Poetics

Read Back Issues to Get Familiar with What We Like

2012-01-30T23:15:00.002-06:00

I've looked at many literary magazine's guidelines, and they usually say one of two things, or both. They usually say something about publishing the best work they can find, and/or else they say they suggest you comb over their back issues so you get an idea of what they like. Sometimes they even try to describe what they like, but most of the time their descriptions aren't relevant or cogent. It boils down to quality, and they think you need to read their back issues to see what they mean.

One clear exception is when they are devoted to a particular slant or theme, which is easily stated: Send your lefty stuff to Minnesota Review, send your gender stuff to, well, anywhere I guess. Send your fairy tale stuff to one place, your confessionals elsewhere.

Why don't editors articulate their aesthetics plainly? Because they can't. Good art has that certain something, which defies definition--at least that's a premise on the art side of our civilization.

They could say: Read our past issues so you can intuit what we can't describe. You're the poet, after all, you should be sensitive to these things.

Oh, there is a little more to it than that. Tastes do vary from zine to zine. A few stand out. Rattle does a great job of being inclusive and taking risks. As far as Poetry or the New Yorker, well, if you've read enough of their poems, you have a sense of how they tack slightly one way or the other from other mags. If you want to publish there, you will usually need to ponder their past work and conform as subtly in your soul as you can to that directive. A few other zines, too, have a slightly individual aesthetic. But it seems that the vast majority of lit mags are interchangeable. Isn't that right?

So, for most of them, you don't need to bother to look at their past issues. You already know what's in them. If you have any doubt, just glance at a few of their covers. And if you've think that poem you wrote has that certain something, it very well might, and then it doesn't matter which editor you send it to, there's a chance that any one of them might like it.

The Fraudulence of "Show Don't Tell"

2011-04-02T19:42:00.019-05:00

Everybody who has ever looked into being a fiction writer has been told the first rule of writing is "Show, don't tell." Show the character's upper lip sweat, his eyes dart about, his hand tremble; don't tell us "he's nervous." Let the readers come to their own conclusions, they say.

And while that's true, that's also the lie of it. I'ts true to the extent no one likes to be told what to do. Fiction writing that is just telling is bossing people around, and most of us don't like that. But at the same time, everything we say in a story is telling; we're using words and all we can do is tell with them. And the reader still has to get at least some of the conclusions that author has intended for there to be any real communication. It's just that the reader wants to be told at a slightly subtler volume level. The reader wants you to hint, not tell it plain. The catch is, as a writer, if you are too subtle they will miss your hints all together.

In the next state over, in Iowa at the Writer's Workshop, they like to talk about the bridge between the reader and the writer. Only go as far as you have to go as a writer, let the reader work to meet you half way. Well, one person's halfway is another one's oblivion. A writer I know used the phrase "chaos theory" and expected the reader to get the implicit irony in the remark. I, for one, didn't get it. He had to come out and tell me 'chaos' means deeply messy and disordered, but 'theory' indicates a deep, orderly structure. Therefore, "chaos theory" is a contradiction. I suggested he needed to use a few more hints.

The higher your level of education, the more English classes you've taken, the fewer hints you need. It's like a fancy acrostic puzzle system we're running. We get subtler and subtler in the clues. We can guess that song in one note.

My parents and grandparents used to play bridge, and I would watch sometimes. All that bidding they did first, it took me a long time as a child to catch on to what that was. My uncle was the one who clued me in: "We're asking each other what cards we have, but we are doing it in code."

It's about normalizing to our common esthetic. Look at the French, how they love novels of idea, how they love the declarative sentences. They like being told. And honestly, we do too, at least sometimes. I was talking with a friend of mine about this, and he says some of his favorite books were just the author talking at him, like Roth's Portnoy's Complaint or Saul Bellow's Herzog.

Well, beauty works in all the codes, somewhere. It's all about normalizing. That's what I meant by 'fraudulence'--the "Show don't tell" is not one of the universe's fundamental esthetic principles, it's just an agreement we make. One nice thing about telling, it's efficient. I can make this point pretty quickly in an essay, just telling you. But it would have taken me a long time to say this if I'd used characters and a situation instead. Doable, but slower, and, yes, somewhat different. And then not everybody gets it. Thanks for getting it.

