Sunday, April 30, 2006
On Monday evening, I will be reading at
Saturday, April 29, 2006
This weekend, it would be a good idea to check out the plot to carve the internet up and turn it over to the major telcos. Save the Internet is coordinating efforts to sustain network neutrality. Let your member of the House of Representatives know that this is not a backwater issue. The so-called Communications Opportunity Enhancement Act (COPE), authored by Texas Republican Joe Barton, represents little more than the theft of a natural resource. Imagine an internet that not only costs a lot more to access, but on which you could never criticize AT&T or Verizon.
Friday, April 28, 2006
The Da Vinci Code is to great literature what Indiana Jones is to great cinema. The book is a relentless plot machine – with only one real pause right up until the final 15 pages – utterly unconcerned with any details that fall outside of its pursuit of the next clue.
In case you have not noticed, we are about to be deluged with hype – the ads have already started – for Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s blockbuster. With a cast that includes Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautoo, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina & Jean Reno, a script by Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man, I, Robot, A Beautiful Mind), & locations that include the Louvre & Westminster Abbey, Sony Pictures is really hoping that it has its ducks all in a row, ready for a monster hit to trigger the summer film season a little early this year, coming to every damn screen at your local multiplex on May 19th.
So I thought I ought to take the vaccine as early as I could & read the book, not the sort of fare I would normally pick up.
The Da Vinci Code is to great literature what Chinese take-out is to great cuisine. Easy but involving & it’ll leave you hungry again in a few hours. And beware the MSG.
I enjoyed the book, though frankly much of it is so clunky that it’s likeable just for how cobbled together the whole project is. To begin with, protagonist Robert Langdon is a Harvard symbologist. The best I can make out about this imaginary discipline is that it must be one part art history, one part religion, one part debased semiotics – somebody forgot to tell them that semiotics is debased linguistics as it is.
Then, save for Sophie and her grandfather (and, in a eensy bit of back story, the albino monk Silas) none of the characters has any family. It’s not that they’re single, it’s that they’re utterly devoid of context outside of the narrative machine. This is particularly odd in that much of the story’s meaning comes from Sophie’s quest to find the truth out about her family, but the whole idea is something that has been so devalued by the rest of the novel that it feels like an afterthought when it finally shows up in Scotland, a bit of wrap-up needed at the end to get the whole shebang under a shiny bow.
What’s true of the characters’ families is true of their personalities – only the eccentric millionaire historian/knight, Leigh Teabing, has any hint of one (and it’s so sketchy here that you know Ian McKellan has free reign to chew on all the scenic curtains in this role). You don’t need a personality if you have a puzzle to solve. As an author, Brown is an architect rather than a writer, so consumed with getting his clues all lined-up that he can commit a howler like the comment about the left-brain in the following:
Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church's defamation. In
In fact, it is the right brain that is alleged to be creative, associative, improvisational; the left is said to be analytical & logical, the antithesis of irrational. But it doesn’t fit Brown’s thesis, so he simply reverses the facts.
This book is an easy target for any game of Gotcha, precisely because it has to weave so many details together in what it’s author hopes will be a credible net of connections. The material here on the Fibonacci series, in particular, made me cringe. So did this passage on iambic pentameter:
Before Langdon could even ponder what ancient password the verse was trying to reveal, he felt something far more fundamental resonate within him—the meter of the poem. Iambic pentameter.
Langdon had come across this meter often over the years while researching secret societies across
Iambs. Two syllables with opposite emphasis. Stressed and unstressed. Yin yang. A balanced pair. Arranged in strings of five. Pentameter. Five for the pentacle of Venus and the sacred feminine.
"It's pentameter!" Teabing blurted, turning to Langdon. "And the verse is in English! La lingua pura!"
This is a level of subtlety that one associates maybe with My Name is Earl. But if it did show on American TV, you could almost count on it being lampooned within the week on Talk Soup. This actually is a critical juncture in the plot.
Nothing quite reveals Brown as a clumsy carpenter so much as the way he likes to contextualize the opening of a chapter, giving way too much detail before turning to the character at hand, as in :
The Hawker 731's twin Garrett TFE-731 engines thundered, powering the plane skyward with gut-wrenching force. Outside the window, Le Bourget Airfield dropped away with startling speed.
