Then We Were Ten

Yesterday was our workshop's monthly meeting. The group now numbers ten, and guess what, yesterday ten people showed up! We met at a home in Kensington, and we were all glad (especially me) to see the sun. That may have been the only thing we all agreed on. Well, we also agreed that it was exhausting and overwhelming to workshop ten poems (many of them long) in one afternoon. We timed it, but we could not keep to our timing. We took short breaks, then sat down quickly. I kept on hoping for haiku.

Various people had been talking about trying to improve or retool our meetings so that we all saw the big picture instead of concentrating on this word or that line break. There were a few attempts at going big picture and some dismal failures, such as when my own poem was hijacked by someone's interpretation and everyone got on that plane. Grrr. Mostly (I thought) there wasn't time to do big anything. If each of us spoke for one minute, the total time for that poem would be two-thirds gone.

It was disconcerting to some that that there was so little agreement--and yet--I thought of Little Emerson. As many know, the editors of Little Emerson have yet to agree on one submission. With that in mind, is it so strange that some of our number should think this line is perfect while others think it is too much, some see satire where others see stereotype, some like seeing the bones of the thought process and others are horrified that is "non-organic"?

Meantime, Robert said, "I know this sounds hopelessly corny, but I really don't think people ever learn anything unless they feel loved (for lack of a better word) by the person they're learning from." I think this is an interesting theory... I personally wish that we could separate our feelings (about each other?) from our thoughts about the poems. I know I am fiercely competitive, have an ugly, ugly green streak of envy. I hope to improve, some day, to be more detached....

Poems Talking to Themselves

A lot of people talk about music as conversation—the “argument” between the piano and the violin, the “dialogue” between the saxophone and the bass—and I think poems are the same. In some sense every poem seems to be in a conversation with itself, like the old ballads:

Oh where have ye been, Lord Randall my son? …
I’ve been to the wild wood: mother, make my bed soon

Even poems like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

or Basho’s haiku:

The leeks newly washed white—
how cold it is!

seem like dialogues, the second lines a response to the first. And I think we judge poems on whether the responses seem adequate, like we judge people. If someone is sad, it may be an adequate response to say, “Bummer—let’s go out for Thai food,” but if they’re suicidal, it’s not.

Conversations often drift, and we enjoy the drift, but part of being a good listener is also remembering where they drifted from. It’s like a session between Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi. Remember when he tells her he wishes he could live a carefree life like “the Happy Wanderer” and, when they’re talking about something very different weeks later, she nails him by reminding him of the Happy Wanderer and he asks, “How do you remember that shit?”

That remembering is one thing that makes a good listener, and also what makes a good poem. The last line of a poem has to remember the first. Chekhov said, “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.” The play can’t forget the gun. In a poem the effect is usually subtler, but the idea is the same. Pound’s “petals on a wet, black bough” remember the faces in the Metro.

If poems are conversations, different parts of the mind talking to one another, then what makes a poem great is our sense that the different parts are really listening to one another as well as talking, the way the musicians in a great jazz ensemble listen to one another when they play. When Robert Hass in “Meditation at Lagunitas” talks about the woodpecker “probing the dead trunk,” it’s a response to the comment that opens the conversation: “All the new thinking is about loss.” The “woman I made love to” responds to the idea that “everything dissolves,” and the “little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed” respond to the idea that “a word is elegy.”

A lot of poems are full of great images like “the little orange-silver fish” but the images don’t speak to one another. What makes “Meditation at Lagunitas” great is our sense of how closely the lines listen to one another and, like friends, remember what’s been said in the ongoing conversation, that “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” is a genuine response to the sense of loss that began the poem.

Beauty by Mistake

I’ve been rereading Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and was struck by one passage. Franz and Sabina are comparing European and American ideas of beauty, in particular the beauty of European cities and the beauty of New York, and Sabina says: “Unintentional beauty. Yes. Another way of putting it might be ‘beauty by mistake.’ Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake.”

Probably the cool thing for me to say at this point is that I like “beauty by mistake,” but I think the truth is I like what Franz likes in Unbearable Lightness—what he calls “premeditated” beauty. The first section of my new book is called “Engulfed Cathedral” after Debussy’s prelude. I probably love more than anything the sort of heartbreaking beauty I find in some classical music and nowhere else.

What does it mean that I can easily imagine finding a soul-mate who has no interest in poetry, but not one who has no love for classical music? It’s not that I don’t like rock and jazz. Someone who likes Chopin but not Elvis Presley or Fountains of Wayne would seem like a snobbish hypocrite, or at least a sad person who doesn’t know what they’re missing. But I can’t help feeling that someone who’s never really listened to Beethoven’s quartets is missing a depth and richness and complexity of feeling that I’m not sure can be found anywhere else.