Review of J.C. Reilly's chapbook, La Petite Morte

2011-01-19T20:54:00.009-06:00

I had decided by the fourth poem in J.C. Reilly's collection that I liked her stuff. Her poems are mostly lover's complaints, written with intelligence and humor in a comfortable, conversational style. They mix literary allusions and other high-minded tropes with a mordant, biting wit that should make one careful not to irritate her.

Some poet, I can't remember who, said most contemporary poems have a train that runs on schedule, arriving just on time at the Epiphany Station. JC. Reilly ends her poems crisply, and they usually pull into that same station, only with her trains the engineer is carrying a cream pie in one hand: most of her poems end with a joke. This is her charm and the same time her limitation. Her work is clever and amusing, but sometimes I think she hides behind the humor and goes for a ta-da! kind of ending gag when she could have had an even stronger poem by exploring the heart of the matter a little more.

Usually the heart of the matter is that her lover pisses her off. The first poem opens with a "Discovery Channel Valentine" where the literal heart has been removed from the poet and given to the lover, along with a scoop of insouciance. The romance just gets worse from there. He's insensitive, he's feeling sorry for himself, he's gone out with the boys on Valentine's while she is soldiering on, alone with her humor; angry and presumably heartbroken.

There's a lot of funny stuff here; almost every poem has something that entertained me. For example, in "Amphigory" we have "a yellow goat / in blue galoshes, humming / "There's Nothing Like a Dame" where "Love's little toe, / while unquestionably nutritious / could give you indigestion."

It verges into the tragicomic, too, where you can feel the pain that drove the joke, such as in "Deus Ex Machina" when her mother "said to take it as a sign / when the B&B you've planned / your wedding at burns down." Or in "At Heart" where "the wedding gown I loved / ...you said made me look / like a lace-and-satin-sheathed sausage." That's funny, but it hurts me even to type it. And so she kills him off, in the former poem by burning him "one night when you're asleep" and in the latter poem by "garrotes and guillotines and guns oh my / (and the occasional atom bomb) / laying waste to your flesh."

She kills him off in about half the poems, and writes him off in the others. She's angry and sarcastic in all the poems, and while there's nothing wrong with that, I would have preferred a little more range. Neruda wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and J.C. Reilly is Looking Back in Anger Twenty-Three Times. All in all, though, I like her stuff. She says in her notes that she is thrilled by weirdness. I have to admit I have a penchant for that, too, and look forward to coming across her work again.

Grumpy Old Men

2010-12-02T23:24:00.001-06:00

Rumor has it that Ted Kooser and Billy Collins are a couple of grumpy old men when it comes to each other. I don't have any documents of Billy's that I can turn to at the moment, but in the current Rattle, Alan Fox gets this out of Ted:

Ted: "I want the writing to be completely transparent...I want my reader to just simply go right through the screen of the words into the experience."

Alan: "That's good. I assume then you would agree with the adage that 'brevity is the soul of wit'?"

Ted: "I think I would. I'm a little averse to wit and witness and cleverness. Those are things that I don't think always serve us too well in poems. There are some of my contemporaries who, once you scrape all the cleverness off their work, there's really nothing underneath."

Ouch! I especially like the preposition "off" their work. But think about Misters Kooser and Collins, how similar they are: Neither one is writing for the elitist magazines, neither one is trying to win one of the genius contests. They are both writing for the same audience, the higher educated, general audience. And they both have a pretty light touch. Both seem pretty upbeat. Both are completely accessible by anybody out of the fourth grade. Neither one is dumping his crap on us like some poets I could name, neither one is writing about politics or public definitions. Neither one of them is talking down to us; they are both regular guys. These are personal, lyric poets who would both be splendid guests at a barbecue.

Just separate barbecues, I guess. Like Felix and Oscar, the Odd Couple. Yes, and I know which one's Felix, too. Do you? Of course you do. Thanks for reading.

A Note to Jane Williams, a Poem from Emily

2010-12-01T11:18:00.005-06:00

"And Emily, I'd forgotten that one, but it's good to be reminded, especially as I was talking (pleasantly) to a hot shot big time novelist yesterday at the English Department and starting to waver. There's so much love of fame there! And they sneer at the industrialists for wanting money! Dear Jane! And as for ee cummings, I thought my friend Jimmy Walla, the Genius of Our Generation, was joking the other day when he said I should dress in a SS Officer's uniform and put a sock monkey puppet on my hand and shriek that ee cummings is the only poet! ee cummings is the only poet! until they pushed me off the cliff... You'd think he was joking, too, but he said later he was serious, that ee cummings totally blew apart poetry and nobody's been able to do anything since but dwell comfortably in the ruins... Well I added that last part myself (remember Thumper adding to the rhyme of vegetables, "but they sure are awful stuff to eat"?) Those ee poems are gorgeous."

