Strong Verse

2012-01-11T13:19:00.005-05:00

The proofs have been reviewed, now on to finalizing the ebook and audiobook!

Look for With Rough Gods ordering information by the end of the month!

A Winning Poem at Lutheran Surrealism

2012-01-02T14:08:00.003-05:00

Enjoy my poem "Lost Revelation" at Lutheran Surrealism.

Happy Jabberwock Day!

2012-01-02T14:01:00.001-05:00

It's 1/2/12 (one-two-one-two!)!

Happy Dio de los Jabberwock!

Why We Should Go To Readings

2011-12-15T12:11:00.003-05:00

Check out this excellent piece on the importance of reading series by the inimitable Courtney Maum.

With Rough Gods

2011-12-13T12:44:00.001-05:00

I'm happy to announce the website for With Rough Gods is live!

Keep checking it for all your With Rough Gods needs!

With Rough Gods--coming soon!

2011-12-03T16:55:00.001-05:00

Hello all!

A happy announcement to say my first book, With Rough Gods will be coming out in January, 2012.
Look for more information at Jagged Door Press.

Here are two poems from the volume:

Aphrodite & Hephaestus

Ariadne & Theseus

Order early, order often!

CPRW Review: Broetry

2011-10-20T18:21:00.002-04:00

Today is the formal beginning of my critical relationship with the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Many of you may have noticed, if at all, that there have been no reviews since February. I have actually written three reviews since that time: they will be appearing at the Contemporary Poetry Review.

The first is here: a review of Brian McGackin's Broetry.

Enjoy!

Though I don't foresee reviews continuing to appear here, I will still weigh in on matters large and small. Thank you for your support of me as I began my foray into reviewing.

Have you laughed yet today?

2011-10-14T10:47:00.004-04:00

Because you will.

(thanks, reddit!)

Footnotes and Ebooks

2011-10-14T10:24:00.000-04:00

So the New York Times presents an interesting question today:

What will ebooks do to footnotes?

The author laments that footnotes being relegated to endnotes is destructive. I agree.

But HTML has shown us what needs to happen with footnotes: hyperlinks. Now, this isn't yet possible in all ebooks because all ebooks aren't for presentation on touch screens.

But they will be.

Solve the problem now, even with the clunky cursor system of the Kindle and you get folks used to the idea of hyperlinked footnotes and expecting that sort of interaction when capacitive touchscreens are the norm in ereaders.

Art & God

2011-10-10T11:28:00.002-04:00

Over at Lutheran Surrealism, Kirby posits that:

Art is a personal dialogue with God.

It's a fine idea. Perhaps finer than he intends.

Humans are, by nature, observers--"pattern makers" as Grendel calls them. So when we see art--that result of a dialogue between the artist and God we impose a pattern upon it.

This pattern becomes our experience of the art.

It's been said that art is in fact a conversation between the audience and the artist mediated through the artifact.

I think, though, that this discounts the importance of the artist in creating the artifact in the first place.

I'll be one of the ones leading the charge to tell you that, once the artifact exists, the artist wanes in importance, approaching insignificance--but it is the height of ignorance to claim the artist is never important--or rather is not of primary importance.

So that conversation with God is the spark. The reception of the inspiration from the muse. Art is born.

Then the artifact exists. If it finds and audience it becomes a second art--the art of communication between humans.

Between the divine and the human to between humans is the distilled story of creation--renewed each time an artist lifts his chisel, his keyboard, his paintbrush, his bow, his pen.

The Academic World: a Conversation

2011-09-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

So through reddit, I got into an interesting conversation with R.S. Bakker over at Three Pound Brain.

I think you'll enjoy it. I am.

Laura Miller is an Ignorant Nazi

2011-09-28T23:00:00.002-04:00

So Salon.com thought it fitting to print this drivel today:
"some classics are painful enough to ruin reading forever"

Sigh.

No, Salon.com. No, Laura Miller.

Some teachers and some children and some parents are ignorant enough to ruin reading forever--but that's not the fault of the books. Some writers are painful enough to ruin Salon.com forever, too, but that doesn't stop them from writing.
In her tiny, ill-conceived screed, Ms Miller chastises Beowulf, The Lord of the Flies, The Pearl, Animal Farm, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, A Separate Peace, and Ivanhoe. The comment section gets far worse.

Now let me be the first to say I was underwhelmed by A Separate Peace. I wasn't really interested in "Brinker's salient buttocks" or anything else that happened at that private school. I also set my copy of The Pearl on fire in seventh grade. I don't like Ivanhoe or Oliver Twist, either (or Hardy or Austen or most pre-20th century novels [except Victorian children's literature--that stuff is the truth]).

But Beowulf is amazing. Read the Heaney translation. Read the Old English aloud. Beowulf. Is. Amazing. Sure you've got to do some frontloading as a teacher to make kids understand it but so what--that's your job?

The Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and A Tale of Two Cities are all great reads--again requiring work on the part of the teacher--but honestly none of that really matters. What matters is that Laura Miller doesn't get it.

Because one of your jobs as a high school English teacher is to teach kids how to extract information from texts they couldn't care less about because they are likely to have to do that for their entire professional lives. That's the point.

So I'm sorry, Ms Miller, if you had a bad English teacher (or string of them) who couldn't make the books come alive for you--but grow up. Threatening, suggesting, or joking about banning books is bad form in the extreme. Not only does it make light of the very real past and present evils of censorship but it also adds fuel to the fire of future censors.
Before you open your big keypad next time don't. Open a book instead.

The Quiet Passing of R.E.M.--a Eulogy

2011-09-21T22:23:00.001-04:00

In the fall of 1996, when I was 18 and didn't know the first damn thing about the publishing world or copyright (and precious little about writing), I was convinced that my liberal use of song lyrics (and especially R.E.M. song lyrics) in my poetry would get me in trouble when I got big and famous. O for the ignorance of youth. . .

Anyway, I called directory assistance for Athens, Georgia and got the number for Jefferson Holt, the longtime legal council for the band (yes, I was fan enough that I knew nerdy things like that)--I called him right up (nb: I either have no shame or huevos grande--or a little of both). I got his wife, who said he was no longer working with the band (this was not yet common knowledge) but that I should call Bertis Downs, the manager. I did and, after my questions about "getting published real soon" or whatever bumkin junk I said, he told me to send my stuff along and they would check it out. Like a nerd, I did. He called me back some weeks later and said the band thought it was fine if I quoted them. Now, I've no idea if Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe ever saw my work--I doubt they did--but the story ought to tell you a bit about how I felt about R.E.M. I was the "buy every album on vinyl, tape, CD, and special release CD, go to the first-or-midnight release (Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and UP) kind of fan. Unfortunately, they only toured once that I could see them (I wasn't going to see them without Bill Berry--sorry, gents) which had done the previous fall with my ex-girlfriend who (for all I could tell) hated me though I still madly loved her--things got really uncomfortable when Michael Stipe told us all to take our shirts off.

My first R.E.M. experience was listening to "It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" on a church road trip when I was 12 or so. Unfortunately, that was 1990, and the radio and MTV were full of Madonna's "Vogue" and Wilson Phillips "Hold On." But then came that day when I was glued to my MTV and a dark set appeared, rain drizzling and people ducking and then the clear knife of a mandolin. I had no idea what I was listening to--or if I even liked it--but I had to keep listening; every time (which wasn't a lot in '91--yet) "Losing My Religion" came on MTV I watched. My mom got me a CD player for Christmas and I ordered Out of Time out of the BMG music club (along with some dozen other awesome [Men At Work's Business as Usual] and awful [I think there was some Bryan Adams in there] albums). Unfortunately, the CD player had a program function, so I just made it play the songs I liked. I pined for new albums by Nirvana and Pearl Jam, whose tracks made the rounds later that year but had to pay that big BMG bill first.

In my freshman year, however, I got involved in a band, The Actual Size. My bandmates, Tommy and Loyal, came over to my house and went through my CDs--and thought I was a dork until they came across Out of Time. They asked how I liked "Belong." I didn't know what they were talking about. They made me listen--it was amazing. We listened to the whole album. Loyal then played Green and Document for me. I was hooked. Hooked more than my friends were, in fact. Though The Actual Size had long since broken up (in a parking lot, close to a woman throwing bottles at her man wailing "I love ya but you're scarin' me!"), we spent that Christmas in Tommy's huge house, playing pool and drinking Crystal Pepsi. I gave Loyal a copy of Murmur. By this time I had bought all the albums on tape or CD (Automatic for the People had just come out and excuse my hipster, but I loved "Everybody Hurts" before there was that cool video) and was in the process of tracking them down on vinyl (Neil Young told us that everything sounded better on vinyl). I dreamed about them going back out on tour so I could catch them live--it would be just like Pop Screen!

Sophomore year I dated Sara (a senior--aww yeah), who was a bigger R.E.M. fan that I was. She completed my early music education (everything pre-Blues and Bluegrass), filling out my knowledge with bootleg concerts of Stipe and Natalie Merchant, Sisters of Mercy, Morrissey, "Kinko the Kid-Lovin' Clown," and The Velvet Underground. We found a pink album called So Much Younger Then with songs like "I Want to be a Narrator (for the Jacques Cousteau Show)" from some unnamed 1980 show. That homeless summer I crashed on the couch of my buddy Kris's Air Stream in a Cuervo and clove-induced haze and listened to my vinyl Life's Rich Pageant more times than there were mosquitos in the air.

When Monster came, I was ready--I learned "What's the Frequency Kenneth" on guitar (with the help of my bassist), wished I could get a star t-shirt, skipped school to buy the album on the day it was released (we didn't have midnight release parties in Tampa yet--at least not for R.E.M.), and even learned the words to "Tongue"--I was overjoyed when they said they were finally going to tour. Even the aforementioned awkwardness didn't stop me from enjoying the show (and getting the set list).

The story was pretty much the same with New Adventures but as a better guitarist, I sat down and figured out all the songs myself--if I had had faster internet access and typing skills, I could have tabbed the whole thing out for everyone on day one--falling slap in love with "Electrolite" and hoping it spoke of the new direction the band would take. I played it with confidence at open mikes and apartment concerts--it even "got me the girl" once (though not "The Girl"--she doesn't really like R.E.M.).

Though I didn't think the band would survive Bill Berry's departure (after all, he had written "Perfect Circle" and "Everybody Hurts" among other songs), I looked forward to the release of UP. I was running a pirate radio morning show at the time and we played, critiqued, and analyzed each track. Though it was a good album with some fun songs (I still love "Lotus") it just wasn't R.E.M. The other Mike of the Mike and Mike morning show quipped "well, they're just falling into the Depeche Mode maxim"--the limit of a band sounding like Depeche Mode approaches infinity as the band progresses in age.

Reveal came out and it was awful. Maybe it was good music, you might think so--but it wasn't R.E.M. The soul of "Don't Go Back to Rockville" and "So Fast, So Numb" had died. Around the Sun was worse. They tried with Accelerate and I tried to love it but the songs faded as fast as they lasted--and sounded like they were written that quickly as well.

I didn't even know they released Collapse Into Now earlier this year.

While it's true one can grow out of a band (much as I used to love "Ghost" by the Indigo Girls I can't even approach that level of angst as a happily married father of three--it's simply laughable) I think R.E.M.'s announcement today proves what everybody knew in 1998--R.E.M. wasn't a band--or at least wasn't a great band--without Bill Berry.

It's not that I'll miss them--you can't miss what hasn't been fresh in 15 years (half the band's life)--but I do mourn the passing of what could have been.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to Begin the Begin--and end with a Perfect Circle.

Our Fellows

2011-09-20T12:59:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't heard, A. E. Stallings and Kay Ryan have just been announced as MacArthur Fellows for the Class of 2011.

What does this mean for poetry, especially the poetry that we promote?

First I have to say that if it weren't for Alicia (A.E. Stallings), I wouldn't know half of what I know. In the middle part of the last decade, when I got professionally serious about poetry, I sought out some "leaders" to figure out where I should go for instruction and publication. Alicia was the most helpful of many helpful people and directed me to the Eratosphere, which helped me hone my critical and metrical crafts.

But what do Ryan and Stalling's awards mean for not just me but all of poetry?

First we ought to note that Kay Ryan's award comes on the heels of her Laureateship (2008-2010) and Pulitzer (2011). This doesn't detract from her award (and, honestly, Ryan does such a good job of writing that not much should detract from her awards) but it does "place it" in meaning for poetry--here we are, adding more laurels to the queen. Nothing wrong with that and I'm glad it's not going to other, similarly aged famous female poets whose work I prefer slightly above the average grindcore album. Ultimately it's the less surprising of the two awards--but here's to hoping we get some more amazing work out of Ryan from it!

Stallings' award is more from left-field. Though I would argue most working poets are familiar with her work, Stallings' doesn't have the mountain of accolades (nor the name recognition) Ryan has. Part of this is the beauty of the MacArthur foundation--good for them for supporting A. E. Stallings.

But what's more important is that Stallings is, if I may wrench a term, a "compleat poet." Her works run the gamut from light verse to the scholarly-and-accessible to complex undertones (see "The Ghost Ship" along with the other poems there) to translations (hello? De Rerum Natura? AWESOME). Her work is vital and alive and valuable. If anyone's going to out-Fagles Robert Fagles in the 21st century or contribute that verse to our common life and the lives of our children's children, Stallings is a heavy contender.

Moreover, perhaps of the utmost importance, she is a master of form.

Her receipt of a major award (which I hope is the first of many) signals the end of our obsession with the poor flattery of prose we have allowed "our poetry" to become. I, along with many, applaud it. Congratulations, Alicia.

Poetry Contest at Lutheran Surrealism

2011-09-19T13:10:00.001-04:00

For those of you looking for a nice place to share work, check out this "contest" at Lutheran Surrealism.LS is a delightful little blog where a tight-knit community spars about religion, poetry, and politics.Hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do!

Miserere Mei Deus

2011-09-17T21:44:00.001-04:00

You should listen to this and contemplate the beauty that is human invention.That is all.

2011-09-12T17:20:00.001-04:00

Well, this is serendipitous.

Poetry Post-9/11

2011-09-12T11:11:00.000-04:00

Hello neglecterinos!

If all goes well, reviews from me will start popping up at the Contemporary Poetry Review any day now.

I thought I would need to shutter the blog in respect of their publishing schedule and a new, grueling pace of work.

Since, however, they publish on a traditional-publishing model, I think it's best I get back to the blog for some unadulterated poetry commentary.

First I think we might as well start off acknowledging our new calendar. Conveniently we have the 9/11 attacks to encourage us to look at "the new millennium" as an actual turning point and not simply a calendrical one.

We live in a world of blogs, smartphones, viral videos, and a bunch of other junk that it's pointless to say and makes me look like a bit of a fuddy-duddy.

I'm not, however. But most poetry publishers are.

A search on Amazon tells me that the most popular books in poetry are all e-book editions. Even the books that are popular in hard-copy have audio and e-books available.

But those are all published by "the big guys" and the problem with "big guy" publishing is that the poems are generally tepid at best and more like lukewarm sugar-coated kitty litter in practice.

What of the small presses (even the big ones)?

A search on Red Hen Press gives me lots of books to buy but none to download, either to read or listen to.

I don't see any electronic versions on Graywolf Press's site either.

The micro-presses I'm most familiar with don't offer such things.

Now, I would love to be wrong.

I would like, you my readers, to say "this! This small press publishes e-books and audio-books along with their traditional books."

Because if I can't find that then we have witnessed another gaping hole in the quest to deliver great poetry to the people (and specifically the American people): there's no outlet above the "mere blogosphere" yet below the giant publishing houses to deliver quality work.

Why?

Recording studios do this all the time--every band with a recording has a way to buy that music electronically.

Why don't we do this with poetry?

In a world where skyscrapers can be knocked out of the sky, why are small presses still holding on to hard-copy books?

Anyway, that's what's on my mind this morning.

I've changed this blog a dozen times since I started writing. We'll see where this new iteration takes us.

My Only Thoughts on the Subject

2011-05-01T23:54:00.002-04:00

Are from another's pen:

Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.

Palmer on Poetry: 197.3 December 2010

2011-02-17T09:06:00.001-05:00

December's copy of Poetry has been sitting with a Cross been stabbed through its unfinished pages since my last review post. This has been partially because of the business of the season (Thanksgiving-through-New Year's Day is a festive blur in the Palmer house). But I have two other, mostly unread, copies of the magazine staring at me and AWP glancing over its back at me from two weeks' time. I'd really rather have as many reviews as possible done by then (especially as I'm now flying and not taking the train).

The December issue is called "The Q&A Issue" and covers a scant Baker's Dozen poets (though really that number is reduced as three of the poets are dead Italians here translated by Geoffrey Brock). According to the Poetry Foundation website there was another Q&A issue in April of 2010 (prior to my subscription starting). I hope these don't become a trend but judging from some of the letters-to-the-editor in the February issue, they just might. For my part, I found the majority of the question-and-answer sessions to be extraneous at best. Indeed, they're the reason it took me so long to get through the issue as most of the readings were a slog.

Poetry
Volume 197
Issue 3
December, 2010

Michael Robbins
Paula Bohince
Tom Pickard
John Tranter
Charles Baxter
Jane Hirshfield
Clemente Rebora
Giovanni Pascoli
Attilio Bertolucci
David Roderick
Linda Gregerson
Vijah Seshadri
Sina Queyras
Belle Randall

There are no gravestone endsheets in this issue.

Apologies for the earlier post. Blogger was having problems today. That was a draft. I don't have much to say about this issue, but I want to get to January and February.

A Review: Terminal Diagrams by Garrick Davis

2011-02-04T12:44:00.001-05:00

Terminal Diagrams
by Garrick Davis
2010, Swallow Press, $13.56 ($5 ebook)

It is possible that in Terminal Diagrams we have been given a rare bird--a collection of poems that seems at once Christian and reactionary (as in rejecting this modern age). I believe that Don Colacho would be fond of much of this work.

This is not to say the collection is flawless--indeed, like the sinners that it drinks with it has flaws and, I would argue, is aware of them.

One is alerted to the "different" nature of this book from the very cover--we have Mr. Davis and a lovely lady coming out of a gleaming Maserati--made more gleaming by the book's silvered cover. It is telling that a collection of poems that as objects on the page look unflashy and full of "quietude" that the cover and content should be so unashamedly forceful.

The first poem is the book's epigram, in which we find the terms "mechanical," "pandaemonium," and "sotto-voce." Unlike many, this is a useful clue to the contents of the poems within--wefind in the collection a syzygy of the temporal, the canonical, and the classical. Though Davis's poems engage Eliot more than Milton, the Revelation imagery that presents itself in the volume's final poems stretch his depth of influence to a refreshing pandaemonium.

In the poem's second epigram we are told by T.E. Hulme about "the relation to machinery" that "vital art" must reconcile in this modern age. Though this epigram serves the first poems well, by the end of the volume it clear on which side of modernity this book's bread is buttered.

The opening poem "Ultramodern" gives us in the first two stanzas a hint of what I find most expertly done by Davis, that of the apt word, phrase, or juxtaposition. Even in a poem that I might otherwise find middling, there is a gem so perfect that it requires a reevaluation of the text surrounding it.

In "Ultramodern," people are "paid/to sit and wait for someone to speak" but they only listen "when the clock says they can leave." If you've not experienced this, simply call an 800 number and try to get help--either from human or machine. The poem continues in its description of our modern maladies, from lights that "switch night to utter asphalt" and "tabloid lines" that "plead/This Is Not A Hoax!"

Indeed it is not. I would like to add that the poem ends with what I would call one of Davis's flaws: "Who shall stand in the wrath to come?" Here Davis chooses shall over what, by all modern and alliterative rights, should be "will." It feels as if Davis here is choosing propriety over poetry--but it may be simply choosing the past over the present; either way it's a note too far.

"New Bohemia" is one of many poems in which Davis seems to be both channeling Eliot "at the absinthe-hour, I scribble these lines" and, inexplicably, me "a black-leather dandy of nightclubbing" (though my unpublished work--so unless Mr. Davis is a mind reader, I suppose we have just tugged on the same invisible literary lines). With its final "orphan of the oracle," Davis taps in to the "fatherless sons" vibe so present to a post-Fight Club world.

"Lila" and "At the Underground Club" are solid works that stolidly tell of the process of aging without achievement; again the pre-Ash Wednesday Eliot is never far from the surface in these poems.

"Metal Machine Music," with its title cribbed from Lou Reed, gives us "the pre-millennial tension" of "blips and beeps/instead of notes" and introduces us to the important symbol of "muzak," here "a muzak-of-the-spheres." Muzak, that elevator symphonist, runs throughout Terminal Diagrams, reminding us of the artlessness of modern art.

"Aubade" is a bit of a misstep, with its "flesh deflating" too very. I did find the end of the poem, the "piece of its mirror/in which I can't see anyone alive" to fit well with the book as a whole, but in the collection it seems out of place.

"Techno" and "Pastoral" are workable poems, with the possible criticism of "or what is left of it" being redundant--again the endings, especially escaping "the horizon's/fine thread of telephone lines" connect the poems to the book. "Unrestricted Development" is one of Terminal Diagram's many short poems, all of which are pleasurable and many profound.

"Cost-Benefit Analysis" and "Disaster Report" are two excellent pieces that from cubicles and the evening news put fire to the meaning and value of modernity--it is in these poems that the "mass market appeal" that seems so inevitable in the prior works is first challenged.

"Drive Song" is one of the first poems that I delight in, though it is a despairing delight as the poem tells us of the "choked tears in driveways" of those "charged and mortgaged to the marrow."

"The Art of Drifting Through Los Angeles" fully plants Davis's work in Eliot's "Unreal City"; though Eliot would never have chose, in 1922, LA, it seems clear that the city, in Davis's view, has built itself upon "The Waste Land." Speaking of waste, it is in "On Passing the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant" that Terminal Diagrams begins to embrace its symbolic structure, adding "Moloch" to the mix. The biblical allusions arrive in the second half of the collection, and modernity becomes place, and finally overshadowed, in the context of the past.

This symbolic structure continues in "Christmas Shopping at Horton Plaza" where the season, stripped of meaning, is rebuilt "by thin ladies" "as acolytes." The poem has my favorite description of Davis's commercial world, which I will simply quote:

The eye of God peers from its dollar,
On each indulgence bought at the mall.

