Poetry Thought o' the Day

“From the beginning, some of the most exciting, overwhelming moments in the modernist tradition have come when a poet breaks through into the kind of prose freedom and prose inclusiveness which I have tried to suggest.” Robert Pinsky, from The Situation of Poetry.

This interests me because my own poetry definitely has some qualities of prose, for better or worse. I tend to write long poems with long lines and long convoluted sentences chock full of detail, and reading them may require some of the patience you need to sit down and read a novel (even though they’re not that long!). Hopefully they also offer some of the pleasures and richnesses and intricacies of a novel.

My sense is that people have very different tastes on the prose/poetry issue. People who don’t like my poems (yes, there are some!) may prefer poetry that’s at the far end of the spectrum from prose, while I like poetry that’s very lyrical but still has something in common with Anna Karenina and The Maltese Falcon and even Winnie-the-Pooh. I suspect everyone could rate the poetry they most love on a scale of 1 to 10 depending on how far it is from prose.

True Confessions

Well, I really would love suggestions/ideas/challenges from those who know me and those who do not about what I should do now that my hideous but cosy job at IBM as a technical writer is a thing of the past. No pity! Just possibilities.

So in order to hopefully draw more people here, I'm going to post some things people don't know about me, following Deb's challenge. Don't know if it will be all that interesting, but here goes, in no special order:

1. I worked as an associate editor of pulp fiction magazines--first True Detective, then Stag Magazine. The latter was a sort of low-class Penthouse or Hustler. Our readership sent us letters from prison written in red crayon.... I also wrote confessions for romance magazines.

2. When I was 21, I met John Lennon, talked with him, he gave me a coconut. Also met Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, his then-wife Maureen, Phil Spector and others that same weekend. I still have the coconut.

3. When I was 28, I almost died of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

4. In the Seventies, John (later, my husband) and I worked on a Public Access TV show in NYC. It was a talk show. The talk show host interviewed his guests while he was tripping out on acid.

5. I won first prize for fifth-grade girls in the city of Yonkers for my science project. I think it was 1960. My mother told me not to talk about it because my brother hadn't won for his. The project tested variables in method for baking muffins as to illustrate the scientific method.

6. As a teen, I worked in doctors' offices. It was our job to open the mail. We stole the sample diet pills, spent the summer speeding...

7. I was in high school when M.L. King was killed. I took up a collection to send to the striking sanitation workers he was supportiing when they shot him.

8. Which reminds me. I was class Idealist and class Dove in my high school yearbook, categories invented for me.

9. There was nearly 300 points difference in my verbal and math SAT scores. Guess which was higher.

10. In kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, I was considered very cute, selected to appear in cute newspaper pictures of first graders doing cute things, and so forth. In second grade, they cut off my long red braids, I got braces and glasses. End of story.

11. I have been fired um, numerous times (including from Sears for not wearing a slip under either of the two skirts I owned), laid off numerous times. Dear Reb, I always cry.

12. Except for crying, everything from this list relates to my life before I was thirty.

Good News, Bad News/Ends and Beginnings

First the good news: I am in San Luis Obispo for my son's graduation from Cal Poly. Actually, the graduation was this morning, at 9:00. We were way early in order to get a good seat for my 86-year-old mother-in-law who has a bum knee. The fog was in, and I sat there in my cool little black linen dress and bare legs and pretty but useless green shrug and just froze. Some time around 9:45, the fog burned off and instantly it was warm as toast. As a consequence, I'm now sporting a pretty good sunburn. Who thinks about sunscreen when you're freezing.

The graduation was in two parts, the first, what I call the Moonie graduation, where they make speeches and then they confer a degree on the masses, the second at the individual colleges, like my son's for Electrical Engineering, where they call the students individually and give them a paper. It's not actually a diploma. It says "Congratulations on participating in commencement exercises." Many, my son included, still have a teensy bit to go, despite having "walked." But it was a milestone nonetheless, a happy occasion, one he has worked hard to make happen. And we are confident that the real degree will happen.

Afterwards, we toasted champagne with him and his friends at his place and tonight we'll all go to dinner. I could go on, say more, though possibly I should say less. My son is a musician as well as a engineer geek, and his friends, many of them musicians, are great kids, embarking on their lives in so many different ways....

The bad news happened last Thursday, to me. Some of my closest friends know, but many do not. On Thursday morning, while my mother-in-law, staying in our home, was congratulating us on how well life is going for us, I was laid off from my technical writing job at IBM. It's true I never really liked the job, that I was incredibly stressed, and often complained about it. But it really was our bread and butter--John's photography business was just the dessert. Now we have to reevaluate, make decisions.