Jane says:

"Also a fan from childhood of Emily Dickinson - "

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you -- Nobody -- Too?

Then there's a pair of us!

Don't tell! they'd banish us you know!

How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!

How public -- like a Frog --

To tell one's name -- the livelong day--

To an admiring Bog!

No Name Reading Series

2010-05-17T07:57:00.006-05:00

The graduate students in English at the University of Nebraska Lincoln put on what they call the "no name" reading series, which is a venue for their creative writing students to do public readings. It is held in a bar, which mutes the classroom atmosphere created by the patiently listening undergraduates, who are required to be there. One of the stated aims of the series is to promote the creative writing talent "throughout the greater Lincoln community," although evidently this must be tempered with the students' need to go out on a Friday night, as they have the readings at 4:00 every other Friday, a time when most of the greater Lincoln community is still at work.

My wife and I go often, and I am pretty sure we are the only members of the greater Lincoln community who ever show up, which is too bad, as the readings – mostly poetry – are pretty good, and sometimes very good.

The 2009-2010 series closed with two poetry readings, by Jennie Case and Monica Rentfrow. It occurs to me that if I were them, I would be very interested in a neutral, third-party reaction to my work, so here it is:

Jennie Case: A judicious use of pathos, good detail selection, a fine speaking voice – these I-narrators are precisely competent, and bespeak of a comfortable career awaiting her in poetry. I think she is perhaps also capable of innovation, and could really shine once she masters that. She is a strong poet, and I enjoyed her work, all the more so because her subject matter – mostly behavior in a group home – is something I am familiar with.

Of what I could hear, Monica Rentfrow had very interesting turns of phrase and a sometimes mordant wit, but I missed at least ten percent of the words, which is a pretty important part in poetry. For a moment I was like a New Yorker cartoon caption, leaning to my wife, asking “Did she say the sandwiches are slowly fading?” I wish I could have heard more, as I am very curious as to what’s on this woman’s mind. I see her creative writing thesis is on line, and I will put that on my reading list.

Although, as of this writing, these is no podcast of these two women reading, the no name series occasionally posts podcasts at: http://nonamereadingseries.mypodcast.com/. And thank you for reading.

Is The MacGuffin a misspelling?

2010-04-15T08:32:00.013-05:00

Do they have a titular typo? On their website, The MacGuffin cites Alfred Hitchcock to explain their name, saying he used the term and stated "No film is complete without a MacGuffin" because that's what "everybody is after."

Sadly, I need to report that Alfred spelled it differently than the magazine. In his interview with Francois Truffaut, (available on the DVD bonus features of Notorious, if not elsewhere) he actually spells out the term at the beginning of the interview, and it is MacGuffen, with an "en."

So what should our friends at The MacGuffen do? Change the name? Unlikely. They could argue, a bit sheepishly, that Hitchcock was wrong, or that he was using a variant. They do say the term actually derives out of Victorian England, as a name for a device used by mystery writers. Perhaps, if one wanted to take the time to research it, the original users of the term might have spelled it the way they do. I, for one, don't have that kind of time for research, but perhaps someone you know does.

Another reaction could be to imply I'm being too retentive about spelling. Hoo kers about spelling, anyway? Arguably a pretty radical step, but then again their very name is kind of insouciant and radical; maybe the rest of us are like cattle, letting spell-checkers jostle us down a constrictive line of orthographic conformity. Mu?

Perhaps it's best to say it's their title, after all, and they can spell it however they want. Pretty hard to argue with that. So I guess we can all go back about our business, and try not to think of it as a typo. Thanks for reading.

Contemporary Themes

2010-02-06T14:17:00.005-06:00

Right after the last post my mother took sick and then died, unexpectedly. For a couple of months I ate candy and played video games. While there is much that could be said about all that, in terms of poetics, I wondered if someone could still write a poem about the death of a mother? All that Victorian fodder seems so passé. No one writes poems about flowers any more, except Amy Clampitt did and an occasional New Yorker poet does, but it's rare. In private, flowers themselves are not passé, nor is grief, but I think a poem about one’s mother’s death would be hard to pull off if you meant to show it to people.

