the ways I’ve also heard people talk about the visual arts and poetry:

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It can be hard to escape, and even harder to argue against, the feeling that something we used to love is going away, or already gone. This is less a critical position or a historical insight than a mood, induced by the usual selective comparisons and subjective hunches. Back then (whenever it was) the stars were more glamorous, the writing sharper, the stories more cogent and the critics more powerful.

Are movies essentially a thing of the past? Does whatever we have now, digital or analog, represent at best a pale shadow of bygone glory? Among the recent arrivals in bookstores — speaking of obsolescence! — are two collections of writing by prominent critics that say as much in their titles. The Library of America volume of Pauline Kael’s essays and reviews is called The Age of Movies, a period that evidently lasted from the mid-’50s until the early ’90s, when Kael departed her perch at The New Yorker. Meanwhile a book by Dave Kehr (who writes a home-video column for The New York Times), titled When Movies Mattered, gathers up his articles from the ’70s and ’80s, when he wrote mainly for The Chicago Reader.

As a platform for criticism, the Internet lends itself to the endless making and circulation of lists, and it has also become a gathering place for cinematic antiquarians of all stripes and sensibilities. At the same time the history of film is now more widely and readily accessible than ever before. We may lament the end of movie clubs and campus film societies that presented battered prints of great movies, but by any aesthetic (as opposed to sentimental) standard, the high-quality, carefully restored digital transfers of classics and curiosities now available on DVD and Blu-ray offer a much better way to encounter the canon.

But the very proximity of this canon contributes to the devaluation of the present. Those Criterion Collection and Warner Brothers boxes — of Ozu and Rossellini, of westerns and films noirs and avant-garde cinema — gaze reproachfully from the shelves, much as the Turner Classic Movies titles lurk in the conscience of the DVR, silently scolding viewers who just want to catch up on “Modern Family” or “Bored to Death.” Shouldn’t we be giving our attention to movies that have proved themselves, over the years, worthy of it?

By all means. The alternative is an uncritical embrace of the new for its own sake, a shallow contempt for tradition and a blindness to its beauties. But there is at least an equal risk of being blinded by those beauties to the energies that surround us, and to mistake affection for a standard of judgment. Of course no modern movie star can match Humphrey Bogart’s world-weary toughness or Bette Davis’s sparkling wit, and of course nothing in today’s movies looks or sound the way it used to. But why — or how — should it? Every art form changes, often at rates and in ways that cause discomfort to its devotees. But the arts also have a remarkable ability to withstand and absorb those changes, and to prove wrong the prophecies of their demise.

The camera has an uncanny ability to capture the world as it is, to seize events as they happen, and also to conjure visions of the future. But by the time the image reaches the eyes of the viewer, it belongs to the past, taking on the status of something retrieved. As for those bold projections of what is to come, they have a habit of looking quaint as soon as they arrive.

The movies survived sound, just as they survived television, the VCR and every other terminal diagnosis. And they will survive the current upheavals as well. How can I be sure? Because 10, 20, or 50 years from now someone will certainly be complaining that they don’t make them like they used to. Which is to say, like they do right now.

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It’s better to burn out than fade away . . . natch.

Will I sleep? Will I dream of anthologies?

2011-11-19T07:57:00.000-08:00

So here’s my dream:

The Poetry Foundation would fund the creation of an anthology of contemporary American poetry that would be edited by a board of diverse (aesthetically antagonistic, even) editors to attempt an accurate representation of the poetry that’s been written over the past 25 years, from Ai to Zapruder.

The anthology would contain no apparatus or introductions. It would be raw data, just “representative poems” that would be chosen by the editors, and then donated by the poets or their estates for free to the project.

The editorship would be the editors of several aesthetically diverse literary journals, and/or, it could be editors of aesthetically diverse presses, or it could be Don Share, Stephen Burt, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Cole Swensen, or Ron Silliman, Dana Gioia, Rebecca Wolff, and Natasha Trethewey. (You get the point. But, I would recommend that the editors remain anonymous.)

The anthology would be sold as a paperback at printing cost (which I’m guessing would be at most $7.00 or so a copy), and be distributed for free to libraries, local arts agencies, museums, and high schools. All members of AWP who teach poetry would agree to purchase this anthology for use in their creative writing classes at least once. Also, I think Robert Pinsky had an idea similar to this, years ago? He was looking for a way to get anthologies of poetry into hotel rooms? We should float that idea again. And there must be someone out there who knows how to get books into Walmart stores?

There is a lot of power in The Poetry Foundation. But there is also a lot of potential power in AWP, as well as the Poet Laureate who could talk up the anthology to Jeffrey Brown and various newspapers. And the First Lady. I bet she'd like this.

And, as such dreams go, it’s both utopian and would never happen. But doesn’t it sound at least a little fun?

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In a related issue, I think The Poetry Foundation should fund the creation of an application for ereaders that wraps text properly for poetry. Unless someone has already done this? I don’t have an ereader, because when I looked at some, the poetry just looked awful. Has that been fixed yet?

Ut pictura poesis was our flame

2011-11-17T15:40:00.000-08:00

Two things of interest this week.

First, Jordan Davis, in his conversation of Some Math by Bill Luoma, has some general comments about the 90s, and now, that I think could be considered outside of the specific poetry under consideration:

http://www.constantcritic.com/category/jordan_davis/

There were a few years in the mid-nineties when it looked like the poets gathering in New York might fuse a thousand disparate styles and beliefs and wishes into a single beam of classical beauty, rude comedy and what can only be called zen clarity (New York School, Beat, and Black Mountain)—the Newer (American) Poetry. If you have a copy of New Mannerist Tricycle lying around the house, I don’t need to persuade you that this is a true statement, and yes I know one third of that chapbook was and is D.C. based—in the mid-nineties D.C. was part of New York.

I was a baby poet and therefore an unreliable witness, but it seemed to me that of all the stoned geniuses circulating in the time before the hanging chads and falling bodies, Bill Luoma gave off this glow most consistently. His chapbook My Trip to New York City (collected in Works and Days) recounted a series of buddy movie misadventures pitched somewhere between Kerouac and South Park (this was before South Park) that like Ted Berrigan’s masterpiece “Tambourine Life” changes suddenly from picaresque to elegy. It beaned me. A few other chapbooks of roughly the same vintage struck me as similarly serious—Katy Lederer’s Music No Staves, Anselm Berrigan’s They Beat Me Over the Head with a Sack, Lisa Jarnot’s Sea Lyrics. Thinking back on them now (without actually getting hold of my copies of them) I imagine what they had in common was a Jules et Jim light-heartedness, with hard-earned awareness of the effects of gravity.

What most of those poets also had in common, at that point anyway, was a devout commitment to incantation, to a more or less regular, hypnotic cadence.

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And then he goes on a bit later to add this:

Poetry has been mistaken so long for an all-or-nothing proposition that it sometimes feels like more of a hierarchy than the A.P. College poll. If a poet isn’t ranked in the top twenty-five, the feeling goes, why read him or her. Maybe I’m imagining it, this consensus-seeking chasing after the current number one with a bullet; maybe it’s real but also only a reflection of the larger culture. Most of the time I remember to forget it.

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The second is Richard Deming’s essay on The New York School, reprinted this week on Poetry Daily:

http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_deming.php

In 1961 . . . “Frank O'Hara . . . published” For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson." In that poem, O'Hara writes, “It’s a strange curse my 'generation' has we're all / like the flowers in the Agassiz Museum perpetually ardent.” [. . .] Still, what is somewhat prophetic about O'Hara's lines describing his peers as flowers in a museum is the fact that the New York School increases in influence and importance with every passing year. [. . .] The School has become an institution.

But what is the curse that O'Hara mentions? Is it because the flowers are not wild or transient but are representations made of delicate and precise glass and on display, kept vivid artificially, at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology that makes being like them a curse? Given that Koch, O'Hara, and Ashbery all were undergraduates at Harvard, there is a specific and prevailing nostalgia encoded in O'Hara's metaphor, as if the poem suggests that their passion and joie de vivre reified at the moment of inception. The possibility of being always already imbued with nostalgia would be a horror. As different as each of the poets was, as dissimilar as their work is in terms of form, content, and poetics, they all prized a certain immediacy and wrote (or in Ashbery's case, still write) poems that seek to maintain a vivid, complex sanguinity, an intensity open to the flow of daily life, poems that do manifest, at their best, a kind of ardor. Yet that ardor, like any ardor, is often fraught, complicated—is never assured.