The sound track for the film of Unbearable Lightness is the chamber music of the Czech composer Janacek, and the longest poem in my book is also about Janacek. Like a lot of people, I took piano lessons as a child. Sometimes it was exciting, sometimes torture, but a few years ago when I felt unable to write, I found myself going back to take piano lessons for a couple of years, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. It didn’t take long for me to realize how little talent I had, but that didn’t matter: it was so amazing to get inside the music, maybe a sonata by Janacek, the way you have to when you’re painstakingly struggling to work out the notes with your own hands.

I’m not sure why I’m thinking about this, except that it’s strange that music can mean so much to people. If I’m at a concert listening to Chopin, I could be sitting next to someone who loves the music as much as I do and we might not even know what to say to each other if we had dinner together. But if there’s one chord I particularly love that they love too, it feels for that moment as if we’re not only feeling the same emotion, but feeling an emotion that many people in the world may never have felt, as if we’re seeing a shade of green no one else has ever seen and that I don’t want to disappear from the earth.

Tuesday, Walking

Tuesday morning, out walking Greta, I discovered a lovely little park only a few blocks from my house. Yes, I have been living here almost 19 years, and yes, we always wished there was some place close by to take the pooch, especially if one only had time for a short walk and didn't want to jump in the car. (Our usual routine on weekday mornings is some version of a two-mile walk.) And yes, I feel dumb that it took me so long to go here. All one has to do is turn west on Grafton/Garfield at the bottom of my block and go a few short blocks to Victoria or Ramsell, and then go uphill. At the top there is a large garden of native plants, seating, views (well, if there's not fog), a large fenced-in community vegetable garden, an area where people apparently do Tai Chi and so on, and, behind a rock wall, a large running area where dogs can be off leash. I'm shaking my head in awe, still, a day later.

We are talking about process in our poetry group. We are not in crisis, but talking is good. As with my discovery of the little garden, one can be walking the same path for years and not see what is right under one's nose. Interestingly, it seems, a few people have come up with similar ideas to try, independent of the others. This is a good sign, I think, of our being able to work together, of being on the same page, as they say in corporate-speak. (Ideas include having someone other than the poet read the poem a second time, modeling the kind of criticism one would like to receive when one is talking about another's poem, bending over backwards to approach the poem on its own terms...)

Speaking of corporate-speak, I have an interview on Thursday--3 1/2 hours. I don't even know if I want the job. I'd love to be able to work in publishing with a garnish perhaps of academia (part-time college teaching). Oh well. we'll see. My dear sister was visiting last week and helped me buy a very convincing interview suit. That alone could get me a job.

d-

Toot Toot

I’m back from Gualala and the cats were happy to see us last night even if we weren’t so happy to be back from vacation. I read the wonderful opening “Combray” section of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and also Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and Ruth Rendell’s A Sight for Sore Eyes, and also managed a few walks along the bluffs overlooking the ocean. I was surprised that so many wildflowers were still in bloom! It made me think of the sometimes strained relationship between poetry and nature—maybe more on that later.

Meanwhile, my poem “Complaint of the Muse: Take This Job and Shove It” is featured on Slate today. They accepted it way back in February 2003, so I’m pretty excited to finally see it.

Also, big congratulations to C. Dale on having his new book accepted by Four Way Books, and congrats to us all that we’ll finally be able to read it!

Blogging in the Wee Hours

Warning: insomniac post!

Well, Robert and his wife are off in vacation mode, but I'm stuck in the fog. Today I had an excuse to go downtown, and it was blissfully sunny. You have no idea how much that can mean unless you are stuck in this relentless gray grayness day after day all summer. Wait! It did clear last Saturday, but that was almost wasted, for me, 'cause with John (and our car) around, I can go in any direction and join the sunny world. It's only here, within view (hah!) of the ocean that summer does not exist.

I had thought to go up to Napa for some of the winery readings, which are open to the public--C. Dale's or Brigit Kelley's. But the logistics were too complicated, and I decided not to. I'll probably regret it. But it would have meant rescheduling two appointments tomorrow and working all day from John's San Rafael studio--not a terrible idea, re the above, but I don't want to be in the way while he is working. Then we would probably want to eat someplace nice in Napa and that would dent our budget. And there was Greta (dog), who really likes poetry but doesn't like sitting in the car. All these excuses seem pretty lame as I type them, though, I admit.

Tomorrow I'm going to get my manuscript printed and off to Tupelo in time to make their July open submission deadline. Oh ye poets out there, wish me luck. Damn manuscript has been close but no cigar lotsa times...and then not even close more times, and really, it's just as good as a lot of 'em out there, but at this rate it's going to be published posthumously. Seriously, I really want to get beyond book one, I am beyond book one. Well, maybe this is it. When I gave my radio reading on J.P. Dancing Bear's show, he said (unprompted) that he thought he could see Tupelo publishing my work; it seemed to fit their line. (Those weren't his words, but his meaning. Do publishers have a "line"? I can't think, at 2:00 in the morning.)