Someone gave me a book of contemporary grief poems after mom died. Mostly they are confessional streams of stuff, and I am glad the flood of that school is receding. Ted Kooser has a couple of good ones in it, and there are a few other fine and delicate poems in there. When they are good, they are kind of indirect, often by deflection.

Much could be said of that, of poetry being overheard not heard, or of grief being very personal. Or of poetry’s habit of using obfuscation for mystical effect, or how sometimes we just stare into the ineffable and scribble notes and leave it at that. The other side of it is the audience, we as readers, so highly intellectualized. And, frankly, jaded – or shall we say at least very sensitive to cultural repetition, so what some might call forthright, we might call cliché. We're too cool for school. Yet the death of one’s mother seems so prosaic and thoroughly explored, what else but taking some of the tangents and back roads could deliver any aesthetic pleasure?

Well, maybe. I’m not sure. I suspect I am talking about all this at least in part as a way of not talking about my mother, whom I miss very much. At the risk of being cliché, may your mother be blessed with good health, and may she go to heaven when she dies.

2/10/2010, p.s.,
Here is a nice elegy written for a parent, by Natasha Tretheway, in the current New England Review. Click here.

James Dickey Born Under the Southern Cross

2009-10-23T09:16:00.006-05:00

Say, you'd think being laid off would have suddenly given me much more time to blog. For some reason, and I think that reason is anxiety, I'm feeling really busy.

I will never write a paper comparing James Dickey and Les Murray, although I could. Florid, dense effusions. Frank O'Hara, they are not.

I have a hunch their world order has similarities, too, or at least their lunch habits. But I have to go worry about finding a job, so, Thanks for reading.

How Great Thou Art: Dishonest Reviews and Bamboozling Blurbs

2009-09-03T13:36:00.021-05:00

How much damage we do with the things we say about other poets! How corrupt and vain we must appear as we flatter each other! I don’t know about you, but I can’t stomach reading the majority of reviews, and every single blurb I read makes me want to throw up or die. What a pack of liars we must seem to be!

We expect politicians and merchants to have a problem with lying. But poets? Isn’t truth, in some form, our stock in trade? Isn’t it crucial people find our words trustworthy? I’m talking about inventing lies to trick other people into buying shoddy merchandise. And to then get other poets to return the favor.

Why do we do it? There is such little at stake. Fame as a poet is so spindly. Book sales usually don’t exceed the hundreds no matter how many blurbs you butter the covers with. 403b’s are fattened with or without the praise. Life is so short.

About ten years ago, the ‘future of poetry’ article in the Atlantic explained how we shrink our readership by lying: The outsider, nosing in, hears us say everything is genius, everything astonishing, every little mutton chop is deathless. Since the readers can’t see the emperor’s new clothes, they give up on poetry, and leave us to ourselves.

I know what Charles Bernstein would do: Instead of judging these little crimes on moral grounds, he would treat them as a literary genre in their own right. I think that might take the edge off. Gain a handle over them by distance and irony. Why not? It’s worked for everything else.

Hey, that might be a good project for somebody casting about for a quick thesis project: Collect the choicer tidbits of this meretricious tripe, and start chopping and dicing.

But promise me, promise me, if you want to keep your self-respect, you will never ever pen a pile of praise-crap for somebody, even if, especially if, you think they will return the favor.

Thanks for letting me vent.

The Relaxing Tan Lin

2009-09-01T16:10:00.027-05:00

I’m taking in large amounts of Tan Lin’s stuff lately. What is he doing? Serving up bowls of ambience with crumbled toppings of philosophy. It is really splendid stuff in its placid weirdness. And it has a mind-bending effect on me similar to the effect I get from reading Boëthius, or as I got listening to Kraftwerk back in the 70’s. He’s rearranging categories, like most postmodernists, but I think he could actually lead us somewhere.

His poetics are gorgeously intellectual. While his poetry is a spray of space oddities, you ought to hear the man marshal out his intellect. Wow. Super rational, while the poetry is not. Here's his page at Penn Sound, I've listened to all of it.

Here is a typical example of the way he swirls around in things. It’s from a poem, which is a food review of a restaurant he hasn’t eaten at, fused with a description of an object ID system used by the Getty museum. This little riff pops up:
“the best waiting areas today are located in books and airports, where traveling equals waiting, time equals non-activity. Being in an airport is as close as we can come to being stranded on a grid. Now I am flying to Tokyo. Now I am flying to Reykjavik. The conflation of space with surface, and interior with exterior, mirrors the condition of global capitalism….” And on and on. Riff after riff.