As I stroll and sing an ad-jingle
a plane, towing brand-names, blocks the sun.

Next follow "Zone" and "Revelation," two of the collection's stronger works. It is in Zone, which we are told is "after Apollinaire," that Eliot rears his head (or shows his own influences) and that we get what is, perhaps, the collection's clearest line:

I lived like a fool and wasted my life.

"Revelation" is simply spot-on from start to finish. In it we are "entertained to the end" by the devil in the cables. This sentiment is continued in "Deus Ex Machina," wherein "time is kept by launch code and fuse" and "science is a liturgy," in "www.prepare4y2k.com" where we are "awaiting/a glitch in the millennium," and "While Reading the Revelation of St. John the Divine, I Turn On the Television," where "each day the world holds by a hangnail."

This despair is brought to its conclusion by the collection's eponymous poem. In "Terminal Diagrams," "one cannot buy the letters," and "history now belongs to the vanquished." Here Davis demonstrates clearly the inescapable dangers of this machinery Hulme warned us of--"box-office receipts form our Bulfinch" and "we have old episodes for classics."

"Gone" are "beautiful manners," "tradition," and "foundations." The poem calls for "some Jonah" but is convinced that no prophet is coming or would ever again be heard.

The poem, and thus the collection, ends with two of the most delightfully enigmatic lines I have read. They work with both the poem and the collection as a whole:

I see the end is near, the flashing signals,
As that last man, crossing the Rubicon.

I have in my notes three questions, none of which is it possible to answer--and that may be the value of the entire work that Davis has presented us with:

is this poem finally embracing the loss of all that is beautiful? That is, does the collection end on a 1984 note? Do we love modernity? That is, is this last man crossing the Rubicon simply aware that Caesar has already crossed (and Sulla and the Gracchae before him) and that there is no going back?

Is it simply the acceptance of the inevitability of the conflict between past and present and the rugged willingness to join that conflict?

Or, finally, is it one more soul climbing Parnassus? What was Caesar fighting--to change or preserve?

As a classicist who cut my poetic teeth on modernism, I must say I dearly love this collection. It does what all good poetry--what art--must do--it presents the world in new ways and, as poetry, translates the unspoken words bound upon our modern tongue.

AWP-Bound!

2011-02-02T08:49:00.001-05:00

Hello all,

I'm headed to DC this afternoon for my 3rd trip to AWP.

Come visit me Saturday at the UNOPress table.

I will do my best during downtime (does that exist) to finish these gall-darned reviews I have.

See you in the cold!

Pay for your books!

2011-01-07T17:08:00.000-05:00

My friend Adam Deutsch of Cooper Dillon Books has a post on selling books of poetry.

My favorite part(s):

Shouldn't the sale of books keep their books in print?

and from Gandhi:

Institutions maintained on permanent funds are often found to ignore public opinion, and are frequently responsible for acts contrary to it.

Happy reading!

How the state co-opts community and personal responsibility

2010-12-06T13:17:00.000-05:00

Here we have two opposing views on what it means to be a responsible member of a community.

In the first we have Jesus:

“If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

And then we have The MTA, now co-opted by DHS:

Remember, if you see something, say something. Alert a police officer, train or bus operator, station personnel or call 888-NYC-SAFE.

The first requires individual courage and responsibility.

The second relinquishes both courage and responsibility to the state.

Since we are what we imitate, in which world would you live?

Why Bad Poetry is Bad for Poetry

2010-12-06T10:19:00.000-05:00

Walter Benjamin: we have a "gift of seeing resemblances."

Iain McGilchrist: "Imagination is how we know what we know and how we become who we are."

Humans are imitative animals. I'm demonstrating this if nothing else than by these posts from the Good Doctor's Good Book, in which I stop reading because I have "seen a resemblance" between what McGilchrist has written and the reality of poetry.

We imitate what we know.

When we are given "bad poetry" to imitate--poetry that is selfish, that is closeted, that is straight-jacketed by convention (even, perhaps especially, when that convention is "experimentation"), that is, for lack of a better term, bad--we in turn make bad poetry.

The first test of "bad poetry" should be:

does someone who is not a poet like this?

Why, you ask?

It's easy. We process art as a new, whole, living thing--unless it is something we have studied in depth--then we begin to process art with which we are familiar as pieces of a mechanical whole. We artists are only "surprised" by something entirely unexpected--even then we may only appreciate it on a mechanical level; i.e. "oh, that is clever" not "oh, that is Good."

The layman, however, still approaches art as a whole thing alive. If the artificiality of your art for artists means that it does not read as a whole living being to a layman then you have failed--you have made, not art, but a clever imitation of art--that is, you have made "bad art."

So what happens when you, as a jaded artist, continue to appreciate "bad art" for its "cleverness" and then teach this to aspiring artists and laymen?

First is that the aspiring artists learn all the wrong things--they learn to create art for artists' sake, not humanity's. They learn that "cleverness" is to be praised above all else. They learn, in short, to make bad art.

What does the layman learn? He learns that art is not for him and rejects it.

Perhaps he is lucky and encounters a novel that a friend passes on, or notices a particularly beautiful painting or sculpture, sees a great play, and rediscovers art. Note what I have left out--where is that layman to find great poetry?

We have become so dedicated to bad poetry that we have no galleries, no word-of-mouth, no stage for greatness--only hollow planks supporting hollow words.

No wonder we are in a rats' land.

No end, just silence

2010-12-01T13:25:00.000-05:00

The end of what, Son?
The story?
There is no end,
there's just the point where storytellers stop talking.

Pretty profound for a little comic strip.

Honesty is the Best Policy

2010-11-30T11:04:00.000-05:00

FYI: I support Wikileaks in spirit, if not with capital.

Does that make me a terrorist? Or just a thoughtcrime terrorist in training?

Neither artist nor Christian should side with secrecy and dishonesty. It's unfortunate that our current purveyor of disclosure and honesty should be such an apparently unseemly fellow (one should avoid all appearances of impropriety) but I, as a proud member of civilization, applaud his organization's work, even if it means DHS opens a file in my name.

Palmer on Poetry: 197.2 November 2010

2010-11-23T14:11:00.000-05:00

To say that November's issue of Poetry pleased me far greater than October's would be unsurprising to those familiar with my taste. November's issue has sat on my desk for a few weeks now, and since December's issue came in the mail on Friday, I figured it was time to get this review done.

Poetry
Volume 197
Issue 2
November, 2010

Ron Offen
Edwin Morgan
Samuel Menashe
Karen An-Hwei Lee
Joshua Mehigan
Derek Sheffield
Jeramy Dodds
Alan Shapiro
Donald Hall
Billy Collins
Larry Bradley
Wesley McNair
David Yezzi
Lance Larsen
Rebecca Lindenberg
Brian Swann
Christopher Shannon
Dora Malech
Brooklyn Copeland
Miriam Bird Greenberg
Nate Klug
D.H. Tracy on Ange Mlinko and Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Giacomo Leopardi (trans. W.S. DiPiero)
Various Letters to the Editor complaining about this review or praising this essay.

The gravestone poem on the first endsheet of November's issue is by Ron Offen. He begins "Being of Pound mind, hence dotty" and I have to stop there if for no other reason than from what I can tell, having spent time with folks who knew Pound well (like his daughter, Mary), I don't think "dotty" is the right word--though it certainly belies a lot about Offen (and a general set of poets): Pound must have been "crazy" to believe things because no sane person can believe differently from me. Ach du.

The remainder of the poem is a mashup of creeds; a sort of prayer-vow-credo that really highlights the limited and pathetic nature of its vein of contemporary poetry.

The first poem proper is "Who" from Samuel Menashe. As the delivery of the November issue predates Hallowe'en, I think the poem itself is a nice touch for those who might want to "decorate" with poetry. The poem itself does a good job of "touch[ing] "the corpse[s]" of the Golem story and Dr. Frankenstein, with the requisite hints to Job thrown in and is a study of how much one can pack into six quick half-lines.

"Who" is followed by two poems by Karen An-Hwei Lee: "Prayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine" and "Dream of Ink Brush Calligraphy." "Prayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine" refers to this phenomenon, which means that the poem, in light of its first five lines, tries to have it both ways:

May our seedpods nourish rodents
who roam our groves

without rebuking lands with famine.

Well, that's pretty impossible. Either the seedpods are going to feed the rats and create a rat flood (yes, you read that correctly: Rat. Flood.) or they're not going to blossom. It's hard to take a poem seriously that errs so egregiously in its dealings with reality--but there's nothing wrong in dreaming (or praying), though one dreams or prays for something impossible. The poem, ultimately, is over-long but nice enough, with lovely phrasing like "turmeric flourish" and "perennial synchrony."

In another unreal poem, Lee's "Dream of Ink Brush Calligraphy" begins "In prayer." The poem is a reversal/palindromic poem; each line is repeated except for the middle line, "chaogao or grass calligraphy." The poem creates a nice concrete image of a calligraphic stroke, raising what could easily be a "trick poem" to something more useful--an interesting retreading of the "ink as my blood" theme.

Joshua Mehigan's "Fire Safety" comes next, which I am delighted to say is a precise example of what I mean by "fun verse" (though the phrase "nothing to reveal" is perhaps a tad both inaccurate and harsh). Mehigan personifies all of the life-saving devices tucked away "like a tea urn," sitting/supernaturally still" "waiting for us to cry out" because the poem, the poet, and its readers know "we will." A fine and fun poem.

I'm still trying to understand why Derek Sheffield's "The World's Other Side" is center-justified. Poets, please, don't do this--the only thing more ugly is to not lineate at all. The poem itself lacks a center, so perhaps this is the reason. "The World's Other Side" is made up of three unmarked sections. The first is a description of death in Japan. The second is a description of a father at the beach. The third is a memory of finding a globe in the ocean. If you can figure out what these three sections are doing together, please feel free to comment. Perhaps the poem is a sort of macro-ideogram: death-beach-globe and is a metaphor for Pearl Harbor. I've no idea--and more importantly--the poem doesn't give me a reason to want to know.

Jeramy Dodds' parents "blessed" him with an "alternate spelling" of his name. Perhaps this inherent confusion--this strife to make sure his name is spelled "correctly" plays out in his work--a second disjointed work, though one with far more hints as to "why" than the previous poem. Perhaps, of course, I'm just editorializing.

At any rate, Dodds's "Harbor Porpoise" juxtaposes two scenes or rather two views of a scene: viewing a porpoise jumping out of the water as folks leave a place to which they "cannot return" and a relating of a discussion of the event with the ship's marriage counselor. The poem is marred by an anachronistic and unearned "thus" which serves to mark the shift from the first to second part. I suppose the poem is a serviceable image of said porpoise and there is imagery sort of hanging around, but the whole thing seems unemployed. One would guess that the dual nature of the porpoise speaks to some sort of relationship between the speaker and his apostrophe, but there's not enough there there to suss it out.

So speaking of Pound, ever since I read as a high-school sophomore that Pound took a green crayon to The Waste Land, I have found myself editing poems that I thought could benefit from such cutting.

One such poem is Alan Shapiro's "Flowerpot." In just about every line there's an unnecessary word: "I lay back on the carpeted bottom step" needs either "carpeted" or "bottom" but not both. Likewise we don't need to know the television is "on somewhere above me"--either location will do. Having cut the lines so that the poem appears like the first draft of Radi Os, I like the poem and its view of the colloidal sunbeam.

Shapiro's second poem, "Sickbed," suffers from a problem hinted at in "Flowerpot": being trapped in time. In "Flowerpot" we hear of the television, a word even now old enough to date its speaker but in "Sickbed" we hear the song about "short shorts," which either dates us to the late 1950s or to the mid 80s and those awful Nair commercials. It is possible Nair is still running that campaign--but one would have to watch "television" regularly to know--'taint no Nair commercials online 'ceptin' for youtube. Anyway, the poem ends with the ancient notion "no one paused to wonder/Who to thank for just how bad it was." I say ancient because in the book of Job, God asks: "will you pronounce me wicked/in order that you may be right?" "Sickbed" is a odd poem to come upon before Thanksgiving--it's the voice of someone who can't see the forest for the trees--Thank God you're not dead. Thank God you're not a child soldier. Thank God your mind still works. Thank God you've got the leisure to write and read poetry.

Next is Donald Hall's lengthy "Closings," an elegy in nine parts for Liam Rector. The poem, like all of Hall's work of the last fifteen years, is also an elegy to Jane Kenyon, who is mentioned in one of the poem's many sectional enjambments. The poem works, as it does, though it's possibly too close to the subject be useful more broadly and one suspects that it finds itself in the pages of Poetry both because of Hall's prominence and Rector's importance to the citizens of Poetry America. The poem ends on a wrong note, though one Hall felt he had to write, in order to deal with the subject:

Tree knew Liam
did what he planned and needed to do.

Tree is Tree Swenson, Rector's widow. Hall lets Rector get away with the suicide, which apart from rearranging deck chairs, hardly makes for a moving elegy--an elegy doesn't accompany a proper death but rather one that, as James Dickey says, bares "that eternal process/most obsessively wrong with the world."

It is telling, of course, that "Closings" comes on the heels of "Sickbed." These poems reject not so much God (though that is implicit in such behavior it is hardly necessary to the conversation) but the sense of wonder and awe in humanity. Both of these poets, both of these poems look Dylan Thomas's "dying of the light" in the face and give up and die.

Is this where we, as poets, have come?

Next comes Billy Collins's "Memorizing 'The Sun Rising' by John Donne." I know I've had less than complimentary things to say in the past about Mr. Collins, and I stand by them. This poem is interesting, as are Collins's poems, in that it takes a clever conceit and runs with it.

This poem takes Donne's aubade and throws it into the middle of a solitary work poem. Donne's speaker is surrounded by his lady, Collins's speaker is surrounded by poetry--it is possible, even probable, that Collins wants the poem to work as a love poem to a love poem. And as that is, it's fine. My complaint with Collins is, as always, that his poems don't stand up to being beaten with that "rubber hose" and I want my poems tougher.

Collins is followed by Larry Bradley's "Barber," a poem that for some reason lacks most punctuation. It reminds me of Christopher Smart's cat and doesn't seem to update much from that point.

"When She Wouldn't" by Wesley McNair is a poem in the old-folks-at-home tradition. It surfs the wave of popularity lent by the show Hoarders and is rather overlong for a poem about not doing things.

Continuing the thematic vein of inaction, David Yezzi's "Lazy" does a better job at doing nothing. Yezzi has several poems in the voice of an "asshole speaker," my favorite being "The Call," collected in Azores. This poem is along those lines, though more metrically and sonically playful. With hints of Pound's "Tame Cat" (why does he keep popping up in this issue? Damn you, Offen!), the speaker spins around engaging with anyone as his radio spins in the dial--until landing on a song that's "not the one [he] hoped for." I put a period here because the poem ends more strongly on the line than the next, which is unnecessary, even if its unnecessariness is perhaps intentional.

For something completely different, Yezzi's "Lazy" is followed by his "Crane," which along with being diametrically opposed to laziness, is a structure apart. Its clean lines that approach dimeter without being trapped and clean rhymes remind one of the poem's "creased paper." The poem itself speaks of slow construction, the process by which we "press our designs" which seems to "diminish/what we hold." In the end, though, the speaker can

understand
how this unleaving
makes of what's before
something finer
and finally more.

It's a flawless note on the process of creation; creation as "unleaving." We artisan apes cannot leave a thing untouched--and by our "hands'/careful work" what we touch becomes at first "diminish[ed]" but "finally more." My note on the poem is simply: "damn, son." This truth of creation, important in general, will be specifically important later in the review.

Yezzi's work is followed by Lance Larsen's "Backyard Georgics," seven couplets apparently unrelated. The third and seventh are especially lovely--the third reprinted here because of the issue's dependence upon elegy:

Not euologies or hearses but sandwiches after,
estranged cousins chewing under one umbrella.

Rebecca Lindenberg's "Litany" follows this and since I'm already connecting everything to Pound, I might as well point out that the poem sounds like "Canto II" with its "long-limbed animals" but quickly makes what can only be termed an Essbaumian turn: "O you gods. . ." becomes "O you gods. . .please." Like "child, please."

The poem doesn't quite turn into a satire of itself, however; its lines following the turn keep the lift of the opening's language, only hinting back at playfulness with the likely puns of "coax" and "her soft hollow," which lead to a second "please," this time, not playful at all, but entreating the gods to "lend [her] a word." Acknowledging the gift, at the end, she sings.

The "regular poems" are closed out by Brian Swann's "Peel," a poem that, about an orange and creating art, reminds one of Frank O'Hara's much anthologized poem. Being from Florida, I do like oranges. Can we find a new metaphor though?

The next group of poets are all "Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellows" which means that the poets each got an award of $15,000 and so if you see them you should hit them up for drinks.

The first poet is Christopher Shannon, whose poems "We dollhouse monsters," "We had decided with Cocteau," and "The Late Show" each commit some errors that one supposes can be chalked up to youth. In "monsters," Shannon has apparently not learned that folks don't really want genitalia in their poetry--especially not genitalia pertaining to ones father. The rest of the poem is similar to McNair's "When She Wouldn't" but with the requisite disdain for structure that passes for artistry these past ten decades. We are told, by way of explanation that the speaker of "We had decided. . ." is Igor Stravinsky. This may be true, but it doesn't make me any "less proud of being bored," as the poem says. The final poem is "The Late Show" which has little to be forgiven or recommended for.

The second poet is Dora Malech, whose "Delivery Rhyme" is a combination lullaby and gore-fest. Full of punning and wordplay: "debutante bawl," "wrest from the nest," the poem can't get above the "drawn lots, blood" that cover over it. "The Kisser," Malech's next poem is also hamstrung by its dominant image. On can't say "the kisser" and then "as in, in the, of course" and not then be bound by The Honeymooners. This poem is also full of Essbaumian (hey there's that word again) word play--I say Essbaumian because it's "sexy" word play: "trussed me." Her final poem, "Love Poem," gives words to the problem inherent in her work:

KO to my OT and bait to my switch, I crown
you one-trick pony to my one-horse town.

Well, she said it.

The third poet is Brooklyn Copeland, who is apparently channeling e.e. cummings in her "From 'Field Notes,'" which one hopes are not "plucked" from a collection. Far stronger is "Prayer's End," which is disserved by its linear disassociation. "The wind/speaks fluent/rain" is a fine line on its own without being sliced mercilessly. Reverting completely into disjunction, "From 'Reunions'" is another piece that appears, in a refreshing honesty, "penniless/before/a judge."

Miriam Bird Greenberg seems to have an idea of how a poem should appear on the page and moreover seems to enjoy narrative, but with "Brazilian Telephone" and "I Passed Three Girls Killing a Goat" she seems to forget Twain's instruction that "a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere." So while I always praise the attempt at narrative, I wish these were good narratives. Greenberg's final poem, "Long ago I heard footsteps," has more of a story--in fewer words--but it attempts to create a mystery by leaving out important information--not exactly the preferred mode of construction; however, the poem itself "works" in a way the previous two don't.

The final fellow is Nate Klug, whose "The Choice," with a nod to "Prufrock" and Bishop's "One Art" would be better written as a two- or three-line aphorism. "Parade" and "Conjugation" work towards their final images and questions but without lifting above the bar set by "The Choice."

The final endsheet poem is a nice apocalyptic piece from Edwin Morgan that is a fine combination of 60s end-times chic and H.D.'s "Oread."

In the Comment section, D.H. Tracy reviews two works: Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions. Tracy, in full Enlightenment mode, praises Mlinko for being "self-conscious about aesthetic cliche. . .that descriptive fidelity would expose her to." He sings that in her work "nothing is quite literally given shape and, as it were, trapped." To quote Ms. Lindenberg: "gods, please." It floors me that this review comes on the heels of Mlinko's interview with Iain McGilchrist and that Tracy--and apparently Mlinko--misunderstand how the mind views art. When we see a painting of a landscape, we think neither to ourselves "this is a window" nor "this is some color on a board." Art does not have to draw attention to itself in the way that Mlinko's poetry appears to, according to Tracy's review, and in the way that Tracy's review does in its self-referentiality. When a work says "I'm art here! I'm being fake here!" it robs the mind of its ability to see it as art--as something alive and new--and only leaves the work as object.

Tracy's review of Schnackenberg's work is, I assume, intended to make sure Heavenly Questions "sit[s] on this year's shelf with a hundred other poetry books, to all appearances an identical order of thing." It does the trick.

The penultimate section is a collection of writings by Giacomo Leopardi, translated by W.S. DiPiero. There are a few passages worth mentioning, that serve to criticize poetry in general and Poetry in particular. I wonder, with reading this work and the McGilchrist interview if such things are seen by the staff--I would guess they are.

First the quote that graces the back cover:

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

Though I would take a bit of umbrage at this (friendship? love?), Leopardi's point is one to be taken by today's writers: what, exactly are you trying to improve?

More succinctly, art doesn't change. A minor interval is just as "sad" now as it was four thousand years ago. An archetypal, moving hero is the same today as four thousand years ago--the need to sell news aside.

Second, from August 7, 1822:

Certain foolish poets, realizing description gives pleasure, reduce poetry to nonstop description: they drain all pleasure from poetry and replace it with boredom.

He goes on to paint Ovid with this brush, so if you are feeling "called out" remember that you are in good company. This quote is the problem with the Greenberg poems above--all setting and no story.

There is an excellent passage from July 12, 1823 in which he discusses what it means for a poet to be "contemporary." His jist is that "cultured people" are "self-engrossed and philosophical, stripped of meaningful illusions and barren of vital passions" and when they call for poets to be "contemporary," they want the poets "to conform to the language and ideas of this narrow class of people."

"What is poetic in them?" he asks. What indeed.

Three--no, Four--truths about Art

2010-11-19T10:01:00.000-05:00

Keeping in mind that truth conceals as much as it reveals.
Also, the first is not mine, but comes directly from Joe Bastianich, and apparently indirectly from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Children's Publishing.

Art without commerce is just a hobby.

If you must explain your work you have failed as an artist.

If it can be summarized it is not art.

And a fourth (from the Good Dr. McGilchrist): We experience art as a living thing.

Why Do We Still Have the Old New?

