Chain Link

Giving credit where credit is due department: David Galenson "discovered" it, Daniel Pink wrote about it, Wired published it, Jilly Dybka (Poetry Hut Blog) posted it, C.Dale Young linked to it, Robert Thomas pointed me to it. I'm talking about this theory that there are two kinds of geniuses, the ones whose brilliance flowers at an early age (the Conceptualists) and the ones who slowly come into their own later in life (the Experimentalists). Wow! You can see right off why this excites me; it means hope for those of us who have gray hair as well as gray matter (heh, heh -- figuratively speaking, because I'm not gray) and have more lines in their faces than their bios.

I'm actually interested in the whole concept of creativity and genius, beyond the need to prop up my perennially sagging self-esteem. I've always wondered how much opportunity, encouragement, and, well, luck has to do with the making of genius. You may think I'm finding excuses yet again, but take, for instance, everyone's favorite example of genius: Picasso. What he painted at fourteen just totally boggles the mind. But. Picasso's dad was an artist. No genius, he was a competent painter who was also a teacher. He recognized young Pablo's talent. (In fact, it is said that he gave the 16-year-old Pablo his brushes and he himself never painted again.)

What if Picasso had a dad like mine? My dad refused to let me apply to a liberal arts college with a creative writing department because, he said, no self-respecting man would ever go there. Note: I'm not now nor ever was a man. But Dad was sending me to college to get married, and the kind of man that filled the bill didn't apply there.

I'm just commenting. This is light years away from the article referenced above. But it ties in with it in my mind as well as to other reports I've been reading about young women who don't consider themselves Feminists (and, bless 'em, don't need to).

Over and out, for now.

Something Uncontrollable

In case I’ve been missed, I’ve been working on a series of poems about this woman, La Donna Velata. With any luck, I’ll be finished sometime in 2008. I saw this portrait in Rome over 25 years ago, and though I’ve never been back, it’s haunted me ever since. Painted by Raphael about ten years after Leonardo painted Mona Lisa, for me it has all the mystery and force that I imagine people found in Mona Lisa before it became a cliché. As this article in The Guardian says about the painting:

Something uncontrollable is happening under her rich clothes, as the silk of her sleeve goes into convulsions, but she looks back at you boldly. Vasari thought this was the woman for whom Raphael lusted to death. Others say it was a baker’s daughter. All that’s certain is that this is a different Raphael, painting like an open-hearted Venetian and not a Roman careerist. Pity he didn’t do it more often.

End o' June

End of day, end of week, end of month. I'm finished with my contract. There are no more sessions of my class. I'm oddly relaxed. The fear of what comes next hasn't set in yet.

Today, where I live, we had about two hours of sun. Now a fierce wind has started up as the sun and fog vie for control.

I want to say more, but I'm very tired. Here's a link to a strange but appealing video inspired by Blake's Tyger.


Next day--The link isn't working properly. I'll try and embed the video here:

Prelude to Fireworks

I liked this bit from an interview with A.S. Byatt:

One of my theories of British literature is that it suddenly began to flower—the British novel—in the 1970s because the novelists realized they didn’t give a damn about literary theory. Or literary critics. And they started telling stories. And the reviewers were still saying, you know, stories are vulgar. Everything is random and haphazard and kind of a miasma. But the storytellers, people like Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter, continued telling stories. I'm sure it has to do with a kind of split in my generation between university and being a writer.

And yes, as hinted by the mysterious “R” in Diane’s post below, I’m heading off for a week in North Carolina for a writers’ conference and Fourth of July 30th anniversary celebration of the Warren Wilson MFA program, fireworks and all. Mostly I hope to sit in the sun (or the thunderstorms), but there will also be workshops, readings, etc. (I’ll be part of a reading on July 3 if you’re in the neighborhood).

The poets in my workshop have already exchanged poems, and it’s a pretty impressive selection. What’s most impressive, I think, is how different all the poems are. We’re all Warren Wilson alumni, but I’m glad to see we’re not stamped in a Warren Wilson mold but have gone in radically different directions. That probably says more about the quality of the writing program there than anything else I can think of!