Be on the receiving end of this stuff for an hour or two and it changes you. It's that change that excites me about his work.

There’s lots and lots more I could say about him, but I want to make this post readably short. Let me end on Tan’s primary stated purpose of making poetry "relaxing". I think relaxation for Tan is the intellect finding its satisfaction by quietly grazing over the grass. But I don’t think this thought will endure. I don't think more grass is going to keep doing it for him, long term. I think he's going to have to find some ideology. Or just grow gradually quieter and quieter.

Keep your eyes on the clouds as you erase content. Focus on your breathing as you dissolve categories. "I said that. Me. Bill Blake."

Thanks for reading.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lin.php Tons of good stuff from Tan there!

Not Linear, Fibrous: P. Inman at the Bowery Club

2009-07-22T12:59:00.008-05:00

I feel like I’m being basted in colors.

Phrases drift by such as “chin smidgens” or “Y minus peninsula” or “cement negative he put” or “tarred vanilla.”

Many made up words, all of them genial: Ersp, nogvolt (or was that nog and volt?), plooper, vanblum, nopera, urch, to cite a few.

It’s pleasant stuff, and the man himself is completely pleasant in his reading and in the interesting but non-eventful interview with C. Bernstein.

Nothing really representational here, unless you count this stew of morphemes as representational of the inner, contented and pre-verbal self.

I prefer narrative or rational, but I can’t fault him for what he does. It is fine and nuanced stuff. And I find phrases such as these very telling, if in a kind of slanty, hinting way: “the centralism at one blow” or “now’s the time pain oat inside” or “slab prairie alignments” or “everything left unturned but more wording” or “mind put to squareness” or anything else, really, in his reading. You couldn't call him linear, but you couild call him fibrous. (Or hempen, for that matter.)

I think many mundane poets would find any of his jazzy riffs as just the thing to cap off a mundane poem with a gloss of profundity.

I’m not interested in curling up with his books; I don’t think I’d enjoy reading this stuff too much. But it is, as he says, acoustic, and I can easily imagine spending an evening listening to his voice, with my wife or a friend, and a couple of glasses of that green fairy juice Van Gogh drank…

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Inman.php

Kim's List of Ex-Realities

2009-07-07T12:36:00.021-05:00

I made a list of all my ex-girlfriends last night, and then this morning I happen across this clip of Kim Addonizio reading her poem "Ex-Boyfriends". I like coincidences; I believe everything is related. I also like the way I could imagine Kim was on my list, and while it didn't make any difference to my moonlight, it was still pleasant. What I don’t quite understand is why Kim has so much fame but so little critical attention. Am I just not noticing the attention? I think it may be that they perceive her charm as simply facade, but I think she's being honest. I think she’s a cool girl (okay, woman) all the way through, and she’s writing what she knows.

But the ending of the poem is wrong – we’re just lonely old heavy trucks lumbering in the dark? Waiting for the Cynical & Drunk exit? ("Last time I saw Kim was Detroit in '68...?") And yet how else should the poem end?

This post is about making yourself something else as a poet.

Dominique Fourcade says some really interesting things in a fairly recent PennSound interview: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Fourcade.php He talks about preparing mentally as a poet and it sounds like he's talking about an athlete in training. His motto: "Be ready but not prepared." He means we should work on having a very broad, almost zen-like awareness of things without any preconceptions in order to be honest as a poet. A glad willingness to accept the truth as it comes. The poet must put herself through "formidable training" to improve all her capacities of perception, to "understand, un-programmatically, how to perform".

A bit impossible perhaps, I don't believe we can ever completely escape our ideologies. But I think every poet would agree we should try.

As I write this post, I find myself re-writing it. You can't deal with the French without getting sucked into that dialectical paradox machine. But I have to draw the line somewhere, so I can actually finish this one thought before it turns into something completely different. (I.e., is truth prescriptive? Is zen-indifference itself a bias? Is the Heracletian fire stable in its burning? Do we stay still as the world flows by? etc. etc.)

Anyway, this post started as one thing, but somehow two ferrets slipped out of the bag. Has Kim not achieved Dominque's mental state? Is her honesty, as strong as it is, just a chick flick of preconceptions? Kim, I think, just reads too easily for her critics - what's there to critique? The industry of exegesis has nothing to grind. They want more conundrum served up with their sex. And Kim is just writing where she is.