2010-11-18T08:35:00.000-05:00

If Heidegger proved that things repeated become "dulled and inauthentic," ultimately resulting in our conceptualizing of them, which is an inability to directly experience them, and Wittgenstein showed that practice--that is, experience--is always more important, more primal, more real, more useful than theory,

Why do we still have a dominant poetic mode based upon a 100-year-old call misinterpreted as senseless innovation strangled and supported by theory?

It is no wonder that our art is sclerotic--it is held up not by reality but by machine.

It is time we pulled the plug.

Thinking rationally is only half thinking.

2010-11-16T08:05:00.000-05:00

The root of "rationally" means "to count."

Counting--rational thinking--means separating the parts from the whole. Rational thinking is essentially dissection. You cannot think rationally about a subject and keep your subject alive.

One must also think holistically.

A Poem as a Poem is Not Enough

2010-11-15T14:16:00.000-05:00

from The Master and His Emissary (151):

"We see things by seeing them as something."

Another problem with self-aware quasi-Enlightenment-style modern poetry is that it often takes too close to heart MacLeish's "a poem must not mean but be."

No really, folks, a poem must mean.

That is to say--we already know it's a work of art. We know upon reading the thing that it is, in fact, a poem (prose poetry/ubuweb-stuff aside).

But we cannot see the poem unless we see it as something. We cannot understand the value of the art itself unless it becomes an object in our minds. Not a mere poem, a rank verse, but a living, breathing thing that engages our mind.

McGilchrist says earlier in the book that metaphor is the only way of knowing anything--that we learn and understand by comparison.

If a poem exists solely as itself, it's nothing. It is by calling upon itself comparisons to previous knowledge and experience--that the poem becomes anything, let alone art.

Why Poetry is Difficult

2010-11-10T09:01:00.000-05:00

Poetry is inherently difficult because its understanding requires three forms of knowledge:

The denotative meaning of words. That is, words "alone."

The connotative meaning of words. That is, words "in context."

And the archetypal meaning of words. That is, "hyper-contextual words"--words not in the context of the poem itself but in their historical use.

A well-written poem combines the three required forms of knowledge to create meaning on multiple levels--that is, "depth."

The problem with many poems is the direct neglect of one (or more) of these forms of knowledge--creating far more difficult--and ultimately less satisfying--works at the expense--or on the altar of "progress."

Once we understand that the arts do not progress--and that this includes poetry, we can embrace poetry for its inherent artistic value.

This means accepting that poetry, on its face, is "difficult"--moreso than prose--because it requires a greater depth of knowledge--and that there is little point in making it intentionally more difficult (to show ones "intelligence" perhaps?) in order to satisfy some overthought and overwrought "need" of the author.

Language and Manipulation

2010-11-04T09:17:00.000-04:00

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is properly named because its practitioners used the manipulative nature of language, specifically through criticism, both formal and informal, to turn poetry from its correct nature as prosody (that is, the music of language) and metaphor into prose spaced on a page--robbed of power, metaphor, and currency.

Palmer on Poetry: 197.1 October 2010

2010-10-12T13:24:00.000-04:00

As Poetry doesn't read blind, these reviews are likely the end of any small hope I had of my work being included within its pages. I suppose I embrace that, though being included in the same pages that broke Eliot has always been a dream of mine. Ach du.

I hope to have these reviews done in a more timely fashion in the future, but take them as they come. I hope you, my readers, find them useful.

Poetry
Volume 197
Issue 1
October, 2010

Leslie Scalapino
Rachel Wetzsteon
Bob Hicok
Eleanor Ross Taylor
Joel Brouwer
Peter Spagnuolo
Dean Young
Jane Mead
Ange Mlinko
Iain McGilchrist
Fanny Howe
Paul Baumstarck
Daisy Fried

October's issue opens with a word-salad tribute to Leslie Scalapino. The poem begins its end with "'embarrassed' is being elated." I'd have to agree; this poem, as an epitaph, is an embarrassment.

The poems proper begin with another tribute. Rachel Wetzsteon's poems "Cabaret Ludwig," "Algonquin Afterthoughts," "The World Had Fled," "Rain at Reading," and "Silver Roses." The order of the first two poems, perhaps, should be reversed--because as "Algonquin Afterthoughts" is quick to point out, Wetzsteon is here rewriting Dorothy Parker. While one wonders if Ms Parker needs rewriting, Wetzsteon's poems are fine for what they are--sexy without solemnity. "Cabaret Ludwig" is clever for the inclusion of the f-bomb in its glaring absence (a poem about sex that rhymes "duck" and "pluck" and "cluck" and "luck" is hardly going about itself subtly) but finally too light. This lightness is echoed in "Algonquin Afterthoughts" in which one is reminded of Milton's exhortation of English rhyme as something "to set off wretched matter." Perhaps Wetzsteon would have agreed; in poems like these there seems to be too much rhyme for meaning to seep in--we're carried to quickly by the words to their works' end. It may be, as with many poems in this issue, that meta-cognition is the point. If true, it's too fine a point on which to balance a poem.

"The World Had Fled" is a lovely poem on the nature of "love's widening third stage" marred by the odd simile of "flying lovesick pigs." What are these pigs doing in the poem? It is as if Wetzsteon was afraid to leave her poem lovely. "Rain at Reading" gives a nearly too precious moment of "exchanges. . .between craft and climate" after which the poem exposes the inherent flaw in much of light verse--as Stein said: "there's no there there."

Wetzsteon's poems do end on a rather more solid note, however, with "Silver Roses," a sort of ballade-canzone hybrid. It's a bit of a disappointment that Wetzsteon didn't insist on a handful (instead of a pailful) of rhymes in this poem--as her strength for rhyme limited to four or five repetitions would have served the poem well--indeed, its most successful points are in its few recurrent internal rhymes:

when he marches in the door
they soar some more

The Italian feel of the poem leads one to look within the words, and in the penultimate image of a "trembling ungloved hand" one can't help but see the word "love." In this final poem, the deft rhyming that is nearly wasted on rewriting Dorothy Parker becomes, not a pushing force, but an inexorability throughout the poem--this is how rhyme drives verse.

Bob Hicok's selections, "Feeling the draft," "Report from the black box," "A private public space," and "Unmediated experience" are underwhelming. The first three poems feel as if the final lines were written and the poems then shoehorned on top of them. There's certainly something to be said for "When the next Adonis/stepped up to throw the bomb" but, as the rest of "Feeling the draft" feels, well, drafty, it's hardly worth the journey. As I said of Wetzsteon, perhaps this is another "meta" poem in which we're supposed to feel drafty until the end--ha ha get it? But I don't think so--and even if I did, that's hardly a conceit on which to build a poem.

"Report from the black box" begins with the precious Wheel-of-Fortunism "A cooler/head of lettuce" and quickly devolves into, as its says, "the etceteras." The poem ends on the question "which side is which side/are you on?" Which begs the question "what thought is what thought/picks these poems?" One can understand the writing of such work--indeed, when I get to Iain McGilchrist below, he sums up why they are written, but one is baffled to consider the publication history of such work. What, finally is the point?

"A private public space" has more "there there" but again drives to the final thought: "'just/a friend'. And oceans are merely dew/upon the land." This is a delightful flaying of the old relational lie, but does the rest of the poem live up to it? Moreover, it's indicative of our current sickness that the poem contains this passage:

I said nothing
for years until this morning I realized
no one reads poems: my secrets and hers
are safe in verse.

Really, now, Poetry?

If we let ourselves adopt this attitude we might as well pen drivel.

"Unmediated experience" is a bit more interesting than the previous works--but a poem that abuses the old chestnut "a puppy is not just for Christmas" to write on growing up leaves an empty taste in the mouth.

Eleanor Ross Taylor's poems include "Vita," "Schizotableau," "Trying to Get Through," and "Small Trek." Unlike the previous two poets, Taylor's work gets exponentially weaker as it progresses from first to last. "Vita" does what light verse is supposed to do--with a not to Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," it captures the nostalgia of childhood in a far more perfect way than Hicok's poem--and with dependence upon nothing but the English language.

Unfortunately, "Vita" is by far Taylor's best work here. "Schizotableau" is simply a rehash of "author-as-writer" works with a dash of Yellow Wallpaperism thrown in. "Trying to Get Through" could be saved as a meta-work--it screams for context as much as its narrator does and though this is perhaps the first poem in the collection to be able to carry itself on its metatextuality this is certainly thin praise. Taylor's selection ends with "Small Trek" that "pointblank" has no point.

Joel Brouwer's "lines": "Lines from the Reports of the Investigative Committees," "Lines on Marriage," and "Lines on Distance" are weighty with craft but for at least the first poem, drowned by temporality. Just a few months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it is already too late to read such a poem--poetry is not news, it's truth. A mismashed, dial-spinning, wheel-spinning poem simply goes nowhere. Perhaps like all that effort to seal that cap--but I fear that is gilding the wilted lily.

"Lines on Marriage" and "Lines on Distance" are more successful, though "Lines on Marriage" falls into the nihilist's trap:

they don't do
anything and are
no one. Which is to
say they're like us.

. . .

the disease
is pettiness and
mediocrity, which is
to say life itself

The hateful bleakness of Brouwer's poem is countered with the image of marriage, and hearkens back to Wetzsteon's earlier poems in the issue:

and as long as you
are with me I wish
never to be cured.

The speaker has an absence of faith in anything but his love. This is far more bleak than sweet.

"Lines on Distance," while not as disjointed as the first poem, is still bogged down by temporality (the War on Terra) and a distasteful discourse on masturbation. The poem includes the curt instruction: "If nothing like/this has happened to you, imagine it" but its value hardly pays for the poem itself, which ends up being a purposeless poem about purposelessness. If that was the goal, how is the ink superior to a blank page?

Peter Spagnuolo's two sonnets are "Her Scar" and "Interpol 22019-1.7: The Head of the Hatra Apollo." "Her Scar" is a passable nostalgia poem that makes the nearly unforgivable mistake of a heavy-handed etymologicalizing of "remember" into "re-member." I suppose this is inevitable in a climate where metaphor is shunned, but obvious wordplay is hardly a substitute. "Interpol. . ." cuts a more dramatic picture regarding the dual impermeability and inessentiality of art. Of the poems in the issue, it does the best job of painting image--we see the singing goatherd and his Kalashnikov.

Dean Young's two poems: "The New Optimism" and "Speech Therapy" have "learned all the wrong lessons." "The New Optimism" falls prey to histrionics ("the last polar bear") and, though it begins as fine satire, loses it in the last quarter, not unsurprisingly, when it mentions a certain oil spill. "Speech Therapy," as it says "learned the wrong lessons": it begins on a wrong note and ends, not explaining the wrong note, but in an entirely unrelated place--perhaps imagining how the speaker is better than Prufrock? I suppose that's a fine and attainable goal (he's not the best person, you know) but if a poem's going to run up against Eliot, it ought to have some fight in it.

Jane Mead's poems "The Geese" and "Walking, Blues" close out this issue's poetry section. In "The Geese," Mead refers to geese as being "nuanced/and muscular." Perhaps there is a different brand of Goose in Florida and Italy, but I've never seen one I would consider either nuanced or muscular--indeed, cooking a Christmas Goose means using an electric roaster so as not to coat the house oven with fat. "Walking, Blues" is a good stab at light verse, with rhythms and rhymes hidden. But the poem is in such a hurry--to what?--that I can't get a grip on it. I wonder if it's not a rewrite of "We Real Cool"--but it lacks the threat and punch of Brooks' gangsters.

In "This Is Your Brain on Poetry," Ange Mlinko interviews Iain McGilchrist on the nature of the division of the brain and its relationship to poetry. First let me say that McGilchrist's responses were so cogent and moving that I put down the issue in the middle of the interview, went to amazon and ordered the book. If you like the angle of the arguments I have presented on this blog, this book is for you a thousand times over.

Mlikno references the "atomized, utilitarian culture in which . . . the quantitative is valorized" but does not seem to see that this applies to much of contemporary poetry. McGilchrist puts her straight. It is his assertion "that metaphor is the only way of understanding anything." Though I would restate this as "comparison is the only way of understanding anything," McGilchrist is fundamentally correct.

In discussing the value of "slow poetry," McGilchrist says "Subtlety and depth require tact, time, and sheer hard work, not likely to find favor in a culture that demands instant gratification, prefers the loud and blatant over the quiet and tentative [c.f. "School of Quietude"], and is impatient of the idea that nothing good is achieved without a battle. McGilchrist almost dismisses his battle when he says that his neuroscientific research was "rather a waste of time" because it hasn't convinced anyone. It is cogent, however, that as metaphor or comparison is the root of all meaning that people reject correct comparisons if they do not jive with their worldview (of course, that means I perhaps overvalue McGilchrist because of selection bias--but selection bias is just a tool for discounting arguments).

In response to his emphasis on metaphor, Mlinko says that "metaphor is . . . merely ornamental." She then goes on to quote Larkin's "The Trees" and Ashbery's "Some Trees" in an effort to show the value of Ashbery's complexities over Larkin's simplicities.

Having none of it, McGilchrist points out that Mlinko, as she says "fetishiz[es]" Modernism (indeed, faith is simply replaced with fetish) and points out that the Enlightenment is when metaphor was first rejected (as a reaction against Donneian/Miltonic conceits) and that her trying to box in Larkin is a lark. McGilchrist goes then on to pull apart Mlinko's assertions and demonstrate why Larkin is "far richer" than Mlinko allows and while the Ashbery "is a great poem too, . . . because it takes more working out exactly what is being said" it is "the less powerful of the two."

McGilchrist then makes the "distinction between newness and novelty": "poetry need not seek novelty, because true poetry makes what had seemed familiar new."

After backpedaling, Mlinko tries to defend the notion of "over-aphasic poetry" as a reaction to "the disenchanted world." But apart from one wondering what the point would ever be of writing "over-aphasic poetry," it is clear that because McGilchrist has already said "in poetry, being simple takes more skill than being difficult" Mlinko's assertion falls flat.

McGilchrist closes with the assertion that "we should not be concerned with proving ourselves clever, but with doing something science could never do on its own, understanding and celebrating experience." He says that insisting on making our own world traps us in "the postmodern predicament: nothing really exists because we made it all up ourselves." He insists that "incarnation provides the necessary resistance without which nothing could move, or change, or have any meaning." Dante would be proud, of course, but it is just as well to see a modern thinker admit the "soul and body" are "each as awe-inspiring as the other."

In "Keepers of the Image," Fanny Howe discusses adaptations and translations she has done from Ilona Karmel, a Polish writer. I've difficulty reading the passage, though her assertion that poetry is "syntax, balance, and image" makes me smile. If only she had used the word syzygy.

The October issue closes with a Letter to the Editor from Paul Baumstarck regarding Daisy Fried's previous Letter to the Editor in which she derided Dana Gioia for serving "America's most malignant administration ever." Baumstarck chides Fried for "self-indulgence" but I think a more apt response would have been to encourage her to write a Brownian "Lost Leader" sort of poem. At least it would have scanned.

A Poem I Wrote

2010-10-08T10:23:00.000-04:00

Hey y'all.

Haven't posted in forever.
I know.

I keep trying to write reviews of Poetry but I'm having a hard time writing negatively without sounding like my old prof William Logan.

Anyway, if you go here you can read a poem I wrote for my wife for our anniversary.

Enjoy!

Taking Poetry Seriously

2010-07-28T00:55:00.000-04:00

"Decadence" comes from the Latin for "falling apart."

Question:

Is "flarf" like the following:

The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Ox chip gastrology
The farmer in the dell

The farmer takes a wife
The farmer takes a wife
Pupa reconnaissance
The farmer takes a wife

mere gallows humor?

Or have we not progressed in nearly a hundred years beyond Gertrude Stein?

That's right, flarfy folks--what you're doing was tried and tired way back in 1910. Note: it wasn't very interesting then, either.

It seems at least honest to me that many writers of free verse are gladly unlining their work--the current obsession with "prose poetry"--but when your work is (apologies to the Nepotist, for whom I have only the highest regard) best characterized as disjointed or wholly derivative (see the above "Farmer in the Dell" riff), in what way are you a poet?

I would prattle on about how poetry is a craft but that's not the point, actually.

The point is that poetry is not just the sound of words.

Nor is it just the juxtaposition of images.

The former is music and the latter is figurative language. The two by themselves do not create poetry.

Ah, but you say, they dooo--anything artsy is really "a poem."

Bull.

Our problem is that, inbred like royalty, we've lost all notion of perspective--instead of improving ourselves, we've taken on the affects of our most deformed relations--in the Spanish Court it resulted in the comical and delightfully kooky Cathtillian lithp. In poetry it's given us flarf and prose poetry and a host of other garbled crap.

And the garbled crap would be delightful if it weren't so pervasive--if it weren't lauded as an Emperor of invisible cloth. Admit you don't know what the hell you're doing--that you're just having fun and maybe that twitch in my eye will go away.

But people want to have serious discussions about the merit of reconstructed Shakespearean Sonnets. These things get anthologized and taught to kids who think--this is poetry? Fuck this shit.

And that's why I'm writing--not in a tawdry "won't someone think of the children" way but in a "let's think past our own noses" way.

When you write, imagine a non-poet reading your work. Hell, imagine a beginning reader reading your work--or someone who has never seen a poem. Your poem is the only poem they will ever see.

What message, what history does it transmit?

Or rather,

If your poem had to carry the weight of poetry, could it?

My Poems at The Nepotist

2010-07-23T08:59:00.000-04:00

Hey all!

Thanks to John Q. Poet, you can now read the three following poems of mine:

The Final Arc
Birth of a Nation
and Malacorp

at The Nepotist.

I don't know who this Nepotist fellow is, but I sure like him.

Enjoy!

A Review: Sixty Sonnets by Ernest Hilbert

2010-07-19T12:34:00.000-04:00

Sixty Sonnets
by Ernest Hilbert
2009, Red Hen Press $18.95 ($14.97 at Amazon)

First let me say that Ernie Hilbert is a sneaky bastard for including the Bauman's Rare Books Catalogue in the package that delivered his excellent sonnet collection to me. As I am a poor poet and teacher, I include the link in the hope that if I have more well-to-do readers they may buy something and not waste the good Dr. Hilbert's postage. If anyone feels so inclined to buy something for me, there's a fine copy of The Waste Land I saw in there.

On to the poems.

Notes on the organization and structure of the book aside (see sixtysonnets.com), what I value in Sixty Sonnets is tension.

There is a tension between poems, sometimes even an internal stylistic tension within one poem itself, as they skate between the pedestrian and the ineffable. This is not to say the poems are pedestrian, they are far from it; Hilbert, however, is unafraid of employing language in its most ordinary to bring it to its most extraordinary.

In "Church Street," a scene of blasted youth who "needed parties" and "liked company" is revisited in what, but for the rhyming and decasyllabics, would be called mere lined prose; except that the entire sad play is raised by the couplet:

We'd vent, catch any reason not to grieve,
Revel down days torn from the years we'd leave.

Much of the value of Sixty Sonnets is built upon this tension. A lesser (or perhaps "cute"?) poem like "Literary Artifacts" is followed by the strong and quick "Leander Without Heroes" whose conceit of literary death entirely reframes the previous riff on Sammy Peyps's "grand gallstone." This is nothing if not a very well put together collection.

I could go on at length about the tension set within these poems and the collection as a whole, and the music that sings from their springs, but as "Cautionary Tale" says, "you can only get away with so much." Suffice to say that in reading Sixty Sonnets if you think you don't like something, wait and Hilbert will have put in a peach in the next line or on the next page to pay for the pit you thought you read. Indeed, the only other poet who plies risk against reward so deftly is Pound.

The form of the sonnets bears some discussion (and a bit of criticism). Hilbert employs what has been termed the "Hilbertian Sonnet," fourteen decasylabbic lines of two sestets closed by a couplet. Unfortunately, the decasyllabics can get in the way of the poems. I don't know if Hilbert uses the non-metrical line as A.E. Stallings says to "allow for the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech" but when he's forced to write, as in the final line of the train-wrenchingly fun "Blotter": "sometimes you will hide when you should have run," there's something amiss. Take out or contract the auxiliary verbs and you've got a stronger line: "sometimes you hide when you should run." not surprisingly, the line also becomes perfect iambic tetrameter. As I will say until the language changes, iambic tetrameter is the meter of the American tongue. Syllabics are too artificial and the pentameter is too archaic.

Having said that, there are great poems in this collection which is very much worth owning. The collection starts with a quote from Dylan's powerful "Not Dark Yet," a work which in itself looms over the first section, setting that delicious tension before the first rhyme is sprung. The first two poems are both good and exemplary of Hilbert's work, giving us both his juiced-up verb choices ("roamed up," "sprawled to," "propped in") and his linguistic tension:

I would be fine, and they were quite good hosts

Versus

I am sinking on a soft black balloon,
Dreaming of the break. It is coming soon.

Then comes the first great poem, "William James Still, Drowned in the Delaware River" (many of the titles are on the long side). After reading it, I reread the first two poems with a keener eye. My love and respect for this poem comes from two halves of one line. In the second half, we have the phrase "staring up to the world." I was, at first, bucked by that "to," but in light of the collection's epigraph ("facilis descensus Averni": it's easy to get to Hell), "to" makes an all too apt sense. The first half of the line is simply the thick, deliciously sonic "snug in muck," a line I loved so much I wrote it a few times and said it aloud. Heck, say it now, it floods the tongue. Snug in muck.

After Billy Jim dies, a girl hooked on "kind blue pills" robs a liquor store and dies on the run in Las Cruces. Seriously. Hilbert can do a fine turn in narrative told through sonnet. Being the narrative junky that I am, I wish those sequences were longer. Instead, the collection moves to tackle Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ted Hughes. I don't know if Hilbert wins, but his work certainly doesn't lose, either. His interweaving of nature and nostalgia reaches a fevered pitch in "Magnificent Frigatebird" and sounds perfectly in "At the Grave of Thomas Eakins."

As the collection develops, the works move towards the "couplet as punch" mode of sonnet writing to great effect. This is most pronounced, perhaps, in the wonderfully revisionist "A Suburbanite Briefs a Historian." After regaling said historian with how "it is fun to be so bourgeois" the eponymous suburbanite goes for the kill with the couplet:

And we can't go back to what came before,
Ten to a room, half sleeping on the floor.