I'm fleeing the country, Sophie thought, her body forced back into the leather seat.
There is no way for Sophie, for example, to know what model aircraft she is in, nor the name of the field. No matter – it’s a way of showing us that Dan Brown, guy novelist, knows his machines. Or, another example:
The Depository Bank of
Or:
The Sprawling 185-acre estate of Château Villette was located twenty-five minutes northwest of
Langdon brought the armored truck to a shuddering stop at the foot of the mile-long driveway.
Or:
The Range Rover was Java Black Pearl, four-wheel drive, standard transmission, with high-strength polypropylene lamps, rear light cluster fittings, and the steering wheel on the right.
Langdon was pleased he was not driving.
This kind of awkward, creative-writing class prose is almost a twitch for Brown. Sometimes the details are plot driven, as when two police officers note that a minor character once skipped out on a hospital bill after having been treated for anaphylactic shock. It sets you up from that point forward to be on the watch for peanuts. And, wouldn’t you know, he doesn’t have his Epipen when he needs it forty chapters later. But in virtually every passage cited above, Brown is just setting the scene in the most wooden way imaginable. We do not need to know about
What gets readers beyond this sort of overly built Rube Goldberg-esque kind of language is the degree to which Brown can build plot upon plot. Virtually everyone in this novel, save for our symbologist protagonist and his cryptologist companion, has an agenda that is not quite what it seems. Even the minor characters – the French cops, for example – have separate plot lines & motives, both in terms of what they tell other characters and how they then do (or don’t) follow through. Between the Swiss banker, the cops, the monk, the Cardinal, the knighted historian & his butler & a malevolent Teacher, always capitalized & never revealed until the final scenes, the plotline of the two protagonists (who relate quite differently to their quest) is situated into at least eight other active narratives, all of which are doled out piecemeal, as tho every tale was a mystery here. Then there is the less active but more powerful quest set up by Sophie’s dead grandfather.
For all the excess detail at the start of chapters, Brown’s favorite word in this novel is actually rather vague: something. As in “You and your brethren possess something that is not yours." Brown’s formal problem, chapter after chapter, is how to advance the narrative without giving away key details – in this sense, the book resembles nothing so much as the old Flash Gordon serials from the movies of the 1930s & ‘40s, with their brief episodes lurching from cliff hanger to cliff hanger. And, indeed, the Indiana Jones movies are a kind of homage to those same movies.
Intellectually, The Da Vinci Code makes the Harry Potter series look like Sartre, real novels of ideas. This poses as intellectual fair in that Robert is a symbologist & Leigh a historian & both are constantly having to explain the history of this or that clue to the wide-eyed cryptologist Sophie. But Robert is a symbologist about as seriously as Harrison Ford’s Jones is an anthropology professor. The result is a great romp through the scenery of ideas, but virtually absent ideas as such. As an author, Dan Brown is closer in spirit to Mike Hammer than to Umberto Eco. Indeed, closer to Mike Hammer than to Stephen King or Elmore Leonard or Walter Mosley. If Robert Parker had an interest in history & weren’t so damn lazy with his plots, The Da Vinci Code could have been a Spencer novel. But Parker’s characters have a lot more depth.
Labels: Film
Thursday, April 27, 2006
If you look at the chart at the bottom of the note from Tuesday, you will see that Simmons B. Buntin gave his survey takers just six choices when he asked them what they liked about online resources. Conversely, however, when he turned the question around, asking them what they liked least about online resources, Buntin left it open ended. He got, as a result some 114 answers, which he was able to group reasonably well into some three dozen master categories. But again, six categories predominated, groupings that were listed by nine or more respondents each – no other grouping had more than four. As the chart below suggests, five of the six “least liked” aspects of online poetry resources have to do with the aspects of online technology, only one with the quality of the work online, as such.
One might quibble as how much of the look & feel of online publications is due strictly to the technology (think of the formal constraints blogs face) vs. people having to learn a whole new discipline when contrasted with either offset or (better still) the type case drawers of letterpress technology. Or, for that matter, the overwhelming amount of work that’s available online – is that a feature of the web, or merely a secret that the web has revealed?