It seems that rationally there is no way for us to proceed with the house stuff we were hoping to do--the dry rot work, replacing the rotten deck, and so forth. It also seems that I cannot rationally contemplate starting a literary magazine now. It would be like pouring money into a hole, wouldn't it?

I want to brainstorm and really think about what to make of my life at this point. We had, since my dad died last Fall, gotten out of debt for the first time in our lives, and I'm terrified to get back in debt. I've never had an easy time spending money on myself, but enjoy being free enough to be generous. After the graduation, I went out and bought one of those party platters of meat and cheese and another of cookies, also soda, melon and grapes--and there was the champagne, of course--for the whole crowd. I realized, as I took out my plastic, that I better not do this sort of thing too often now. (Of course, your only child doesn't graduate every day.)

Sorry this post is so personal, maybe not appropriate for a group blog. But I wanted to be open about it because I welcome suggestions from people. I want to hear ideas, however crazy. Maybe I'll just get another job and nothing will have changed and I will continue doing my poetry in my other life. Maybe, though, this is an opportunity to put it all together. On the other hand, maybe I should chuck it all and go live in Paris (just kidding--I think). Or should I go back to school?

So if you have a suggestion, even if it's nuts, let me hear it. I am not good at this change stuff, but I'm trying.

Raging Pit

Yes, folks, the resemblance is striking, isn't it? If only I had red hair, we could be twins, Sylvia and I. Actually when I took this quiz, it was a close call. I was almost the love child of Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens, and that's probably not a bad description of my poetry.


You are Sylvia Plath. People think you are sweet
and pretty, but inside you are raging pit of
ambition and despair. Darkness is your friend,
and you would do well to avoid being alone.

Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

SWEET TO BURN wins Lambda prize!

Announcement: Beverly Burch's Sweet to Burn, which won the Gival Poetry Prize for 2004, has just won the Lambda Literary Foundation prize for 2005.

Congratulations Beverly!

Stravinsky and the Right Note

A few years ago Dustin Hoffman gave a moving speech when he accepted a Golden Globes lifetime achievement award, and it stuck with me. He talked about an interview he’d seen with Igor Stravinsky, and the interviewer asked Stravinsky what the most satisfying aspect was of being a composer. Was it when he finished a great piece like Le Sacre du Printemps? Was it when he was on stage conducting it? Was it when he heard the applause or received an award? Stravinsky kept answering no, no, no, and finally said that the moment he lived for was the moment when he’d been struggling with a particular passage and suddenly found the right note.

It’s a good insight, I think, into the life of an artist, and Hoffman went on to talk about an actor’s struggle to find the right note for a performance, just the right inflection for a word or phrase. Of course poets are all too familiar with the frustrating struggle to find the right word.

Anyway, this all comes to mind right now because I’m getting ready to send the final final version of my manuscript (the final revision of the galleys) to the publisher before the book is printed, and I’ve become obsessed with one line in one poem that just doesn’t feel right. It’s driving me crazy! I keep coming up with one version after another, some of them radically different from one another. I guess I could post a dozen versions here and have people vote on their favorite, but no, I think I’ll drop that idea before it catches on.

The hard part is figuring out how to forget the poem. I figure if I could just read each version as if it were the first time in my life I was reading the poem, I’d know what to do. But when it’s really the thousandth time I’m reading the poem, that’s not so easy. I find myself printing out the maddening page and taking it for a walk around the block. I very carefully don’t look at it and try not to think about it, and then after I’ve walked for a while I sneak a quick glance—hoping to catch that precious glimpse of how it would look if I’d never seen it before. I’m praying I have “a Stravinsky moment” before the printer's deadline!

Cattiness, and the Dog-Eat-Dog World of Poetry

No, I don't think the poetry world is exceptionally nasty, yet the animal metaphor serves well as an entry into the subject of competition. Following the concepts that writing is a way of thinking and that the nature of the blogosphere is one of immediacy, I don't have this all figured out but I'm working on it as I go along.