No, no we can't. Such honesty about the human condition is refreshing in a world where the benefits of progress are often shunned. Indeed it is this very sense of no nonsense and honest urgency that redeems any flaws that can be found in the work. The collection pulls you through it, delighting and injuring, sometimes with the same word.

Before I end, I do want to mention my two favorite moments in Sixty Sonnets: rhyming "MoMA" with "coma" and the incomparable "Song," a paean to those who learn and love craft.

But even "Song" can't escape Hilbert's love of tension. Its final line: "valued and unwanted, admired and ignored" is antecedentless: does it refer to the "old ways restored" or "those who learn forgotten, slow / skills"? Perhaps both. Hilbert is a practitioner of that slow art, as are all poets. The truth of admiration and insignificance doesn't escape any of us.

He echoes this in the first poem of the final section, the aforementioned "At the Grave of Thomas Eakins." The final couplet sums up the poem and the collection's musings on the nature of art:

Wind rearranges sunlight through the pines,
Sowing and destroying endless designs.

Not only to admit but to embrace the ephemeral along with the eternal nature of our work is admirable in the main. As is the entire collection.

The design notes say the collection is based in the sixty minutes of an hour. Give it more time than that. You and the poems deserve it.

News and Reviews

2010-07-19T12:20:00.000-04:00

While six months is not the longest I've gone between reviews, it is the longest I'll go again.

Today's review of Ernest Hilbert's Sixty Sonnets marks the beginning of a new era for Strong Verse. If you care about my poetics and aesthetics, they're easily found on the links to the right. From today forward, I will concentrate on reviews, with a goal of producing two reviews a month.

One review will be of a collected works (shoot me an email to get into the queue) and the other will be of that month's issue of Poetry magazine, from cover to cover. The collected works reviews start today, the Poetry reviews will start when they send my first issue (note: I'm not reviewing the magazine in any official or knighted role--I just haven't had a subscription in years and renewed a few weeks ago).

I may pop in and make a fuss about politics or poetics in general, but I may not. I'll certainly make some noise when my new work can be found.

Enjoy the reviews, and buy the books!

Across the Whale Road, in memoriam.

2010-07-11T23:19:00.000-04:00

Alan Sullivan, poet and polymath, died Friday, July 9, 2010.

Much of his work can be found at his blog, Fresh Bilge.

I recommend his translation (with Tim Murphy) of Beowulf and his translation (with Seree Zohar) of King David's psalms.

Peace, Alan.

Poetry is civilization

2010-06-09T09:08:00.000-04:00

So I don't like prose poetry.

Not that a "prose poem" can't be an example of good writing--take today's Nepotist post--but it's not poetry.

Poetry is about restraint.

By definition it's artificial--all of our great accomplishments are. That's what civilization is, imposing artificial (and beneficial) restrictions on nature.

Prose, on the other hand, attempts to capture "natural" language--it's an uncivilizing force. This doesn't mean prose can't be beautiful. What it does mean is that when prose can be confused for poetry there's something amiss.

As the good Don says: civilization always consists in dressing oneself, not undressing.

Prose is language without clothes.

Poetry is language dressed to the nines.

"The Modern Condition" explained

2010-06-08T13:23:00.000-04:00

In 26 words, no less:

#1,110

Frustration is the distinctive psychological characteristic of democratic society.
Where all may legitimately aspire to the summit, the entire pyramid is an accumulation of frustrated individuals.

From Don Colacho's Aphorisms.

(ht/mm)

The Nepotist

2010-06-04T09:38:00.000-04:00

Who doesn't want to publish their friends? Imagine my surprise when I got an email and a facebook message inviting me to submit "poems that you truly adore but have not been able to find appropriate homes for" to The Nepotist.

Well heck yes! So I sent off my three poems and waited.

On June the first, Anno Domini Two-thousand and Ten, The Nepotist was launched, with Grace Cavalieri as its first poet. The following three days have given us Rusty Barnes, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, and Ernest Hilbert.

Even more than I felt two years ago reading The Oxford American, I'm heartened and thrilled for contemporary American poetry. The work at The Nepotist has been nothing short of amazing.

Go there. Bookmark it before it becomes an anthology.

Strong Verse, Briefly

2010-05-12T13:40:00.000-04:00

In a bow to the tl;dr nature of the internet and with an understanding that the revelation of ideas is not their purest expression, you'll find below the distillation of the Strong Verse series.

In order to recall poetry from stagnation, poetry must become an everyday occurrence.

Poets must understand what poetry does best:

Poetry best joins together voices in a homogenious society.

The job of the poet is not to be a slave to language but to be a servant of humanity. As "the proper study of mankind is man," we must realize that if we are to have an audience we must understand and engage that audience.

We cannot, as David Yezzi says, write short poems by a solitary speaker on individual experience about "going into the woods" and "feeling something."

We must serve, not ourselves, but our society--and if we feel that society is not worth serving then we must serve the society we want to see--civilization follows art and art must lead.

To this purpose, lyric poetry remains useless. The lyric mode is incapable of providing the breadth of experience necessary to continue to validate poetry. Without narrative--and without a re-examination of the purpose of poetry, our art will slip irreparably into anachronism and irrelevance.

The easiest way to do this would be to balance the appetite of the audience with the desire of the poet--but because so many have been poisoned on poetry this is, for all intents, impossible. Therefore we must look to a past when poetry held more relevance. This directs us to the Tennyson-Longfellow era in English-language poetry--which is where we draw the desire for the narrative and a disdain for the lyric.

In discussing poetry, however, we must move beyond the simple lyric/narrative divide and delve into grades of poetry.

For that we turn to the troubadors who divided poetry into three classes.
Updating their language we have:

Fun verse:

"Light" verse that is easy to comprehend but lean--subsequent rereadings have nothing to reveal.

Van verse:

"Experimental" verse that is often difficult or opaque--new techniques are explored and multiple readings may be required for the barest comprehension.

Full verse:

Verse that combines the accessibility of fun verse with the complexity of van verse--subsequent rereadings reveal layered meaning and depth of craft but first readings also reward.

Poetry must be a complete art--with introductory, experimental, and mature work, and it is the mature work (Full verse) that is often neglected.

Four steps to writing Full verse are:

1) Use precise language.

2) Use natural language

3) Write with authority.

4) Give the readers what they need to understand the poem--that is, be aware that there is no room for context in a poem.

A development of full verse in conjunction with the currently thriving (for poetry) fields of fun and van verse will result in a "strong verse"--a poetry that regains relevance--that is no longer a parlor trick but an important part of the lives not of poets, but of all readers.

Justice Falls Before Security

2010-05-03T12:07:00.000-04:00

Sigh.

I hope that these oligarchs simply don't understand symbolism.

I fear, however, that they do.

Strong Verse, Part 7: Strong Verse, Living Art

2010-04-27T09:37:00.000-04:00

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

This post will end the series on creating "Strong Verse." It begins with a bit of discourse on criticism and theory.

So I've found myself dealing again with content created by the fellows at Penny Arcade. Specifically the following:

"As Tycho mentioned, Ebert is simply filling a role played out by art critics throughout history. There was the newspaper headline back in 1959 with regards to Jackson Pollock's work that said "This is not art — it's a joke in bad taste." It's a funny line but time has proven it was also completely wrong. Ebert has thrown his hat in with the rest of the short sighted critics who would rather debate what is or isn't art, rather than simply enjoy the work of artists."

There are two halves to this argument of "Gabe's": the first half, that "time has proven it was also completely wrong" is a bit of a stretch--will Pollack's work still be hanging in a hundred years? Three hundred? That's the time scale of art--which is at heart, the problem with both being a critic and being a critically minded artist (as opposed to one who simply "creates" without mind to audience or time--but generally those ditherers are not worth spending ones time on). Moreover, it doesn't take into account the critics and patrons who supported Pollack.

But the part of Gabe's quote I've been running around in my head is the second part, regarding "short sighted critics who would rather debate what is or isn't art rather than enjoy the work of artists." On the one hand, he does us a great deed to remind us that the proper response of art is our enjoyment.

Critics, on the other hand, serve an important purpose, as recounted in the inimitable Ratatouille:

"There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends."

"The New," is of course, the crux of the problem. Too many critics are concerned with defining "the Good" and not finding "the New."

Defining "the Good" is not possible. What I've tried to do on this blog when writing about writing for the past two years is not to define the Good but recognize its signs and encourage poets to write not for themselves but for the Good. But this is writing theory. One must be careful not to confuse theory with criticism.

It is the job of the critic to discover and defend the new.
It is the job of the theorist to recognize and encourage the Good, which needs no defense.
It is the job of the poet to create work both new and good.

That having been said, let's come to the remaking of a living art (or the resurrection thereof, depending on your level of pessimism)--making a Strong Verse.

It must be said, of course, that poetry is alive and well within the realm of poets--a nebulous population of perhaps a hundred thousand to a million souls in the US.

But poetry has left the mainstream. No longer does a Longfellow create the idiom of the coming decade. No longer does a Dante create and enshrine a new language.

It is possible that that task has been given to song birds and television and film writers. Possible, though depressing.

In order for poetry to return from the echoing halls of academia, strong verse must be brought back to the mainstream. There are three ways for this to happen:

First, the Wagnerian argument that poetry must be a larger part of art (as in, one part of opera--which I'm sure Wagner would put on "the big screen" now) is certainly a tempting one. As I mentioned in the AWP recap, the discussion regarding poetry and opera librettos was both fascinating and productive--I am still waiting for the delightful and energetic Beth to put out her list of poets and composers interested in collaboration--and, indeed, as "novelizations" of films tend to sell very well, it is possible, even probable, that a successful opera, whether filmed or live, would put books of poetry into the hands of non-poets.

The second, as David Yezzi says, is for poetry to embrace the dramatic element, either fully--in developed plays, as Eliot and MacLeish did, or partially--in poems, as Frost was famous for.

The last has been my argument all along, that contemporary poetry is hung on the cross of fealty to the lyric and that narrative poetry will engage the mainstream.

All three arguments are essentially the same--we should tell stories with our verse.

Of the parts of "strong verse," "full verse" is the voice of narrative poetry.

I hope that this series will serve as the definitive theory of this blog. I would prefer to spend my time on discovering and defending the new strong verse being written today--the new narratives that will define our language in the decades to come.

Prophet Muhammad

2010-04-22T13:19:00.001-04:00

Butts and crap!
There is no religion or faith when one must fear not God, but the followers of a god.
The whole "Prophet Muhammad" crap has got to go.
We can tolerate faiths,
we can tolerate beliefs,
we cannot tolerate violence in the name of anything.

Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad Prophet Muhammad

AWP 2010 Recap

2010-04-16T08:37:00.000-04:00

Though certainly appreciative of the comments and traffic and progress generated by the 14th's post, I've got other things to cover. As I said, I returned on Sunday from the AWP 2010 Annual Conference in Denver. Here's the recap:

Disclaimer: If I don't include your name or a good link for you, please forgive me--I'm pretty terrible with names. Just leave a comment or shoot an email and I'll correct the problem.

Flew into Denver about 11p.m. Wednesday night. I know the conference "starts" on Wednesday but I've not been able to drag myself there before Thursday morning yet. Perhaps next year, in D.C.

After using my CPAP machine (why is there an 8-ball in that picture) for the first time (so that's what sleep is like!), I got up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Thursday morning, had a delightful breakfast with the friends who had so generously donated their house for the weekend (seriously, y'all--unless you hit the donate button on the right or get me a book to sell, I don't really have money for all these travelings), and hit the conference.

For the second year in a row (which means 100% of the conferences I've been to) my name tag was "set aside" and difficult to find. Next year I'm starting in the help line.

I started at the reading for the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, edited by my good friend David Yezzi (who I met at last year's conference). The readers in attendance besides David were:

Erica Dawson
Bill Coyle

Joanie Mackowski
Geoffrey Brock
J. Allyn Rosser

David also read from Craig Arnold and Rachel Wetzsteon, two poets included in the anthology who both died in 2009. In my forthcoming review of the Anthology, I'll discuss the readings.

During the question and answer session, the tired old "how can form be new?" question was asked. David's answer of "why would you not avail yourself of every trick in the book?" was, I think the best standard answer I've heard--certainly a great way of putting it. Jill Rosser answered with a different tack: she discussed visual art and wondered if you threw out color because it was old (or, I would say, images at all--why not write a song and call it visual art?).

My favorite answer, though, was from Erica Dawson, who referenced Donne, et al. when she referred to "all that old poetry" as being dirty and nasty and decidedly not old and stale. I liked Erica's answer because she was unafraid to speak to the inherent ignorance in the question--the only people who imagine that form can be staid are, I have to imagine, people who apparently have only read--or heard about--Edwardian poetry. The very question they ask belies their ignorance of the vastness of poetry's delightful and delicious forms. Ah well.

After the reading, I bummed around the Book Sale, arm-in-arm, for the most part, with my dear Jill Alexander Essbaum, stopping every dozen steps or so for her to fling her arms wide and embrace the newest person I don't know but quickly meet.

At 1:30 we went to the reading in honor of Craig Arnold. I didn't know Craig, though I am certain, seeing his picture, that we met at AWP last year--nor was I familiar with his work. Jillian, however, had been a good friend of his--as had most of the people she introduced me to, and so, an awkward guest at the funeral of a stranger, I went.

I was very glad to have gone. Apart from a few hiccups of strange and self-indulgent reading, the poets who spoke were both amazing and powerful--reading from their own works and from Craig's (who, if you did not already know, was a poet of great capability--look for more in my review of the Swallow Anthology). The highlight of the reading was Jenn Koiter, a colleague and friend of Craig's who recounted their time together in Laramie. As I said, I didn't even know Craig but Jenn's remembrance brought a tear to my eye.

After a late lunch at Jimmy John's (ohmigod, I just found out there's two in J-vegas! I wonder if they need a poet laureate?) I met up again with Jill and we took a taxi out to Denver's Green Spaces. Certainly not the best place for a reading, it was nevertheless a fine time of small press readings from poets with Bloof, Noemi, and Cooper Dillon (including Jill--Cooper Dillion brought out her chapbook Devastation).

After the reading, an incident involving Reb Livingston, Jenn Koiter, Steven Schroeder, Jill, P.F. Potvin, a poet from Wyoming, me, a sedan, and a shuttle van led Reb and I to admit that we were certainly no longer in high school.

Friday involved more bookstore wandering and a fantastic panel on libretto writing from Kate Gale, David Mason, David Yezzi, and Annie Finch. There was talk during the Q&A about creating a group of poets and musicians interested in creating collaborative works. Whenever I get the email from the group, I'll provide more info.

After the reading, I got a chance to shake hands with Christian Bok, and to tell him he called me a troll. He said it was likely I deserved it. Had he not been so impeccably dressed and so damned Canadian I might have wanted to punch him. As it was, we had a nice laugh.

Friday evening began swimmingly. Kelli Anne Noftle and I made plans to create a poetry folk band and I was exposed to the Austin contingent of AWP (notably--in terms of alcohol consumption--Malachi Black and Chris Mink [who apparently needs a stronger web presence]) and plans were made for a fine Austin party come May.

Then we went off to dinner. It was a pretty lackluster restaurant (that I was late to--ah, miscommunication!) but so were most of the ones I went to in Denver. We then went to a reading for Barrelhouse. Oy. Not that Barrelhouse isn't a great mag. But the venue was for shite--it was opening day for the Rockies and folks were, well, being folks. The bar was loud and crowded and there was not adequate sound engineering for the readers.

Not content to ruin great expectations, we continued on to the Prime Bar. It should be called the Fu Bar. Don't go here unless you think a mishmash of a chic bar and a sports bar that pumps in vintage Sheryl Crow is a good idea. Oh, and the bartenders can't tend bar.

I left (along with Kelli and Andrew[?]) to go back to the Hyatt bar (where at least they made good drinks) but by the time we got back, my morale was all shot to hell. I had a water.

Saturday was a pretty great day. After wandering the bookstore, going back to Jimmy Johns, and manning the UNO table (and selling lots of books!), my hosts took me up into the mountains. Or at least the foothills. I got a nice picture with my foot in some snow and ate a buffalo burger (overcooked but what do you want?).

After the Rockies was The Loudest Voice reading hosted (with free, good booze!) at the lovely and weird Dikeou Collection. If you scroll towards the bottom of the Loudest page, there's a picture of me and a blow-up bunny. Just saying. So I went to the reading to hear Jessica Piazza. Not only did she redeem herself from the terrible choice of bar the night before, but the reading of her crown of sonnets was perfect. I especially enjoyed her line "people like us: we're dust."

We finished up a fine evening in the Hyatt and then at 11 sharp, I turned into a pumpkin. Off to the airport for a 1 a.m. flight, I got back to Jacksonville at 9:00 in the morning--just in time to leave for church.

Well, folks, that was AWP for this year. Look for forthcoming reviews on books from Annie Finch, Jehanne Dubrow, Moira Egan, Nabile Fares, and Antonio Gamoneda. See you next year in D.C.!

Regarding Freedom of Art and Speech

2010-04-14T10:31:00.001-04:00

UPDATE: Please read through the end of the comments section--everything personal has been resolved. Also, I have edited the tenses in the introduction to reflect the current status.

I've got a lot on my plate from AWP: seven reviews to write and the AWP recap. Plus there are, I think, two or three posts left in the Strong Verse series. However, an event came to my attention today--back in Gainesville, Florida--my old poetry stomping grounds.

A good friend of mine, who is a conservative in a sea of progressives, read a poem that has been decried as racist--consequently he has been banned from one place of poetry reading and was on the verge of being banned from another one--the oldest continual weekly poetry open-mike reading in the state--possibly the country (going strong for 20 years)--though that director (as seen in the comments) has eschewed any such path of censorship.

Here I'll say no more. What follows is the poem, "The New American Slavery," by Michael Bobbitt. After that is my letter to the two poets in charge of the readings who have banned and are thinking of banning a poet for their interpretation of his poem.

I ask you two things, readers: 1) do you find the poem racist? 2) how do you find my letter in response?

Thanks all,

GMP

The New American Slavery

We’re on the cusp of a new world

An order unlike anything our fathers could have imagined

We’ve been trading morality for comfort for too many years

And finally, painted into the corner of our own undoing

We’ve decided to just close our minds

Sit Indian-style like children

And chuckle while shit burns down.

We’ve finally outsmarted ourselves

Reasoned that style and platitudes

Could uplift us straight out of reality

“They’s a nigger in the woodpile”

My granddaddy would say

And though I hated his language

I can only imagine he was prophesizing about right now

And how our leaders herd us like cats

Into unnaturally straight lines

“Come on up here little pussies…

Massa’s got some healthcare for you

Come on up to the porch, Toby,

And get you some free milk…”

The fields are going unplanted

The harvest time will come and go unnoticed

But we’ll just keep grinning

And eating

And not worryin bout nothing

Cause Massa’s got this magic machine

And he just gots to hit a button

And corn will roll out this here contraption—

Wheat and chicken and flour

Will just pop right out I think

And we don’t need to ever plant the fields

Or tend the flocks again.

The rich folks’ll keep the magic machines rolling

And we’ll just grin and think about equality

And how nuthin’s really equal

If’n we don’t get to pay less and take a little more

On account of all the wrong done to our granddaddies and such.

But I’m starting to think the magic machines

Might not be working proper

It’s turning cold again and I worry about the empty fields

I’m doing what I’m told, though.

I continue to hope, to think “Yes we can” all the time

But I’m gettin hungry

And it’s taking longer each season

To get my ‘lotment.

I hear the Chinamen gots all the rice they can eat

But it still don’t seem right

They should have to work so hard

At planting and harvesting—

Food is a basic human right—

What sorta evil Massa they got

Makes them work to eat?

The baby’s sick most days now

And we’re all pretty fed up

With the failin’ machines

Think maybe we’ll get pitchforks and torches

And tear apart that woodpile

Till we find that liar done trained us out of farming.

I tried to plant a garden today

But I couldn’t work out all the steps anymore

Massa’s forgot about me

And momma’s long gone

And it’s turning colder again.

MY RESPONSE TO THE BANNING:

Jimmy and David,

I'm sorry, but since when did the CMC PoJam or other Poetry institutions (TWIS) become centers of repression?

I'm hearing from Bobbitt about his banning. In my day we read naked and drunk--people would read poems about cunts and doing coke with William Burroughs while children were in the room. No one batted an eye. Hell, David--you screamed about cunts at a reading at Michael Bobbitt's house while my children were present.

Though I was annoyed--and disgusted--I certainly never thought about curtailing your freedom of speech.

Moreover, on frequent occasions folks would gleefully read--to gleeful response--poetry that was vehemently anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-American, anti-man, and anti-white. That is to say, religionist, Marxist, progressive, totalitarian, seditious, misandrous, and racist.

Certainly you can't be banning Michael Bobbitt for the use of the word "nigger" or "Chinaman." I have heard that first word uttered at the CMC on more than one occasion--and none of its pracitioners were banned. Though I have never been to TWIS, I have a hard time imagining that you, David, you who so frequently employ "cunt"--which is the female equivalent of "nigger"--and could easily be accused of writing misogynist poetry--would have the gall to accuse someone of writing "racist" poetry.

Moreover, how on earth can either of you possibly imagine bringing in the police force into all of this? Do you truly wish humanity to be ruled by the state? I thought you, Jimmy, were an anarchist.

More than all of this, though, perhaps you should actually read the poem. In no way is it racist. It is obvious that the terms "nigger" and "Chinaman" are used ironically and for effect through the voice of the speaker.

Nothing I see in the poem justifies anything resembling a dustup over its language--perhaps its content should anger one due to the inherent oppression we have been receiving since at least the first Bush administration, ramped up by Clinton, exploded by Bush, and exploited by Obama--but Bobbitt's poem is in no way a racist work.

Even if it were, in what way is it of either of yours to police someone's thoughts or language? And David, how dare you interrupt someone's reading? The proper response--if you were offended by the poem--would be to address Michael after the reading.

I pray that you all will realize the grave error you have made--and the damage you are doing to the freedom of art in Gainesville.