Well, what do I want? Everyone to be a perfect, wise old saint before they write anything? No, I don’t want that.

Here's the link to Kim if the above doesn't work. Thanks for reading. Kim, can I be among the thousands who love you? Can I be the only one? Can I borrow a few bucks, until I get back on my feet?
http://12thstreetonline.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/kim-addonizio-reading-ex-boyfriends/

Alan Davies

2009-07-01T16:25:00.007-05:00

Well, I don't mean to single him out. But as I was listening to the Close Listening interview, it became very clear to me the man was cramped, and carrying a pretty big chunk of repressed anger. At what lengths he went to to prove he didn't believe in truth! Those who do believe in truth, he says, are like fascists.

What a sad knot of a man! Then he discloses he was raised by a minister, and suddenly I could feel all the sad weight of bad fathering and its results.

I think he is just an angrier, less subtle version than we so often see.

He hates Billy Collins poems, too, almost as much as he hates fascists, and I think some of his issues are getting involved. Title of one of his poems? "Bad Dad"

The title of this post is the link to Alan Davies at Pennsound. Thanks for reading.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Davies-Alan.php

Formula of Delight

2009-06-10T13:32:00.010-05:00

I was going to name this post "the Left Turn" but since it has nothing to do with politics I didn't want to confuse anyone. It is about an element of poetry that I think is essential for a good poem and that I see in almost all good poems, yet I have never heard anyone mention. It must be widely known, though, because it shows up everywhere.

I first became conscious of it a few years ago, reading Billy Collins. He does it in every single poem, and it's not something he's trying to cover up. (And since his poems start in delight and end in more delight, hence the title of the post.)

Collins, about three-fourths of the way through a poem, introduces a new element. That is the left turn. It changes the opening theme. It is precisely equivalent to the complication that occurs in almost every single movie or most novels: it re-arouses the spectator's interest, and finishes the narrative in a rich, fulfilling and unexpected way.

All the boring stories in the world have no second act, no complication. All the boring poems just finish what they've started, and lack a left turn. They drive straight down the road they painted in the first few lines, and that's it.

For examples of Collins' left turns, I've arbitrarily taken his first two poems on poets.org:

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16497

The left turn on this poem starts at the bottom of stanza 7, with the museum in Philadelphia line. (The bit about the rabbit at the end is just his defense of the vividness of the imagination, which goes both ways now thanks to the left turn ((art to mind, mind to art)); the rabbit has to be there to braid in the left turn and finish the poem.)

Forgetfulness
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19754

The left turn here is when he brings "you" into the poem, on your way to oblivion. (6th stanza) A lesser poet would have ended the poem at the word "spleen" a stanza above. The first two lines of stanza 6 make way for the left turn, they are kind of like the off ramp, or rather, the green road signs before the off ramp. He pushed himself in this poem, as he pushes himself in all poems. He found the second theme.

It might be a little more obscure in some other poets, those who smear in the left turn rather than taking it outright, and of course there is a whole huge group of poets who you might call irrationalists who have no need for one single left turn when their work is all left turns, like spaghetti, all ambience, nothing linear about it. But it's almost always there when the poet uses text in its natural, linear state. Just like the complication is almost always there in the narrative arts. Anywhere there is theme, there are left turns.

A musician friend of mine told me that Bach could weave in three themes together, and that's what proved his genius, as most musicians can only do two. Bach could make three left turns, that's what I’m saying here. Thanks for reading.

Our Father: A Short Photo-Essay

2009-06-01T14:23:00.019-05:00

Before

After

This is Ezra Pound, and I'm sorry, this second photo makes me so sad, I've been unable to find a short phrase to describe my reaction to it. And yet to have no text seems the wrong response, too. The tragedy in his face is too large. I first considered a flip comment on the fruits of pride, but it would prove or make me a prig.

This photo was taken either just before or just after he spent 25 days in an open cage in Italy, 1945, a prisoner of the American Army. Madness, rage - and he seems just on the verge of collapsing into a heap of incoherent sobs. He is facing the death penalty for treason.

Grievous, sorrowful.

Ouroboros

2009-05-29T13:11:00.019-05:00

Whither nihilism?

This question comes up all the time in indie movies; it practically defines the genre: A twenty-something, usually male, looking at the confusion and noise of our civilization, seeks meaning with all his might. Finds none, but along the way at least finds some solace in sexual love. Might smash up some things in the process, including himself, and he might confront the absurd powers that be. Sometimes he finds some peace in friendships or his notion of place. Quiet and meaningless as rats' feet over broken glass, but at least he’s somewhat comfortable.