Here in San Francisco, on Highway 1, on bluffs overlooking the Pacific, there's a dog and dog-walker's paradise called Fort Funston. Despite the posted warnings that it is a leash-only area, thousands of dogs a weekend come and go along the paths and shrubs and dunes unleashed, following (loosely) their masters, running after balls and other toys, and sniffing each other's butts in friendly greeting, as dogs will do. Many of these same creatures, walking leashed down the sidewalk with their masters, will snarl, bare their teeth, even attack another dog. (My dog only picks on the ones who are smaller than she is, heh heh.) I think the reason behind this is an animal's territorial nature, its need to guard itself and its master from encroachment or perceived danger on the sidewalk. However, free to run from threat and surrounded by miles of space, mastiffs mingle with mutts, pit bulls are rarely pugnacious, and wagging tails are the rule.

What does this have to do with the world of Poetry? Bear with me. As many of us have experienced, success in the business world is as often a matter of who you know and connections, in general, and being in the right place at the right time, as how hard you work and how good you are at doing your job. The smaller and more competitive the world--the high tech situation today, for instance, compared with that of the late 90s--the more those things factor in. Believe me: I am in an enviable job situation while people I know who are far more talented than I have been out of work for years, including people who interviewed me for my job.( Yet no one sends me hate mail.)

In Poetry, where many of the big rewards (I'm not talkiing personal satisfaction now; that is another thing entirely) come in $35/page increments--or two free copies--where, as others in the blogosphere have noted, no one, in the world at large is going to know you even if you win a Macarthur or Pullitzer, and where you will have a hard time all your life explaining to your own family what you do, let alone why you do it, we're all mountain goats, struggling for a foothold on the hill. And we don't want to admit the Facts of Life and Luck here. We don't want to allow that sometimes luck or who you know, or simply knowing how to play by the rules can help or hinder an individual poet's case. And I'm not even talking about sleeping with the contest judge! Let's exaggerate the situation: Suppose you wrote exquisite poetry, were master of both form and content, could assimilate tradition and yet be avant the rest of the garde--and yet you wrote in pencil, in longhand, on onion skin erasable paper and never included an SASE. Believe me, you'd have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting anyone to publish you. Yet when someone wins a competition, even one we did not enter, how easy it is to forget that aside from being a good writer, that person played by the rules. In the latter case, they actually entered. Is that so terrible? Yet sites like Foetry play up tenuous connections, as if all of us should have been born, instead of from the sex act, of immaculate conception and a virgin birth. What I'm trying to say is that the contest mentality, or the intense competition in general for the small (worldly) rewards of poetry is, in my mind, why this happens. If there were room for more of us--or, actually, if there were the perception that there is room for all of us ( because really, my "success" doesn't diminish the chances of your success, does it?) would we be all wagging our tails happily?

Speaking of perception, the ease of connection and communication is, I think, also a factor increasing our sense of competition. I personally think that the Internet is a good thing--because in the past, a nobody like me wouldn't have stood the chance of publishing in the same magazine as T.S. Eliot, let alone maybe communicating with him (if he were alive, that is) or even studying with him. In the past, poets expected to commune only with their typewriters and communicate by mail--and sometimes it worked, but there were many fewer places at the table then. So now, if my right hand and your left hand conflict for space, we can at least be thankful that we are there to sup.

This post is not meant as an excuse for nastiness, not at all. Neither is it a thought-out theory of what we should write or whether poetry matters. We should write our poems. And it does.

Bly Reading

At Robert Bly’s reading last Sunday, he read his own poems from My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy and translations from The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations.

When I listen to Bly, it’s hard not to think of him as a “performance poet.” He frequently interrupts himself to comment on his own poems. Bly probably would not appreciate being compared to Eliot, but his comments almost become part of his poems, like Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land. Bly’s image of a hunchback in an Italian piazza is more interesting when he tells you it’s not some “archetypal hunchback” but the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. When Bly refers to Kierkegaard’s concept of ressentiment, it’s interesting when he explains the concept. I can fantasize a transcription of Bly’s reading that would incorporate his commentary into the poems and create whole new poems—almost postmodern!

It’s also hard not to think of shadows when you think of Bly. For better and worse, he has spent his life trying to bring more darkness into American poetry. The reasons it’s for worse are obvious: we’ve all read too many poems about dark cornfields, dark factories, and the dark pot roasts of Minneapolis.

But the reasons it’s for better are important. I still find Bly’s best poems original and arresting: “God crouches at night over a single pistachio.” Although he’s been writing poems for fifty years, it may be too early to judge his work. James Hillman talked about shadows in his book Inter Views:

I am trying to say that your shadow is your virtue, and that is what love is mostly about. And that’s what remains—if anything has to remain—after a person’s dead. His faults, his unbearable qualities, or hers, become clarified, and you remember them as virtues. They stand out sharp and clear, like essences. It’s amazing how the very thing you couldn’t bear in your mother or father, in your wife or husband—they die, and then the rubies show right in the shadow.”