Conversations

D: Well, you must be gearing up to go. Are you doing your usual packing light? I couldn't do that... Are you going to have time to blog before you leave? I could post something I suppose....

R: I leave Thursday morning. Yeah, I'm packing light. I plan to take just one carry-on bag, although I'm also shipping myself a small box of books to sell while I'm there. I'm not going with intentions of getting a lot (or any!) work done. I just plan to hang out with people (or by myself), maybe go for walks in the Blue Ridge Mountains, sit and read, etc. I'm not bringing much reading material, though. I'm bringing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I probably mentioned I've started, and that's probably all.

I don't know about blogging. I just get a sick feeling of guilt now every time I look at the blog because I know I should be posting more but I just can't get into it.

D: Oh don't get a sick feeling of guilt about that. There are plenty of other things more important to worry about than the blog. I'll see if I can post something today. I just don't want to post anything that I'll be sorry if my class reads. And I don't want to jinx anything re my manuscript. And that leaves?

R: You could blog about some of the interesting stuff you were saying a few days ago about confessional poetry etc., distinguishing between honesty and nakedness, between matter-of-fact nakedness and exhibitionist nakedness, etc. Poetry does seem to be split between these two extremes of people who believe that only "abstract" poetry is valid, preferably a sort of abstract un-expressionism, and people who believe that only naked poetry is valid, preferably a sort of graphic nakedness, Portrait of the Artist Menstruating.

D: You mean: "I really like what you have to say about lines. (I may quote you.) I think that I felt the short lines indicated a lot of pauses, as you say....

When you say that TH is in favor of confessional, are you sure that you don't just mean narrative? I know some people equate the two. I see a difference among a) poetry that is strictly confessional--and maybe only people like Dorianne Laux are doing that now--or has she even moved beyond that; b) poetry that uses emotionally charged seeds to go somewhere (but those seeds may not even be organic to the writer)--exemplified perhaps by C. Dale's poem "Torn" or for that matter by my "Mom Poem," and c) poetry that is narrative, but maybe more distant from the writer (though Freud might say it's not!) like your narratives. And I suppose there's a whole range above, beyond, between, left, right, and center from all these. A lot has to do with intention, I think. Is the point "what happened," or is what happened merely the kinetic force of the stream? A lot depends on, too, how important it is that the reader believes X,Y, and Z really happened to the writer. That is, when you read the body of Sexton's work, you get a good idea of the realities of her life. Or Lowell's of his life. You don't get that from mine, I don't think, even if I used pinpoints of recollection in "Sonhar," for example, to evoke the flavor of a non-working relationship. Maybe I'm saying it's the difference between being honest emotionally (and I think your poems are) and being naked, even a difference between being naked in a functional way and exhibitionistic, like a flasher. Of course I'm showing my prejudices here..."

Fanny and Alexander Meet Al Gore

I haven’t yet seen the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming, but I know it warns about earth reaching a “tipping point,” possibly in the very near future if we haven’t reached it already, where the destructive effects of global warming will be impossible to turn around. Bear with me here, but last night I happened to find Bergman’s great film Fanny and Alexander on TV and watched it again. What it made me realize is that the human race may also be at a tipping point when it comes to our emotional, psychological life, the life of the soul. This film is incredibly rich in imagery and imagination, so sensual and philosophical at once, and has an emotional range that would be inconceivable not only in most Hollywood movies but almost anywhere in our society.

I think it’s this issue of emotional range that for me is the key. I imagine that if you hear sounds and music only within a narrow frequency, or see colors only within a narrow band of the spectrum, you slowly but surely become blind and deaf to anything outside that narrow band. Once that happens, you just can’t hear those sounds or see those colors anymore. You’ve lost them for good. Doesn’t the same thing happen when we’re only exposed to a narrow range of emotions day after day in the media? We literally can’t feel anything outside that range anymore. This is serious! When you wonder why people don’t feel more outrage at Bush claiming a God-given right to ignore the law, is it perhaps because they’ve crossed a tipping point where they can literally no longer feel that sort of outrage? Have our hearts atrophied to the point where they are so small that once they’re filled with the fake sentimental emotions of talk shows and politicians, there’s no room for anything else? If they haven’t reached that point yet, they’re moving in that direction, and there will come a tipping point. Isn’t that exactly why poetry and art are so crucial? They’re all that keep us open to something more than the pablum we’re fed every day. Okay, end of rant. See the film. Both of them—they’re connected!