Peace,

Michael

Strong Verse, Part 6: Lyric, Narrative, and Dialogue

2010-04-12T05:52:00.000-04:00

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Playing music with someone must line up quarks in the brain. My banjo playin' buddy David Yezzi wrote the following:

Contemporary poetry is woefully limited by its over-reliance on the lyric form, but the lyric itself is today further reduced by the absence of the dramatic element, by the loss of voices (and of milieux) other than the poet’s own.

in March's New Criterion. I'll let his entire article serve as part 6 of my discourse on what makes for strong verse.

Duffy giving Beckham a Break?

2010-03-18T12:17:00.000-04:00

Oh, now this--this is funny.

FTA:

When a 34 year-old athlete tears his Achilles Tendon, it is not comparable to the death of a hero in one of the greatest literary works in history. In fact, the comparison pretty much defecates all over the greatness of the original work. It’s pretty much like romanticizing a 55 year-old man’s colonoscopy.

The "poem" in question.

Quite a fall for Carol Ann Duffy to idolize David Beckham, if you ask me.

Strong Verse, Part 5: Fun+Van+Full=Strong

2010-03-02T08:18:00.000-05:00

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

As a dutiful and motivated undergraduate, I took a senior seminar entitled History and Theory of the Novel. I still have an incomplete in the class because I never liked the idea of journaling. I suppose I'm paying that back with the blog (hey Professor Wegner, can I have a passing grade now?).

Anyway, no class on novel theory would be complete without the pillars of Lukacs and Bakhtin. What struck me then, as a young poet who had been interested in narrative and epic poetry for four or five years at that point was that Lukacs and especially Bakhtin put the novel against the epic and discussed what novels could do so well that epic literature couldn't--essentially contain the multivocal nature of a heterogenous society. The poet-contrarian in me noted that in a backhand way they were telling me what poetry did best--to join together voices in a homogenous society.

I view people as people. We come together and make our own culture and where we are together without division and where we work together without derision is where civilization grows. I am a big fan of civilization, ergo I am a big fan of poetry. I'm civilized, therefore I versify.

As a poet, though, I made the keen observation that, with the exception of poets, no one seems to give two shits about poetry. Upon further digging, I found that few poets even cared about poetry outside of their own work. As someone who would prefer the possibility of living off of his writing, this was troubling, at best.

Now as a student of history it was clear that not too long ago poets could live from their work--we all understand the historical significance of patrons, etc. and how the university system (and a bit of private charity) has essentially replaced that system in our new and improved egalitarian society. Good on us. 150 years ago or so, however, patronage was few and far between but you still had poets like Longfellow and Tennyson selling mountains of copies of their verse. Today, not so much.

It was then that I realized what the problem was. Not that it is difficult to "make a living" from poetry--it is and always has been--most writers of any genre work on spec for their entire lives and have other careers--as editors or teachers or doctors or lawyers--that pay the bills. Moreover, just because Tennyson and Longfellow (and Hardy and Kipling) pulled in the dough doesn't mean that Poe or Lazarus (or Hopkins or Dickinson) did.

The problem with poetry readership today lies in the fact that is referenced in this article from the Boston Globe. The problem is that poetry is not an everyday occurrence. Even The Writer's Almanac, arguably the only mass-media daily dose of poetry, only airs at odd times of the day--in the evenings or late mornings--not during rush hour when the most folks are listening to their local NPR stations. The Christian Science Monitor and The New Yorker, being the largest weekly outlets (followed by The Nation) have poetry but it's "hidden" in the pages--sort of like NPR and these fine weeklies have poetry out of a sense of duty but don't really wanna.

So, again, why?

Lukacs and Bahktin would argue that we are a fundamentally different people and no longer need poetry. Silliman did argue that movies, music, and TV take the place of fun and full-verse poetry in our lives.

I say bah. We're still the same people who figured out how to plant crops so that we didn't have to forage any more. Granted, we have a mountain more stored information but it's not like our brains got any faster or could hold any more stuff--we just have a larger collective memory (and exobrains). Literature, music, and art still work on our psyches in the same ways (indeed, this is why drama and film and television are so damnably powerful).

Therefore poetry is still of the same value.

So why does no one care?

Part of it has to do with poets. That's what Part 4 of the series tried to highlight. We must realize that if we are to have an audience we must understand and engage that audience. But poets are not all.

As I argued in Part 2 of this series, most of the problem with poetry--from the reader's side--is that there is no longer any poetry to care about. That's the "magic" of full verse. Fun verse is light and airy and joyful but not deep and van verse is too dense for most readers--they're turned off by the avant-garde and can't build attachments to light verse. But it's in full verse that we build lifetime readers of poetry.

Of course, they aren't going to read that full verse poetry without an introduction to the motifs and styles and tropes of poems that they can easily learn from fun verse and poetry will stagnate again without van verse.

Because we need all three for poetry to thrive, this series will focus on a poetics not of full verse, but a poetics of strong verse.

Strong Verse, Part 4: Notes Towards a Perfection of Poetry

2010-03-01T11:27:00.000-05:00

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5

So WAY back in 2006, when this blog was still a twinkle in its father's eye, I spent a summer in the family castle of Ezra Pound in Brunnenburg, Italy. Having read a great deal of Pound's zany poetry propaganda, I wrote a typography-heavy manifesto called "a poetics of perfection." For many obvious reasons, it and its accompanying chapbook remain hidden.

Culling through the exuberance to the meat of the argument, however, brings me to the next step in the development of a strong poetics. Some of it came through in the declaration, but this work on "Strong Verse" will, I hope, expand upon and update the declaration. Here I present the manifesto, with exuberance redacted:

How does one approach perfection in poetry?

1. Use Precise Language:

a) Do not use a thousand words when four will do.
Repetition is neutral. It is the unnecessary that is disgusting.

b) Do not use lukewarm language.
Use the word that means what you are saying. English is second only to German for usefulness in this regard.

c) If you must be ambiguous, do not be vague.
Have more than one meaning but don't be paralyzed by every possible meaning a reader works on your words. That is, open the doors of your language – don’t tear down the house.

2. Write With Authority

a) If it didn’t happen to you, write like it did.

b) Don't use "as if" or "seems" or any similar word or phrase.

3. Give the readers what they need.

a) Poetry should not require a secret decoder ring.
If your poetry requires esoteric references either explain them or make them clear enough that your readers can find the information on their own. One may need to read Hamlet in order to fully understand “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but at least Eliot tells us that.

b) Your readers care about your verse, not you.
They don’t care about your inside jokes, emotions, thoughts, knowledge, tantric ability, whatever. They care about the language that you have given the world.

c) Your readers don't know you.
Instead of expecting them to "get you" and your references, assume they don't know what you're talking about. Don't spoonfeed them but remember any deficiencies they will have. Allow them the chance to understand your work as you do.

4. Use Natural Language

a) Write the way you speak.

b) Poetry is linguistic art, but it is still language.
That is, your poetry must exist within a common idiom. If no one lives your language, your art has no impact.

tl;dr:

1. Use Precise Language

2. Write With Authority

3. Give the Readers What They Need

4. Use Natural Language

I think perhaps (1) and (4) could be combined. As I said, this is a rehash from a 4-year-old ranty sort of work. The final two points I want to resurrect from Italian ashes are these:

Poets must be recalled from their staleness and complicity.
In Pound's time, this was the Edwardian-style of overstuffed, Longfellowian rhyming verse. Today it is the Silliman-school of versa-obscura and, conversely, his correct attacks on the so-called "School of Quietude." I have long maintained that non-avant poets need to broaden the horizon of their verse.

No one will read poetry until we are writing poems that are good to read.
Poets are caretakers of humanity, not forensic scientists of letters. We must write for the good of the world and not for the amusement of our own devices, ourselves, or our over-educated brains.

This, along with the three classifications of verse from last week (and the rest of the blog, really) will serve as a foundation for the forthcoming poetics of Strong Verse. Happy reading and happy writing, fellow poets!

Strong Verse, Part 3: Trobar ric, part the second: Fun Verse, Van Verse, and Full Verse

2010-02-24T09:57:00.000-05:00

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5

So first we'll need new terms.

Semantics is always important, you know.

Trobar leu is easy. "Light verse" is already an accepted term that is only a vehicle for derision when an idiot is speaking. However, since idiots often speak, let's go with "fun verse," for reasons we'll see later.

Trobar clu presents a greater renaming problem. In many respects it's a form of shibboleth--a poetry for poets' sake, a secret handshake--and at the same time it can and does pull the art of poetry forward. "Vanguard verse" is delightful and alliterative--and retains a nod to "avant-garde" without owing a loaded debt. Since "fun verse" is a spondee, however, I think we should stick with that metrical pattern and skip, Cockney-like, to "van verse."

So we are left with Trobar ric. "Rich verse" is the obvious answer, but I think "ripe verse" is more accurate--if less serious. Likewise I am tempted by "perfect verse" though that is 1) too big of a hand-tip and 2) annoyingly arrogant. "Plenary verse" is the right feel but the wrong word, metrically and lexically. So we're left with the "Saxony" shortenings of plenary: "whole" and "full." As "whole" has a popular and unwanted homophone, we'll go with "full verse."

So we have three classes of poetry, coming roughly from the troubadoric terms:

Fun verse

Van verse

Full verse.

They line up metrically and alliteratively. Good and poetic terms for good and poetic things.

Fun verse is easy to read and immediately understandable but does not gain meaning upon multiple readings. It is not superficial or shallow--for those words are far too loaded to be useful but, if such a word can serve here, fey, or indeed, fun.

We must have fun verse because it teaches readers that poetry is not a puzzle while endearing and indoctrinating them into poetry's many forms and folds. It must be praised and encouraged as it, like all poetry, is difficult to write well.

Van verse is poetry that is exceedingly difficult for the layman to read and understand. Only poets and rare connoisseurs of poetry enjoy--or benefit from--reading it. The closed nature of van verse in no way diminishes it. All art needs a vanguard to discover what can and what cannot work within the limits of the mode.

We must, however, ensure that we--as poets and teachers and promoters of poetry--do not treat van verse as if it were the "only proper form" of writing poetry. Too many poets view form and experimentation as more important connection--and because of the grave tendency within "the right people" to view anything that has popular appeal with derision, there is a trend toward valuing "the new" and "the difficult" and "the unpopular" above all others. Such hubris cannot be encouraged--though we should not commit the reverse sin of throwing out van verse altogether. Just as surely as we will lose new readers without fun verse we will lose all freshness without van verse.

Full verse should combine the best of fun and van verse. It should be easy to read and immediately understandable but it should reward and grow from multiple readings. The form should not be in the forefront but appear as a supporting structure to the verse. It is from full verse that the language should grow--as it once did through the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Longfellow.

Full verse, being neglected in the current longueur, must be encouraged and gotten out to the layman reader. Perhaps the efforts of EA, Longfellow, and Dante will remind people that such works are enjoyed by more than just the attendees of MFA programs and workshops. Perhaps not. To say that the current world of mainstream publishing is unfriendly to poetry is to make an obvious understatement. Serialization might help. A friendly magazine certainly would--perhaps Poetry or another high-tone rag can serialize a long narrative poem. Maybe one of the many periodicals famous for publishing short stories. But again, maybe not. I'm not enthusiastic about the world of print publishing. Serialization online similar to online comics may be the best bet.

Obviously I'm most interested in full verse--as I likely would have been interested in van verse at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries--as a lover and defender of the art of poetry I feel compelled to ensure it is a complete art--with introductory, experimental, and mature work.

As this series continues, which will probably get some name like "complete poetry," we'll look at how to integrate full poetry into the already established teaching curricula of van poetry (and how to get fun poetry in there, too) and what changes can be made (or proposed) that will allow room for full poetry in publishing (where fun poetry and van poetry are already well-established, if not well-read).

Strong Verse, Part 2: Trobar ric, part the first

2010-02-23T11:08:00.000-05:00

Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Troubadors, the medieval rock stars who gave us the Canzone, the Sonnet, and the Sestina, divided poetry into three classes:

Trobar leu, or light verse: broad-based and appealing poetry meant to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Trobar clus, or closed verse: difficult and complex verse for poets and fine connoisseurs of poetry.

Trobar ric, or rich verse: a middle path between the two--involving wordplay and complexity but without losing its broad appeal.

My contention is that we, as poets, have given up on trobar ric and that this is precisely why poetry has failed as a popular medium for art.

Ron Silliman correctly points out that experiments in poetry fall into the trobar clus category. His conclusions about trobar ric and leu are off--and his thoughts on trobar clus could use some refining. At any rate, I am not here to bow to him, but I thought since I ran across his post researching this one I should mention it.

So here it is:

Most poetry that sells is trobar leu: Billy Collins, Shel Silverstein, Bok's Eunoia, Ginsberg--it's easy to read and immediately understandable. It may reward multiple readings and deep delving but, more often than not, all that's there is there.

Most poetry that is praised by poets is, not surprisingly, trobar clus. Unlike Silliman, however, I include not just avant-garde works in the Pound/Olson/Johnson vein or some of the complex trickery of a Mohammed (most avant-garde poetry is trobar leu anyway--see flarf). I also include most of the neo-formalists--as for many of them--whether audience or poet--the majesty of the structure overcomes the subject--and an obsession with small forms has resulted in "little" poetry. It's often praised and well-received by other poets but it's not on a grand enough scale to draw in laymen--while a painter may be interested in brush strokes an observer wants to see the whole picture.

So we have candy and we have caviar. What we don't have is a main course.

Strong Verse, Part 1: Looking forward (and backward)

2010-02-22T10:53:00.000-05:00

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Lyric poetry remains useless.

I know that's not the most popular sentiment I've expressed.

Indeed, many of the folks who I've reviewed here on the blog disagree with me, more or less vehemently.

I submit, though, that their greatest poems are the ones that tell stories. Go back, read some Yezzi & Essbaum--tell me which poems strike you and you'll see the story.

I am persuaded to generalize the above statement:

The lyric mode is useless.

I say this because the point of the lyric mode is incapable of providing the breadth of experience necessary to continue to validate our artistic medium.

In other words, everyone is painting portraits and no one is painting the Sistine Chapel.

Okay, that's not entirely true--as my reviews point out. It is to some extent though. David Mason uses the techniques of Sistine Chapel painting to give us a really big portrait & Campbell McGrath paints on a large scale but uses an unrefined hand. I know there are others--though my readers have been lax of late in offering new narratives up to me--and certainly none of them are taking the literate world by storm.

Why?

That's the hell of it, isn't it?

It's the question I've been asking for the better part of a decade and the only answer I can come up with is that there is little-to-no interaction between the layman audience and the poet.

This is not true of performance poets. The problem is that performance and content are so inextricable that they poet may never be able to suss out what was good from what was bad--only to change one or the other and judge the reception.

Now, generally the reaction between the layman audience and the novelist is limited to sales--but sales of poetry books are so few and far between that this is difficult to judge (at best). And when a book of poetry sells to laymen it often does because it is either a curiosity or by someone "famous" (like Jewel & Tupac's books--or, in the case of Cobain's journals--both).

So until books of poetry start to sell we won't know what the audience wants and we won't know what the audience wants until books of poetry start to sell.

Well at least now we know what's happened since elitism overtook poetry (and patrons stopped being people and started being corporations).

So how do we look at what an audience wants?

I think I've pretty exhaustively gone over the notion that the reading audience wants stories. If you still doubt that, I'm not sure I can convince you know. Look me up at AWP in April and we'll talk about it. So we have looked at the present and we know its answer.

So how do we look forward to producing such work? For that we have to look about eight centuries backward--and look to a different post.

Aquarian Blog

2010-02-12T22:08:00.000-05:00

Happy 2nd Birthday, Blog!

For those of you who feel like celebrating, there's a donate button to your immediate right -->

Things to come

2010-01-29T07:56:00.000-05:00

Good day, Lovers of Poetry! I've just a brief newsy post for y'all--it's the run up to the blog's second anniversary, after all.

We'll be welcoming baby 3 near the middle of February. I've no idea what this means for blogging frequency as I can't really be said to blog with any frequency.

I'm always looking for great books to review. Contact me if you've got a great book of poetry recently out or out soon.

My doomsday clock of the death of poetry has been moved back a little lately. It's not that folks are all happy-cum-friendly about creating outstanding narratives and embracing a natural meter--though that's not holy-crap weird like it was nearly two years ago--just that the feelings seem to be swinging away from post-avant silliness. One can hope. I'm guessing that I'll get a better feel at AWP in April (who is going besides me? Post in the comments!).

That's about it for now. In short:

Baby

Reviews

AWP

Heady times!

Strong Verse is now a Wikipedia source?

2010-01-29T07:35:00.000-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Alexander_Essbaum

Tee hee :)

I noticed my name isn't notable yet.

Oh well.

I hope my newfound internet street cred results in many sales & much recognition for the excellent poets whose work I review.

A Review: Jill Alexander Essbaum: The Devastation, Necropolis, and Harlot

2010-01-07T10:08:00.001-05:00

The Devastation ($9)

Necropolis ($13.25)

Harlot ($15)

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

When the words of Jill Alexander Essbaum are anthologized and collected, her long poem "The Devastation" (2009, Cooper Dillon Books) will serve as the introduction to her work. I should say her early work, as Jillian is in her 30s, but unless there is a radical shift in direction, theme, and style (and there ought not to be; her writing is practically perfect), "The Devastation" (this is a prayer) will remain the place to pry into her poetry.

"The Devastation" is a sometimes-rhyming, sometimes-metrical, form-shifting poem divided into page-stanzas so that each encapsulates a pulse of thought, a technique taken from the patterns of extemporaneous Protestant prayer. Just to whom the prayer is addressed is a debatable and important point, but by the time we reach the second page, we should be familiar with Essbaum's language and play of language--it serves as her linguistic primer:

Years younger; it is a different cross I'm nailed to.

All my charms, all my conniving.

My doings and my dont's.

Impossible paths. Impassable boths.

(I will. I won't. I will. I won't.)

Jill is riding high here on Frost and Eliot and Plath (and a few others I'll let you discover; no sense in revealing all her secrets) though she goes farther than any of them (or any poet I know of save Shakespeare) in word play--her wrenched Plathian rhyme of don't/both is so speedy and arresting that it nearly eclipses the delicious vowel-switching and letter-flipping of "Impossible paths. Impassable boths." Jill is a bit infamous for her puns at the Best American Poetry blog and wisely keeps the spirit of punning alive in her work but spares us the flavor of the howlers.

If we are given a linguistic primer by page two, we only have to wait until page three for the topical primer: "Years ago, I was old in my adulteries," says the supplicant;

I was beaten like a woman.

I was eaten like a woman.

I was smitten with paramours and paracletes.

Ever nearer to thee, but never near enough.

Yes, folks, that's right, Jill Alexander Essbaum is bringing Donne back. While the bluntness of the 21st Century prevents her from the subtleties of "The Flea," Jill's poetry is the made of the rare air of The Song of Solomon, a conflation of sex and divinity; superficially this can be seen as more of the same--we live in a sex-obsessed culture rivaling that of Athens or the court of Elagabalus. In truth, however, Jill's poems turn the sex-obsession onto its head--sublimating the primal desire into the divine.

Unsurprisingly, in "The Devastation" the sublimation doesn't quite work out--the poem's not called "The Creation," after all. Once the speaker tells us that "there's no logic to the Word" we know that something is up. The prayer then ends abruptly leaving us both with a sense of turned tables and the need to re-read. Unlike the inescapably comparative "Prufrock," the end reframes the poem; on the final two stanza-pages, Essbaum demands that we reread the entire prayer--which then becomes less of a prayer than a Jacobian struggle with the speaker's past, her poem, and her paraclete whose divine end, like Dante's, replaces language with the primordial cry.

Once we understand Essbaum's thrust, we can pierce her previous volumes, Necropolis (2008, neoNuma Arts) and Harlot (2007, No Tell Books). These books are best understood as two halves of the same quest: the reconciliation of spirit and flesh. Necropolis is organized around an Easter weekend, half-Dante and half-Christ. Its cover is grey, with a stylized graveyard image. Though dedicated "chiefly to Nick Cave," the acknowledgements point to the importance of the death of Jill's parents and it is through death that Necropolis moves.

On "The First Day," "Terra Infirma" leads us through a dead landscape and, like the end of "The Devastation," informs us that "there is nothing left of Christ." As the day extends to night, we walk through "Cemetary Road" "burned and bitter" in loss and "fearing the darkness of the grave" even though as "Good Christians" we ought not to.

During "The Second Day," we "descend into Hell," following "nothing left" into "maggots." In this fleshy Hell we encounter "Danse Macabre," a poem that is pure Essbaum, from "weep off that white dress" to "I'll pare by halves your berry," a sexy poem that is creepy, crawly, and catabolic but still ends on Christ. Unable to escape the embodied Hell, "The Second Day" shifts with "What (C)remains" into the question of redemption and intention and, while I would prefer a differently punctuated title, the double question of the end

How exactly has your will been done?

And where, precisely, has she gone?

punctuates the central question of this book perfectly: what is the will of God and how am I, the lost, able to fulfill it?

We are given the beginning to this answer in "An Alabaster Jar and Its Oil," the following poem, where "the faint waft of Christ" leads the speaker to "a promise" (of salvation) "[she dares] at once to doubt and to believe," giving her the strength (with drink) to stumble into the third day.

For "The Third Day," the body becomes "A Variety of Hells," where a little death is mixed in with life and sex. To grasp the full force of Jill Alexander Essbaum's ability to mix sex and life and death and faith, "La Petite Mort"--where "sex is the solvent of all isolation"--cannot be missed. As the day, and the book, comes to a close, we are told in "RSVP" that the speaker has had her fill of death; she is "off to elsewhere" and "even Heaven. . .can't have [her] yet."

We can, however, and in Essbaum's Harlot we can have her deeply. If Necropolis is stuck on death and subtle, Harlot is stuffed with sex and subversive--made clear by the cover, a watercolor of naked woman embracing a phallus twice her size. Yet of the three works, Harlot burns the brightest and the most holy; it reads as if John Donne and Sylvia Plath had a child and gave her only the Song of Solomon and the four Gospels to read.