Maybe I should attempt to get some sleep.

Temporary Ceasefire Declared in Poetry Wars

Cheryl and I are heading up the coast today for a week in Gualala, a town we consider heaven even though in Already Dead Denis Johnson says it was “once named among the California coast’s top ten ugliest communities.” I will probably be incommunicado for a while, and hopefully taking a break from the poetry wars. I suspect that poetic preferences are deeply rooted in one’s personal history in any case, and converting from post-avant to mainstream or vice-versa is about as likely as changing one’s sexual preference, no matter how politically correct it might be to be poetically bisexual.

Poetry Reading: Feature Film or TV Sitcom

I was very interested in Ron Silliman’s recent comments on the format of poetry readings: “the two recordings reminded me of one of the basic truths about poetry—the one-hour reading, or something relatively close to it, is always preferable to the 20-minute one. As an experience, the differences between the two are not unlike the differences between the major motion picture and a 30-minute sitcom on TV.” He also says, “With a longer reading, you can almost year the moment at which the audience relaxes into the text—it always occurs somewhere after the 15-minute mark, sometimes after the 30 .... At 40 minutes or thereabouts, I’m so tuned into a reader’s sense of time & the formal scope of the text that it is as if a vista opened up.”

I am really curious what people think about this (even though it’s a safe bet that Silliman would not want to listen to my poems for five minutes). What format do you like? I think it’s true that the 20-minute reading has become the “standard.” It’s hard for me even to know what I prefer because I’ve heard so few “long” readings recently. Tonight I’m looking forward to the annual blockbuster benefit for the Squaw Valley workshop—Lucille Clifton, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Kevin Young—but in this kind of setting, each poet will probably read for considerably less than 20 minutes.

I do think the typical short-reading format is almost more like a book review than a reading, in the sense that I don’t fully experience the poetry. I just get a taste of it, sometimes enough to know I’d like to read the poet’s book so I can really get into it. But usually I don’t get into it at the reading itself. As I’ve written some long poems recently, this interests me a lot. If I read my longest poem in full, it would probably take 40 minutes, and a couple others would take 20 or 30 minutes. Typically I read an excerpt from longer poems (they’re in sections that can be read independently), but it would certainly be “interesting” to do a reading of nothing but one 40-minute poem. I think Silliman may be right that an audience can’t really hear the poetry at a reading until they’re 15 or 30 minutes into it. What do you think?

Picasso and Matisse look at Pollock

It seems to be important for most of us to align ourselves one way or another for or against a kind of poem with, if not a narrative structure, at least some kind of semantic framework or, conversely, with the kind of poem termed Language or Avant Garde, where meaning is disbanded in favor of surprise, novelty, or texture. (Please forgive me if these descriptions are inadequate and feel free to correct my definitions.)

Often comparisons are made between poetry and music or poetry and the visual arts, as both these other fields have had their own controversies concerning what can loosely be termed abstraction. I thought it would be interesting to talk a little about Picasso and Matisse, both giants in the field of painting and both pioneers, in the early years of Modernism, in turning painting away from purely representational art. (I have done a lot of research on Picasso in recent years for a work on the women in Picasso's life.)

I find it interesting that although both Picasso and Matisse were abstract painters--Picasso and Bracque can be said to have invented Cubism, and Matisse had complicated theories about the language of color--neither Picasso nor Matisse was able to embrace abstract expressionism (for instance, the paintings of Jackson Pollock).

There is a discussion of each of their attitudes toward Pollock in Francoise Gilot's book Life With Picasso. Picasso and Matisse were rivals and sort of friends and often paid each other a visit. During one of these visits, Matisse pulled out a catalog containing reproductions of Pollock's paintings. Neither artist could stand Pollock's work, but for very different reasons.

Matisse pronounced himself incapable of understanding the work, "for the simple reason that one is always unable to judge fairly what follows one's own work... It's completely over my head." He related a story of Renoir's reaction to his own painting, when Matisse, in his youth, had approached Renoir. Renoir didn't like what he did but recognized that what he was doing was not inconsequential.

Picasso, however, dismissed Pollock's work out of hand. He said, "I'm against that sort of stuff... I think it is a mistake to let oneself go completely and lose oneself in the gesture... there's something in that which displeases me enormously... Whatever the source of the emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world."

I wanted to share this story because I think it is very telling--though I don't exactly know what it's telling. I think I'm more inclined to take Matisse's stance when it comes to Language poetry. (Though part of me does think that the Emperor has no clothes.)