Isn’t this true of poets too? Whitman’s poems are full of flaws. Do we wish he had gone to a workshop and turned his “barbaric yawp” into a polished gem? His weaknesses are inseparable from his strengths. Williams went too far in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” Plath went too far in “Daddy,” and Shakespeare went too far in Hamlet. (Do we really need all that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stuff? It’s four hours long, for God’s sake!) Do we really wish an editor had whipped these poets into shape? If you edit out of your poems all the elements that are vulnerable to parody, you’ll take the life out of them.

OK, I can see I’ve gone off topic and gone into rant mode. Whatever you think of Bly, I think he’s encouraged poets to embrace the weirdest aspects of their eccentric visions (as Blake did), rather than cutting their poems to fit any fashion, and I’ll be forever grateful to him for that.

Jackson Pollock vs. Andy Warhol

Wow, one would almost think Ron Silliman had read my dig at Andy Warhol in my last post from reading his latest: “any history of American painting of the last century that doesn’t put Warhol on the same plane ultimately with Pollock isn’t credible.” Silliman is responding to a questionnaire, and his answers are an interesting summary of “post-avant” thought.

The best art in any medium is that which expands our understanding of the possibilities of the medium itself. … A poet who directly understands & confronts his or her medium has an opportunity to address questions such as truth. One who uses language instrumentally, as a second-order mechanism to get at some “truths” that lie elsewhere is not only a bad writer, but a dishonest one.

I realize this sort of thinking is pretty standard, but it still amazes me. Can anyone really believe that when Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” or Dickinson wrote “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” or Joyce wrote Ulysses or Creeley wrote “I Know a Man,” they were not trying to get at some truths that lay “elsewhere”—outside of language? Weren’t some of the best and most experimental artists of the last century (e.g., John Cage) trying to get at truths that lay “elsewhere” (e.g., a non-Western, Buddhist vision)?

I’d say that Ron Silliman’s own best work gets at truths that lay elsewhere too, which I think just means that, like a lot of great artists (e.g., Ezra Pound), his best work violates his own principles. In getting at truths that lie elsewhere, I think of course the best writers do expand the possibilities of language, but it’s only because they’re trying to get at truths that lie elsewhere that the expansion is genuine, not gimmickry.

Are You an Individual or a Citizen?

I went to a reading by Robert Bly last night in Marin. It must be 25 years since I heard him read with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and others in San Francisco. While I want to write more about the reading later, though, at the moment I'm thinking about an interesting recent post on Josh Corey’s blog:

The real conflict between poetry partisans may not be between mainstream and post-avant but between those who see poetry as a preserve of individual spiritual autonomy and those who see it as an intervention into particular historical and political circumstances. Do you primarily address, do you primarily read as, an individual or a citizen? … My own allegiances are split and confused; I'm caught up in what I suspect is a generational project to synthesize the public and private.

That formulation of “the real conflict” makes sense to me, and maybe his formulation of “a generational project” is right too. I think I’m of a different generation, though, and don’t mind saying I see poetry “as a preserve of individual spiritual autonomy,” and even that protecting that preserve may be the most important political act one can take. But perhaps my generation is overly concerned that writing as a “citizen” tends to lead either to social(ist) realism or to the pyrotechnic ironies of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of Mao.

Corey concludes by criticizing those who are neither “poets of experience” nor “visionary poets,” but merely “middlebrow poets with a passive relation to the structures that helped produce them.” I am a bit skeptical of that formulation, as I don’t know anyone who’d admit to being a middlebrow poet and I’m not sure what the term means other than “poets who don’t write very good poems.” To me the definition seems to reflect an excessive faith in the intellect, as if mediocre poets could bootstrap their way into excellence if only they’d undertake the tough intellectual work of adopting a more active “relation to the structures that helped produce them.” But then much of postmodernism may reflect an excessive faith in the intellect (just as “postromanticism” may reflect an excessive faith in the heart)!

What It Is--Continuing the Conversation

After my reading last Thursday, Scott, Robert and I went on about Poetry (that's a surprise!) over a few beers. Later, we went out separate ways and continued it into email. The following are the highlights:


from Scott...

D,

Yeah, I do want to continue the conversation.