Having read several books – from Hardt & Negri’s Empire to Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book to, most recently, The Da Vinci Code (about which more anon), in e-book format on various Palm Pilots, one of the things I appreciate most about the new technology is its extremely portable nature – it’s lighter & more versatile than a hardback & even most paperbacks. But I have yet to see a good conversion of poetry’s spacing in a PDF file from a PC (where it will be absolutely perfect) to a pocket device. So, yes, the limitations are real, at least for the present.
When asked what the biggest misconception people have about poetry appearing online, at least 85 of the 103 responses were variants of the “online poetry is not as good as poetry in print” theme. Some of this no doubt is the absence of certain older poets from the online scene. Some of it is the inept use of HTML¹ some journals evidence. Some of it is the sense that certain mags online have had of printing anything and everything they get. And more than a little of this has to do with sites that get abandoned, or which fail to get updated, even as the zine promises the Spring ’03 issue is just around the corner. There is an interesting & fairly complex discussion to be had as to what happens exactly when an active site goes dark.
But when I read, for example, Bill Berkson’s masterful online chapbook in the current issue of Big Bridge, or when I see Norman Fischer’s “After Alberto Caeiro” in the same issue, it is evident to me at least that the upper limit of web publishing is every bit as high as it is for print.
We see these same somewhat conflicting messages again when Buntin what the “biggest truth” about poetry appearing online is. There were 104 responses, which he was able to cluster together into 35 basic groups, but again just four accounted for a substantial majority of the replies. The most common, cited 23 times, was that online poetry is that it achieves broad geographic distribution – it is more readily accessible than any print journal ever could be. But the second most commonly cited response – this is from an open-ended question, Buntin didn’t ask his respondents to pick from a list – is something of a perpendicular argument, taking a similar position but in a completely different direction: 13 folks noted that there is much greater exposure to a greater range of genres, commentary, and writers. Unlike the chain bookstore that carries mostly trade and university presses, or the small press cornucopia like Woodland Pattern that carries the absolute inverse of what you find at Borders, the web has everything, from the snooty neoformalism of William Logan to blogs devoted to slamming & the open-mic type sites like Poetry Super Highway. You want to check on the English-language poets of
But the next two commonly cited responses show us the conflict people have about the web directly. Twelve respondents commented that “Quality on the web varies widely,” while ten responded “Quality on the web is as good as it is in print.” Only one of these statements can be true in any deep sense of that term, but I think it’s an argument that you can hear both sides of, and that the line between one and the other is constantly being renegotiated. The long-term trend is that, in another decade at the very most, quality on the web should be utterly indistinguishable from quality in print, at least with regard to journals. Already the idea that an appearance in Poetry would have more value than one in Jacket is naïve at best.
The final four questions in Buntin’s survey reiterate themes already highlighted. Asked what additional poetry resources should be online, respondents generally asked for more, more, more of everything. In particular, audio resources, video resources, a centralized – and comprehensive – poem search engine linked to a far more complete inventory of texts by poets past & present. One senses that there is a fairly deep need for the work of writers who may be out of print, but still “in copyright” to be added onto the web. There have been a couple of repositories of out-of-print books, mostly in PDF format, but the logistics of a major repository obviously would be daunting. Similarly, the problems of web sites going dark and the lack of in copyright resources show up again in response to a request for “overall concerns about publishing on the web.” So does the debate over quality & the despair at just how much quantity there is already. That’s an interesting double-bind – there’s more poetry on the web than you will ever be able to read, but it doesn’t include, say, William Carlos Williams’ The Wedge or Robert Creeley’s Words, which might be the exact works you are looking for.
One person noted in the “additional comments” section that many print journals maintain “teaser” sites with a poem or two online to encourage you to acquire back issues. Those are a form of online publishing, of course, but basically they’re bad marketing. A press like Coach House that tends to put up entire books from its backlist and to treat the web as an interactive archive of its print efforts is far more likely to be the way presses are representing themselves on the web in a few years.