After Reading Crush

I read Richard Siken’s Crush a couple days ago, and I was going to write a little review, but after reading Emily’s comments, I realized I was about to duplicate much of what she said, even (amazingly) down to her particular picks of great lines (“every time we kissed there was another apple / to slice into pieces”), not-so-great lines (“You will be alone always and then you will die”), and her choice of the poem “Saying Your Names” as the “greatest hit.”

So I thought I’d talk instead about something else. I absolutely agree with Louise Glück in her introduction to Crush when she says, “In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. The great task has been to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the inchoate, the chaotic.” She goes on to say (and I’m not sure I’d agree with this) that “Crush is the best example I can presently give of profound wildness that is also completely intelligible.” She compares Crush to Plath’s Ariel in its urgency and obsession.

Crush is a reminder that while there are thousands of Plath imitators, no one has really taken her place. I think there’s a longing for poetry of her urgency and obsession, and Siken has tapped into it whether or not his poems are at the level of Ariel (whose are?).

Seriously, if you want to read poems with that urgency, who would you read? Uh, Ted Kooser? John Ashbery? Glück herself? It’s not that that’s the only kind of strong poetry, but isn’t there a big void in contemporary poetry if that’s what you’re looking for? I can hardly think of anyone who even approaches that particular sort of intensity. I think of Ai, who most people would agree wrote her best poems 30 years ago, and in a strange way I also think of Frank Bidart, even though both he and Ai do what they do primarily through persona poems. Also Lynda Hull, who may be the closest “partner” I can think of for Richard Siken. But who else? I must be forgetting dozens of people, right? Or am I?

Siken’s book takes a lot of risks, in the best sense. For example, take the poem “Boot Theory.” Let’s not even mention the fact that it starts with the old “Take my wife—please” joke. Just go straight to the ending:

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.

Are these great lines or awful lines? I think … they’re both! I can imagine myself reading them in a certain mood and thinking they’re shallow, rehashed Merwinesque surrealism. But in another mood: they’re unbelievably powerful, original, heartbreaking, devastating.

Siken’s poems are defiant, too. I kept thinking of this James Wright passage:

If you do not care one way or another about
The preceding lines,
Please do not go on listening
On any account of mine.
Please leave the poem.

Siken’s poems have a similar tone. I love how they seem to say, “I know there are people who will hate these poems, and they are welcome to go to hell.” I think Siken needs to watch out to avoid the melodrama that Ai sometimes falls into her poems, but that doesn’t mean to avoid the extremity, the passion, the chaos. When it works (“My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me”), it’s electrifying.

“My” Side of the Bed?

Most of the books on “my” side of the bed are Cheryl’s, and she has even larger stacks on her side of the bed, so this will have to be a very partial list:

1. Anna’s Book, Barbara Vine (stolen from vacation house we stayed in a couple years ago at Sea Ranch, to be returned when we stay there again later this month)
2. The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made
3. Crush, Richard Siken (more on this in a future post)
4. Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
5. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (I’ve been trying to finish this for years)
6. Runaway, Alice Munro (Munro is one of my favorite authors but I’ve been trying to finish this book for, well, months at least)
7. Already Dead: A California Gothic, Denis Johnson (as Cheryl says, “pretty bad but in an interesting creative way”)
8. Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson (oops, did I borrow this from you ages ago, Diane?)
9. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
10. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt (no relation to the Tom Cruise movie; experimental and very interesting novel if you can get through the first 50 pages)
11. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson (everyone should have this at their bedside)
12. Dude, Where’s My Country?, Michael Moore
13. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
14. Dancer, Colum McCann (I love love love this book! I liked The Kite Runner but why it’s on the bestseller list and this amazing novel about Rudolf Nureyev is not, I don’t know)
15. Here There Was Once a Country: Poems, Venus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Marilyn Hacker
16. New York Times, last Sunday’s edition
17. New England Review, current issue
18. Harper’s, many, many old issues that need to be recycled
19. Granta, special issue of essays on music (highly recommended!)
20. Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell (autographed by Kinnell: Before my Aunt Marcy’s death, she went to a book signing just to get this book autographed for me, her poet nephew. Kinnell asked her if I was a romantic or a purist, and she said she didn’t know but guessed a purist. Kinnell said in that case he’d just sign his name because a purist probably wouldn’t want a personal note.)
21. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell
22. Access Guide: California Wine Country
23. Jacqueline du Pré: A Biography, Carol Easton (research for poem in forthcoming book)
24. The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500-1800, Olwen Hufton (research for book after forthcoming book, full of fascinating facts like did you know that women who died in childbirth used to be buried with a good set of walking shoes so they could make the trek back from eternity to check on their child?)
25. Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch (I know a lot of people think this is one of the 20th Century’s masterpieces, but I couldn’t get into it)
26. The Second Assistant: A Tale from the Bottom of the Hollywood Ladder, Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare (I have no idea)
27. One Advair diskus inhaler (for Cheryl’s asthma)
28. One pen (nothing to write on)


  

My side of the bed / What's on yours?