Gonna fly

First off, right up front, please read Robert's meatier posts if you are hungry for thought-provoking discussions about poetry. Right now, I seem to be preoccupied with getting through the days, the weeks, the months, with having my life work out in some okay way.

I just wanted to put on record that my course, the poetry workshop I will be teaching for City College Continuing Education, is going to fly. No, I did not get the required number of people--unless a lot sign up tonight at Fort Mason--but Kirk Stoller, the guy in charge, is letting us go ahead anyway, although they will reduce what I will be paid. Since I'm not doing this for the money anyway (is anything involving poetry done for the money?), that's all right by me. I've put some time into preparing this class, I'd like to be able to put it on my CV, and mostly, I want the experience. I want to know, too, if this is a direction I want to go in or not. Some people, as my friend Idris says, have the teaching gene; some do not. I doubt I do. I'm far too nervous. But I want to find out.

I'm nervous, but I'm pretty sure I'll get through the three hours. I have an enormous leather tote filled with books--no, stuffed with books. I'm taking my laptop (and there's Internet access in the classroom). I've put together a 15-page handout. The students are supposed to bring copies of a poem they've written. If that (and the preliminaries) don't take us through the evening, we can just read poems from those books. If we read one poem from each of the books, we'll be there through the weekend!

I'm more nervous about the extra-curricular things. Getting there and (especially) getting back, because it involves night driving and I don't see well at night. But the tradeoff is that traffic isn't bad at that hour. All I need to do is put my car in the right lanes, basically.

I might write more about this later...

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Later. I survived. Not a huge turnout, but it's working. Hey, I talked myself into a corner a few times (Donald Duck like), but I don't feel too bad. I wasn't teaching CPR or anything. There's a fair amount of give, you know. Like Spandex. Oh yeah, I've had a glass of wine.

Driving to the class, I heard a urban parcours (sp.?) athlete talk about getting into a zone where there was a "warm hole in my head and I'm in there." I might have got that wrong, but it was so interesting that this guy probably had not idea of the metaphor he'd just created.

dkm

Of Moose and Mold

I know that prose poems are a tired subject, but I’ve been thinking about them because I decided to include one of my poems on the Amazon listing of my book and made a mistake when I uploaded it so it came out as a prose poem and, well, I decided I liked it better that way.

I am one of those people who gets excited when I see a prose poem. It just looks more interesting than its broken-line cousins. I realize this is an irrational response, though no less rational than a spontaneous negative response. A prose poem seems to say, “I have a story to tell” or “I have something to say,” while verse says, “Here is a thing I have made.” And if the prose poem does not have a story to tell, so much the better! I love how the narrative or expository expectations of prose are undercut by the sheer lyricism of the piece itself, e.g., Karen Volkman’s “A Light Says Why.” I’m also attracted by the urgency of prose. If you’re writing a suicide note, you don’t worry about line breaks.

In connection with the sense of urgency, I’ve been thinking about my need to write. It’s almost a cliché that a true poet writes out of an inner need (as opposed to cranking out another poem to keep a teaching job). I have some doubts, though, about writing out of compulsion. Sure, in a way I feel I need to write in order to “fulfill my destiny,” but probably 99% of people go through life quite happily without ever “fulfilling their destiny,” so you can’t exactly call it a need. More importantly, are the best poems written out of necessity? Legal briefs to save a convict on Death Row may be, but “Sunday Morning”?

Like science, poetry comes out of an intense focus on things that do not seem to warrant our attention. Who feels an inner need to study some mold growing on a dish in the sink? Yet that’s how penicillin was discovered. Elizabeth Bishop may have felt compelled to write about the suicide of her lover. She probably did not feel compelled to write about a moose or a filling station or Robinson Crusoe. But by working against her compulsion and, instead of writing about her obsession, writing about an armadillo and a baby rabbit, her passion came through all the more loud and clear:

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

That clenched fist is so much more powerful when seen in the context of Bishop’s almost scientific observation of the scene, her wonderful “short-eared.” When you will yourself to write what you don’t need to write, isn’t that when your compulsion most nakedly shows through?