In that sense, the curse O'Hara's generation wrestled with is the possibility that in work striving for spontaneity, the emotional life, by being on display, becomes in reality an exquisite representation, ever fragile, and ever pointing to some other thing. Ut pictura poesis.

The joy that is so often seen as the defining characteristic of the poets of the New York School needs to be measured against their sadness or even anxiety that the time for immediacy and its corresponding necessary intimacy is always just past. To miss that gap between the ideal and the art is to miss that the spontaneity is never fully achieved, and that what might be called a desperation inflects the attempts of these poets to make life real and present. Or as Schuyler once wrote in his beautifully heartbreaking poem "Daylight," "And when I thought / 'Our love might end' / the sun / went right on shining." It is a lovely juxtaposition, until we realize that the sun doesn't actually engage with the possibility of whether that love might end. The human and the natural world are juxtaposed. And since all things must end—we know this and we know the poet knows this—the sense of denial within the uncertainty is that much keener because "the sun [will go] right on shining" in its certainty. That tension to go on despite the fact that an end will come to all things is where Schuyler's poetry places its stakes in humanity as well as its faith in art. The curse that O'Hara refers to might be, then, that art's semblance of life, however precise, is never life itself—and that exquisite failure is what remains forever memorialized. Call this their aesthetics of affinity.

[…]

The legacy of the New York School is, finally, not the gossip or parties or self-celebration, nor even the identity politics. From the early days at Tibor de Nagy to Padgett's newest book, what marks this body of work, taking it in toto, is the persistent sense of wonder that each word we say contains possibility, and that poetry depends not on a particular diction or a magisterial stance or some unblinking look at "the human condition." In the hands of Schuyler, Padgett, and the others, poetry manifests a vivid attention to our own dailiness, and the countless shocks, sadnesses, and joys that constitute a fully human life.

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These two struck me as a fascinating duo of Post-New York School, New York School thinking. Or re-thinking. Davis’s 1990s “beam of classical beauty” and Deming’s (O’Hara’s) 50s-60s curse of museum flowers are both part of the architecture now. The “persistent sense of wonder” and the feeling of being just past; the feeling that “a thousand disparate styles and beliefs and wishes into a single beam of classical beauty, rude comedy and what can only be called zen clarity” is/was just about to happen.

This is a feeling that I still see around in many styles. The joy + anxiety. I see it strongly in Heather Christle’s work, for instance (which I mention at random as I’m reading her The Difficult Farm this week). This tradition, as Wallace Stevens once said about the tradition of the Irrational in art, is still unfolding. But it’s changing, of course, as all things must. I wonder where it’s going, as contrary to Tony Hoagland (and others), I see it as healthy and plural.

It doesn’t need to be one thing. It doesn’t need to be the new thing, the old thing, passing, emergent, or passé. As Davis reminds us: “Maybe I’m imagining it, this consensus-seeking chasing after the current number one with a bullet; maybe it’s real but also only a reflection of the larger culture.” I’m also growing more and more tired of the lists, even as I have a shelf of my favorite books in front of me. Yes. But outside of what’s in or out, worthy or dismissed, then or now, these desires remain. And this rough strand of American poetry continues.

August/September 2011 Notebook

2011-11-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

[This time the notebook was a nice pale green. MEAD, 3X5. Plastic cover. As usual. I prefer the plastic covers, as they don’t rip. It’s from August/September. I’m just not getting to transcribing out the poetry bits.]

What art would you make if you made what you wanted to make? If the answer isn’t the art you’re making, then why not?

If you concentrate only on the significant works, you will misunderstand what the movement was all about.

—John Berber

In any period, the best answer to art is “all of the above.” The biggest error people make when talking about art is surety.

You can’t intimidate architecture.

Some art tries to find things, some art tries not to find things, and some art is otherwise occupied.

There are a lot of people who know precisely which part of the piano you’re hitting at any given time. Turns out, it’s not that difficult a trick.

What can you add to a conflagration, other than yourself?

The question of philosophical language: boundaries are not stable. Between friend and enemy, the new must be restored to conceptual order. And what if we can’t find out? What if it’s undecidable?

We work by enchantment.

We have subjects and we have strategies. Must we say form and content?

There are no such questions but we keep asking them anyway.

I’ve never claimed that what artists do is possible.

The translator has to navigate meaning—does it arise fundamentally from a prior center, or does it arise in the relations of the subject and strategies of the poem. It’s an unnecessary binary, as answers in such an economy turn out to be yes and yes.

Phenomenology and Structuralism holiday at the same places.

Art for art’s sake bores me.

Yes, of course art is relational to the world.

Is the slap Zen, or is the receiving of the slap Zen? What was the question again?

There is only an inside to personal experience. It is a combination of outside forces and the internal working and reworking of those experiences.

I hate dystopia monkey movies. Same with zombies. Not because they violate binaries (Oh how we love our dystopia movies where binaries are violated), but because they want to kill us. I don’t like watching us get killed.

We can’t say what we’re meaning because meaning and saying are over a fence, being good neighbors.

The biggest error people make when talking about art is surety.

I like poems both in their unassembled pieces and in their “totality,” but mostly though, when I read, I read more for the moments than for the overarching theme. I’ve always read poems this way, which is probably why I don’t get hung up on a lot of recent poems that seem to privilege the periphery of a poem’s thinking over the consistent center. I’ve always rather thought consistent centers were a fantasy anyway.

However we spend our time, we’re spending our time. Would you like a cookie?

They treat you better when you’re famous.

—Kevin Bacon

A book of poetry I came across: The air whooshing from the ties that tie everything up, that great sucking sound.

When you fall down the rabbit hole, sometimes you injure the rabbit, sometimes the rabbit injures you, sometimes you have to marry it, and sometimes all three.

And this does nothing to “explain” poetry. Explained poetry wanders off in search of a restroom.

Save us from Rousseau.

You don’t need an argument to swim when you’re pushed into a swimming pool.

My sympathy for Thomas: It’s difficult to convince me of something if you can’t point to it. I’m not much for going on the perceptions of others that I can’t externally verify.

“Poetry is a hat.” Why do we need metaphors for what poetry “is” or “is like” anyway? Poetry is like science. Poetry is like basketball. Poetry is like philosophy. Poetry is like wow. You know? I just don’t get it.

Can you make outsider art if you’re inside? “Outside” what? “Inside” what? An argument could be made that most (all?) poets are outsiders. An argument could be made that most (all?) poets are insiders.

Small/rural colleges and universities, to a large extent, don’t know how to deal with artists. What they do understand, though, is juried publications, juried shows, performances, etc. They’re fine hiring whatever poet comes along, with any aesthetic affiliation, as long as there are books and publications. To most of them, we’re all at just about the same level of inscrutable.

Art always breaks.

No one knows what poetry is, and I'm OK with that.

If there’s a rational explanation for an art object, it’s not an art object.

(That was fun to write.)

Line breaks make poets consider form at least once every line.

If your poetry doesn’t challenge you, then you’re failing your poetry.

It seems each generation gets its big anthology problem and a handful of schools and theories to get past. None of them really appear as none of them really go away. Remember Leaping Poetry? “Raw” and “cooked”? Naked Poetry?

After reading A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, the first thing I thought is that we’re all talking about something different when we talk about the line in poetry. I find that interesting.

Often the straight answer doesn’t appear straight, like a path through the woods that winds because it must.

Some things can’t be contained in the available forms.

The biggest error people make when talking about art is surety.

“When I say ‘irony,’ I mean ‘them.’”

Give me an example of what you mean by irony, when you tag it as a negative tendency of the times, and then tell me why you used the word “irony.” I feel this would become a definition something like this: Poetry that doesn’t constantly telegraph how you should feel about its content is ironic.

Art that presses its intentionality bores me. It can still be accomplished and fine and all, but it bores me.

On reading a recent book of poetry: This would be better if I didn’t understand it.

All art is a destruction of possibility.

What we need is a revolution in understanding of how we really work as people, so that we are aware and act accordingly with the knowledge that the rational mind is subservient to the irrational mind.

Rationalists are faking it.

After one renounces everything about art, one must make art.

The parts that are made up are the most true, as they come closest to our desire.

Because grammar hides logic.

On reading a late book of poetry: The poet failed art long ago, and now is left to be only a defender of gestures.

Because anything follows from a contradiction, we tend to overreact when confronted with contradictions, and go running and shouting into the yard.

The old jokes are the best: “This sentence is false.”