The lips of "Young Magdalene's Prayer" curl around "flimflam fists," "flesh [and] fire," "swelling seas," and "Holy Writ." The young Magdalene "can hardly imagine/what she might do with her fingers" once the "safe-keeped" "box of hers" is finally unleashed. And though the sex of the passage is obvious enough, when one remembers that Mary Magdalene is often conflated with the Mary of the Anointing of Jesus the meaning of a safe-kept box expands. This play of holyness and whoreishness is the point on which Harlot revolves.

"The Clockmaker's Mistress Knows Complications" and "The Villagers Warned Me About You" each take punning and wordplay about as far as they can go in a poem without breaking it. The draw of these poems is their differing approaches. Where "Clockmaker" is remorseful, "Villagers" is playful" but on re-reading it is "Villagers" and not "Clockmaker" that results in despair. "La Linguiste" continues this wordplay with an insistence on the word "whore"--a word as central to the book as "harlot"--a word, the poem argues, central to us because "who're is just a stroke away from "whore." "Stroke," of course, being a double-edged word.

The final third of the book, starting with "Folie a Deux, Menage a Trois" (which has been written about elsewhere), refocuses us back towards the divine. A "Strange Woman" tells us to "use her. She will let you." Though we may be confused by the title the cover of the book we cannot forget the dedication to "Rahab. . .". In the end, the harlot is used by God, not man--and it is to God that she opens fully.

This full opening is made clear in the penultimate poem "Nightboat," a retelling of The Gospel of Mark, 4:35-41, where the both the storm and the body of the speaker are made to behave Christ. As the poem progresses, the waves become bodies of Christ and the speaker and the bodies become waves until in the end, the speaker prays "pilot me" and is rewarded for her faith. She of the poem gets driven gets nailed by Christ and like Christ and, in the body of the poem, is redeemed.

No poet today dares play with such spiritual fire like Jill Alexander Essbaum dares. Her poems skirt the edge of blasphemy and pray for re-readings and a spiritual embrace. Dancing on the edge of her words one finds despair and salvation, often in the same word. She echoes Donne and Plath and riffs on Eliot but has the precise benefit of being alive and full of our time. I can find few poets to recommend so highly. A reader would be hard-pressed to find finer contemporary verse.

Harlequin Courier

2009-12-09T09:43:00.000-05:00

So: this

and this

and finally this.

While I'm not the first person to make the comparison, I will say I WANT ONE NOW.

Moreover, this is an outstanding device for writers:

We set the clamshell up like a book, use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and now we are typing on pages that actually look like pages. <>

I suppose, like most good things, I'll have to wait, but it's nice that computer technology is finally catching up to my nerdy childhood dreams.

No Joy in Gainesville

2009-12-05T19:53:00.000-05:00

In Alabama, where the rednecks live, the crowds are drinking deep;

The 'Bama fans are sneering, and 'Bama records keep,

Alabama men are inbred, but tonight they all can shout;

For there is no joy in Gainesville— mighty Tebow has struck out.

A Poem

2009-12-04T03:42:00.000-05:00

Forgive a bit of digression. This is also not an attempt at conversion. Please do read, however.

I don't know how you are on the belief scale. I follow Jesus.

30 minutes ago, I had the worst dream I had ever had. I dreamed I, and someone else, shot the 1-year old version of my oldest daughter (she is 5) and then had to fling her on a trash heap. I was wracked with weeping. I have never felt such depth of despair and sorrow. When I woke to find her still alive, I still couldn't shake the realness of the dream, so I prayed that I might forget the dream. I was clearly told that I could not forget it, that in fact I might as well be committing those actions because right now, representatives of my country -- who I pay for and educate -- are murdering babies halfway across the world. And I could not forget it because God is angry and God's people need to know that. I then wrote a very short poem. Here it is.

No peace;

No victory

is worth a murdered child.

We've got to stop the war today.

And then I wandered down here and posted this, after forwarding it to a few friends. At 3:42 in the morning.

Peace. We have to make it happen.

The Problem with Providing Your Own Content

2009-10-28T23:45:00.000-04:00

or, The Service Publishers Provide

Here, read this.

Most of you know I read online comix with a great amount of passion and frequency. Or at least now you know.

One of the best is The Order of the Stick.

Now, in the back of my mind, I've always wondered what the hell the point of publishers was. Sure, they can get distributorship deals, but so can a motivated writer.

But in googling about server problems with Erfworld (a comic given web-life by Rich Burlew, creator of OOTS), I ran across the above conversation. Use ctrl+f to find "the Giant" and read what Rich writes.

If you'd like, you can go to the GITP forums and see more of the same.

I submit the above for you, readers, why it's often bad to provide your own content.

Consumers are going to complain about, well, everything. They are also going to speculate, create fan fiction, and do all sorts of things that may (rightly) annoy an artist. When the artist is a whiny d-bag about it (as most are) this is not normally a problem. Complaints, etc. are handled through a 3rd party -- you know, like the publisher. Hell, even this site isn't published by me -- it's got the power of 1 with a hundred zeros behind it. Woot and what-not.

But when the artist is also the content provider, his all-crazy-lame-fests ain't got no filter. Two hundred years ago, Archduke Rudolph told his court buddies to ignore the crazy bullshit of Beethoven. Fifty years ago, Ezra Pound's publishers (and friends) worked to get him out of the crazy house. Publishers provide all sorts of services as far as protecting their artists from their audiences -- and vice versa.

Far be it for me to actually support some sort of intermediation, but with as batshit crazy as so many artists can be -- especially wrt their own work and responses to it, I think it behooves us as thinkers-about-new-methods-of-content-delivery who or what can do the publisher's job of being a buffer between the artist and the audience.

Strong Verse Blog: an introduction

2009-10-27T09:38:00.000-04:00

With over a year and a half since my first post, I think it's high time for a Strong Verse primer. The declaration is good and the numbers and prosody are useful in their own ways, but every system of thought needs an introduction, so here is mine:

Forms of literature:

There are three forms of literature: Prose, Poetry, and Propago. Propago is a bit of wrenched classicism that means "literature that also has images." Ergo comix, moving words, word art, etc. Feel free to come up with a better word, but it's important to acknowledge the "new" form of literature as it takes its rightful seat among Poetry and Prose.

Definition of poetry:

Prose is easy to define. It is simply written-down language. Propago, even, is easy to define -- as I did above. Poetry, however, needs a bit of help, as evidenced by the eternal (and silly) question "what is poetry?"

Poetry is writing that is dependent upon the syzygy of content, sound, and form. In a previous definition I said "image" instead of content -- but content is far more accurate.

III

All writing can be art. I defined art a few weeks ago, but I'll repeat the definition here:

Art is work of quality made for the indulgence of others. Ever since Kirby's criticism, I've been trying to find a "better" word than indulgence. I don't think the word exists that conveys enjoyment, enlightenment, and sometimes punishment -- except perhaps "schooling" but that's a bit slangy for me.

This blog is concerned with oral poetry. Indeed, my contention is with the three divisions of writing that "visual poetry" is propago and should be understood and studied as such. Tl;dr -- if it's not written to be spoken, it's not poetry.

This blog is concerned with formal poetry over "free verse" poetry. Indeed, I would prefer that most "free verse" poets realize what they write is prose, stop putting it in lines and work within flash fiction, a worthy and noble cause. This is not to say that poetry cannot be written without the aid of a metrics of some sort -- note the definition is "form" not a specific kind of form. The art is in the imposition.

This blog is very concerned with the state of poetry and poetry readership in the US. Suffice to say that I lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of US poets with most of the rest falling to our failing educational system. I do not blame publishers, as I wouldn't ask anyone to throw away money. I do, however, think that the cronyism inherent in American poetry is shameful though inescapable. I'll do a 6b here and say that I generally talk about poetry in the US because that's where I am. I don't know how the "scene" works in any other country, so unless a reader wants to tell me, I'm a bit short on info.

VII

This blog promotes narrative verse. This is not simply to be contrarian. If both quality and readership are in the toilet, perhaps we as poets need to do something different. Experimentation is tried and tired. I think we should stop naval-gazing and do something difficult -- like telling a good story in a way that sounds as good as it tells.

VIII

This blog serves as a place for reviews -- either of new literature or of poems and poets I think people ought to know about. If you'd like me to review a work, I will generally be glad to, though I will not write a negative review, as I'd prefer not to give any press to a work I find distasteful.

As with any blogger, I am prone to a bit of off-topic ranting and raving. I support no party and am against chaos and violence.

Well that's it. Weather permitting, I'd like a post or two every week. We'll see.

Fixing Education

2009-10-25T00:17:00.000-04:00

If we have a nation of non-readers (200 million or so) that is (by far more) also a nation of non-poetry readers (290 million? something like that), part of the blame has to be on the educational system -- granted, the lion's share of the burden falls on the inability of most American poets to write anything worth reading, but the soul-sucking monster that is compulsory public education needs to be addressed as well.

to wit:

G.M. Palmer's Plan for Fixing Public Education

a baker's dozen rules

1) Test all teachers on a standardized test (WISC, SAT, ACT, GRE, TAAS, FCAT, etc.). Whoever doesn't score in the 75th percentile or above gets fired (do you want people who aren't smart [not just "not dumb"] teaching kids?).

2) Increase starting teacher salary to at least 100% of local median income. Make 20-year teacher salary 200% of median income. Give salary adjustments of 10% for each graduate degree step (Master, Specialist, Doctor) earned by a teacher. Now you have a salary scale. Use it.

3) Recruit heavily in high schools and colleges, reminding potential teachers that we only work 196 days a year.

4) Create and employ a strict and permanent expulsion policy. If a kid comes to school just to fsck around, he doesn't need to be there. Which leads to. . .

5) Remove "compulsory" from public education.

6) Give credit for all classes based on nationalized, standardized competency exams. Make these exams available at all times to all students. Passing the exam (which I would hazard a guess to say means getting well over a 90%) gives you credit for the class, end of story.

7) Award various "High School Diplomas" -- General Education, Trade Education, Business Education, College Prep, Technical Prep, etc. All of these will be credit -- and therefore competency-test based.

8) Anyone 18 or under can go to any school at any time.

9) All classes are open-enrollment and capped for attendance solely at teacher discretion.

10) No school campus should have more than 500 students. When 125% of capacity is reached, the community must find and provide new housing (I hear abandoned Wal-Marts are readily available for conversion. . .).

11) All campuses will incorporate any grade-levels a teacher wishes to teach/the students wish to learn.

12) All campuses will incorporate any subjects a teacher wishes to teach/the students wish to learn. This includes all arts, trades, humanities, sciences, etc. up to and most definitely traditionally "extra-curricular activities" and sports. If a competent adult is willing to teach children how to do it and children are willing to learn and work it can be done.

13) This may be restating (5) but attendance in classes is not mandatory. We should care that students learn, not that they breathe the same air as us.

A Review: The Year of Loving Dangerously by Ted Rall and illustrated by Pablo G. Callejo

2009-10-09T07:44:00.000-04:00

The Year of Loving Dangerously

Ted Rall (author)

Pablo G. Callejo (artist)

MSRP: $18.95 ($13 at Amazon, though)

(regular readers wondering why I'm reviewing a graphic novel would do well to read this)

The graphic novel-as-memoir is as likely a choice as you'll ever see from Ted Rall. Generally a target for controversy, at least with this book Rall can quash the arguments that his work is poorly drawn -- Pablo G. Callejo's artwork is delightful and spot-on and period (1984) when it needs to be.

The Year of Loving Dangerously chronicles Rall's "annus horribilis": from the fall of 1983 to the fall of 1984 he nearly died from a vampiric wart, failed out of Columbia, and was dumped by his long-time girlfriend. In what can scarcely be termed an improvement, Rall spent the summer and a great deal of the fall bed-hopping, bumming food, and fencing typewriters in an attempt to stave off homelessness. Dangerously ends with Rall in a secure job, sharing an apartment with his coked-out pothead of a buddy, and juggling three girlfriends.

Rall intended Dangerously to be "a chronicle of desperation, of how easy it is for anyone—even a white male attending an Ivy League school—to fall off the merry-go-round of U.S.-style laissez faire capitalism." I, however, tend more to agree with Xaviera Hollander's assessment: Rall's memoir is not a "chronicle of desperation" but rather an instruction book in how Rall "exploit[ed] his looks in return for financial reward."

That is, Rall's Dangerously does not read like a map of the dangers of capitalism. It reads like a glorious paean to it. When "the system" of specialists (professors) and bureaucrats (deans) not only failed him -- but became hostile to him, Rall went underground. Employing his only remaining capital -- good looks, intelligence, and charm -- Rall "avoided the ignominy of spending a night outdoors" not once but for the better part of a year.

Rall consistently found ways to exploit the system and make a profit -- whether in bedclothes or cash -- month after month of living screw-to-screw Rall did not survive -- he thrived. Knowing that the cheaper Connecticut transportation tokens work as subway tokens, Rall ran a nice black-market exchange to double his savings whenever he could. When he had to come up with nearly two month's pay for an apartment deposit, Rall stole equipment from the corporations he seems to despise even today -- becoming a bit of a corporate robber baron himself.

Reading Rall's memoir of homelessness and desperation, I was reminded of Adam Shepard who became intentionally homeless in order to prove that with drive, intelligence, and diligence there were no barriers to success. What Rall and Shepard have that most homeless folks do not are simply those few things -- education, intelligence, and drive -- that are imperative to financial success. So reading The Year of Loving Dangerously does not give us an insight into the problems of homelessness in America -- what it does is show us that if a "white male attending an Ivy League school" finds himself in dire straits he has no damn excuse but to pull himself up out of it.

I do think that Rall's book can be exceedingly valuable (though not as he intended) in helping understand the problem of homelessness. If Rall (or Shepard) can be ultimately untouched by homelessness, then what are the inherent problems keeping others homeless? Knowing that the problems are largely internal and not external ought to serve as a guide for those who want to eradicate homelessness (and don't we all?).

I would be remiss in my review of Rall and Callejo's excellent graphic novel if I didn't mention the "graphic" part. The book, when it is filmed, will certainly garner an "R" rating. The graphic novel is a perfect medium for depicting sex. As Tom Wolfe recently showed us, there is no right way to write directly about sexual intercourse -- it comes off as either mechanical or prurient. Either a medical journal or a Penthouse letter -- there are no in-betweens. With a graphic novel, however, sex-writing just works. It straddles both poles and rides to satisfaction without stains of boredom or pornography.

As I say, The Year of Loving Dangerously is an excellent work. If I may have wanted to know more about what happened to Rall at the end, that merely shows he and Callejo did an excellent job of telling a story. As more folks read it or when this book is filmed (yes, I said that twice), I expect that Rall's exploits during his "annus coitus" will rub up a tight debate on the ownership and exchange of sex and the benefits of truly unregulated capitalism.

Defining Art

2009-10-05T16:01:00.000-04:00

I like working definitions. Let's have one for art, shall we?

This post will concentrate on artists in the main, over what they create; as art is made by artists, they are fundamental to understanding what art is and what it is about. Familiar readers may also expect that I will mention audience a few times. They will not be disappointed.

Before I get going, I'd like to thank my friend Drew for the kernel of conversation from which this post grew. Its first iteration came at Kirby's blog (look to your right) but I'm fleshing it out more here.

The simplest -- and therefore most correct -- definition of art is this:

Art is work of quality made for the indulgence of others.

In order to be on the same footing, let's visit these words.

Unless Bill Clinton has started reading the blog, I don't think we need to treat "is," "of," "for," the," and the second "of." We'll also leave the period alone.

"Art" is defined by the rest of the sentence.

"Work" is important. Art takes effort -- generally in creation itself (as in, say the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) and in training -- though with enough training, it's possible and likely that the time required for creation will be reduced -- if nothing else because an experienced artist makes fewer mistakes. "Craft" might be a useable word here, but it frequently has anartistic connotations and "work" is the simpler word. Work, however, is functioning as a noun -- that is, it is something that is made.

"Quality" of course is a slippery word, but I like it better than "highest standards." Quality is the part of art that is up to the artist. Many people can make work for the indulgence of others. We generally call this the business model. The artist takes this work-for-the-indulgence-of-others, adds his or her own highest or most exacting or most demanding standards, or quality, and makes something more lasting than a double cheeseburger.

"Made" is of the utmost importance. Part of the uncomfort we feel when confronted with "found art" is the sense that no one made it. Surely this is the impetus behind the joke inherent in Duchamp's Fountain. It is certainly the difference between Warhol and Duchamp. Made also relates back to work. This made-work is what makes an artist like Christo interesting (or makes a person like Christo an artist to be less generous) -- he (and his team) put a hell of a lot of effort into wrapping those trees and walls and Reichstags.

"Indulgence" is what makes art art and not, say, food. Food is essential; art (to be religious) is adiaphoric. To some extent this is a silly argument. We, I believe, know good and well that it is the adiaphoric that makes life "worth living." By design we don't notice the essentials unless they are gone. This is, perhaps, a point where Luther erred in designing his churches -- he told them "not to sweat the small stuff" but for most of us, "the small stuff" -- the non-essentials -- are the details we actually care about. Ergo so much debate about art. But the adiaphoric nature of "indulgence" is only half of the story. I was tempted at first by the word "entertaining" or, perhaps pedantically, "edification." But these words ignore the possibility that art may shock and injure as well as delight and heal. Indulgence is, to my knowledge, the word that best encompasses all of these abilities -- "extra but desirable."

"Others" is the key to art. Way back a decade ago (in the Clinton era!) when I taught creative writing, the first thing I told my students was: if they were just writing for themselves they were not creating art -- they were making expression. Art is not art unless it is both shared and influential in some way. The observer must internalize the work to a degree that he or she has been changed enough to "possess" the work mentally and physically. This brings a tweest in, though -- not all art is art to everyone.

Art is a conversation between the artist and the observer with the work as the language. Because we look at the world differently, we value different kinds of art. Part of the impetus of my writing so far has not been to say "this art is crap" -- though surely a lot of it is -- but that, rather, "this art speaks to too few people."

So when we set out to make art, we should ask:

What work will I do?

What are my standards (desires?) for this work?

How will I make it?

What will it do for my audience?

Who is my audience?

Perhaps this is not what we ask when we begin to create an expression -- when we first write those words granted by the muse. But these questions are what we must ask ourselves when we craft our coal words into diamond art.

Intro to Poetry List

2009-10-05T09:56:00.000-04:00

I suppose this list says a lot more about me than poetry.

"Blackberrying" by Sylvia Plath
"She Walks in Beauty" by George Gordon, Lord Byron
"Red Red Rose" by Robert Burns
"Since Feeling is First" by e.e. cummings
"Tame Cat" by Ezra Pound
"Sonnet 130" by William Shakespeare
"What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats
"The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Sestina: Altaforte" by Ezra Pound
"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Warming Her Pearls" by Carol Anne Duffy
"The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche
"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot
"Gretel in Darkness" by Louise Gluck
"The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot
"In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound
"Mending Wall" by Robert Frost
"The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe
"Fever 103" by Sylvia Plath
"Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot
"Home Burial" by Robert Frost
"Lycidas" by John Milton
"Usura" (Canto LXV) by Ezra Pound
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"East Coker" by T.S. Eliot

I hope to be back now after my extended hiatus. Life's been busier than poetry -- though I'm delighted to find this blog on a professor's reading list. w00t.

this blog is normally reserved for poetry

2009-07-17T15:05:00.001-04:00

But holy Jesus how cool is this?

Some of you may know my first performance/writing love (by about a year) was music. I was a rocker before I was a poet. So when I got a text message from a techy bud about create-your-own-rockband songs I (to be all 80s) totally flipped.

I'm not sure (yet) how to abuse this for poetry distribution, but if you are in a band or just like to write music and you don't exploit the living hell out of this, there is something wrong with you.

Look for my old band's cheesy bar-blues to be appearing (since I still have all the masters on cdrom) as soon as this goes live. w00t what!

Flarfers like to insult folks I guess

2009-07-14T23:35:00.001-04:00

Well it seems I've pissed off Christian Bok. He called me a troll on his twitter page. Tee hee.

What he choses to ignore, of course (in a lovely tu quoque sort of way), is that Kenneth Goldsmith said "Conceptual Poetry" (his caps) was child's play.

Perhaps that Kinsey Gaffe wasn't so intentional after all, eh Ken?

Can ya ken wha I mean, Ken?

Update (7/17):

I've also cheesed off Silliman. He refers to my post below as being "so pained it's almost flarf"; in the comments section, Many Zeros says that the point of my post seems to be "get your ass down to K-mart and see what [the troglodytes] want in their poetry." Close, but no cigar, Zero Mostel. Those folks at K-mart with their trans-fat biscuits don't generally read (remember, only 1/3 of Americans read on a regular basis).

It would be useful to say, go to a Barnes&Noble or mine Amazon (or just look at best-seller lists) to try to figure out what readers like. . . at the very least we need to stop writing to please ourselves or to please other poets -- no more masturbation and incest, folks!

Keep it clean! Seriously you guys, the whole idea of exogenous creativity is that we get infusions of new blood and new ideas -- we aren't getting that from inside the realm of poetry, we've got to go outside our camp, beyond the land of the backslappers and grantgivers.

Poetry for schoolkids

2009-07-14T14:13:00.000-04:00

So how many of you know teachers?

One of the ways we can reintroduce enjoyable poetry to the mass of readers is through schools. Most schools I know of encourage their teachers to put a "what is Mr. So and So reading?" spot on their walls or bulletin boards, etc. From experience as a teacher, kids even ask to borrow such books -- especially if they're reviewed or rated.

So what's a good book of (dare we hope narrative) contemporary verse we can get into the hands of teachers (and by extension, kids)?

How do we get it to them? MLA conference?

Note: my wife is now reading the Madeline books to our daughters -- those are books of poetry. . .

Flarf and Conceptual Poetry: by children, for children

2009-07-06T15:01:00.000-04:00

Welcome, Sillimites! Don't forget to read these too!

The good people at the Poetry Foundation have lost their minds.

This month’s issue gives lip to the ALL-CONCEPTUAL ALL-THE-TIME crowd, which leads me to believe that Christian Wiman & Co. must have dusted off some old copies of BLAST and thought the 1910s still had some interesting poetry left to be squeezed out of them.

Beginning things is an introduction by Kenneth Goldsmith, whose “essay” starts off with the falsest of propositions:

“Start making sense. Disjunction is dead.”