I'm supposed to see some people in my "home office" tomorrow, which means I have to clean up! So I thought I'd document at least one pile of books that will have to be disassembled. Okay, yes, my bedroom is not my office, but I can't have people here without showing off my garden, and the only way to the garden is through my bedroom. So anyway, here are the books on my bedside table, in no special order:

Crime and Punishment --library paperback
Pushcart book of Essays, open to Robert Hass's essay on Wallace Stevens
Arts and Letters--Journal of Contemporary Culture, Spring 2005 (free copy)
My large brown 8.5x11 journal, first entry 12/27/01, last entry 7/8/05
booklet from the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo commencement exercises
Poets & Writers, July/August 2005, unread
newish Moleskine notebook, too good to use
2 bottles of spring water, one empty
The Essential Tales of Chekhov, edited by Richard Ford
box of tissues
Search Party--collected poems of William Matthews (very well read)
printout of friend's friend's 11-page piece (unread)
New Letters "Workings of the Body" Vol 71, No2--(free copy)
Twentieth Century Pleasures--Robert Hass (many times read)
Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell translator
Road Atlas--Campbell McGrath, which I keep "forgetting" to return to Robert Thomas
Mead Composition Book for recording dreams
Gulf Coast Winter/Spring 2005
Poetry Daily printout of APR article on "The Heroics of Style" by Dana Levin
Territory Ahead clothing catalog
the coconut John Lennon gave me
a quilted bear
one pencil/ one pen
alarm clock, picture of son, driftwood, leaf from Vermont, sand dollar, mom's sewing box

Variations on a Theme

"...Not the human heart but
Brueghel turns the plowman away
for compositional reasons
and smooths the waters for a ship he made."

--William Matthews
"In Memory of W.H. Auden"

There's the poem they call ekphrastic, about another work of art, and there's the work that's epidemic, radiating out, infecting, well, affecting everyone and everything it touches, effecting a world. This is, what, I guess, is called intertextuality. How appropriate that Matthews points to the made aspect, the decisions made by the artist in the creation.

In these lines by Matthews are layered Williams' poem as well as Auden's. Another by Anne Sexton comes to mind (although that alludes as well to a poem by Yeats). In fact, here, thanks to Google, is a whole bibliography of poems that refer to Brueghal's painting--the painting, in turn refers back centuries, through Ovid's Metamorphosis, into the insubstantiality of myth--and then forward, too, to Joyce's fictional Daedalus and numerous other paintings, from those of Peter Paul Rubens to Matisse.

Add opera, ballet, film: The Man Who Fell to Earth....

I love thinking about these things. They knock me out.

-Diane

Is Originality Passé?

It seems fair to say that all poetry combines theme and variations, repetition and originality. We all have a love-hate relationship with the poetry of the past, don’t we? If we didn’t love at least some of it, we wouldn’t have been inspired to write in the first place. We’d have gotten a real estate license or started a restaurant. And if we didn’t hate it at the same time, there’d be no reason to write our own poems. We’d be content to be a teacher and pass on to others the poetry of the past.

It also seems fair to say that some people put a higher value on repetition and others on variation. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I wonder about what effect the explosion of literary magazines, MFA programs, and just the sheer number of poets has on this equation. I suspect it skews literary fashion in the direction of originality. I’m sure if I were an editor reading a thousand submissions a month, or a teacher reading a thousand student poems, I’d run screaming at the thought of one more poem about autumn leaves, a walk on the beach, or a father’s death from cancer.

I might perk up, though, if I saw a poem about a father’s death from differential equations or Krazy Kat’s death from cancer. On the other hand, the world would be missing a lot of great poems if everyone who wrote about plum blossoms had thrown their poems in the fire when they remembered “it’s been done before.” It’s not necessarily a bad thing if Emily Dickinson woke up 500 mornings in a row thinking “I’ve got an idea … I think I’ll write a poem about death today!” I love originality but I fear that the literary world may have become too obsessed with it: “Oh God, not another poem made out of words. Been there, done that.”

On another topic, I sent the final corrections of my book galleys back to Carnegie Mellon this week. They’ve really done a beautiful job designing the book. The poems may leave something to be desired, but I love that typeface. It’s funny how obsessed I can become, though. What if they print cat instead of car and my whole book is ridiculed by the universe because of one typo? I don’t want my poems to be that original!

My Favorite Things

Ever since—well, ever since May 13 when Diane posted it here—I’ve been thinking about this quote from Dean Young: “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.”