The problem with aesthetic stances is that they tend to be recursive. It’s a difficult proposition to keep an aesthetic position fresh, as recursive stances in art tend to yield diminishing returns. This is why I’m skeptical of people talking about “voice” and a “signature style.” To me these sound like blocks against the central questioning/questing that art is best at. But maybe I’m being too literal. Perhaps an aesthetic position, voice, or signature style, can be open enough to allow for an open future. I remain cautiously skeptical as examples of the negative side of this can be heartbreaking.

It’s more a kind of work on oneself that has to happen. On one’s own conceptions. On the way one sees things. The artist must invent his/her own mind.

One of the things science shows us again and again is how what we thought was unitary breaks down and then becomes something we think is unitary, until it too breaks down. If this means anything to how we measure ourselves and our experience, then it means something for the art we make. But just what is an open question.

The biggest error people make when talking about art is surety.

Salon has an article on poetry!

2011-11-14T14:51:00.000-08:00

Salon has an article on poetry!

But, alas, it’s this one:

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/13/its_time_to_occupy_poetry/

Controversy is always a hit, even when it’s about an art form no one notices outside the family. It leaves me to wonder what life might be like if poetry were talked about in the way that novels even were talked about. But I guess we have to take what we can get? But, really, does it need to be this?

That was pretty much it. It has all the flash of a High School lunch protest in the school library.

In the Salon article, this to-do at The Poetry Foundation is lightly being compared to the Occupy movement. Maybe it’s similar? Certainly the aims are just as elusive and the methods kind of, or almost, funny, in a youthful, futile kind of way. What else is there to say? The Poetry Foundation is doing with its money what it wants to do with its money. That seems a very different situation from the Occupy movement, where the claim is that Wall Street (or wherever) is doing things with our money (I think?). I do really like the idea of someone forming a percentage sheet about poetry. Who would be the 99%? Who would be the 1%?

Here’s the larger question the article gets to:

Odd as the CPC’s agenda may be, it does reflect a common (and romantic) notion that wealth is at odds with artistic authenticity. Nor is it new to fume that poets in particular grow dull amid the trappings of capitalism. In a recent Vanity Fair article on the photographer Milton Gendel, James Reginato tells the following anecdote. Sometime in the 1940s, two American editors at the French Surrealist magazine VVV gave their boss, André Breton, engraved Christmas cards. Breton had them fired immediately. “These snakes at my bosom!” he screamed. “I have fought the middle-class bourgeoisie all my life. And now they bring me Christmas cards!”

Moreover, shenanigans have always had a place in the art world, and they can sometimes needle us into taking a fresh look at things. Sure, one can find plenty to admire in issues of Poetry and in the programs of the Poetry Foundation (in full disclosure, I’ve written articles for them), but one may well ask whether the foundation could do a bit more for the lower classes in Chicago, or whether its wealth now distracts from its mission. It’s also worth considering the CPC’s observation that “the language that [foundation president] John Barr uses in talking about the Poetry Foundation … is eerily reminiscent of the corporate language of marketing and branding.” For them, the fact that Barr used to be an investment banker on Wall Street says it all.

At the same time, these protests reflect an unwitting hypocrisy: The group claims to fight for the common people but in fact has put its own priorities above those of people who attend poetry events. There’s irony in a protest that seeks to defend poetry by disrupting poetry readings. Those who would rather not have their evening “queered” are simply too bourgeois, it seems, to count. In much the same way, one wonders why Ms. Dunn claims to defend art by licking paintings. Between that kind of activism and any form of accountability one finds a buffer of obtuse pseudo-theory, a convenient layer of cerebral anarchy.

I'm with Forrest Gander on this one. Aw, just let ’em go.

Reconstructive Post-Modernism

2011-11-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

Jump.

This is a nice synopsis (from the book description).

Charles Jencks
What is Post-Modernism
1996

What is Post-Modernism? Is it a new world view, or an outgrowth of the Post-Industrial Society? Is it a shift in philosophy, the arts and architecture?

In this fourth, entirely revised edition, Charles Jencks, one of the founders of the Post-Modern Movement, shows it is all these things plus many other forces that have exploded since the early 1960s. In a unique analysis, using diagrams designed especially for this edition, he reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. But why has post-modern culture arrived?

In an ironic parable, ‘the Protestant Crusade’. Jencks uncovers some hitherto hidden origins: the Modernists’ abhorrence for all things sensuous and natural, and their zeal for all things orderly and mechanistic. This pseudo-religion led in the 1920s to the famous ‘vacuum-cleaning’ period, the purgation of values, metaphysics and emotion. In the 1970s it led on to the ‘Protestant Inquisition’ which inadvertently created the very enemy Modernists feared — Post-Modernism; a Counter-Reformation, the reassertion of worldliness, fecundity, humour and pluralism.

However, more than one tradition emerged and Jencks, distinguishing two types of Post-Modernism (deconstructive and reconstructive) demonstrates that the former is often a disguised form of Late-Modernism. This takes the de-creation and nihilism of its parent to extremes.

The main engine that drives global culture today — post-modernisation, the electronic economy and instant communications network — is analysed in its close relation to other ‘posts’: Post-Fordism, Post-Socialism and the post-national world of trading blocs and unstable nations.

Jencks argues that this may result in catastrophe and global governance, or a web of transnational institutions and obligations. The most radical idea of this challenging book is the conclusion: the notion that the post-modern world does not mean the end of metanarratives, but something quite different. Belief systems are flourishing as never before and, Jencks argues, ‘a new metanarrative, based on the story of the universe and its generative qualities, will soon create a new world view that will affect all areas. It is a story which grows directly out of the post-modern sciences of complexity and is thus both true and mythic.’

Always hoping for a bigger splash.

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I haven’t read this book, but I’ve read some other things from Jencks, and this seems to fit well with what I remember of those books. At the time (the 90s), I wasn’t seeing quite what he was talking about in regards to “reconstructive post-modernism,” but now, by 2011, I think his analysis has come into flower.

Post-modernism, as many have heard it talked about (the cliché version, or the kitsch version, of Post-Modernism), is really what Jencks would term “Deconstructive Post-Modernism,” and really, not a proper Post-Modernism at all, but rather the spinning out of Modernism.

The plurality that we see erupting on all sides that doesn’t fit these definitions of Deconstructive Post-Modernism, has now gotten large enough to no longer be able to be swept under the rug of the easy term. I like that idea. I’m sympathetic to that idea. Reconstructive Post-Modernism. It sounds hopeful. (As long as the flowering meta-narratives don't get consumed by their success and we end up with a horrific global order/catastrophe, that is.)

It’s fitting, then, staying on the hopeful side, that David Hockney is one of his favorite examples. He's one of mine, too.

So let's go! Oh, wait, we're already there.

Addendum: Here’s a bit more on the Jencks’s Modern Lineage:

CRITICAL MODERNISM – where is post-modernism going?
Charles Jencks

After developing for thirty years as a movement in the arts, after being disputed and celebrated, Post-Modernism has become an integral part of the cultural landscape. Charles Jencks argues that the movement is one more reaction from within modernism critical of its shortcomings. The unintended consequences of modernisation, such as the destruction of cities and global warming, are typical issues motivating Critical Modernism today. In a unique analysis, using many explanatory diagrams and graphs, he reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation.

Critical Modernism emerges at two different levels.

First, as an underground movement, it is the notion that there are many modernisms (not a single style or ideology). As far as the critical side is concerned, they react to two very different things: their own internal problems and the outside world as they find it, today globalisation and the terrorist debacle. In the arts it means looking critically at both the content and formal languages of creation, simultaneously, and it shares with Critical Theory the idea of exposing ideologies in order to enhance freedom, both of the group and individual. As far as the modernism side is concerned there is the usual commitment to progress, competition, and the romantic urge to overcome the previous generation. This results in a curious continuity and break, the swerve and the concealed repetition.

Second, when these movements follow each other in quick succession, as they do today, they may reach a ‘critical mass,’ a Modernism2, and become a conscious tradition. After two hundred years of one modernism replacing another, this might result in a more reflexive movement, one mature enough to reflect on its own dark side while celebrating creativity, a tradition come of age.

Modernisms: The key polemics

I 3rd-5th century – Modernus. Early Christians proclaim their ethical progress over paganism.

II 1450-1600 – Moderna. Renaissance usage by Filarete and Vasari on the superiority of the classical rebirth, distinguishing the ‘good’ revival (buona maniera moderna) from the ‘bad’ contemporary Gothic.