I think a poem must have something of the heart in it. Poetry is about emotion
-- for me. Maybe not for you.

I'll look into the blog when I get time. Not now. Trying to pack for Mendocino
with N.

.....
Nice seeing you guys last night after the reading.

Hope you're not mad at me for coming in and "crashing" after you'd read. I had
my class up until 8. I did bring two students though.

from Diane...

Scott-

Well, I want to try and describe what I think fully, not sum it. Since I don't know what I think fully, that's going to be hard. So for now let me say that I think the heart is the side effect. Something like Emily's directive to tell it slant.

Dean Young says:

Poetry's primary and perhaps only obligation is, through the manipulation of its materials, to express and discover forms of liberty, thereby maintaining the spirit through constantly renewed meanings.

A.F. Moritz says:

Poetry is unavoidably the verbal art of independence and refinement. Refinement is essentially vigor. Its opposite is the simulated vigor of cliches, which are forms of conformity, a stereotyping of attitude and behavior, a removal of suppleness by continual production of copies ever more remote and crude. Refinement is suppleness: closeness of the palpable form to the living pith of experience and its movement.

I like these statements and essentially agree with them. More (maybe) later when I can synthesize some of this and talk about it.

from Robert...

Hey, folks, here are a couple quotes that I like. The first is from James Tate's introduction to the Best American Poetry he edited:

“What we want from poetry is to be moved, to be moved from where we now stand. We don’t just want to have our ideas or emotions confirmed. Or if we do, then we turn to lesser poems, poems that tell you killing children is bad, chopping down the rainforest is bad, dying is sad. A good poet would agree with all of those sentiments, but would also strive for an understanding beyond those givens.

“The poet arrives at his or her discovery by setting language on edge or creating metaphors that suggest dangerous ideas, or any number of other methods. The point is, language can be hazardous as it is our primary grip on the world. When language is skewed, the world is viewed differently. But this is only effective if the reader can recognize this view, even though it is the first time he or she has experienced the thought.”

I think Tate's emphasis on "skewing" encourages experimental writing, but his last sentence (“only effective if the reader can recognize this view”) warns against the excesses of experimental writing. Anyway, I especially like this from Charles Simic’s introduction to his BAP:

“Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of anything doesn’t work. Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of realty is being written.”

from Diane...

I like these. I think what the Tate quote emphasizes for me is that whether
you use "setting language on edge" or "creating metaphors" or whatever,
those means have to work.

I like the Simic quote as well. I may put all these quotes into a blog
post-(is that okay?)

more from Diane...

I guess my only point, if I have one left, is that I think it's important post-Modernism or Post Modernism, that poems make the language new (in the way Dean Young says in that quote) and that I think the avant garde or some of them or pieces of the avant garde do serve to help renew things if only by stirring things up--that I don't want to be reading the bland kind of poetry that gets its whole impact from the truth of the feelings within (because, as I've said before, I distrust that, there being noble or moving feelings everywhere from Hallmark on out) and because I want poetry to do what it can do that prose can't.


from Robert...

I'm feeling a sort of love-hate thing about blogs. I've gotten addicted to reading them, but at the same time I'm tired of reading about all the poetry wars. Part of me just wants to go to a cabin in the woods with no computer and write poems for a year or two. Not that I'd really do that.

Harry Potter vs. Grand Theft Auto

Interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker on Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You, about how pop culture is raising people’s IQ. Gladwell quotes Johnson’s only-half-joking contrast of books with video games:

Isn’t the extraordinary success of the “Harry Potter” novels better news for the culture than the equivalent success of “Grand Theft Auto III”? Johnson’s response is to imagine what cultural critics might have said had video games been invented hundreds of years ago, and only recently had something called the book been marketed aggressively to children:

“Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. …

“Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. …

“But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. … This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.”

An Evening with Anne Carson at the Herbst

Because Ilya Kaminsky couldn't make it and gave his ticket to Robert Thomas, and Robert couldn't make it and gave his ticket to me, I got to see/hear Anne Carson at the Herbst Theatre last night, in conversation with Wendy Lesser from THREEPENNY REVIEW. It was quite an experience, and I'm glad I went, despite having had to rush there from my workout without dinner and with only a cold shower (the hot water boiler had broken at the YMCA). It was not sold out, which really surprised me, and it seemed evident that the audience was made up of people quite familiar with Carson or Lesser or both.