There was one question asking for recommendations, most of which were pretty standard words to the wise, e.g., Don’t enter competitions. One that did jump out at me was the suggestion that responding to blogs is a good way to get known. Curiously, tho, nobody mentioned that having a blog of your own has become the fastest and most popular method, a fairly interesting twist for a medium that is itself barely five years old. And one person, thinking no doubt of the issues of inept web design and programming, recommends keeping the formatting issues to a minimum. Someone else, of course, took exactly the opposite approach, suggesting that you take note of the fact that the web is, by definition now, multimedia.
¹ As has been mentioned more than once in the comments stream here over the past couple of years, I’m obviously a primitive when it comes to web design myself.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Of course the fun part of a survey like the Terrain.Org study of poets and their use of online resources is when they get down to naming names, and listing what they do and don’t like. For example, when Simmon B. Buntin’s 137 respondents were asked to identify their three “favorite online poetry resources,” they listed 113 different web sites. Interestingly, tho, just eight were cited by as many as six respondents each – none had five mentions. The eight are graphed in the figure below:
There’s a ringer here – one of the two sites that advertised the survey last July was this blog – that accounts for my embarrassingly high score here. Still, this isn’t a bad roster of major poetry web sites – I was personally surprised to find Poetry Free-for-All, which I think of as a web equivalent of an open mic drop-in poetry workshop, listed, considering that a majority of responses to the survey came from readers of this blog. I need to think about that some. And I was surprised also not to see more people list Third Factory, MiPOesias, Selby’s List, Big Bridge, Duration Press, How2, Light & Dust, or PENNsound, all of which received between two and four citations each. Wom-Po proved to be the listserv most widely mentioned, but that was only twice. Poetry and Ploughshares were each mentioned once – the first is sort of sad when you think of the $100 million they have to put into their operations there. At $6.95 per month for an upgraded version of Site Meter, which is what this blog costs, I’m getting a lot more bang for my buck.
But the real message of a listing of 113 different “favorites” is just how decentralized poetry has become in our society – half a century ago, back in the heyday of Personism, Deep Image, the SF Renaissance, the Boston Brahmins, Black Mountain & the Beats, 113 web sites would have meant roughly one site for every three publishing poets in the United States. The twin literary heritages back then were called Raw & Cooked by some – Overcooked by some others – and they squabbled then as they squabble now. But the argument in those days seemed a lot more coherent – you could think of the New Americans as a group of unlettered barbarians or of the Brahmins as a bunch of Jeeves wannabes, reeking of mothballs – tho that coherence was enforced through the benign neglect of whole populations who proved neither fish nor foul. Now that everybody is pretty much allowed to play, the relationship of writer to audience is undergoing an amazing transformation, one that neither the schools nor the trade presses nor the so-called public media have even begun to figure out.
We can see this new pluralism in responses to other questions in Buntin’s survey as well. Asked which E-zines they liked to read, respondents listed 85 different choices. Once again only a seven received six or more mentions: Jacket (25), Terrain.Org (12), Can We Have Our Ball Back (12), Shampoo (9), How2 (8), MiPOesias (7), Typo (6). As with the previous question, Terrain.Org benefited greatly from being the sponsoring site for the survey, but none of the other ezines here is a surprise. We get only a slightly different list when we ask their three favorite e-zines to submit to: Can We Have Our Ball Back finished first, with just seven mentions, followed by Terrain.Org (a ringer here as well, methodologically), then four journals listed by five respondents each: Jacket, MiPOesias, The Hold & Mot Juste, a relatively new magazine that appears in PDF format.
Where the question of a plurality of tastes shows up most profoundly is in the question Who are your three favorite poets? Respondents listed 223 different people! Only nine were mentioned by as many as four people & nobody by more than five. So much for the settled canon. The nine who were most often listed were Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver with five mentions each, followed by John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman & William Carlos Williams with four. Any attempt to frame this survey as skewed towards the post-avant is pretty much cancelled by the presence of Collins, Oliver & Heaney right at the top of that list. Not one respondent listed Louis Zukofsky!
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Yesterday, I looked at Simmons B. Buntin’s survey of poets conducted thru Terrain.Org, noting in part how Buntin’s cross-section of writers differs materially from the ”poetry users” recently surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center for the Poetry Foundation. Perhaps the starkest contrast between the two groups is that over 90 percent of Buntin’s respondents read poetry at least once each week, a majority of them doing so daily, whereas less than 17 percent of the Poetry Foundations “users” do likewise.