III 1600-1850 – Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. Again ‘modern’ means improvement over the ancient, invention within the classical tradition. The famous “Quarrel” within the French Academy starts in the 1690s and lasts 200 years, while the British contrast progressive classicism with Gothic.

IV 1755 – Modernism as fashionable rubbish. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defines ‘Modernism: Deviation from the ancient and classical manner….Modern: in Shakespeare. Vulgar, mean, common. “We have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless.”

V 1900 – Modernism. a Roman Catholic movement examining tradition that was officially condemned in 1907 by Pope Pius X for atheism and having an exaggerated love of what is modern.

VI 1914-30 – Modern Movement. In literature the free verse, stream of consciousness and experiments by Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Woolf; in design the technical and social progressivism of those practicing the International Style; in the arts the isms stem from Baudelaire and include Dada and Surrealism.

VII 1930-50 – Reactionary Modernism. The movements led by Mussolini, Franco, Hitler and Stalin that accepted the modern notion of the zeitgeist and a progressive technology and mass production.

VIII 1960s – Late Modernism tied to Late Capitalism. The proliferation of formalist movements, such as Op and Conceptual Art, and the exaggeration of abstract experiments in a Minimalist direction eschewing content. John Cage in music, Norman Foster in architecture, Frank Stella in painting, Clement Greenberg in art theory, Samuel Beckett in literature, and the Pax Americana in politics.

IX 1970s – Post-Modernism. Stemming from the counter culture, was the double-coding of modernism with other languages to communicate with a local or wide audience. In literature, John Barth and Umberto Eco, in urbanism and architecture, Jane Jacobs and James Stirling, in the arts, Pop Art, Land Art and the content-driven work of Ron Kitaj, Mark Tansey and Damien Hirst.

X 2000 – Critical Modernism. Refers both to the continuous dialectic between modernisms as they criticize each other and to the way the compression of many modernisms forces a self-conscious criticality, a Modernism2. Skeptical of its own dark sides, yet celebrating creativity, it finds expression in cities such as Berlin that have come of age under opposite versions of modernity.

Mark Jarman on Charles Wright

2011-11-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

Here is a debatable proposition from Mark Jarman:

More than any other American poet writing today, perhaps more than any poet since Whitman and Dickinson, Charles Wright has recorded in his poems a lifetime of spiritual seeking. That pursuit has had more of Emily Dickinson's skepticism than Walt Whitman's affirmation, more of her struggles with Puritanism, than what Galway Kinnell once called Whitman's "mystical all lovingness." And yet the urge toward Whitman's embrace of multitude and the discretion of Dickinson's straitened thought have combined to create through Wright's genius an instrument which is to the spiritual life in contemporary poetry what the sonnet was for John Donne and George Herbert. Charles Wright has, for over forty years of mastery, given us a mode and a means for that journal of the soul which American poetry has, since Whitman and Dickinson, always had at heart. He has almost singlehandedly invented an American form of the devotional poem.

I don’t have a problem with it, really. I’m not going to argue against it, per se, but it’s a pretty large claim to make, especially of a writer who has (to the best of my knowledge) always referred to himself as a version of agnostic.

Does one have to be religious to write spiritual poetry? I suppose that’s my question. And I suppose then that the answer is no, one doesn’t have to be conventionally religious in the sense of belonging to a denomination, being a member of a recognized faith community to be or to write spiritual poetry. But what about "Devotional" poetry then? So the whole thing has me kind of scratching my head. I’ve admired Charles Wright’s poetry a long time, though I haven’t turned as often to his recent work as I turned to his books from the mid-90s and before.

It reminds me of a talk I heard G.C. Waldrep give a week or so ago. He spoke about the silences, the absences in poetry, especially what one would call “difficult” poetry (where Charles Wright is often placed), as akin to the absence of the physical Jesus in the world. The poem is a place to exercise the imaginative connection one can have with this absent Jesus. Waldrep made a distinction between believers and non-believers, saying that for believers this imagination bridges the absence, makes it a presence, while the non-believer doesn’t bridge this absence, but instead dwells in it.

I’m getting this at least a little wrong, as I’m recreating it from memory. Anyway, it was a brilliant talk, and it got me to thinking of poets like Charles Wright. For Charles Wright (who was influenced by George Steiner’s book Real Presences, which I think is a cornerstone text for this way of thinking about art and the spirit), this is more of a “real absence.” “Devotional” then, for me, isn’t quite the right word for Wright’s idiom, though I suppose it's close.

Here’s Jarman, summing up:

It is in Littlefoot, halfway through, that Wright gives the clearest expression I know to what might be called his existential theology. It comes in section sixteen.

Born again by water into the life of the spirit,

but not into the Life,

Rivers and lakes were my bread and wine,
Creeks were my transubstantiation.
And everything’s holy by now,
Vole crawl and raven flyby,
All of the little incidents that sprinkle across the earth.
Easy enough to say,
but hard to live by and palliate.
Camus said that life is the search for the way back
To the few great simple truths
We knew at the beginning.
Out of the water, out of the cold air, that seems about right.

Yes, easy enough for you to say, Mr. Wright! I've been trying to argue this about your poetry for over 5,000 words, and here it is perfectly expressed. Why am I not surprised? The dimensions of the soul, this poet's soul, include the earth and the past, those most apprehensible elements of Time and Space.

The essay is titled, “Soul Journals: The Daily Devotions of Charles Wright,” and it originally appeared in Northwest Review, Volume 49, Number 2.

It’s reprinted here, on the Poetry Daily website (for a short time):

http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_jarman.php

Frank O'Hara - Selected Poems

2011-11-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

Frank O’Hara’s “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” is one of my very favorite poems of the 20th Century. I think of it as a sort of un-writing of Eliot’s “Prufrock.” The flipside, maybe, where it’s not the glittering surfaces or the form of the occasion that do us in or divert us, but the people there we care for that hold us up, and give us hope.

Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's

At last you are tired of being single

the effort to be new does not upset you nor the effort to be other
you are not tired of life together

city noises are louder because you are together

being together you are louder than calling separately across a telephone one to the other
and there is no noise like the rare silence when you both sleep
even country noises—a dog bays at the moon, but when it loves the moon it bows, and the hitherto frowning moon fawns and slips

Only you in New York are not boring tonight

it is most modern to affirm some one
(we don't really love ideas, do we?)
and Joan was surprising you with a party for which I was the decoy
but you were surprising us by getting married and going away
so here I am reading poetry anyway
and no one will be bored tonight by me because you're here

Yesterday I felt very tired from being at the FIVE SPOT

and today I felt very tired from going to bed early and reading ULYSSES
but tonight I feel energetic because I'm sort of the bugle,
like waking people up, of your peculiar desire to get married

It's so

original, hydrogenic, anthropomorphic, fiscal, post-anti-esthetic, bland, unpicturesque and WilliamCarlosWilliamsian!
it's definitely not 19th century, it's not even Partisan review, it's new, it must be vanguard!

Tonight you probably walked over here from Bethune Street

down Greenwich Avenue with its sneaky little bars and the Women’s Detention House,
across 8th Street, by the acres of books and pillows and shoes and illuminating lampshades,
past Cooper Union where we heard the piece by Mortie Feldman with “The Stars and Stripes Foever” in it
and the Segamore’s terrific “coffee and, Andy,” meaning “with a cheese Danish”—
did you spit on your index fingers and rub the CEDAR’s neon circle for luck?
did you give a kind of thought, hurrying, to Alger Hiss?