After a brief introduction by Lesser, Carson and a group of four others performed something she called an oratorio. Appearing and disappearing behind a series of window frames, Carson and her group recited and sometimes sang. The piece, she explained later, had been written for a symposium on Gertrude Stein organized by Susan Sontag. Because it was written around the time the government went to war on Iraq, the emphasis of the piece was on guns. And that's about all I feel equipped to say about it, that it was "after" Gertrude Stein and about guns, and that it made use of the song The Lonesome Pine, a favorite of Stein's. I definitely enjoyed it, but I can't really describe it.

Following the performance, Carson and Lesser sat in armchairs and proceeded with the interview portion of the program. Carson seemed very low key and, while sure of herself and confident, she was not at all brash or arrogant. She talked about how she came to be a classical scholar: She came upon a bilingual edition of Sappho in an ordinary bookstore and became fascinated with the Greek side and then was lucky enough to have a high school teacher who taught her Greek. She discussed how she thought about her writing: in almost a painterly fashion; she would dab here and dab there and then look at the overall effect of what was on the page. She didn't put on airs. While Wendy Lesser, in her questions, showed herself to be intellectual and wide-ranging and profound, Carson's answers were for the most part simple, unpretentious, and straightforward.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a great deal of what was said. Questions and answers, both, were very interesting. What music did Carson listen to? Whatever her friends gave her. She would listen to a CD exclusively for about twenty days and then never listen to it again. She seemed to reject a comparison to John Cage, said she does not make her choices by chance, but artfully. That said, she doesn't define the reader's experience for them. She talked about how Greek drama is not character based, that the characters are masked and not allowed to change, but that the drama is pure action, and that it is that way because the ancient Greeks truly believed in destiny in a way that we do not and cannot.

At the end of the evening, Lesser handed one of Anne Carson's books to her and said that Sidney suggested she read the short portion the book was opened to. As luck would have it, I have the book they used (PLAINWATER, Essays and Poetry) so I can record what she read. It is an Introduction from the section called "Short Talks":

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called "audacity," which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is a task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Shameful Memories

Paul Guest must be approaching some record with 77 comments so far on his blog on guilty pleasures. It’s not exactly a guilty pleasure, but I was reminded of one of my own shameful memories. I am old enough that in 1967 I was a teenager attending the legendary Monterey Pop Festival. One of my biggest regrets in life, and one of the stupidest things I ever did, was missing the Janis Joplin performance. I saw Laura Nyro and Hugh Masakela, for God’s sake, but I missed Janis Joplin! That’s not the shameful part, though. The shameful memory is that I was one of those people in the audience—and there were lots of us even though no one wants to admit it now—who thought Jimi Hendrix sucked. Yes, I thought Jimi Hendrix doing “Wild Thing” was just a mess of noise and I wanted him hauled off the stage so we could get to the Mamas and the Papas. What can I say? I was young and foolish.

That’s a perfect example, I think, of why one needs to be careful about rejecting experimental poetry as “just noise.” Almost anything original is just noise the first time you hear it, whether it’s Jimi Hendrix or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Almost anything original has no emotional meaning the first time you hear it, but someday Mahler or Coltrane may bring tears to your eyes. Anyway, I’m interested in the shameful memories people have of gross aesthetic misjudgments they have made.

The Double Life of Veronique

An interesting discussion on The Great American Pinup about Charles Wright quotes Wright on his own poetry: “My subject (language, landscape, and the idea of God) is not of much interest now. But it will be again.” This interests me because I’ve heard a couple poets say they’ve felt an unusual urge lately to write about God or “metaphysics” (whether or not—most likely not!—they believe in God). It also interests me because current events have certainly brought home in a violent way how important, for better or worse, religion and “the idea of God” still are in the world.

It seems to me there are two currents of “avant garde” poetry: one very accessible that has its roots in poets like Whitman, and one very difficult, almost inaccessible. But both currents often share a progressive political perspective that is deeply skeptical of religion and its destructive impact on people’s lives.

One thing that strikes me is how different this perspective is from the perspective I often associate with Eastern Europe. OK, I’m thinking about this because last night Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique was on cable TV so I watched it again, and I also recently re-viewed the film of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Both these artists are often thought of as exemplars of postmodern experimentation, yet their work embodies values that I think can only be described with words like “mystery” and “soul” and “inner life”—just the values that seem to be dismissed by the good old U.S.A. avant garde as bourgeois nostalgia.