Buntin’s agenda, it is clear from his questions, is to find out how the web is changing the reading and publishing habits of active poets. The responses he gets are worth thinking about. He begins by asking
How are you notified about new poetry appearing online?
This was a question for which multiple responses were possible, and indeed the total answers received was slightly more than two per respondent. No surprise that the most common answer was through email, listed by 86 of the survey’s 137 respondents. What is interesting is that word of mouth finishes second, listed 59 times, followed by discussion groups (e.g., Spidertangle,
Respondents were asked – and the wording here is important – if there was a “difference in the quality of poetry appearing in online journals and print journals.” The majority (55%) responded that they did not see a difference in the quality of poetry. Asked to identify how poetry differed online and in print, respondents gave a wide range of answers that Buntin subsequently grouped whenever possible. The most common response, accounting for nearly a quarter of the answers given, was that “online poetry is more experimental, more avant-garde, more engaging, more innovative and fresher.” The next two most widely cited answers, however, clashed with the optimism of this conclusion. The more common one was simply that the “quality of poetry in print journals is higher.” This was followed by a response not about the poetry, but the presentation, the idea that “print journals look and feel better.” This was closely followed by two other propositions that tended toward optimism toward online poetry, but in a more qualified fashion. The first, as worded by Buntin, is the proposition that “online journals tend to feature younger poets whose work may be less well-crafted or may be really good, just no quid pro quo.” This response was tied with: “There is a broader spectrum in the quality of poetry online: some of the poetry in online journals is quite good, but some is awful.”
The next most commonly offered response differs almost completely from a couple of the above, including the one given most often: “Work in online journals is more accessible and narrative.” This reflects one of the implicit questions of a survey like this: which journals are we talking about? There are online journals that are entirely experimental, especially those that take advantage of flash animation and some of the other graphic potentials of the web. But there are also web journals that could have been done in print form well over a century ago for all of the work that they present.
Those responses accounted for just under three-quarters of the responses to Buntin’s question. The remaining ones echoes some of the themes above, but sometimes with interesting twists. Here they are and the number times each was cited, again in Buntin’s wording:
3 Online journals feature more than print journals can.
3 Quality of online submissions is increasing, quality of print submissions is about the same.
3 Well-edited online journals are usually better quality.
2 Print journals have more well-known poets.
2 Print journals take themselves too seriously and are humorless.
2 Some online journals appear to be set up as mutual fan clusters, or cliques, supporting each other.
2 There is a better, broader range of poets in online journals.
1 Harder to find top-quality poetry in online journals that you find in print journals.
1 Online journals usually have a different niche.
Unsurprisingly, acknowledged perceptions about the differences between online and print journals leads to different strategies with regards to submitting and publishing in them, at least for some poets. While two-thirds of respondents do make distinctions as to what they send to print and what they send to online journals, the other third have very clear ideas about this. Four distinct answers accounted for just under two-thirds of these responses. The two answers given most often are interesting for how they intersect without quite conflicting. Most commonly cited was the idea that “I submit more experimental work to online journals.” Cited somewhat less was the counter theory (if it is one) that “I send my best work to print journals.” The next category of responses were those who choose to send either their longer or their shorter work to online journals – there seems to be no consensus as to which is preferable. Cited as often was the refusenik position: “I do not submit to online journals.”
The counter to this last statement, “I do not submit to print journals,” was cited, but only half as often. In fact, after the four responses above, no other statement was mentioned by more than three respondents & tend to be all over the map. Other comments included the following:
I do not submit to print journals.
I submit more 'formatted' poems to print journals, which can space text better.
I submit more formal work to print journals.
I submit to print journals first, and if rejected I then submit to online journals.
Online journals solicit more poetry.
I do not like the long response times of print journals so send to online journals.
I only publish my poetry on my blog.
I prefer to publish more than half my work in print journals.
I send my best work to online journals: more readers, easy to find in Google, accessible, never goes out of print.
I submit to online journals first, though the poems may be reworked before appearing in chapbooks or books.