As I recall somewhere Nietzsche said that it was necessary for us to destroy. Didn't he say later we could rebuild? For the last century or so thinkers in the West have been busy with the destroying part: God is killed by high-pitched thinking. The rational, centralized self is exposed as a charade, as ludicrous as the nation state. Perception is shelled into a soft, malleable sponge. Reality is destroyed ~ bonsoir! And with it, truth. Is that true? Love, of course, has its many assassins. So much is damaged or destroyed: The family. Gender. Standards of art and morality. Republicans.

What's left to kill? The body? When will the snake choke on it's tail?

No wonder the young poets are so jittery. Post-structuralism isn’t cozy. It is adverse to completeness. Always on the verge, always a bridesmaid: once you say something then the truth in it dies. How would you like all your poems to come out DOA?

By not finishing this post, I'm finishing it, and making a protest-in-kind. I'm biting the hand that doesn't feed.

The Astonishing Genius of Steve Willard

2009-05-14T18:39:00.015-05:00

Certainly the highest-minded have a poetic champion now. I have just come across his book and read some of its poems and reviews. We can go ahead and say that Steven Willard is astonishing, but, darn it, it's the kind of poetry you have to take Dramamine before you read.

Calvin Bedient, in a podcast on the future of lyric poetry (U of Chi) says Steven Willard is one of the saviors of the lyric poem, and while he is awfully deft, I'm not sure this is the direction I want poetry to go in. (The other poet Mr. Bedient mentioned was I think Carol Grant.)

I haven't read that much of him, but I'm getting the feeling that one of the premises here is that Not Everything Is Dead Yet. Here's one of his poems: http://bostonreview.net/BR29.3/willard.html If you click on the title of this post it will take you to another, better poem. Thanks for reading.

Bowery Club reading review: Magdalena Zurawski & Julian T. Brolaski

2009-05-08T13:28:00.007-05:00

The edgy Magdalena Zurawski (Minor American) does a nice lexical swoon on Daphne as woman as tree as marble sculpture (did she include as picture, as spoken word?) and if you want to know why she left college or how she found the underlying hum of the universe (and what she did when she found it), you are just two clicks away: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.html#5-2-09 Or click the title of this blog entry.

What’s pleasant about Julian T. Brolaski is the like-minded translations of Catullus. Birds of a feather. I enjoyed his original poems, too, but my judgment is colored because anyone who likes Catullus enough to learn Latin has me from the word polymetra.

Abraham Lincoln Poetry Journal

2009-05-07T12:50:00.002-05:00

I’m wondering if you should use dead-pan when dealing with a poetry journal that specializes in dead-pan? Is it doing as a Roman in Rome? Or is it being rude?

I left this post at the Abraham Lincoln poetry journal blog site yesterday: http://abrahamlincolnmagazine.blogspot.com/

“Hi. I'm a sociologist, and I'm doing a study on the side effects of modern nihilism, and I was wondering if I might ask you a few questions? Thanks, John Philip Johnson”

At first I was intrigued. I had read Kasey Mohammad’s (the editor's) poems on the web, and I liked the contumelious energy of them -- they were like small, contemporary eruptions. They seemed vital.

So, I thought I would contact him, schmooze a little or just be friendly, and send him some of the stuff I had which would probably fit (some flarfy stuff with my lyrics braided in). (the zine is by invitation only)

Then I saw the rainbows and ponies, and read the dripping dead pan which corresponded. I could feel the contempt for mass culture, and even what seemed to be the hatred of it. The thing is, my nine-year-old LOVES rainbows and ponies.

I had to choose. So I left my post for him and went home to give my darling a hug.

Here’s my question, kind of dressed up:

Is the poetry at Abraham Lincoln a neo-brutalist stance against the pop-commercial glossolalia that befloods us daily, or is it merely the smarmy, gurgling confusion of individuals who have been overcome by that flood?

I think I would like Kasey if we met. I do like his poetry, as I like the poetry of Tan Lin. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll like the noise, but for now it feels refreshing. The other day I was listening to a Tan Lin reading (PennSound) while I was reading something else, which is probably the perfect way to enjoy him, and the subject of another post, which I'll save for later. Thanks for reading.

Here's the Abraham Lincoln Magazine website: http://abrahamlincolnmagazine.blogspot.com/