It’s the day before February 17th

it is not snowing yet but it is dark and may snow yet
dreary Frebruary of the exhaustion from parties and the exceptional desire for spring which the ballet alone, by extending its run, has made bearable, dear New York City Ballet company, you are quite a bit like a wedding yourself!
and the only signs of spring are Maria Tallchief’s rhinestones and a perky little dog barking in a bar, here and there eyes which suddenly light up with blue, like a ripple subsiding under a lily pad, or with brown, like a freshly plowed field we vow we’ll drive out and look at when a certain Sunday comes in May—
and these eyes are undoubtedly Jane’s and Joe’s because they are advancing into spring before us and tomorrow is Sunday

This poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long, long for this life and these times, long as art is long and uninterruptable,

and I would make it as long as I hope our friendship lasts if I could make poems that long

I hope there will be more

more drives to Bear mountain and searches for hamburgers, more evenings avoiding the latest Japanese movies and watching Helen Vinson and Warner Baxter in Vogues of 1938 instead, more discussions in lobbies of the respective greatnesses of Diana Adams and Allegra Kent,
more sunburns and more half-mile swims in which Joe beats me as Jane watches, lotion-covered and sleepy, more arguments over Faulkner's inferiority to Tolstoy while sand gets into my bathing trunks
let's advance and change everything, but leave these little oases in case the heart gets thirsty en route
and I should probably propose myself as a godfather if you have any children, since I will probably earn more money some day accidentally, and could teach him or her how to swim
and now there is a Glazunov symphony on the radio and I think of our friends who are not here, of John and the nuptial quality of his verses (he is always marrying the whole world) and Janice and Kenneth, smiling and laughing, respectively (they are probably laughing at the Leaning Tower right now)
but we are all here and have their proxy
if Kenneth were writing this he would point out how art has changed women and women have changed art and men, but men haven't changed women much
but ideas are obscure and nothing should be obscure tonight
you will live half the year in a house by the sea and half the year in a house in our arms
we peer into the future and see you happy and hope it is a sign that we will be happy too, something to cling to, happiness
the least and best of human attainments

The poetry of Frank O’Hara loves life. The ragged ease of his line, the purely presentness of his idiom. his was one of the fundamental singular and brilliant visions of the 20th Century. he wasn’t finished when he died. He was barely into middle-age. We never got to see his poetry take on the 70s, and growing older. We’ve seen that in so many other poets, and how that brings them into a new way of telling. O’Hara, like Plath, and many others, will always have this unfinished quality.

Sure, even he joked in his poetry about his “I did this I did that” poems, but what about his larger vision of friendship, love, and one’s time?

In Favor of One’s Time

The spent purpose of a perfectly marvellous

life suddenly glimmers and leaps into flame
it's more difficult than you think to make charcoal
it's also pretty hard to remember life's marvellous
but there it is guttering choking then soaring
in the mirrored room of this consciousness
it's practically a blaze of pure sensibility
and however exaggerated at least somethings going on
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat

an angel flying slowly, curiously singes its wings

and you diminish for a moment out of respect
for beauty then flare up after all that's the angel
that wrestled with Jacob and loves conflict
as an athlete loves the tape, and we're off into
an immortal contest of actuality and pride
which is love assuming the consciousness of itself
as sky over all, medium of finding and founding
not just resemblance but the magnetic otherness
that that that stands erect in the spirit's glare
and waits for the joining of an opposite force's breath

so come the winds into our lives and last

longer than despair's sharp snake, crushed before it conquered
so marvellous is not just a poet's greenish namesake
and we live outside his garden in pure tempestuous rights

I’ve had a perfectly wonderful time going back through the Borzoi edition of his selected poems this week. “Existence is elsewhere,” I quoted from Breton the other day, thinking about Surrealism, and the Fake Surrealism. John Ashbery has called his poetry soft Surrealism, I think. Or maybe it was “fuzzy” or “lightly” that he used. And we know that Reverdy was O’Hara’s heart. And yet his poetry seems to argue a very different view of existence from either Ashbery or Surrealism. It’s a poetry of place, absolutely. O’Hara’s New York is mythic in its absolute surface . . . but the power of O’Hara’s work is social. He was an ecstatic poet and I wish more poets were influenced by his enthusiasm and unpretentious delivery, his absolute, warm humanity.

Steps

How funny you are today New York

like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days

(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue

where’s Lana Turner

she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple

who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk

next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it’s wonderful

to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

Fake Surrealism

2011-11-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was reading the Montevidayo blog the other day

http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=1728

when I came across the term “fake surrealism” and it reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what, and then a quick google reminded me: Theater of the Absurd.

I used to really love absurd theater, ever since Ian Hunter sang about it on Short back ‘n Sides in the early 80s. It was mostly a forgettable album, unfortunately, as his album just before it, You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic, though not an accurate use of the term, was his strongest work. How quickly things fall apart.

ANDRÉ BRETON (all in caps!), in 1924, from

MANIFESTO
OF
SURREALISM

(all in caps!):

“Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.”

Unspare me, then. I googled “Fake Surrealism” and the first hit was Montevidayo, but after I waded through a band, Infinity’s Fake Surrealism (!), and the picture (below) from a blog posted back in 09, I came across Eugene Ionesco. I was thinking of Edward Albee, but this will do.

Here’s a bit on Ionesco (just in case).

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Ionesco's+Imperatives%3A+The+Politics+of+Culture.-a016314580

Eugene Ionesco, the late denouncer of rhinoceritis, “the malady of conformity,” and the father of absurdist theater, has, for almost three decades, been sitting in the Pantheon of contemporary classics. In the 1950s, when his plays were largely misinterpreted or ridiculed by established critics and intellectuals for their cacophony, ineptitude, pseudometaphysics, or fake surrealism, Rosette Lamont appropriately coined the phrase “Metaphysical Farce” to define a dramatic genre in which philosophical thought and political criticism were hidden under the wit and laughter of comedy. This dramatic mode was born out of the inadequacy of the traditional genres of tragedy and comedy to represent a contemporary world of mass killings, reification• of human life, tyrannical powers, and “police encampments.” The farce, the grotesque, the irrational, theatrical illusion, caricatures, and parodies contained a power of derision and a critique of language well adapted to “the humiliated physicality and ontological awareness of the post-Holocaust-Gulag world.”

Lamont, a loyal admirer and an insightful decoder of Ionesco's theater, demonstrates how parodies, caricatures, and the use of clichés function as the artist's irreverent debunking of the manipulating discourses of the world while intertextuality reactivates the most visionary texts of Western culture. The encounter of Shakespeare's Macbeth with the French comic strip Les Pieds Nickeles, for instance, results in a corrosive attack on political tyranny.

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Not Surrealism, then, but Fake Surrealism. And then what? Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” springs to mind. Because that's what happens next. History is formal in that way.

Breton: It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.

The point of this post (because points are necessary, the voices keep saying) is just to say my new favorite phrase is “fake surrealism.” It will take all the time one doesn’t spend to decode it. To construct a curriculum for it, and to call it Fear Studies.

Breton: Not so fast, there; I’m getting into the area of psychology, a subject about which I shall be careful not to joke.

Because whatever is, is as a form of action. It shows one how to use a hammer, even though a bronzed videotape of 2001: A Space Odyssey would be more fitting.

And who might the poets of Fake Surrealism be? Indeed. In my mind it’s not a derogatory term, the way American Fake Realism, in my mind, would be. It’s celebratory. Necessary, as position one of dance four.

Breton: What I cannot bear are those wretched discussions relative to such and such a move, since winning or losing is not in question. And if the game is not worth the candle, if objective reason does a frightful job -- as indeed it does -- of serving him who calls upon it, is it not fitting and proper to avoid all contact with these categories?

Such things are time-bound, of course. And later the ones at whom stones were thrown will collect stones from the piles around them to throw at some new interloper. “Because these things have meaning,” they say, “and that meaning is me.” Fake Surrealism celebrates the stones in the air.

I wanted to post Albee’s The Sandbox, and found this version (below) featuring the Übermensch and some pals, patting things down. No worries here. (I have my shovel and my pail.) Turns out it’s a whole genre of YouTube videos. Who knew?

3 mins 33 sec ( as title, the video is 3:34 )

There’s no telling where Fake Surrealism might lead us. I’m all for it. I welcome it.

Breton: Existence is elsewhere.

from The Discursive Situation of Poetry, by Robert Archambeau

2011-11-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

Mary Biddinger and I had a great time putting The Monkey & the Wrench together. And one of the things that formed it, that gave to a landscape, was Robert Archambeau’s essay “The Discursive Situation in Poetry.” All the essays in the collection are strong, and we were met with excitement after excitement reading them. It’s a book we’re proud of from first to last.

Because the issues raised in the Archambeau piece are important to keep in mind, I want to circulate a bit of his essay, so I’m posting it. This is about 1/3 of the essay, the opening two sections, and the short final section. It misses a lot of the support for his major point, but it gives enough of the flavor of it for one to extrapolate, I think.

You’ll find the whole essay in The Monkey & the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, Biddinger & Gallaher, eds. 2011. U of Akron.

from The Discursive Situation of Poetry, by Robert Archambeau

“Why do poets continue to write? Why keep playing if it’s such a mug’s game? Some, no doubt, simply fail to understand the situation.”