I’m calling bullshit. Straw man argument is straw man. Perhaps in the avant-garde world that led directly from the most unintelligible lines of the post-war modernist poems to the disjointed madness of l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e “poetry,” the refuse that is flarf and conceptual poetry counts as making sense.

Here in non-navel-gazing-land, however, it doesn’t. Yes, yes, Mr. Goldsmith, we can see in your poetic examples that “whole units of plain English with normative syntax, [have] returned.” However, as Noam Chomsky so wonderfully pointed out, “plain English with normative syntax” doesn’t always make sense.

Nor can this poetry in any sense be said to be “juncted” (I suppose “coherent” is the word here). Mohammad’s “Poems About Trees” makes as much sense as an R.E.M. song crossed with a Pollack painting. Seriously, folks. Why are you kidding yourselves?

Let’s find out.

Goldsmith goes on to talk about “[feeling] language again” and the “delight” and “joy” it brings. He compares C/F poets to children wrecking things. Well perhaps he does know who he’s kidding. A “movement” which can produce such beauties as “I Google Myself” (I thought it would be impossible to do worse than the original; color me incorrect on that count) is nothing more than a bunch of children playing at poetry.

When I saw Mohammad speak at AWP this year, he went on and on about how he made “sonnets” out of nothing but anagrams of Shakespeare’s originals. My question now, as then, is “what’s the point?” By his own admission they were not good poems. Why waste the time?

Because Goldsmith has here committed a Kinsley gaffe. These poets are, in effect, children running around the island, doing as they please. It explains a lot, especially that heated, “we’ve got sharp sticks” look whenever you bring up reality or getting off the island or why we got here in the first place and isn’t that a boat right over there?

So in his first paragraph, Goldsmith does get at some truth: conceptual/flarf poets are children. Considering 1) that I’m a grown-up writing for folks who’ve little interest in living in Neverland and 2) Uncle Shelby’s books have the corner on the “kids’ poetry” market, I’m tempted to just point this out and let well-enough alone.

Except Goldsmith opens his next paragraph with this doozy:

“our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers.”

The hell it does. Perhaps Mr. Goldsmith has never put down his Adorno and McLuhan. I neither know nor care. What is nails-down-the-chalkboard (is there a German word for that?) infuriating, however, is that Goldsmith continues, saying that C/F poetry is attempting to solve the problem of “what it means to be a poet in the Internet age” and answer the question “why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s.”

Perhaps the irony is too deep for me. Maybe all these poets understand that they’re aping Ezra Pound in 1914. Or maybe they know they’re following in Duchamp’s footsteps, somehow pissing on new ground.

If not, however, let me answer these questions without having to resort to Conceptual and Flarf poetry. Question the first: “what it means to be a poet in the Internet age.” It means what it has always “meant” to be a poet – that you communicate through verse while at the same time “purifying the dialect of the tribe.” To use appraisal language, poetry is the “highest and best use” of language. We are its creators.

Answering the second question is even easier. You are always using someone else’s words. Admitting that, rather – being deferential to that, simply means you are an immature poet. Of course, we’ve already covered that, thanks to Mr. Goldsmith.

The real question is what does “this” mean in a world of 4chan memes and instant distribution? “This” of course, being the whole of writing and publishing and reading poetry. According to the current issue of Poetry, it means that hack writers can get their work and mini-manifestos published in a canonical rag. If all you’re interested is wrecking and playing, I suppose that’s enough.

What this new technology really means, however, what these Conceptual/Flarf people continually miss, is that there is now nothing between the poem and the audience.

There’s that nasty word I keep employing. That’s correct, y’all. What it means to be a poet in the internet age is not that you can more rapidly act like Burroughs and do cut-up poems, but that your poems have instant access to readers. To an audience.

You don’t have to be friends with the king, or the rich guy down the lane. You don’t have to blow your poetry professor. You don’t have to get a publisher drunk at a poetry conference.

You just set up a booth and go. No cost.

Now obviously this has worked in the favor of those crazy Conceptual/Flarf/Avant Garde/whatever Ron is calling them this week poets. I mean someone has to be going to those websites, right?

But all those folks have done is found themselves. Conceptual/Flarf poetry is the Rule 34 of literature. If you like amputees and gore, well, there’s an audience for you full of other folks who also have a disjointed sense of what writing is.

But what about that untapped audience for poetry? Is it 30 million Americans? 100 million? We don’t know. My guess is one-half to one-third of current American readers. Certainly it’s more than the 3 million we’ve got today. But one thing is sure – we aren’t reaching them and no one knows how to.

Why don’t we know? Because we’ve been given the most powerful publishing tool since Gutenberg and all we’re doing with it is turning walnuts into pigeons.

We should be ashamed.

Or, rather, we should be changed.

We must find what people like – what they’re “buying” if you can call it that – and make it for them. And make it in the most brilliant way possible – and when they buy it, they can find all the subversive, artistic things we’ve done. This is art, folks. Impenetrability and flash never make art. Expertly created work can. Art is work, not play.

When Mr. Goldsmith and his lost children understand this, maybe their work will grow up too.

West Chester debriefing part 1

2009-06-18T17:53:00.000-04:00

West Chester was fantastic. My brain is still full of information and swimming with crazy poetry.

If you didn't go -- and you're a poet who reads this blog -- you NEED to go next year.

Here's a breakdown of the weekend as I saw it:

I arrived late on Wednesday (missed the damn banquet, etc.) but got to meet Quincy Lehr and David Landrum and a few others of Eratosphere fame. Woo hoo -- free wine.

On Thursday I wandered around for a bit, talking with Davids Yezzi and Mason and Mad Dog Gioia who has a memory for conversation that bespeaks one qualified to climb the ladder of governmental arts.

Chatted a bit with Donald Hall about Hall's interviews with Pound. Hall told me Pound's assessment of his political activities was that "he may have been a bit off base." All poets should be so aware.

Class started, a lovely jaunt on poetry in the classroom with the verse wonder-twins of tag-team wrastlin: the Pythoness of Poetry Moira Egan and the inimitable Rhina P. Espaillat. Thursday night I brought my mandolin and strummed up with Michael and Krys, Mike teaching me more in 10 minutes about the mandolin than I had learned in 10 years of owning one.

Friday brought more classes and a jaunty private chortle with critic-god Christopher Ricks ("how about Beckett? He's quite good too, what?") whose lecture reminded me why I wanted to go to U Boston for grad school when I was a wee sophomore.

Friday night birthed full-on bluegrass with the Mike & Mike show, Yezzi-brand Banjo, and harps from as far away as Scotland. Oh 'twas glorious. After having my Glenrothes stolen (tha bastards!) and Yez and I riffing on the banj till 1, I strolled up to Ernie's room and è stato un colpo di fulmine -- I met the impossible Jillian. A bad Christian girl with matchless skills in reimagining religious texts, I found a sure conspirator. We all boozed it up in Ernie's room till 4 or so, drunkenly reciting remembered favorite poems. Ah, poetry.

Saturday we wrapped things up, I bought two of JAE's books (expect reviews swoon), and we went to the (indoors, unfortunately) picnic. Heather and the girls were supposed to join us but were caught up at the Adventure farm and so arrived after most everyone had left. No matter, everyone who met them now knows my girls rank on the cuteness scale at at over 9000 yottaharo (Haro Kiti [that's Hello Kitty, y'all] being 1 unit of "cute" -- most of your standard lol-fare rates on the kiloharo range, a megaharo would be Hayley Mills in Pollyanna, a petaharo Momo-tan, and my friggin adorable daughters are off the yotta, yo -- but I digress).

Saturday night brought more booze and schmooze but in a cramped ballroom, so of a decidedly less-fun flavor. I did have a great discussion with Our Photographer (ha!) Daniel Lin that will (I hope!) bear fruit. Once most people started to leave, I did do some confabbing with the Mason (who tried to pour me a straw), J. Allyn Rosser (that's Jill to most of us), and The Jillian. Oh and Sam Gwynn and I liberated booze from the bar while Yezzi ran interference. w00t what!

All-in-all a fabulist's formalist dream. I await next year with open feet.

A Review: Shannon by Campbell McGrath

2009-06-03T08:14:00.000-04:00

Shannon: a poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

by Campbell McGrath

2009, Ecco

$23.99 (well, $17.99 at amazon...)

Campbell McGrath's Shannon is perhaps the first serious attempt at mythologizing America written after the deconstruction of the twentieth century. It is "a poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition," an imagining of the sixteen days Private George Shannon spent wandering alone and lost on the prairie, a found horse in tow, trying to reconnect with "the Capts. & the Corps of Discovery." Told in a free verse style that combines the best of Pound and Olson, George Shannon's hallucinatory travelogue praises both the newly purchased America of 1804 and Shannon's dream of the America to come.

McGrath wholeheartedly embraces the zeal of the early 19th century vernacular in his poem, giving us an sectional-epic -- a descent into hell. But hell for George Shannon is filled not with flame and demons but hunger and buffalo. Shannon begins his journey full of wonder for the "fine & open country" but when he realizes the "pure foolishness" of setting out alone with "but five balls" of shot, he begins to worry. When he realizes he cannot find "the good Capts.," he falls into despair.

His lost days recounted in verse, Shannon muses on the "wind-torn lands flung to the horizon" being molded into states of the Union. He wanders half-starved through Lewis and Clark's West, finding prairie dogs, antelope, beauty, and everything but his lost Expedition. As he lays down, exhausted, hungry, and ready for death, Shannon imagines the future of the land on which he will perish.

Though he sees a land populated by his countrymen, he knows that the West will always belong to the buffalo. Indeed, Day 13, "the buffalo-god" section, is the surreal zenith of the poem, Shannon embracing the ever-present and seemingly sacrosanct buffalo. Shannon knows that no matter how many "indians" die, no matter how many Americans die, their bones buried in the soil, "numberless generations" must die "to claim this land from the buffalo."

Shannon is not being naive. He is aware that "[his] countrymen / Will populate in numbers these fulsome plains." But what Shannon understands is that the land itself -- its lay, its soil, its soul -- belongs not to man, but to the buffalo. McGrath, writing from two centuries out, has the benefit of knowledge -- once returned to the plains and prairies of the West, the bison (for no one today calls them buffalo) thrive and grow, as if taking possession of what is obviously theirs. But it is through Shannon that we know that irrespective of the highways we cut, the water we pump, and the acres we claim, the land only gives itself to the buffalo.

Having failed to find his Expedition, Shannon is ready, like a good soldier, to sacrifice his life for his Union. In his final prayer, he gives his body to the land, to stake a claim of ownership:

My name is George Shannon

& I bequeath my remains

To seed this land

With American bones.

While on the prairie, Shannon walks into a deep reverie, a journey of realization and discovery. McGrath, thankfully, doesn't abuse Shannon's thoughts with anachronisms. There is no room in Shannon's "country of herds" for post-colonial worrying. The only hand-wringing McGrath allows Shannon to engage in is the theological sort. Shannon, with his distaste for the "sanctimony" of "Parson Macready," rejects the church and acknowledges that he never "will come to believing," knowing the reassurances of the Parson that his brother John died to fulfil God's "mysterious ways" are nothing more than "the palaver of a Kentucky card sharp / Caught bluffing."

But at the same time, Shannon sees "the flower of which Jesus even was made" in a dogwood, and questions the nature and scope of God, even as he contemplates the scope of America's new West. This struggle between the platitudes of the clergy and the majesty of experience was not only something we find to be true as historians of post-revolutionary America, but was viscerally true, with great men like Franklin and Jefferson trying to define belief against rationalism. A struggle Shannon would have been wholly aware of and keen to participate in as an educated man.

Here is where McGrath's writing shines. In being unafraid to recount a historic episode not as it would be today, gussied up with dusty costumes or dissected in dry volumes, but as what it must have been like that summer of 1804, McGrath allows us not only to have the voyeuristic experience of historical fiction but, and far more valuably, to question and understand what internal struggle is. By freeing George Shannon's journey and turmoil from any agenda, any contemporary-ism -- McGrath's frees his verse to carry the reality of conflict, the scarcity of hunger. McGrath shows us the truth in Shannon, not what we wish the truth might be.

To be fair, there are parts of Shannon I do not love. In his more Olson-ish moments, McGrath dandies with typography and repetition. While these parts certainly work within the poem, such sops don't excite my reading tongue. I also wish that McGrath were interested in meter, as the "rhythm and breath and musicality" he employs in his free verse lines are no more exciting than any unmetrical lines written in the last few decades. I doubly wish this, as Shannon is a powerful poem, but one from which I have remembered the story far more than the verse.

But these are small and biased complaints about an otherwise excellent and compelling work. McGrath understands as a poet what it means to give himself to the poem. Giving himself, he has given us a text, a poem that points the way towards a poetry that does not serve its master, a poetry that is not trapped in thought and academia, but a poetry for the people. A poetry in which history and truth and beauty are held for riches, and shared freely with the world.

Silliman on School of Quietude, Oxford, and Academic Poetry

2009-05-27T09:04:00.000-04:00

Hoo boy.

First let me say that I care neither for Prof. Walcott's alleged sexual indescretions nor for who has what post at Oxford (unless, of course, they are offering me a post -- in which case I accept).

I do, however, care for the framing of this whole "schools of poetry" thing. At the above link, Silliman refers to both Walcott and Padel as School of Quietude poets. Certainly I would place them in the world of oral poetry (Walcott, of course, gets a nod as a narrative poet, too).

Now, I've read Omeros. It was all right. I would recommend other narrative poems first, though in making a study of contemporary narrative/epic poetry, it's pretty invaluable. Padel came on to my radar at the same time she came on to yours -- that is, a couple of weeks ago. In reading the poems she has available on line, I am willing to say she's not a favorite of mine. Here's a bit from her "latest poem":

At night the savannah comes to claim me.

Thirty females and their calves

in search of a leader. Shaggy manes

down each nape. White bellies, white cheeks

and that dagger of kohl down the nose.

Kind of that "truncated prose without transistion" school of writing "poetry." Not that we haven't written it -- but jeez, the featured poem on your website? Oh well. Perhaps more "School of Boringtude" or, more accurately, "School of Academia" -- but more on that in a minute.

No. What really gets my goat is this quote from Silliman:

The surprise is not that the School of Quietude is ruthless in its practice of power politics. That has been its hallmark forever – beginning with a century-long pretense that it represents the whole of poetry, rather than just an anti-modernist / premodernist sliver within a far larger spectrum. No, the surprise is that the SoQ is so very bad at it.

Well of course he's surprised, as his school of avant garde is so good at it. They circle the wagons, close ranks, and defend their territory with such predictability one thinks they must be orchestrated (though they don't appear to be -- unless there's a kool-aid distributor I've missed).

The real culprit here is not School of Quietude or Avant Garde -- but academic poetry. As I have said, academic poetry creates these cancerous and mutated growths of "verse" unsupported by market economics. Even the patronage poets were subject to the whims of the market (even if the market was a noble and his guests). Academia, however, with its system of tenure and captive audiences, is about as anti-market as you can get (guess that's why everyone in college is a Marxist. . .).

This means that there are no real-world consequences for writing bad verse. As long as your work fits within a certain mold and you hobnob with the right folk, you're in like flynn. No matter that your books don't actually sell -- and therefore no one reads your work, you can get acceptance as a "poet" and fleece wannabe poets out of tuition and workshop fees. Now, this is a great system to get in on, for the established poets. It's a terrible system for poetry, however, and we've seen the 20th century take poetry from the lips of the masses to the quips of asses.

It's time we wrote not for tenure but for people.

"Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes"

2009-05-26T12:26:00.001-04:00

It seems that a certain Judge has watched Avenue Q a few too many times:

Apparently, holding sexist and racist views like Sonia Sotomayor will get you a nomination to the Supreme Court -- and here I thought the best way was to be a lapdog or a friend to torturers. . .

FTA:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor.

To remind us of where we should be:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

But that's what happens when you politicize things. Just like folks politicized literature -- and as now we're stuck with this awful dreck (really, just search the links in the archives y'all) masquerading as poetry, we are stuck with this awful dreck masquerading as progress.

To quote GnFnS:

Things are seldom what they seem,

skim milk masquerades as cream. . .

update: she apparently is not a fan of free speech

West Chester Poetry Conference Coming Soon!

2009-05-21T14:29:00.000-04:00

Hey all,

Just wanted to let you know that I'll be at the West Chester Poetry Conference coming up in 3 weeks. Woo!

After going to my poetry in the classroom workshop, I hope to be bumming around with a mandolin, a bottle of booze, and a stack of poems.

Good times.

Narrative Poetry Saves the Day; it's not vizpo, langpo, orpo, forpo, and freepo -- it's narpo.

2009-05-14T14:18:00.000-04:00

or, Why Poets Should Tell Stories

So I've been wandering in the wilderness for a bit. Like any good sojourn, it's refreshed and refocused me. Not a bad thing 'tall.

We've also had some great visitors here. Check the comments section for a handful of generally genial folks taking me to task for clarity and specifics. Good stuff all around.

And I've been reading poetry -- first the folks I met at AWP, then the free books I got at AWP, and lately a few books that have been mailed for review (though I didn't review them -- nothing good to say and whatnot) and of course narrative prose as well.

No narrative poetry, though. I've read through a dozen or so books of poetry and the only one that even attempted a sort of narrative was half a collection of episodic/thematic sonnets; nice, but. . . (there's a review forthcoming, but in Florida English).

So, folks, we know the point of this blog is to work towards a revival of poetry. Namely to save poetry from its poets -- to turn our focus as makers of poetry, as artists, from our shoes to our spectators.

I believe that one of our greatest audience-reaching problems (book distribution, discussed here and here, for starters) is in the business of being solved. Espresso Book Machines, by the way, are located here. Check one out and check back in with us!

So the technology is keeping up with us. The writing, however, is not.

I've talked before, at length, about narrative poetry.

I've also had, since starting this blog, the opportunity to come into contact with a great many good poets. Follow the links or just look to the right for even more.

Problem is, not many folks actually know them. I was talking to an old prof over drinks at AWP and we surmised that the only people who read poetry anymore are those who write it and that there are approximately 4 writers of poetry for every 1 reader (I forget where he got the writers number from but it was about 10 or 12 million Americans). I, of course, know why the readers number is so low.

Of the four above writers and the four poets to my right, only two of them are writers of longform narrative poetry (that I know of -- Kim Addonizio also wrote a novel) and, not surprisingly, they have the greatest amount of google hits (by a factor of 5 & 50 over the next two most popular). Except for Mr. Philp, all the poets have far fewer hits than even regional and genre prose fiction authors. I'm sure that their sales numbers are all smaller (by definition of poetry sales being utter shite), though I haven't been so gauche as to ask them specific sales numbers (yet -- we may get friendly enough at West Chester Poetry Conference, where at least 3 of the 8 will be).

Hits, of course, don't mean everything -- but they do mean how distributed the poet's "name" is (which still means less than a lot as even Mr. Philp is dwarfed by a Stephen King or JK Rowling -- both of whom are dwarfed by Harry Potter, Lost the TV show, American Idol, and porn -- priorities, priorities. . .) and how familiar the public is likely to be with said name.

Speaking of, I got berated at an old blog for being concerned with poets and not their poems. Well first, I like poets for their poems; but more than that, we have to realize we live in a world of brands -- and we always have. Brands are nothing more than commericalized authority (and, really, hasn't authority always been commercial?) and as such, we should respect the impact that a name makes.

Back on topic,

Why is narrative poetry so important?

The answer is simple -- memory. I read Yezzi and Addonizio and Spera's and Barenblat's work and really liked it. The only poems I "remember" are one by Yezzi and one by Spera that were very short (40 lines?) stories. Yet I can quote at length from what happened in Mason's Ludlow, and can get people interested enough in the story to want to read the poem.

And there it is. How can I get people interested in Kim Addonizio? "Hey man, there's this poet and she writes some really fun verse -- a lot of it is catchy and risque" or Rachel Barenblat "so there's this poet and she rewrites a lot of the Torah -- really great updated religious poetry."

Note -- I'm not trying to write bad copy here, I'm just saying that the best thing I can say about them without having their poetry in front of me is a generalization of what their poetry is "about" -- or not even about, since lyric so often is about ephemera -- or what their poetry does.

Not very exciting -- except to a poet. . .

A story, on the other hand, gets everyone excited. Readers are hooked in by stories, not writing ability, or more important, writing style. If they find a good story, they'll read it. Not to beat a dead horse, but look at Dan Brown. Interesting stories propped up by bland and formulaic writing -- but not only does he "sell," but the VATICAN talks about his work.

When was the last time the Vatican concerned itself with a book of poetry?

We are missing out on something big, folks.

To pick up on that something big, we need to start writing stories in verse. They need to be stories people will buy into written in verse they can read and understand. It would be best if people loved the stories and the verse was memorable and moving.

Obviously the second part is most widely accomplished through rhythmic verse (whether metrical or accentual doesn't really concern me at the moment -- but we need regular beats). Rhyme (at least in English) is an arguable factor. But we need that backbeat rhythm to really really kick em in the heart of rock and roll and get them reading poetry again.

I've said before, we don't need to generate original stories. In fact, it may be best that we don't while there are so many stories to mine. Mason's Ludlow is a prime example of that -- as are the Iliad and Odyssey and even Paradise Lost. Indeed, historical non-fiction (of a sort) is the home territory of narrative poetry and it's a shame we gave it up.

So, write narrative poetry for the connections;

write narrative poetry for the memories;

write narrative poetry!

Update on the Espresso Book Machine

2009-05-14T11:39:00.000-04:00

So the Guardian numbers were a bit off. I talked today with the good folks at On Demand Books and the New Orleans Public Library, where an Espresso Book Machine is currently located (the others are here).

Here's what I found out:

There are three versions of the EBM 2.0:

Two black and white models with different printing speeds:

The Turtle (35 ppm) for $75,000

The Rabbit (105 ppm) for $95,000

There is a color version as well:

The Leary for $100,000

Each version has a color printer for covers, but the Leary prints interior color as well.

There are currently 15 installations, with more coming. Each unit has between 7,500 and 20,000 sales per year. At a cost of $.01 per page (as the website says), with a book cost of $10, a 300 page book makes $7. Split that even with the author and you're making $3.50 a book. Charge more and, well, you make more. That means the machine pays for itself in less than two years at a good rate of sale (assuming you're selling the books for cheap).