Now I’m a pretty big fan of Dean Young, but I’m not sure I know what this means, and if I know what it means, I’m not sure I agree with it. When I think of liberty, I think of music. I think of John Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things,” opening doors that you not only didn’t know existed, but that seem to open whole new dimensions you didn’t know existed—and you certainly didn’t suspect they existed when you heard Julie Andrews sing it in The Sound of Music!

As I talked about somewhere before, I think the best poetry combines jazz and blues: the freedom and openness of jazz with the passion and, well, the confinement of blues. It’s that sense almost of bondage that seems missing if you find only liberty in art. Obviously I’m speaking metaphorically about poetry, not just music, but blues without jazz feels claustrophobic to me, and jazz without blues feels like petals in wind instead of blossoms rooted in dirt. If “A Love Supreme” by Coltrane is an archetypal jazz song, then Big Mama Thornton’s “(Love Is Like a) Ball and Chain” must be the archetypal blues song.

Digression: I had to look through about a hundred websites to find one that acknowledged Willie Mae Thornton as the writer of “Ball and Chain,” the song made famous by Janis Joplin—and that website was in French! Joplin herself acknowledged her debt to Thornton over and over.

My point is: in so much contemporary poetry I find a lot of liberty, but I miss the “ball and chain.” There’s energy and imagination but I miss a sense of depth, gravity, blues. I think this is what Lorca probably meant by poetry inspired by an angel but lacking duende. I can imagine Big Mama Thornton singing like Lorca’s “Girl With the Combs,” who “had to mangle her voice because she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form, but for the marrow of form,” and whose voice “opened up like ten fingers of a hand around the nailed feet of Christ ….”

Which Tarot Card Are You?

I couldn't resist. I got this quiz from C. Dale's blog, and the result does seem accurate. Of course, the way these quizzes work is that the result could just as easily have been "You Are Batman" or "You Are a Krispy Kreme Doughnut" and they would have seemed accurate too. Nice image, though!


You are the Lovers card. The Lovers card is about
union. Each of us carries in our DNA the
ability to be the opposite of what we think we
are. Often our romantic attachments grow out of
awe and respect as we see in another the
characteristics we repress in ourselves.
Society often presses us into molds of what it
thinks masculinity and femininity should be. As
a result, many of us associate with our gender
certain positive characteristics and call
others negative, when if these same qualities
were held by a person of the opposite sex, our
attitude towards them would be reversed.
Getting in touch with our inner animus and
anima, (Jung's terms for our inner male and
female), allows us to see the whole of our
personalities in a positive and constructive
light. When you draw The Lovers card in a
reading, you are working with balancing these
forces. Depending on where the card is, you
have either achieved balance or need to. The
Lovers could indicate a romantic or even a
platonic relationship. Ask yourself is this is
a positive relationship that contributes to
your growth as a complete human being, or if it
fills an emotional craving within you that is
actually detrimental to your personal growth.
Image from: The Iranian artist Riza.


Which Tarot Card Are You?
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Writing Groups

This Sunday is the 13 Ways monthly meeting, and as it’s been meeting for over 15(!) years, it makes me think about poetry workshops. While our group unfailingly produces an delicious array of food, I admit I have mixed feelings about the workshop process itself. In Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School, he has Hemingway give this advice to young writers: “Don’t talk about your writing. If you talk about your writing you will touch something you shouldn’t touch and it will fall apart and you will have nothing.”

That’s what the argument against workshops (and against blogs?!) boils down to. Wolff also says that a couple of years in a workshop can be valuable (in an MFA program, for example), but continuing longer than that is destructive. I’m not sure I believe that, but I do think it can be destructive to show work to others too soon. When someone says, “I wrote this last night—what do you think?” often the real message seems to be, “I wrote this last night—am I going insane?”

Going insane can be a drawback in real life, but I’m not sure it’s a problem in poetry. The problem with poems is more often that they’re not insane enough, and workshops may encourage premature sanity. It’s always a problem when you find yourself writing with an audience in mind other than yourself, or maybe some imagined other. If you imagine some real Jane or Jack looking over your shoulder when you write, it’s hard not to edit something so it’s more to Jane’s liking, or maybe add a line just because you know Jack will hate it, and that can’t be good.

At the same time, there are undeniable benefits to workshops. For one thing, they make you face the fact that you haven’t written a word for six weeks! Also, I always do get helpful editorial comments like “Leave out that stanza—no one wants to hear about your pet monkey.” Even though some people probably would like nothing more than to hear about my pet monkey, it’s probably good advice.

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?
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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...