—Sven Birkerts

The important point to notice, though, is this:

Each poet knew for whom he had to write,
Because their life was still the same as his.
As long as art remains a parasite
On any class of persons it's alright;
The only thing it must be is attendant,
The only thing it mustn't, independent.
—W.H. Auden

Statistics confirm what many have long suspected: poetry is being read by an ever-smaller slice of the American reading public. Poets and critics who have intuited this have blamed many things, but for the most part they have blamed the rise of M.F.A. programs in creative writing. While they have made various recommendations on how to remedy the situation, these remedies are destined for failure or, at best, for very limited success, because the rise of MFA programs is merely a symptom of much larger and farther-reaching trends. These trends are unlikely to be reversed by the intervention of a few poets, critics, and arts-administrators. I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Or, in any event, I’m not sure it is worse than what a reversal of the decline in readership would entail. Let me explain.

Decades of Complaint

While we don’t have many instruments for measuring the place of poetry in American life, all our instruments agree: poetry has been dropping precipitously in popularity for some time. In 1992, the National Endowment for the Arts conducted a survey that concluded only 17.1% of those who read books had read any poetry in the previous year. A similar N.E.A. survey published in 2002 found that the figure had declined to 12.1%. The N.E.A. numbers for 2008 were grimmer still: only 8.3% of book readers had read any poetry in the survey period (Bain). The portion of readers who read any poetry at all has, it seems, been cut in half over sixteen years. Poetry boosters can’t help but be distressed by the trend.

Poets and poetry lovers have somewhat less faith in statistics and rather more faith in intuition and personal observation than the population at large. They’ve intuited this state of affairs for more than two decades, beginning long before the statistical trend became clear in all its stark, numerical reality. As far back as 1983, Donald Hall sounded a warning note in his essay “Poetry and Ambition.” Although he did not blame the rise of the graduate creative writing programs for the loss of connection with an audience, he did feel that M.F.A. programs created certain formal similarity among poems. The programs produced “McPoets,” writing “McPoems” that were brief, interchangeable, and unambitious. His solution, delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, was to abolish M.F.A. programs entirely. “What a ringing slogan for a new Cato,” wrote Hall, “Iowa delenda est!” (Hall). Five years later Joseph Epstein picked up Hall’s standard, and carried it further. In the incendiary essay “Who Killed Poetry?” Epstein argued that the rise of writing poems led not only to diminishments of ambition and quality — it furthered the decline of poetry’s audience. The popular audience for poetry may have shrunk by the 1950s, argued Epstein, but at least the poets of midcentury were revered, and engaged with the larger intellectual world. By the late 1980s, though, poetry existed in “a vacuum.” And what was the nature of this vacuum? “I should say that it consists of this,” wrote Epstein, “it is scarcely read.” Indeed, he continues,

Contemporary poetry is no longer a part of the regular intellectual diet. People of general intellectual interests who feel that they ought to read or at least know about works on modern society or recent history or novels that attempt to convey something about the way we live now, no longer feel the same compunction about contemporary poetry.… It begins to seem, in fact, a sideline activity, a little as chiropractic or acupuncture is to mainstream medicine—odd, strange, but with a small cult of followers who swear by it. (Epstein)

The principle culprit in the sidelining of poetry was, for Epstein, the credentialing and employment of poets in graduate writing programs. “Whereas one tended to think of the modern poet as an artist,” argued Epstein, “one tends to think of the contemporary poet as a professional,” and, “like a true professional, he is insulated within the world of his fellow-professionals” (Epstein). The poet, instead of responding to the audience-driven world of the book market, responds only to his peers, with the effect that the audience simply melts away.

Après Epstein, le déluge. The 1990s saw a phalanx of poets and critics complaining about the decline of poetry’s audience, and linking this decline to the rise of M.F.A. programs. Dana Gioia fired the loudest shot when, in Can Poetry Matter? (published as an article in The Atlantic in 1991, republished in book form a year later). “American poetry now belongs to a subculture,” said Gioia, “no longer part of the mainstream of intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group” (1). While he allows that they have done so “unwittingly,” it is “the explosion of academic writing programs” that is to blame for this sad state of affairs, as far as Gioia is concerned (2). Gioia was by no means alone in this opinion. Vernon Shetley’s 1993 study After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America tells us that poetry has “lost the attention not merely of common readers but of intellectuals” (3) – and that creative writing programs have contributed to this loss by cultivating “a disturbing complacency” and by “narrowing of the scope” of poetry (19). Bruce Bawer introduces his 1995 book of criticism Prophets and Professors by lamenting the professionalizing of poetry. He tells us that “those who read poetry — which, in our society, basically means poets” shy away from being too critical of the art, since “they conside[r] poetry so ailing and marginal a genre that criticism was… like kicking an invalid” (8). In the same year, Thomas Disch claimed in The Castle of Indolence that “for most readers… contemporary poetry might as well not exist.” The reason, he says, is

…that the workshops, which have a monopoly on the training of poets, encourage indolence, incompetence, smugness, and — most perniciously — that sense of victimization and special entitlement that poets now come to share with other artists who depend on government or institutional patronage to sustain their art, pay their salaries, and provide for their vacations. (5)

Blaming writing programs for the isolation of poetry extended beyond the fairly conservative literary preserves inhabited by the likes of Bawer, Disch, and Epstein. Charles Bernstein’s 1995 essay “Warning — Poetry Area: Publics Under Construction,” argues “it is bad for poetry, and for poets, to be nourished so disproportionately” by universities, adding that “the sort of poetry I care for has its natural habitat in the streets and offices and malls” (Bernstein).

By 1999, the chorus had grown so loud that Christopher Beach claimed we were “discussing the death of poetry to death” (19). Not that this stopped anyone. In 2006, Poetry Foundation President John Barr caused a stir with “American Poetry in the New Century,” an article in Poetry magazine in which he noted poetry’s “striking absence from the public dialogues of our day,” as a sign that we have a reading public “in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed.” The problem, he asserts, stems from the writing programs. These produce poets who “write for one another,” producing “a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor… entertaining.” It cannot exist without “academic subsidies” and fails in the market, unable to sell in “commercial quantities” (Barr). While Barr surveys the terrain from the heights of the Poetry Foundation offices above Chicago, more recently the poet Daniel Nester has come to similar conclusions (albeit without the invocation of the values of the marketplace) from the depths of New York’s poetry scene. Nester has characterized that scene as the product of the writing programs. Looking around at poetry events, he says he’d see university cliques such as the “Group of People Who Went to Iowa” and those starting “Teaching Jobs Out West.” The scene was isolated from a larger engagement with society, with “a lack of connection to the reader” and readings attended only by “other aspiring poets” (Nester 2009). “It’s an unsustainable system,” he said when asked by an interviewer about his article. “Even the most niche of niche art forms has an audience. Not so with contemporary poetry” (Nester 2010).

As even this brief and incomplete survey of writers makes clear, American poets have noted the decline of the audience for poetry, and found it troubling. But when decriers of the decline make M.F.A. programs their whipping boy they misunderstand the role such programs play in the distancing of poet from audience. In fact, poetry’s decline of popularity predates the rise of writing programs, and such programs are properly seen as the latest episode in of a larger and long-enduring drama, a drama that began in the nineteenth century.

Bohemia Misunderstood

Both Dana Gioia and Joseph Epstein contrast the contemporary situation with what they imagine to be better times for poets: for Gioia, the golden age took place in the 1940s, while for Epstein it took place a decade later.

What strikes one most immediately about Gioia’s imagined halcyon days for poetry is the strange combination of market-driven values and the idea of bohemia. The whole apparatus of poetry in the 1940s was, in Gioia’s view, based on meeting consumer demand. In the 1940s, says Gioia, poets wrote with the idea of reaching a general readership, and “a poem that didn’t command the reader’s attention wasn’t considered much of a poem.” Editors of poetry journals looked to the market when determining their choices, picking not poems that met their own particular aesthetic standards, but choosing “verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences” (7). The problem since the professionalization of poetry has, for Gioia, been that “a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers” (10). Even critical judgment was bent to this end, as “the reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets… but with the reader” (16). Such conditions continued only so long as poets remained outside of an organized profession, and a preponderance of them “centered their lives in urban bohemias” (12).