Countdown to Thursday

I need four more students by Thursday for my class to happen. For more information, see the City College Continuing Education site (in San Francisco.)

Commercial over. Return to your regularly scheduled life.

Bridesmaid in black

I haven't posted in a while, and I'm due. I've been busy working on my latest contract. I probably shouldn't talk about it--having been bitten by my big mouth, I'm twice shy. But I'll say that I'm writing a manual in Microsoft Word, a project any tech writer worth her salt dreads. Those of you who don't know any other word processor don't know what you're missing, don't know what it's like to make a decision and have it stay instead of reverting at will in some devil-induced fashion. Geesh. it's good to be earning some money, but I definitely feel like I'm earning it.

At the same time, if I believed in astrology, I would say that it must be in my stars that friends from the past would suddenly be appearing on my doorstep. It's been reunion city here (the actual reunion--#38 for my high school--is happening in September) but old friends have needed our help, come into town, stayed for dinner, stayed the night... Whew! If we vacuumed the dog hair three times this week, you know it's been Grand Central. Tonight is quiet, thankfully, John and I stationed like bookends on either side of the coffee table, both of us with our Powerbooks, Greta curled up between us.

I have to say that I'm very depressed about my poetry. I'm not depressed about writing it. I know well that it will wait for me and I don't feel "blocked," just doing my best to take care of matters of the physical world. (I'm terribly anxious about those matters, but even so...) But I don't feel at all confident that my writing will ever matter, will break through the surface, will rise to the top. I'm still sending Demimonde out, but after 16 or more times as almost-won, what chance does it have? And even if I had the time to revise and reshuffle it now, I wouldn't know if I'm making it better or worse or simply different.

I sent a packet out recently with a description of the book. Robert was right--the description needed work--so I fiddled with it. Here's my definition of Demimonde, the book that is almost good enough.

Demimonde, which means, literally, half world, is usually defined as an underworld or underclass of people. I think of it as an underworld that is under the visible world, an undercurrent or subconscious world. So it is the vulnerable underbelly of the world.

At the same time, Demimonde is the small world inhabited by each of us, with our own needs and obsessions. My manuscript, Demimonde, is a book of poems generated by these small worlds, occurring in them.

The Poetic Idea

Recently I reread Cavafy’s poem “Darius.” I love this poem! I think of Cavafy as writing two kinds of poems: brief erotic lyrics and longer historical poems, the historical poems often written in persona. A handful of his poems combine the two impulses in historical love poems, and they are probably my favorite. “Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340” might be my favorite Cavafy poem.

I’ve been thinking about why I love these poems so much, partly because I feel a strong interest myself in writing this sort of historical persona poem. I think what attracts me is the enormous field these poems give imagination to work (or play) in. I love the wheels within wheels of imagination conjured when Cavafy imagines a Persian poet in turn struggling (in the midst of a war) to imagine what the subject of his poem, the king Darius, must have felt as his own kingdom was threatened:

But in all his turmoil and trouble,
the poetic idea too comes and goes persistently—
the most probable, surely, is arrogance and drunkenness;
Darius must have felt arrogance and drunkenness.

I don’t know Greek so I can’t judge the accuracy of the translation. Perhaps the poem simply says that even in a time of turmoil, the poet keeps coming back to thoughts of his poem. But the phrase the poetic idea feels so right! This struggle to imagine what someone else is feeling inside their skin (“the most probable, surely, is arrogance and drunkenness . . .”) feels so central to poetry that it seems right to call it “the poetic idea,” the very idea of poetry itself.

One contemporary poet who often does this is Norman Dubie. One of my favorite poems by Dubie is “The Fox Who Watched for the Midnight Sun,” where, as in Cavafy, Dubie imagines a writer, Henrik Ibsen, in turn imagining what his characters must feel:

Ibsen had written earlier of an emotional girl
With sunburnt shoulders,
Her surprise when the heavy dipper came up
From the well with frogs’ eggs bobbing in her water . . .