My online submissions are inferior because they represent my earlier and less mature writing.
What I find interesting about these two disparate lists of responses is that they show exactly how broadly, and differently, it is possible to think about this question of print vs. online journals. There are a lot of different ways to consider these questions, but it is worth noting some trends. One is that the (current) inexpensiveness of setting up an online journal is not particularly a major factor here. Others that seem to be more important are speed-to-publication, appropriateness for the text, distribution and prestige. It is absolutely true that certain authors, especially among writers of my own generation – I’ll be 60 in August – still show a generational allergy towards the internet. Since writers who have been active for 30 or 40 years tend, almost by definition, to be better known, the bias against the web shows up as a perception that some writers are above the web. This is the contemporary equivalent of some buggy riders being above the motor car, but it has interesting consequences. One is that the absence of these older poets is taken as an index of quality. In fact, print journals show pretty much the same range as do online journals. Some, like Jacket and How2, are as well edited as anything in print. And if you see as many print publications as I do – I get about 20 per week – one thing you cannot miss is that some print publications, journal, book or chapbook, can be every bit as ill-conceived or poorly executed as anything on the web.
I really like the answer of the one person who responded that he or she sends his best work to web journals because they have more readers, are easy to find in Google, are accessible and never go out of print. What that doesn’t deal with is what might happen when online publications go offline, or if an editor should die. It seems clear that there is, or soon will be, a need for a web archive for online journals – but if you look at what has been done with sites like the
Thus it is not surprising to see that accessibility is the aspect of the web that Buntin’s poets like most about online resources, as the graph below demonstrates.
Two other questions Buntin asked, concerning the ease of submitting work over the web, and the speed with which editors respond to submissions, underscore the value of the web’s real-time 7-by-24 environment. Just under half of all respondents replied that online journals respond to submissions more quickly than do print journals – less than two percent claimed that print journals respond more quickly. And just under three-quarters of all respondents indicated that submitting work over the web is easier than via the old hard copy by mail routine. Nobody thought that the web was more difficult, tho elsewhere in the survey you could find some reservations about the web’s ability to handle complex spacing issues.
Next I will take a look at what people are reading, which resources they prefer, and where they like to send their work.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Last July 16, I posted the following note to the blog:
Terrain.Org is conducting a comprehensive survey about the online reading & publishing habits of poets. Go here and fill out the form.
Simmons B. Buntin, who crafted the survey, kept it open until late fall – the final survey was filled out on November 29. Last week, he sent me the results with permission to post them as I see fit.
Overall, Buntin got 137 responses. It’s not a scientific survey in that he didn’t randomly select respondents from a larger list of poets, poetry readers & poetry site visitors, but rather got replies from people who actively chose to fill out some or all of his questions. Nonetheless, 137 is an excellent number of replies from which gather data and the responses are well worth considering. For the record, 81 of the responses came within one week of my posting the above note, so that readers of this blog presumably account for a majority of his replies.¹ Not every respondent filled out every question, so when I give percentages in what follows, those percentages will represent the portion of people who actually replied to the question, not the total number in the respondent pool. The exception will be those questions for which multiple responses were possible. Looking through the email addresses of respondents, I note a few Canadian, Australian and British addresses, and one from
The first question Buntin asked was where had respondents published poetry, a question for which multiple replies were possible. Most respondents indicated that they had published in print journals or anthologies (119) and that they had published in online journals or e-zines (114). Just half of all respondents had published a print chapbook – 50.4 percent – while a smaller number – 38 percent – had published a larger print book. While these numbers feel about right to me, it was interesting to note that a much smaller number had published a book of some kind on line, 18.3 percent having had an online chapbook, while 10.2 percent had published a larger online book. Just seven respondents (5.1 percent) indicated that they had never published a book.
Several things jump out from these responses. First is a confirmation that, be it in print or online, chapbook authors outnumber the poets publish larger volumes, in spite of a printed chapbook’s invisibility in bookstores and difficulty getting distributed. Second is that, in spite of online publishing’s alleged “ease of access,” respondents with print volume experience outnumber those with online book experience by more than two to one.² It would have been interesting to have followed up with a question as to how many books of each kind had each respondent had published – the numerical gap between chapbooks and “books” would really open there – and also to ask how many books one had published by trade presses, university presses and “large independents” such as Coffee House, Graywolf, Copper Canyon, Godine/Black Sparrow or New Directions.