Gioia’s idea of a market-driven bohemia is, to put it mildly, singular. One can find nothing like it in the annals of the sociology of bohemian life and art. The standard view is that bohemia emerges in response to the marginalization of artists, poets, and other creative producers. Cesar Graña’s classic study Bohemian vs. Bourgeois, for example, finds the origin of bohemia in the economic dislocations following the destruction of the aristocracy in the French Revolution. These dislocations led to a migration into urban centers of a “large marginal population” of educated people formerly connected to, or dependent on the aristocracy. Here they worked in opposition to, or at best on the fringes of, the market-driven world of the bourgeoisie (39). Albert Parry argues in Garrets and Pretenders that bohemia can only exist when there is an overproduction of certain kinds of skills and talents in relation to market demand for those skills. Pierre Bourdieu has famously defined the world of artistic production, especially as it involves poetry or occurs under bohemian conditions, as “the economic world reversed” (29). “The literary or artistic field,” says Bourdieu, “is at all times the site of a struggle between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favorable to those who dominate the field economically (e.g. ‘bourgeois art’) and the autonomous principle (e.g. ‘art for art’s sake’)” (41). The heteronomous principle — that art should serve a force outside itself, such as the market — is certainly the force Gioia saw at work prior to the rise of writing programs. But the heteromomous principle is not the dominant force at work in the poetic and bohemian worlds. In such conditions, says Bourdieu, “the economy of practices is based, as in a generalized game of ‘loser wins,’ on a systematic inversion of all ordinary economies” including that of the market, because “it excludes the pursuit of profit and does not guarantee any sort of correspondence between investments and monetary gains” (39).

Validation for the poet, under bohemian conditions, cannot come in any great measure from the support of the market. Indeed, as Parry and Graña point out, bohemia comes into existence because there is too much literary and artistic talent for the market to absorb. In the absence of market support, poets do not seek to command the attention of a large readership for a sense of their worth. Rather, they start to seek validation from one another, and from a literary community separate from the broad, commercially profitable marketplace of readers. As the sociologist Ephraim Mizruchi puts it, the establishment of bohemia depends upon conditions where “status opportunities contract or organizations fail to expand in time to absorb” artistic producers (39). Under such conditions, artistic producers such as poets worked “to establish and monitor what they alone determined to be the highest standards of artistic output” (15). That is, artistic producers in bohemia start to set their own standards for what counts as good or meaningful work.

Gioia’s notion that bohemia represented a market-driven world for poets is deeply at odds with the sociological consensus. In point of fact, bohemia represented a stage in literary development quite close to that which we have come to see in the (admittedly less colorful) world of M.F.A. professionalization: in both cases, poetic value is determined by a community of poets and critics, not by a market. One could follow Mizruchi and argue that the development of writing programs is little more than organizations finally expanding to absorb the artistic producers they could not absorb during the time of literary bohemia. The absorption involved little change in the notion of the validating principle of poetry. In both conditions it remained a matter of autonomy, or poets deciding for themselves what was of value, and ignoring the market forces Gioia imagines were dominant in what he takes to have been happier times.

Like Gioia, Joseph Epstein laments the failure of contemporary poetry to be governed by market forces. “Sometimes it seems as if there isn’t a poem written in this nation,” he writes, “that isn’t subsidized or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation or the government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or another” (Epstein). Unlike Gioia, he is too aware of the conditions and values of the pre-professionalized literary era he valorizes to claim that this was an era in which poets were broadly popular. Praising the modernists writing in the 1950s, Epstein tells us:

They published their work in magazines read only by hundreds; their names were not known by most members of the educated classes; their following, such as it was, had a cultish character. But beyond this nothing else seems comparable [to the world of the writing programs]. Propelling the modernist poets was a vision, and among some of them a program—a belief that the nature of life had changed fundamentally and that artists now had to change accordingly…. New, too, was their attitude toward the reader, whom they, perhaps first among any writers in history, chose in a radical way to disregard. They weren't out to épater. If what they wrote was uncompromisingly difficult, they did not see this as their problem. They wrote as they wrote…. Somehow, through the quality of their writing, the authority of the sacrifices they made for their art, the aura of adult seriousness conveyed in both work and life, the modernist poets won through.

The “somehow” is, one fears, a little desperate. Epstein dearly wants the poetry of the 1950s to have been central to the general culture of the time, but he is too well-informed and intellectually honest to omit mention of the evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, he is not able to prevent himself from simply dismissing it with a wave of the hand.

Should we wish to provide evidence for the centrality of poetry to national culture in the 1950s, filling in the virtually blank space where Epstein gives us a vague “somehow” and an even vaguer “won through,” we would be a bit hard up. The only truly dramatic piece of evidence, one oft-cited by critics and journalists, would be T.S. Eliot’s appearance before several thousand people in Minnesota. This event, prominently misrepresented as a poetry reading in a baseball stadium in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot, was in fact a lecture held in the rather smaller confines of a university basketball arena. Few records of the event are available, but those we have tend to deflate any sense that the event represented anything like a massive popular interest in poetry in the 1950s. Consider the testimony of Theresa Enroth, an audience member for Eliot’s lecture writing to the New York Times in 1995 to disabuse readers of some inaccuracies in the paper’s representation of the event:

When Eliot appeared at the University of Minnesota in 1956, his performance had no similarity to what is generally meant by "poetry reading." He read his essay called "The Frontiers of Criticism." That the poet drew a big crowd probably had something to do with his having received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature.

For a great many readers at that time, his voice defined the disillusionment and angst of the midcentury. In addition, Eliot's poetry and criticism were central to the study of poetry in many college English departments where the New Criticism held dominion. The department lions at the University of Minnesota included, successively, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. (Their friend John Crowe Ransom gave a poetry reading there — to a small crowd in the auditorium of the science museum.)

The cultural capital of the Nobel Prize, the novelty of the presence of a Nobel Laureate in a provincial city in the 1950s, and the incipient academicizing of poetry all seem to have played a role in the size of the audience, and the event was both atypical and unrepeatable, as the modesty of Ransom’s audience shows. The notion that Eliot attracted an audience disillusioned with the dominant values of the times also argues against the idea that poetry was connected to the central values of our society in the 1950s.

When, then, was poetry popular, and in sympathy with the values of a broad public? When and where was it viable in terms of the values of the market? Epstein actually does give an example of such a time and place, before getting bogged down in nostalgia for the poetry of his own youth in the 50s. “The crowds in London once stood on their toes to see Tennyson pass;” writes Epstein, “today a figure like Tennyson probably would not write poetry and might not even read it. Poetry has been shifted — has shifted itself? — off center stage” (Epstein). To understand our own discursive condition, we need to contrast it not with the 1940s or 50s, but with the mid-Victorian period, when much poetry truly did have popular appeal, market viability, and a deep affinity with the values of the reading public. Only by such a contrast can we understand the forces that got us from there to here.

[Skipping forward twelve or so pages.]-JG

Underdevelopment and the Last Professors

Short of a return to the social conditions of the mid-Victorian era, can there be a return to a discursive situation in which poetry matters to a broad public? One hopes not. When we consider the evidence, we find that, historically, the conditions under which poetry becomes widely popular are not conditions we should seek out. In addition to the singular mid-Victorian situation, we find poetry to be prominent in another kind of situation. Sadly, though, this is a situation of socio-political disenfranchisement. The great scholar of Irish literature Declan Kiberd explains:

A writer in a free state works with the easy assurance that literature is but one of the social institutions to project the values which the nation admires, others being the law, the government, the army, and so on. A writer in a colony knows that these values can be fully embodied only in the written word: hence the daunting seriousness with which literature is taken by subject peoples. This almost prophetic role of the artist is often linked to ‘underdeveloped’ societies. (118)

In colonies, and among people oppressed by their governments and unable to find expression in the institutional life of their countries, poetry takes on a great social importance. But just as we would not wish to return to mid-Victorian levels of literacy and social development just to see the rise of a new Tennyson, we would not wish to fall victim to colonization just to have our own Celtic Revival. Those of us who live with discursive conditions that keep poetry unpopular may count ourselves lucky.

None of this is to say that the present professionalized conditions will continue. Just as the poet as man of letters depended on specific historical contingencies, so too is the idea of the poet as a professional working in relative autonomy from the market. The oversupply of academically credentialed poets points toward a shifting of the center of gravity away from academe. Moreover, academe itself is facing increasing pressure to respond to the forces of the market. In Britain, this includes new government guidelines for departments to demonstrate the market utility of their activities. In the United States the situation remains milder, but, as Frank Donoghue argues in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, the encroachment of market values on the previously semi-autonomous academic system is well under way, and is probably irreversible. Critics who long for changes in the relation of poets to the public and the market may take comfort in knowing that some sort of change is surely underway, although it will occur with or without any of the efforts at publicity and cross-marketing those critics may make.

Ten-Second Books

2011-10-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

Ten-Second Books
(first and last)

Mark Strand, Selected Poems

Unmoved by what the wind does,
The windows
dying little by little into the distance,
wounded me, as this does now.