Also as in Cavafy, some of the most powerful moments in Dubie come when he shifts back and forth between imagining Ibsen’s imagination and imagining Ibsen’s real life:

Inside the parlor Ibsen writes of a summer garden, of a
Butterfly sunken inside the blossoming tulip.
He describes the snapdragon with its little sconce of dew.
He moves from the desk to a window. Remembers his studies
In medicine, picturing the sticky
Overlapping eyelids of drowned children . . .

This feels so much like the movement in “Darius”:

The poet contemplates the matter deeply.
But he is interrupted by his servant who enters
running, and announces the portentous news.
The war with the Romans has begun.

As Cavafy imagines Phernazis imagining Darius’ drunkenness, I imagine Cavafy drunk on his own imagination.

Letter to the Editor

I got my May issue of Poetry in today’s mail (why not until May 27?) and just wanted to mention—in case anyone happened to read my letter to the editor—that the reason my letter is so insipid is that the editors took my brilliantly triple-edged, three-paragraph letter and cut it down to one blunt-edged paragraph that I guess makes someone’s point but not quite mine. Granted, my letter needed some editing, but why did they take out all the good parts?

Maybe this is why I write poetry. It's almost impossible to get poetry published and no one reads it when you do, but at least no editor would think of deleting two-thirds of your poem and publishing it like that without even asking you.

Poetry course PR

This is an unabashed publicity piece (desperate plea) for my poetry course. It's just three evenings in June at Ft. Mason. I'm expecting the course to find its own level--if it's all beginners, the course will be geared to beginners. If I get students who have been writing for some time, we can move into a higher gear.

But whether you, yourself, are interested or not, if you live in the SF Bay Area, please spread the word for me. If I do not get at least ten enrollees, there will be no class. So please download my flyer and post it where you work or play. Thanks!

courseflyer.pdf

-Diane

Happy to be back

Yes, I was away. We left at the crack of dawn on Friday and came back late last night, in time to wish our son Happy 24th Birthday for one hour--before we would have had to have waited for #25. Greta G., pooch in residence, was ecstatic upon our return. She shed so much fur around the house (stress? just because?) you would have thought she would be naked, but actually there was still quite a bit on her scruffy self. I've been taking breaks from work (I have to, to stay awake) and walking about picking up the clumps of the stuff. Haven't I just made it sound attractive in case I ever need someone out there to dogsit?


Back East was okay (Belmont, Mass.), but going away just makes me glad to come home to California. I know people will throw things at me for saying this, but people are just nicer here. Coffee is better. You can find places to go for a walk--paths, sidewalks. To be fair, the motel was in an area of mostly biotech companies, and I did find a nice bike path to walk on, at least by the time I had to head back, but mostly cars ruled. I have to say that the area was gorgeous--everything in bloom: lilacs, dogwood, azalea... The wedding--did I mention we went back for a family wedding?--was in an Audubon sanctuary, which was stunning. How do birds know to come to the sanctuary? Don't know, but I tell you the word was out. Those birds were singing, chirping, shouting out to each other. They were only overpowered, during the ceremony on Sunday, by the thunder. Still, the rain held off during the couple's vows (and no one missed the minister's homily). It was lovely. I was the matron of honor, a first for me, and I kind of got a kick out of it despite looking (I thought) like a shiny midnight blue sausage in my dress. I had midnight blue satin three-inch strappy heels on too, and by the end of the day I was nearly in tears from the pain. Back at the motel, the power was out, so I unstrapped them and wriggled out of my dress in the dark.

It was a third wedding for her, a second for him. Altogether six grown-up children of the bride and groom.

Came back to an "I am sorry" letter regarding the Bread Loaf Scholarship. Although my vanity was warmed by (another!) finalist status and having made it to the final round, that fact doesn't do much for me. Still, it's just as well. With another two trips Back East already planned in the next few months, I could hardly have afforded the room and board or airfare if I had got in. Just bitter about what it takes to make it these days. I guess there's nothing special about me, or not enough buzz, or something.

The Clouds of Magellan

Ten excerpts from “The Clouds of Magellan (Aphorisms of Mr. Canon Aspirin)” by Norman Dubie:

The four terrific agents of movement are earth, air, metaphor, and water.