But the cool thing was talking to the New Orleans Public Library. They've taken a non-mercenary approach with their EBM and use it to make low cost books for children's programs, local geneological societies, and scholarly and creative journals. Which reminded me that I should have thought about small presses. A few small presses could get together and buy an EBM and control their own destiny (bwa ha ha), especially if they were located in the same area.

So that's my EBM update. If anybody has $75-100k, I've got room in my house for one :)

Kindle, Real Books on Demand, and the Future!

2009-05-11T12:07:00.001-04:00

So Amazon's Kindle is pretty amazing. Now, I linked to the (as of yet) unavailable DX version because the new format makes worlds more sense for no other reason than it reads .pdfs natively.

Last week, I linked to a revolutionary little machine that's like the Univac version of a Kindle and a printer (can you print from the Kindle? I don't think so but you should be able to -- add that compatibility, y'all!), the Espresso Book Machine. I lightly said it could save poetry.

Here's how it can.

First, the Espresso needs to be coupled with something like the DOA technology of Music Point to add real nice e-functionality to its products.

Secondly, a coffee house needs to pony up the 250k or so it would cost to get such a double-machine.

Thirdly, have great and wonderful readings both live and memorexed playing all the time.

So Instead of having to carry stock (the yearly inventory in any small bookstore is likely upwards of that 250k figure anyway -- and that's a one-time investment), you sell books and cds (with the books on .pdfs and recordings of the readings) on demand, especially those of readers performing at the venue.

I've seen great readers at a good venue sell upwards of a couple dozen CDs and a dozen or so books, 3 or 4 readers at a time (so say expect 100 -- 200 titles to sell if you know what you're doing). If the pricing scheme makes any sense, you could expect, as a venue to make $500-$1000 on book/cd sales on a good show (mind you, this is in "the world's biggest small town," and we aren't really known for our arts scene) add to that ticket sales ($1000 or more -- wait, you aren't charging for your poetry readings? Why not? Build expectations, y'all!) and 3 shows a week for a year pay off your machines. Don't you have 3 shows a week? Why not? Get people out for your amazing poetry shows! I ain't no Barnum and Bailey, but someone has to be. Where are you, dammit?

This new technology also solves more than a few problems of poetry distribution. Poetry is no longer "back-shelf" material. Hell, even if your bookstore is supported by sales of Sue Grafton and the latest DaVinci Code, you hardly have to advertise those. The reason they're in the front is because that's what people look for. With that space freed up by the Print-O-Matic 9001, poets can be showcased.

Also, there's no such thing as "out-of-print" or "rare"; books are just available. So that copy of Johnson's Ark is no longer $50 from a used bookseller. Pound's A Lume Spento is a nice, even $10.

But let's not forget about that Kindle. With native pdf support and a USB jack, you can sell ebooks at readings. And since the Kindle supports mp3s, you can sell readings, too. You can sell those for way cheaper, using a computer set up for just such a purpose, getting (maybe) a dollar or two kickback from the author for using your venue & technology.

In fact, if you're totally punk rock, you could set up a Kindle account (not a hard thing -- if you've got an Amazon account, you've already got one) and set the price of a poem (or the poems you're going to read) to $.99 -- then tell folks in the audience (who all have Kindles in this dream scenario) that if they buy that poem (or poems) you'll give them a $2 discount on their merch purch (like a free dollar, man!) -- then you've got an audience who's reading along with you.

Totally rocking.

Well, that's enough fanboy fantasy for now. Let's all go out and buy a Kindle! Who's got $500?

Well this could certainly save poetry

2009-05-06T21:17:00.000-04:00

or at least revolutionize its publication/distribution:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/24/espresso-book-machine-launches

framing Oral Poetry vs Visual Poetry

2009-04-26T22:22:00.000-04:00

In some of the comments in my last big post, people took me to task about renaming the actors in a poetic debate.

My intention was not to rebrand "School of Quietude" and "Post-Avant" as "Oral Poetry" and "Visual Poetry,"

my intention is to reframe the debate. The problems that exist are not between the new and the old, as Silliman seems to think -- there's no rebellion here.

The problems that exist are due to a critical impasse that has become a funcitonal and increasingly financial impasse -- so they're problems that need to be dealt with.

The impasse, as I've said is not new and old, but apples and pears. They look sort of the same. Their trees look sort of the same. Heck, they're even members of the same subfamily

yet some people are devotees of apples and some of pears.

Some people like both.

But if you were a food critic and you couldn't distinguish between the two, there'd be a problem. If you were a seller of fruit, and didn't know a bartlett from a macintosh, you'd hear about it. If you were a customer, and the pears were in the apple cart, we'll, you'd go and pick up some of those novel oranges you hear everyone likes so much.

(aside)

Now for some of you, you may be horrified that I'm speaking of poetry as if it were a commodity.

Well, it is. It's art, yes -- but you've got to sell it to the people. If you believe all art should be free and that no one should profit from it, please go start your own website and put all of your work up on there. Good luck with that. . . If you aren't willing to do that, then you should ask yourself what makes you uncomfortable talking about the marketization of poetry.

Marketization is important because that's partially how something thrives among humans -- why are there more cows than tigers? Because cows taste really good. If tigers tasted like bacon, we'd have tiger farms across the nation. Now, this isn't always the case -- creating something commercially with no regard for taste usually gives you wal*mart white bread, pop 40 radio, and Billy Collins. I'm not arguing for that. What I am arguing for is that poets start to pay attention to the fact that they are producing not just art -- but a product as well. Every other artist does that. Jeez!

(back to the point)

And since marketization (of which criticism is a large part) is so important to the survival of poetry, we as poets owe it to ourselves, our audience, and our art (that's in reverse order of importance, btw) to really codify what the heck we're doing in such a way that it becomes conversate-able (that is, something that folks can talk about).

Ergo, instead of looking down our noses at the "inferior" poets who don't write what we think is the Platonic Good of poetry, we can see that they are not inferior -- simply other, and we can embrace them as another facet of art.

So to close with simplicity, there are two forms of poetry:

Oral Poetry:

Poetry whose meaning is independent of seeing its words on the page. Though placement on the page may be used for reading guides, a written oral poem is essentially a piece of sheet music. Any change in the words' placement will likely not result in a substantial change in the poem's meaning.

Visual Poetry:

Poetry whose meaning is dependent upon seeing its words on the page. A visual poem is not like a piece of sheet music but a work of two-dimensional art. Any change in the words' placement is likely to result in a noticable change in the poem's meaning.

Fair enough?

Now with Twitter

2009-04-24T08:28:00.000-04:00

So I guess I'm a twit now.

It had to happen, I suppose, as I explore the realms of figuring out how to distribute poetry.

Well, I have to hand it to old Silliman, his plug sextupled the blog traffic yesterday. w00t!

More later, I am trying to beat out a Korean POW Blues Epic:

in my memory / I build these verses

where only death / can tear them down

tuned on rhythm / I can't forget them

in North Korea / my blues are brown

Skipping High School

2009-04-23T10:53:00.001-04:00

Can we finally admit that American public education is largely broken, outdated, anachronistic, and unnecessary?

School of Quietude vs Post-Avant is really Oral Poetry vs Visual Poetry

2009-04-22T11:44:00.000-04:00

Update: go here for a definition of Oral and Visual Poetry

I've visited this topic before, but Silliman got me thinking today.

He mentions that he chose the term "School of Quietude" to piss someone off. That he was hoping a young buck (or doe?) would do the work of defining the "movement."

Lots of people say there is no "Quietude" movement. I would agree with them but add that there's not really a post-avant movement either. There are several schools within each group.

But each group can be more easily and accurately divided by a name change.

the "School of Quietude" writes oral poetry

"Post-Avant" folk write visual poetry.

The difference is pretty simple. Oral poetry can survive without the page. It may have some interesting graphical trickery (like Dante's acrostics) but it fundamentally sounds like a poem. It sounds good.

Visual poetry may also sound good but has part-to-all of its meaning tied into its existence as physical text. Take Johnson's Radi Os, for instance. Even the parts of the poem that work out loud are dependent upon Johnson's erasure of Milton. The work can't leave the page. All the work on Ubu fits this mold as well, likewise flarf and all the myriad things you can learn about by reading Silliman.

I don't wish any ill-will on the visual poets. I'm simply not one of them. I tried for a while -- if I still had my high school poetry notebooks you could see juvenilia rife with visual traps and tricks. Perhaps that's where my low opinion of visual poetry came from -- it was something I could do (with panache) at 15.

But come, those of you who felt "School of Quietude" as an insult. Tell the world we are oral poets. Noisy poets. Poets out loud. Poets of voice.

A different historical view

2009-04-15T07:25:00.000-04:00

So this really has naught to do with poetry

But imagine yourself as a historian 500 years from now.

How will you see the USA? We mention "end of empire" as if it's an inevitability -- but then we think -- heck, Rome lasted a gabillion (okay, 1100 to upwards of 2000) years -- as a realy & influential nation, it probably had a good 6-800 year run. First in Rome proper and then as Byzantium. Which gives me pause.

England was the dominant power in Europe/the World since the defeat of the Spanish Armada until the end of WWIish. Certainly by the end of WWII they had handed the mantle to us (that's US), a former colony (and a rebellious one at that).

Those of you unfamiliar with the history of Rome might not know that when power began to be shared in the East and West (co-Caesars and co-Augusti and all that -- if you really want to get the digs, go here) there was conflict. War even. And that the (new) Eastern (part of the) empire felt free, independent of, and more progressive than the Western one. And that after a while, all the stuff done in the West simply came out of the East.

We've reversed that, of course, but I think it might be best from a future-historian view to look at the US as not separate and distinct but simply the Western United Kingdom.

Then our seemingly rapid descent into decadence makes much more sense.

and I'm proud to be a Western United Kingdomer
where at least my water's clean
and I won't forget my British folks
who made up laws for me. . .

Abuse of power

2009-04-13T13:37:00.000-04:00

Sigh.

It seems that not even in my hometown can people avoid acting out of fear and insanity.

Not the way to behave, folks.

Damn the internet and damn politics

2009-04-13T12:15:00.000-04:00

You know, Dante and Cavalcante still managed to meet in the middle and write some damn good poetry.

Even if their religion and politics were at odds (to say the least) they were drinkin' buddies.

But you sorta have to do that with your neighbors.

As we grow apart, first in urban-to-suburbanization, then in electronic group isolation, we lose that familiarity.

When I was at AWP, I don't think I met a person with whom I didn't get along. Heck, I'm buddies with Susan Schultz, whose politics and aesthetics probably couldn't be farther from mine. Of course, I took a class with her, which helped.

But then I look at all of this poorly written, shame-faced, shambling false poetry out there and my blood pressure rises. It gets worse if I ever take the time (which I do too frequently) to read the prose justifications of said poetry (note: if you've got to write a justification/explanation for your poem, it sucks; Eliot just wrote the notes for The Waste Land in order to get it to near book length -- quit being an imitating iguana). Worse still if I read the naive political views of so many of the authors (seriously, folks -- did you ever read your history books? Wikipedia has a fine collection of historical facts; perhaps you look at them for a mo').

I know, from the writing of The Declaration last year that the reverse is true. There was a tiny storm of poo from some circles. Actually, I know someone who stopped talking to me because of it ("know I am not your ally" says he).

What gives? Do we all need 3D printers/replicators and video chat so we can get drunk together?

How do you create a sense of community among people with disparate interests but who aren't in one place?

Is it even possible?

Perhaps that's the question of the next few decades. . . what diverse communities can we build when no one has to live together?

T.S. Eliot rejected Animal Farm

2009-04-07T11:29:00.001-04:00

For the right reason -- that it is a funamentally communist story.

Eliot, you must remember identified as a "royalist in politics". This was no slouch of a position. There was no dissolved Parliament in the 1930s.

Eliot was making a very charged political statement. Indeed his trilogy of "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion" was shocking and packed with meaning -- like most everything he wrote. In a time of increased chaotic modernism, Eliot embraced order, order, and order with a heaping dose of authority. And then produced his masterwork -- the Four Quartets.

A lesson to all of those writers floundering around in relativistic agony?

Why words are important

2009-03-24T09:44:00.000-04:00

I suppose what I hate most about modern, anti-reader, anti-language, anti-word poetry is its inherently destructive nature. While most of its paragons are allegedly anti-big-brother types and allegedly pro-freedom, their hatred of language set the foundation for the newspeak we have come to know and love -- from the most PC unoffensive talk to the most vile "collateral damage," these destroyers of language have forgotten -- as did Oppenheimer -- that their actions are not personal, that their beaten butterfly wings do carry resonance around the world.

Or, as I saw in a post today:

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will get me to brutalize my fellow man for the benefit of my rulers.

This has nothing to do with poetry

2009-03-23T12:33:00.001-04:00

At least, not that I know of.

Also, I am aware that hand-wringing about the folks who post on internet forums is specious at best.

So in case you didn't know already, I am a nerd.

Part of my nerdiness involves reading webcomics, like this one.

Now, for those of you who aren't nerds, black dragons, like the ones being shown in a sort of wholesale, Godfather-esque slaughter, are evil.

Not evil like Mr. Burns in the Simpsons but evil like Hitler and Stalin. Greedy and vicious and ready to eat your babies for no good reason. Kind of like polio or MRSA.

What I don't understand is that there are a good number of folks posting on the site's forum about how evil it was to kill all those poor widdle dragons.

Huh?

If the world were covered in deinonychi bent on eating us because we're slow and fleshy, why would we cry if they were killed? Especially if they were ten times as large, could fly, and spit acid on us. . .

I suppose this all comes down to anthropomorphism writ large. Maybe it does have something to do with poetry. People grow up with Mother Goose rhymes and think that everything that can raise its eyebrows is somehow human and should be afforded human rights.

Which is just silly.

I guess that makes me anthropocentric. But of course I'm anthropocentric. Why would evolution/God/FSM make us anything but anthropocentric (I guess we could be theocentric but that's a whole nuther post. . .)?

In fact, if you're a person -- and you aren't anthropocentric, I would encourage you to go live in the forest (or whatever wild you can find) with the clothes you can make for yourself (without killing anything else -- you can always collect and make your own wool) and eat the best you can without disturbing any other creature.

If you aren't willing to do this, then please admit you're anthropocentric too -- and stop whining about dead dragons.

Obama and Harry Potter: the Haiku

2009-03-19T13:50:00.001-04:00

Harry Potter and
Obama's Presidency:
good ways to sell books.

Rewriting Dickinson is a Dickensian Dialogue

2009-03-19T13:14:00.000-04:00

That is, poor and shabby.

Over in the Anti-Verse, Silliman is talking about these poets using Emo-ly's poems as "empty vessels" for this purpose or that.

In a nutshell, folks are (getting published by!) taking Emily Dickinson's poems & structures and either erasing parts of them or replacing them syllable for syllable with other crap.

First, the erasing thing was done in Radi Os. It was avant-garde and vaguely interesting then. Now it is just derivative and stupid.

B, using Emily's verse as a received form is using received forms. Don't knock New Formalists for being from the "school of quietude" and then think it's all bitchin because some Joe K. with an MFA fills the sound of Emily with empty-headed Hollywood baubles.

What the hell is up with all of this rewriting anyway?

Shouldn't we be MAKING IT NEW for versesake? I mean, should we not be creating new work?

What is the point of gilding the lily? Do these people think they have something to add to Emily's oeuvre?

Moreover, do they expect ANYONE to read their crap when the same person could just crack open the internet's full offering of Emily's reworked lyrics to "The Yellow Rose of Texas?"

Why do Silliman's poets hate readers?

A St. Patrick's Day Poem

2009-03-17T07:59:00.000-04:00

I thought, like a lot of you, that the "troubles" would finally be over. As we've seen lately, I don't think so. Anyway, here's a poem from college for St. Patrick's Day:

St. Patrick’s Day

We’re comin through the clover fields
beneath God’s purple sky.
We’re marchin through the city streets,
the Cathlicks soon will die.

In Erin past, a pretty lass
could turn a young gent’s eye.
But now that’s done, and only guns
can make a young boy die.

Now stompin’ down on Danny Boy,
we’re kicking out his knees.
We praise our maker and our land,
we fight to bring all peace.

In Erin past, a pretty lass
could turn a young gent’s eye.
But now that’s done, and only guns
can make a young boy die.

In orange and green, a war machine,
we fight the bloody war.
We kill our foes, especially those
who ask what is this for?

In Erin past, a pretty lass
could turn a young gent’s eye.
But now that’s done, and only guns
can make a young boy die.

Our Emerald Isle is burned and choked
by bombings and by hate.
We fight to enter heaven first
and turn back at the gate.

In Erin past, a pretty lass
could turn a young gent’s eye.
But now that’s done, and only guns
can make a young boy die.

Disconnected weirdos

2009-03-13T08:32:00.000-04:00

From The Poetry Foundation:

Sometimes I wonder how it would go if I had to chose between writing and reading. It’s one of those desert island questions. More than travel, more than interpersonal relations, more than food, sex, sleep, these are the two loves of my life. They are what connect me to myself, and connect my self to the world.

What?

Really, sir? I mean, we all like that lovely quip -- when I have a bit of money, I spend it on books. . .

But books more important than people? (We'll ignore for a moment the food, sex, sleep problem)

More important than people?

If these are the words ex cathedra from our last lonely house of Poetry, how can we be expected to reach IRL humans?

I would dare venture that the above statement is not applicable to most reading Americans (remember, that's 1/3 of the population).

Perhaps this is why poetry is such a dead husk. We've got the mouths of the trade aping the idea that words are more important, nay, more vibrant, than actual people. Maybe this is why the annual, real readership for poetry is about half a million Americans (at best). If 1 in 600 folks feel this way, then I guess that's their thing

but Jesus, aren't people more than that?

I like words. That's pretty evident in my choice of trade. But I like people more.

Words are the way we communicate -- the way we mediate. Words are the glue that holds people together. It's like appreciating nails and not a house held together by them. Special glue can make a great musical instrument (thanks, Strad') but you play the violin, not the boiled horse.

The valuation of words over humanity must be the reason I hate so much of our national poetic output -- I'm glad, then, that The Poetry Foundation tipped its hand here. It's nice to know they really are just crazy.

So we can reach 1 in 600 people with words gratia words. Maybe, if we wrote words for people, we could increase that number. We know that 1 in 3 folks like to read (mostly prose). Maybe 1 in 30 could like to read poetry? Maybe more?

All I know is we'll never know until we stop believing that words are more important than people -- that is, stop believing that the poem is more important than the reader -- a carpenter's duty may be to the chair -- but the chair has to support someone. Today's poetry collapses under the weight of humanity.

Don't write for words' sake.
Write for humanity.

Movin on up b/w a Conundrum

2009-03-03T16:47:00.001-05:00

Hwaet:

I got three review copies in the mail today from a press.

So, I mean, that's friggin awesome, right? I am movin' on up to the East Side and all that. Woo! I'm the next Silliman (but I write "real poems"!)! Wooo!!

But. . .

The books suck. There's one book of prose "poems" and then two books of lineated prose. Nothing to recommend them other than nice covers.

I don't even want to provide links because, well, the books don't really deserve it -- and I wouldn't want you to buy them thinking they were full of poetry.

Conversely, I don't want to savage them in a review -- because 1) none of these books are by famous poets who need to be told "hey man, your work is crap" and 2) I'd really like more review copies -- I even will be glad to do reviews for books I like (or at least link to books that are not bad).

So send your reviews!
And let me know in the comments section if you think I'm off my nut.

What the hell is the point?

2009-02-26T14:02:00.000-05:00

So here in my hometown university's erag,
we get some poems that are anagrams of their source text.

Sure, it's cute. I'm sure it's difficult.

But really. What the hell? Why is this front-paged on Silliman?

Who is going to love poetry because someone who couldn't even come up with their own letters (let alone words) jumbled together some text and made "poetry"?

When will we break free from silly academic exercises and write?

If this is the global result of the ubiquity of the MFA we need to shutter all workshops today.

I'll say it again --

workshop exercises are not poems.

Netbooks and poetry

2009-02-24T08:53:00.000-05:00

So in this article, the author prattles on, all surprised-like, that folks are buying up netbooks in droves.

It's counterintuitive, he reasons, because PC evolution is supposed to come from the top down -- crazy, overpowered gamer PCs are supposed to ride the wave of Moore's Law on $4,000 systems while the proles wait with baited breath for the next PC that can run SL and WOW at the same time.

Oh bull.

This is the problem when an industry becomes top-heavy with specialists. The writers for a mag like Wired are all gamers. Most of your top designers are gamers. By gamers, I don't mean your gramma that spends eight hours a day playing Freecell. I mean h4rdc0r3, 1337-4$$ gamerzzz that envy the astronut who drove around in diapers because their mom won't let them buy depends (again).

The problem, of course, is blindness to what the consumer actually wants. People are buying netbooks as fast as they can be made (seriously, don't you want to buy me one?) because most people couldn't give two craps about running some game that sucks out their souls and spits out goldfarming techniques.

Most people who use computers just want to check email, make documents, and watch youtube. They want simple, not complex -- moreover, they don't want to have to sift through (or pay for) a bunch of garbage to get what they want.

What's interesting is that notebooks have also pushed innovation -- using flash instead of hard drives (I asked a good friend about boosting memory with flash about 5 years ago; glad to be right), really tight and bright screens, super-boosted wifi, and power-saving wizardry -- all unthinkable in a monster gamerztop or a PC built fur sp33d.

We see this also in poetry. Poetry has been seized by specialists who dandy about the wrinkled duds of the avant-garde flinging terms like flarf and alienating any normal person who might actually be interested in reading some poems.

I say let them build suped-up insanity poems that no one will buy (seriously, there were chapbooks at AWP selling for $40 -- are these people on crack?).

Let's us, however, give the world the netbooks of poetry -- innovative, clear, and what's wanted. Let's write not what can be written (for what clever or vulgar high school poet hasn't proven that) but what wants to be written.

And, perhaps, while we're flying under the radar, we can write poetry that is not only popular but good. Perhaps we can rediscover the tools that make poetry not unique and aloof but intimate and personal.

Perhaps
Perhaps
Perhaps
(cha cha cha)