Larry Levis and U2

Cheryl and I went to see U2 on Saturday in San Jose. What a great show! Cheryl has finally converted me into a wholehearted U2 fan, though I have yet to convert her into an opera fan. I do sometimes wonder, though, what toll stadium rock shows take on my hearing, and that's toll in the sense of both bridge tolls and tolling bells, because when we got home I could still hear what I can only describe as ten thousand tiny sleigh bells shaking simultaneously in the distance across a field of snow. I'll also put in a plug for One, the organization to fight global AIDS and poverty which Bono plugged in the show before singing "One."

I guess I'm just constitutionally incapable of forgetting about poetry, though. In the midst of 20,000 people jumping up and down to the music, I was on my feet listening to every decibel but there was still a part of my brain thinking about poetry. And what it was thinking about most was Larry Levis and his dream of Yeats. Levis once gave a talk on elegies and Seamus Heaney that I think was later published in Marlboro Review and was also memorialized in Ellen Bryant Voigt's wonderful poem "What I Remember of Larry's Dream of Yeats."

Levis' talk slowly metamorphoses from a scholarly essay on Heaney into almost a prose poem about Levis' messy apartment in (of all places to encounter Yeats) Salt Lake City, and tells the story of how Yeats comes back to retrieve a poem he'd forgotten: "He went quickly into the kitchen and emerged again with the work in his hand, and passing by me glanced at the new edition of his poems, the most complete and scholarly one available, open to a place where I had made a note in the margin, and he paused slightly and then said, 'What are you reading that for?' and looking straight at me said, 'Passion is the only thing that matters in poetry. As a matter of fact, it's the only thing that matters in life.'"

Anyway, that's what I was thinking of in the middle of 120 decibels of "Where the Streets Have No Name," how a poem can be about weeds on a driveway or Julius Caesar or the Iraq War or your sister washing her hair, as long as it has passion. Yes, I know this is very simplistic. I could argue against it myself, but it really is what I believe is true about poetry, going all the way back to Sappho (as translated by Anne Carson):

Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees

What D'Ya Think?

I've always said I was going to publish my own poetry journal some time in the future. It's something I've wanted to do since I was editor of my high school literary magazine. I'd thought that I would wait until John and I moved someplace further North when we "retired," and we might also run a cafe gallery--possibly with the same name.

But I've been depressed about work, the whole corporate track, and discouraged about the possibilities of publishing the manuscript I have completed. I need something else to care about and work on--though time and money are short. And so I've decided to make that sometime sooner rather than later, to start working toward that goal now.

The magazine will contain poetry and b&w photography. (John will be photo editor, natch.) Of course our "press" will be digital. There's a lot to do and I've got a lot to learn. But first, we need a name.

I've been thinking about this for ages. It seems all the good names are taken. For godsakes, all the bad names are taken too! But last night I couldn't sleep and something came to me. I'll admit it's weird. But I'm hoping people will think about it and tell me what they think. [I'm not sure it's a good idea to solicit advice on names. I knew too many people who did that when they were expecting and people said, "Nah..." I always said, tell 'em after! 'Course when we told our families our son's name after he was born, they both told us what they thought anyway (negative!). Yes, both sides of the family agreed on that. Even so, I want to know what all of you think. The journal name: MARCO/POLO.

Yes, I know it doesn't even conjure up poetry or even art, but, well, let's hear what you think before I give my reasons. Or suggest something else to me. I'm not sold on it. I hope to get some comments from other bloggers here. Please.

ZACK ROGOW AND THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS

Zack Rogow is among the nominees for the Northern California Book Awards. The awards ceremony will take place on Wednesday, April 13, 2005 at the Koret Auditorium of the Main Library in San Francisco from 6:00 to 8:00 pm (book signing 5:00 to 6:00 pm). Rogow was nominated in the translation category for his English version of Colette's novel, Green Wheat.

Alice in Wonderland Meets Ted Kooser

No, this is not about Terry Gross as Alice (although that would be an interesting idea), but I have been thinking about some comments people have made about Ted Kooser’s recent interview on NPR by Terry Gross. He seemed to press a lot of people’s buttons when he talked about the “accessibility” of his poems, as if he were implying in his humble tone that he’s the most accessible dog on the block and you’d better watch out. I didn't hear it that way myself—he seemed very genuine. I like his poems though I don't love them and I doubt they’ll ever make my Top 10 or even Top 40 list.

I think it was J.P. Dancing Bear who recently quoted Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves …”) as an example of what might be called the slithiness of accessibility. I thought Bear made an awfully good point that “Jabberwocky” is one of the most beloved poems in the world despite the fact that “the mome raths outgrabe” is not exactly a model of accessibility.