Job suffered from having two prime suspects. Nietzsche was of unsound mind and obedient to the point of rebellion. Samuel Beckett, the most elegant of them all, couldn’t phrase the indictment. The only successful prosecution of God was conducted during the war years by Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts. She was not seeking a higher office.

Immediately after war, people have little tolerance for symbols.

Trilogy and Four Quartets are great poems. But if they were boats, they would not have carried a single living soul back from Dunkirk.

That lovely Auden wore bedroom slippers on the subway.

Auden mused that the unreal was unanswerable or just absurd. But he conceded that a poem must be more interesting than anything anyone might say about it.

When Orson Welles made his first wine commercial, I realized Falstaff would have found our country cruel and intolerable.

The last evening of the Empire is devoted to gossip, not poetry.

The Sioux buried their dead in the sky? This too was realism.

Both of these men [Proust and Joyce] are sacred and dead. They fucked with time, is their epitaph.

These are from a 35-page prose poem and I have taken them horribly out of context. Forgive me. They were delicious / so sweet / and so cold.

Strange Days

A thick white contrail above, splitting the dome of the sky into two hemispheres. Next to it, its negative or shadow, so that the white streak looks cut out of the paleness of blue.

While awful, outrageous things proceed at such a pace in the world that one turns away from the news, disturbing changes are happening at the local level. Just the other day, it was announced that Clear Well-Lighted Place for Books on Van Ness was closing. (It was at this very good bookstore that I met C. Dale when he had a reading of young writers published in NER.) More recently, the owners of Cody's on Telegraph in Berkeley announced that it would close. And Poetry Flash, announced that its illustrious reading series held there--Robert Thomas, Beverly Burch, Zack Rogow, C. Dale Young and many, many well known writers have read there--would end on June 4, 2006. (I loved to stare during the readings at the portraits that ringed the room.)

Okay, times change. Where did you buy the last book you purchased? At an independent store or Amazon?

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I've picked up a contract for some tech writing that will keep me busy through June. More details about this later.

Isosceles Koan

When Beverly and I gave a reading last week, someone asked me afterward what had made me want to write a long (almost 20-page) poem about an early 20th century Czech composer, Leoš Janáček. I made a rather lame response about how powerfully Janáček’s music had affected me, but the question got me thinking.

The poem is really about a romantic (if—possibly—platonic) triangle Janáček was involved in during the last several years of his life. On the one hand, the question of what inspired me to write the poem implies that while these characters interested me enough to write the poem, that interest didn’t come through for at least one listener. On the other hand, I’m tempted to ask in response, “What didn’t interest you?” From Helen of Troy to Antony and Cleopatra to Anna Karenina to, well, Brokeback Mountain, “triangles” have always been one of the most compelling themes in art.

The only question is why the subject is so compelling, and the answer I come up with is that everyone on earth can relate to the feeling of being torn in two different directions. We’re not all torn between two different loves, and in fact many people find that a self-indulgent form of soap opera. While I’m not ready to dismiss Anna Karenina as high-brow soap opera, there are people who would.

But we’re all torn in two. Maybe it’s between working on a poem and taking our kids to the park, or between political action and weeding our garden, or between spending time with a friend and paying the rent—often, in the largest sense, between love and work. Even though romantic triangles may be a particularly self-indulgent form of conflict, I think in art they become a metaphor for all these larger conflicts in our lives.

The value of focusing on romantic triangles in art is that they are particularly hard to gloss over. We probably spend most of our lives in denial when it comes to the other conflicts in our lives, convincing ourselves we have resolved them. We’ve found a balance point that works. Our kids understand that we go into our room every Saturday morning to write but will emerge on Saturday afternoon to be with them. Or our whole family marches against the war and, voila! no conflict between politics and family.

The thing about a love triangle is that, like a Zen koan, it is absolutely impossible to resolve. It doesn’t allow you to relax in the complacent illusion that you’re in control of your life and know what you’re doing. And if you do relax in that illusion, one of the other people involved, like a good editor, can be counted on to force you to cut the crap. No, I’m not recommending triangles as a way of life, but I do think they’ve been a compelling subject for poetry for thousands of years because they’re a crucible that forces painful truths into the light.