Mary Ruefle, Selected Poems

All day I have done nothing.
To admonish me a few aspen
quiets me down to the point
I am able to sleep at all.

The Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan

The stars whipped at his gaze:
have thorns entered his ways
tates.
Here am I.

Marjorie Welish, Word Group

The dress
The other dress
through who goes furthest in mention against the glass to accrue subentries (F’s rival, etc.). If names retire,
name the criteria once frequenting the index. A kind of forensics of situations is under way.

Bernadette Mayer, Poetry State Forest

when my children were growing up
we never had candy at home but
who still tends to titles as if all of us
are reading a new book called The New Life.

John Tranter, Urban Myths

When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
I’ll die, just like that, for her sake. For my sake.
Say goodbye. Never leave me.

Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
improving your soul’s expansion
in the night and developing our own salt-like praise

Cole Swensen, Try

Throughout the history of painting
Risen until caught in rising. Arrested.
physical intimacy, so one day she said, there’s something I think I should tell
you; I have no left hand.

John Ashbery, Planisphere

Is it possible that spring could be
once again approaching? We forget each time
Life had been forgotten.
Love me anyway, he said.

The Selected Poems of Max Jacob

Doesn’t lightning look the same to a foreigner? Some-
one who was at my parent’s home was commenting
light, for the house to be built again and the ochre hill-
side covered with flowers.

Rosmarie Waldrop, Love, Like Pronouns

A swallow cuts an arc along the roofs, cuts it again, as if to
move the horizon inward. Light spills through my chest,
To draw a black line. Was my intention.
The page is otherwise dark.

Mark Bibbins, The Dance of No Hard Feelings

In Antwerp this afternoon the Museum of Anaesthesia,
the reason one goes to Antwerp, is closed. A way
Hell is coming.
Hell is here.

David Kirby, The Temple Gate Called Beautiful

Sometimes I see my dead parents: at the end of the street,
say, or just ahead of me in the ticket line. At times
the first button I touch, and somewhere
in the building there are feet on the stairs, and a door opens.

Randall Mann, Breakfast with Thom Gunn

The moon, once full, is snow.
The line of transplanted trees,
by the dead, a florist—what else? I’ll tell you.
But soft, the story starts anew.

Rae Armantrout, Next Life

For lack of which
we put ourselves
Be twice as far
and halfway back

Paul Otremba, The Currency

is a horse hung from the ceiling, the dumb
hoisted weight and the weight of the harness,
because with a click it’s a throttled Isaac
staring out, ignoring both knife and canvas.

Jorie Graham, The Dream of the Unified Field

The Way Things Work
is by admitting
I say iridescent and I look down.
The leaves very still as they are carried.

Matthew Zapruder, Come On All You Ghosts

Erstwhile means long time gone.
A harbinger is sent before to help,
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter.

Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma

Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.
Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler
The apple trees in blossom.
The great enigma.

Dana Levin, In the Surgical Theatre

The assistants lift him gently,
gently. For a moment, the one lifting under his arms
it is the work, Sophia, wisdom, jewel,
it is the work.

Martha Ronk, In a Landscape of Having to Repeat

In a landscape of having to repeat.
Noticing that she does, that he does and so on.
First an elbow, finally a fact.
Forgetting, the hardest part.

R.E.M. is going out with a weeper

2011-10-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

R.E.M. is going out with a weeper:

We All Go back to Where We Belong
R.E.M.

R.E.M. have been important to me, off and on, for 25 years of so now. And now this will most likely be their last single. It’s fitting, almost too fitting of a song to go out on, but I’ll take it, as it’s quite excellent. And, again, almost too fittingly, they don’t appear in the video. Instead, we’re treated to a continuous shot of Kirsten Dunst (There's another version, as well, with a stone-faced John Giorno). It’s a charming goodbye. They really were a lovely, absolutely singular, band.

Their last album (unless, of course, it turns out not to be, who knows) is going to be the compilation Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, 1982 – 2011. The above song will be one of three new songs on it that were recorded after the Collapse Into Now sessions. The album will be a 40-song career-spanning retrospective that collects, for the first time in a single release, songs from their entire 31-year career, including their years on both the IRS label (1982 to 1987) and Warner Bros. Records (1988 to 2011). The collection will be released on November 15th, 2011.

Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, 1982 – 2011 Tracklist:

Disc 1:

01. Gardening at Night
02. Radio Free Europe
03. Talk About the Passion
04. Sitting Still
05. So. Central Rain
06. (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville
07. Driver 8
08. Life and How To Live It
09. Begin the Begin
10. Fall On Me
11. Finest Worksong
12. It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
13. The One I Love
14. Stand
15. Pop Song 89
16. Get Up
17. Orange Crush
18. Losing My Religion
19. Country Feedback
20. Shiny Happy People

Disc 2:

01. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
02. Everybody Hurts
03. Man on the Moon
04. Nightswimming
05. What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?
06. New Test Leper
07. Electrolite
08. At My Most Beautiful
09. The Great Beyond
10. Imitation of Life
11. Bad Day
12. Leaving New York
13. Living Well Is the Best Revenge
14. Supernatural Superserious
15. Überlin
16. Oh My Heart
17. Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter
18. A Month of Saturdays
19. We All Go Back To Where We Belong
20. Hallelujah

Thank you Ray, take a bow.

Cole Swensen - Noise That Stays Noise

2011-10-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

Cole Swensen has a new book out in the Poets on Poetry series from the University of Michigan Press, titled Noise That Stays Noise, and I’m about half way through so far. One of the things I like about Swensen is her enthusiasm for ideas. I don’t always follow what she’s saying, but I’m always surprised and intrigued. This book is no exception. I’m having a good time with it.

Here are a few resonant bits from the opening essay:

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Both novelty and redundancy have a place in our interpretation of the world around us. Complete novelty would give us a world like that of Oliver Sacks’s “man without memory,” for whom the world was incomprehensible and frightening; complete redundancy, on the other hand, would amount to the heat death of complete homogeneity.

The degree of nonunderstanding in a given piece changes from reader to reader and is often slight; the novel feeling it occasions is part of the pleasure of reading poetry and is the source of the simultaneous suspension and surprise that seems to bypass the cognitive faculties.

This process, which, borrowing a term from the biological sciences, I’m going to refer to as self-organization from noise, is particularly important in considering much recent American poetry, which often contains a lot of what many would consider noise.

Such an approach demands that we consider a literary text solely as an act of communication, as a completely quantifiable message passing through a channel from a sender to a receiver. Though this may strike some as cold, on the contrary, I think it is just such an approach that can elucidate the ways in which literature differs from mechanistic models of communication and can, unlike them, augment the quantifiable with irreducible qualities of human sensation and emotion.

Noise is most simply defined as any signal, interruption, or disturbance in the channel of communication that alters the quantity of quality of transmitted information.

[I]n a text, various idiosyncrasies from typographical errors to intentional ambiguities can also be considered noise if they too alter (or augment) the imparted information.

Information, in turn, can be defined in terms of the resolution of uncertainty.

[I]n literature . . . noise is not necessarily something to be suppressed, as it constitutes the potential for increasing the complexity of the system of which it is part.

Literary noise . . . is often not a degradation of the message; on the contrary, such noise is often intentional and aimed at preventing the suppression of imagination that complete certainty can cause. . . . This would include poeticity—the unquantifiable qualities of sound relationships, word associations, and innate rhythms—but also things that intentionally disrupt the smooth flow of information, such as fragmentation, unusual syntax, ambiguity, neologism, juxtaposition, alternative logics, graphic spacing, etc—in other words, any alteration to the basic linguistic code.

The way in which poets define noise strongly influences style . . . .

[T]he reader is crucial here . . . .

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The above snippets were taken from the first essay, “Noise That Stays Noise.” Other essays deal with Mallarme, Olson, Susan Howe, fractals, Peter Gizzi, and Documentary Poetry. That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. There’s a brief essay on Ashbery coming up, I see.

I’ll leave you with this nice bit, a reaction (from her essay on Olson) to those who complain about poets using terms from science in their writing:

Such “misuse” of scientific terminology is often taken by scientists [And others as well – JG] as an affront, but there’s another way to look at it, a way that reveals the poet as reaching out to scientific language for its precision, and taking it from there as raw material to be worked through metaphor, metonymy, and ambiguity, until it expresses something that can’t be expressed otherwise.

Infinity isn't just for breakfast anymore.