While Ted Kooser writes poems about subjects that are “common as dishwater” (one of his poems is called “Dishwater”), I don't think it’s true that “ordinary people” want to read only about dishwater. The Da Vinci Code, after all, may not be great literature, but it's chock full of incredibly esoteric (dare one say “academic”) details (and, OK, dead bodies), but just happens to have sold a gazillion copies. It asks readers not only to learn about Fibonacci numbers, the “golden ratio” (1.6180339, more or less), and the 12th century sect of the Cathars, but also to know what the hell a jacquard bathrobe is.

Well, my point is not that the world needs more poems like The Da Vinci Code, or even that any writer should care about what other people want to read. But “ordinary people” are interested in a lot more than dishwater!

And yet … I’m not sure what I want to say. Cheryl and I went back to Pennsylvania last year to spend Thanksgiving with her family, and we visited the site where Flight 93 went down on September 11. The National Park Service has to haul off truckloads of memorabilia for safekeeping in an undisclosed location because there are so many makeshift memorials of hardhats, stuffed animals, photographs, and flowers, and so many are taken by visitors as “souvenirs” if they’re not locked up.

To get to the site, you drive through a strip-mined landscape and small towns that may once have had a “healthy” economy from coal mining, and there’s something unbearable about the juxtaposition of the memorial and the strip-mined hills. I’m pretty sure I’m not capable of writing a poem that would capture that, and I have no idea whether Ted Kooser or, say, Lyn Hejinian would be more likely to be able to, but I sure wish someone would.

Back from AWP

I’m back from AWP and my memories are a blur of Vancouver rain. I vaguely remember walking down a path strewn with cherry blossoms and magnolia leaves in Stanley Park. I also remember the divine morning pastries at Sen5es. I’ve never found such literally melt-in-your-mouth croissants anywhere in San Francisco.

As far as poetry highlights, as I said, it’s all a blur, but I will say that Anne Carson’s reading was amazing. It ranged from new translations of Catullus to an oratorio “in the style of Gertrude Stein.” I think she has a new book coming out later this year (Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera), and I can’t wait. A couple other new books I recommend are Kevin Prufer’s Fallen From a Chariot, which I read on the flight back to San Francisco; Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, probably the best first book I’ve read in a long, long time; Brendan Galvin’s Habitat: New And Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (about time for a selected poems by Galvin!); and Enid Shomer’s Stars at Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran. I haven’t read this last but definitely want to after hearing her read a couple of poems in Vancouver. And yes, I do notice that for some bizarre reason (based on my interest in Calvocoressi’s and Shomer’s books), my taste seems to be attracted to the aviatrix theme lately. Actually Kevin Prufer’s book also strangely fits with aviation. Galvin’s, however, is almost religiously earthbound.

The best parts of AWP are the serendipitous encounters, though, not the readings or books. I was chatting with some friends of friends in a loud bar on Friday night, and finally caught the name of one of them, Mary Cornish. Well … a couple of years ago when I had a chance to nominate some poems for a Pushcart Prize, there was one—only one!—poem I had read over the year that made such a strong impression on me that I nominated it, a poem I’d seen in New England Review, “Restoration” by Mary Cornish. I had had absolutely no idea who she was, and suddenly I found myself having dinner with her and her friends.

As one last memory, I’ll also mention W.S. Merwin, who read with Anne Carson. I think Merwin’s poems are inconsistent, but I found myself deeply moved by some of his poems. Maybe I’m a sentimental fool, but after he read “Search Party,” a poem about the disappearance and reappearance of his dog, I found myself trying to pretend that the tears in my eyes were from allergies. I’ll copy the poem below so you can see what you think. I’m stealing it from another website so I don’t promise it’s 100% accurate. It brings up the interesting question of whether it’s a better poem if you hear Merwin tell the dog story as he introduces it or if you read it on its own and have no idea who or what Maoli is.

Search Party

By now I know most of the faces
that will appear beside me as
long as there are still images
I know at last what I would choose
the next time if there ever was
a time again I know the days
that open in the dark like this
I do not know where Maoli is

I know the summer surfaces
of bodies and the tips of voices
like stars out of their distances
and where the music turns to noise
I know the bargains in the news
rules whole languages formulas
wisdom that I will never use
I do not know where Maoli is

I know whatever one may lose
somebody will be there who says
what it will be all right to miss
and what is verging on excess
I know the shadows of the house
routes that lead out to no traces
many of his empty places
I do not know where Maoli is

You that see now with your own eyes
all that there is as you suppose
though I could stare through broken glass
and show you where the morning goes
though I could follow to their close
the sparks of an exploding species
and see where the world ends in ice
I would not know where Maoli is

—W. S. Merwin

Tuning up

We're still awaiting responses from many of you to join us here. In the meantime, yes, there are a lot of kinks to work out. I've even had some problem posting as myself!

I'd really like to encourage all of you to become team members. This is a great way to discuss books you love, to tell us when you've won a contest or had poems accepted, or just to complain and moan.