Shaman: Hawk or Duck?

I enjoyed Charles Harper Webb’s essay, “The Pleasure of Their Company,” in the Spring 2006 Cortland Review. He says the three qualities central to good poetry are wit, passion, and impropriety, and while passion may be self-explanatory, he defines wit as “quickness of perception, ingenuity, keen intelligence,” and impropriety as “unsettling truths.” I must admit I find it refreshing simply to hear someone talk about qualities this fundamental, rather than people always talking about techniques like rhythm, syntax, and line breaks. I mean I’m as interested in phanopoeia and melopoeia as the next person, but Webb at least tries to keep his eyes on the prize. (Yes, I know this use of “eyes on the prize” may be almost as unconsciously ironic as CNN News’ latest slogan, “Keeping Them Honest.”) But here are a handful of quotes from the article:

More than one poet whose voice is lively and engaging in conversation [and in blogs?] lapses into dull anonymity when the poems begin.

The success and proliferation of dull poetry is at least partly due to the tendency to second-guess and override one’s “gut” response to voice. [I think this is true, despite the fact that it also parodies Stephen Colbert’s great parody of Bush.]

Psychological blind spots—for instance, lack of insight into other people—show up as blind spots in poetry. A man’s unresolved anger toward women may show itself in poorly drawn, stereotyped female characters.

Poets too impressed by what has been written before will repeat it in inferior form. Poets who hate the past too much will write nothing that lasts.

Poets who want to be shamans will sound like quacks.

How 'Bout

A musical interlude: generals,
mustachioed, tipping their hats
look stage left and then the piano
starts with something uplifting
old-timey Oh Susanna Oh
now the backup singers
look to you for their cue
and regroup — natty, colorful,
coordinated, like the generals,
like a counter of folded T-shirts
at the Gap and when the curtain
falls, when the curtain falls when
the curtain drops you exit
vaguely exhilarated, humming.


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Have you seen this? Not musical, but exhilarating:

www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/honda.php

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Have applied for a too-good-to-be-true job, but I want it to be (true).

Plato's Ouija Board

Working as a legal secretary in San Francisco as I do, I think a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of a poet working outside academia. The disadvantages are rather obvious, as teaching offers a way to make a living while working with like-minded people on work one loves. On the other hand, the etymology of academia is simply “the school where Plato taught,” and knowing what we know about Plato’s opposition to poetry, we might expect to find a few problems.

One problem is the inevitable academic emphasis on theory. Yes, it’s important for writers to reflect on the theoretical underpinnings of their writing, to become aware of their unconscious theoretical assumptions. But mostly I think writers need to find a theoretical foundation that works for them. Let’s face it: some of the greatest poetry ever written has come out of the most crackpot theories. Think of Yeats. Inspired by geniuses like Wittgenstein and Barthes? No way. He seems instead to have been inspired by the likes of Madame Blavatsky, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and an apparently literal faith in “the little people.” That is not even being inspired by an esoteric cult. It’s being inspired by a second-rate Las Vegas magic act. Penn & Teller are postmodern geniuses next to the jokers who inspired Yeats. (And I won’t even start on James Merrill and his Ouija board or Ezra Pound and his “economics.”)

But who cares? It’s what they needed to make their poetry possible. In an academic environment they might have found far more brilliant theories that left their poetry cold. And that brings me to my second problem with academia. Isn’t there an inevitable tendency to distort our criteria for judging poetry? Of course this problem is just as true of blogs as it is of academia! What is mean is that in academic settings—as in blogs—we form strong impressions of the people we encounter: who’s brilliant, who’s charismatic, who’s compassionate, who’s honest, who’s boring, who’s shallow, who’s bourgeois, who’s mean. And often these opinions are formed without having read a word of the person’s poetry. How many writers have reputations for brilliance because they’re charismatic teachers (or fascinating bloggers, or wise speakers on a panel discussion at AWP), poets who would never make any foolish, embarrassing remarks about “the little people”—with barely any attention paid to their poetry at all?