If there is one word that every reviewer uses in describing Kieslowski’s films, for example, it is “poetic,” e.g., Caryn James: “Veronique is poetic in the truest sense, … suggests mysterious connections of personality and emotion ….” “Poetic” seems to be a metaphor for all the qualities (personality, emotion, etc. ) that are just what the “avant garde” want to purge from poetry. And maybe they are right to want to purge mystery and dream from poetry because, well, what are those qualities but “the opium of the people”?

I’m sure many people turn to poetry because of how intensely they value their “inner life.” I’m not sure that being “religious” means anything other than valuing one’s inner life, whether or not one believes in any god. But when you put on one side of a balance all the nuances of your inner life (ah, how the wild iris at Point Reyes makes me reflect), and on the other side all the suffering in the world, it seems like the most self-indulgent soap opera imaginable to pay attention to your inner life, unless you somehow equate it with “God.” God falls like lead on the scales. Anyway, that’s what I’m wondering about: whether all the artistic arguments over poetry are really religious arguments (just like all the political arguments).

But I promised myself I would never post a message over 500 words long so I’m shutting up!

Post-Retreat Post (back from Sea Ranch)

This morning, second day back from the retreat at Sea Ranch, where Robert, Beverly, Nancy, David, Zack, Jeanne, Scott, and I spent two days reciting poems by heart, writing, reading, and talking about poetry... yet not entirely back, so reading Robert Hass's Twentieth Century Pleasures on my way in to work on BART (reading it for something like the nineteenth time), trying to stave off reality and bring the poem-making mind with me as close as possible to where the elevator doors would close on me on Market Street. Hass's tone is so intimate, so much on the level with the reader, that it was easy for me to imagine him there with us, talking about poems as we stared out the picture windows at the fuzzy-antlered adolescent deer, the trio of hares in the tall grasses studded with iris, and beyond the meadows to the metallic and un-pacific Pacific beating below the bluffs.

In the first essay, the one on Lowell, Hass says, "I heard, and it was the incantatory power of the poems that moved me. Enchantment, literally," and then not much later, "You can analyze the music of poetry but it's difficult to conduct an argument about its value...." He says a lot more--each paragraph has a phrase I've underlined or checked--and I could fill this post easily with nothing more than quotes from him. But I was thinking about that last statement, and I realized that we constantly try to do that all during the retreat, argue about a poem's value. Is such-and-such a good poem? How would we make it better? Or is it simply trash?

Well, it's fun to, let's say, workshop Elizabeth Bishop when she can't defend herself, and there's nothing wrong with discriminating among poets and poems--if this vintage has a nose of blackberry and chocolate and that one has a nose of wet dog, why can't we do the same with a Dean Young or Gillian Connolly? But you can argue until you're blue in the face if "it's gotten into the blood" or it hasn't. You're not going to change any minds/hearts with close reading.

It bothers me, though, when we descend into typing and prescription. None of us writes in a "school." We write a poem. I don't know about you, but I'm not writing what I wrote yesterday, let alone what I wrote ten years ago. So when someone says, "Poetry is all about XXXX or XXXXX..." or "You can't write that..." I bristle. I know that Eliot's contemporaries condemned his writing. Hell, they did that with Whitman. Man that guy was weird, they thought.

I guess what I'm trying to say is you can't like everything, but it can't hurt to have all different kinds of poetry in this world, fraternizing with each other and cross pollinating and whatnot. You can never tell what will get into your blood, in the long run.

If this is sounding awfully sermon-like for a blog post, forgive me. (Post a comment and let me know what an ass I am.)

What a wonderful weekend it was, maybe, for me, the best retreat ever ('cause man did I need it!), and we've been doing this for maybe eight (more?) years--even if I ate too much and wrote too little, if I never got time to do yoga and didn't get all the way down to the beach. I missed husband and pooch, but it was still wonderful. And by the way, I found my lost copy of Poetry magazine.

Essential Reading?

Ron Silliman has an interesting piece on his blog this morning about Peter Davis’ Poet’s Bookshelf, an anthology of various poets’ lists of “5-10 books that have been most ‘essential’ to you, as a poet.” Silliman says the 13 living poets listed most often on other poets’ “essential” lists are John Ashbery, Edward Field, Charles Simic, James Tate, Louise Glück, W.S. Merwin, Carolyn Forché, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Galway Kinnell, Michael Ondaatje, and himself.

Personally I’m rather happily surprised to see Michael Ondaatje on the list, and if there’s one poet I’m surprised to see not on the list, I guess it would be Anne Carson, but of course there are plenty of others (Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich) whose absence is noticeable. Anyway, Silliman makes this interesting observation:

“This actually points to a curious phenomenon that pops up in the book—one that I suspect is ‘real,’ i.e. true of a broader spectrum of poet/readers than one can find in this book. SoQ poets are often apt to include one–sometimes more—post-avant types in their reading lists of ‘essential books.’ But post-avant poets virtually never list SoQ poets in theirs.

“That can be interpreted variously, all the way from ‘SoQ poets are forced to concede that post-avant writing includes some of the most compelling poetry composed in the past century’ to ‘post-avant poets are far more cliquish & closed-off to a wide range of writing than are SoQ folks.’ But what if the real answer is more both/and rather than either/or?”

Not surprisingly, I tend toward the “far more cliquish” interpretation, although certainly both may be true. But can it also be true that “post-avant” poets are blind to the power of the poetry of Merwin, of Glück, of Kinnell? Or perhaps they just don’t want to call them “essential.”

Haiku Cont'd / Haiku Quiz

A couple of years ago my friend Zack and I were arguing about poetics, and he quoted a haiku by Buson as an example of the kind of poetry he likes:

The lights are going out
in the doll shops—
spring rain.

In return, I quoted a haiku by Basho as an example of the kind of poetry I like:

The morning glory also
turns out
not to be my friend.

I’m not sure if this is an argument between the poetics of Basho and the poetics of Buson or not—I suspect not—but it made me think that you can determine a person’s poetics on the basis of what haiku they like and dislike, and in that spirit I offer the following quiz. (To keep it simple, all the poems are taken from The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.)

Match the school of poetics with the appropriate haiku:

A) Postmodern
B) Post-postmodern
C) Neo-Formalist
D) Confessional
E) Post-Confessional
F) Neo-narrative
G) Neo-romantic
H) Beat
I) Deep Image
J) New York

1)

A snowy morning—
by myself,
chewing on dried salmon.

2)

A cold rain starting
and no hat—
so?

3)

Year after year
on the monkey’s face
a monkey face.

4)

Just say the word “cherry”
and it storms down the mountain,
the autumn wind.

5)

A flying squirrel
chewing on a bird
in the withered fields.

6)

Naked
on a naked horse
in pouring rain!

7)

These sea slugs,
they just don’t seem
Japanese.

8)

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich.
is not art.

9)

The withered fields—
“Once upon a time, deep in the forest,
lived an old witch …”

10)

Even as
my father lay dying,
I went on farting.

Searching for Lost Haiku

The one thing that made me want to be a poet when I was growing up was a high school teacher reciting this haiku by Buson:

In the bedroom, stepping
on my dead wife’s comb:
the sudden cold.

That’s Robert Hass’s translation, but I swear the version I heard as a teenager said nothing about a dead wife. In fact what made chills go up my spine was precisely that it made me feel the grief without mentioning her. The way I remember the haiku—which I’m sure is inaccurate—is more like this:

Sweeping the bedroom,
I find an ivory comb
on the wooden floor.

Of course I didn’t realize it then, but this is a famous haiku and you can find translations of it all over the place, but all the translations I’ve seen mention a dead woman. I would love to find the version I first heard, the one that changed my life.

The different translations, of course, bring up the question of how much to say and how much to leave out in a poem. I’m pretty sure the haiku meant nothing to most of the kids in my class, but it might have meant something to them if it had made clear the woman’s death. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that increase in clarity would have reduced the electrical charge the poem sent through me. Poems seem to need to leave gaps for sparks to leap across in the reader’s mind. Or does the translation need to mention the woman? What would the ideal translation of this poem be?

Poetry Against Poetry During National Poetry Month Is a Great Idea

Edward Albee a great playwright and astute thinker about the game of life believes that one should never do praxis. Praxis is the expected, even a right turn off of expectation is still praxis. Art is not meant to fulfill praxis...as it has already been filled by expectation. Art that surprises and opens even contradicts itself (as Whitman might add) seems very much the point of Art. So posting poems against poetry in national Poetry Month has that slightly creepy, very humorous, and intellectual quality of mis-direction in its purpose. It is contrary to praxis. Argument increases the value of its subject...like an economics of ideas. The market value of a debated idea is greater than one accepted blindly or ignored entirely. Poems against poetry are good for poetry. And I am all for that. Now what would be nice is a posting of poems against poems against poetry.

At Slate Pinsky submits poems against poetry to the public...