Beyond the publication backgrounds of his respondents, Buntin’s next set of questions probes their reading habits. A majority responded that they read poetry, both in print and online, daily. This is worth noting, because it suggests that Buntin’s respondents differ significantly from the more scientifically random pool of respondents ferreted out by the Poetry Foundation in its “Poetry in America” project, the “first scientific study of American attitudes toward poetry,” which was released about two weeks ago. The Poetry Foundation conducted phone surveys with 623 “users of poetry” and 400 non-users, and frankly did a good job, at least insofar as polling methodology is concerned. Table 34 of the foundation survey found that 16.9 percent of “current poetry users,” read poetry at least once per week. In contrast, 91 percent of Buntin’s respondents read poetry in print at least once per week, 61.7 percent doing so daily; 85.8 percent read it online at least once per week, 53 percent doing so daily. For both print and online, those who read poetry daily outnumbered those who read it a few times per week by more than 2:1, while those who reported reading poetry only once per week were far fewer still. In part, these differences reflect the variation between a self-selecting group of respondents, as in Buntin’s survey, and a pool generated by randomly dialing telephone numbers, the Poetry Foundation method. In addition, Buntin’s respondents were most apt to hear of the survey either through the Terrain.Org website, an online journal that includes poetry as part of a broader environmentalist agenda, or this blog. But most importantly, the Poetry Foundation’s survey is a study of “poetry users,” readers rather than writers.³ The survey asks just three questions about that involve the actual writing of poetry: Have you written poetry as an adult? Have you performed or read your own poetry in public? How recently have you written poetry? Buntin’s survey is aimed explicitly at poets.
To clarify this difference, it’s useful to ask about poetry’s most mysterious community – non-writing readers. The question of who reads poetry or, as Mr. Gioia once put it, Can Poetry Matter? is a focal point of the Poetry Foundation survey, which found that
Thirty-six percent of all readers have written poetry as adults. Poetry users are significantly more likely to write poetry (45 percent) than are non-users, fewer than 1 percent of whom have written poetry as adults. Just over one-quarter of the adults who have written poetry (27 percent) have performed their own poetry in public.
The phrase “of all readers” is the Catch-22 here, by which the Poetry Foundation survey means “readers for pleasure.” Contrast this with a recent British study reported in The Guardian last January:
A Book Marketing/TMS survey found that last year 63 per cent of Britons aged 12-74 bought any kind of book, with 34 per cent purchasing fiction and only 1 per cent verse.
Worse yet, fiction readers in the
The respondents in Buntin’s survey are people for whom poetry is not an ornament to a literate life, but central to it.
Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I’ll look further into Buntin’s results, with an eye towards how poets make use of the web, both as readers & writers. Later on, I may look more closely at the Poetry in America, especially because I want to look at the questions it asks and the assumptions behind them.
¹ This obviously skews the data toward poets who are reasonable, intelligent, excellent writers and good looking.
² One possible flaw in the survey itself was the lack of a standard definition of a chapbook, especially for online publication. From my perspective, it’s always been a question of the spine, although I do myself have one volume, Xing, that has appeared both as a chapbook and perfect bound at different times.
³ “The Poetry Foundation’s primary concern is with the reading and listening audiences for poetry.” (Poetry in America: Review of the Findings, p. 13).
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Ashraf Osman added a note yesterday suggesting that I ought to let you know that I’ve been nominated for 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere over at the Poetisphere website. Why he would tell me this is a little unclear, since he himself is currently leading the “race” for this august honor. Maybe he thinks the pleasure of beating me will be greater if I campaign.
The 2005 Laureate was Jilly Dybka. I’m sure that winning this would change my life every bit as profoundly as winning has changed hers.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Friday, April 21, 2006
Yesterday, while all my psychic energy was being spent,
This blog’s 700,000th visitor came and went.
I really appreciate all the notes of encouragement I received yesterday, both on the comments stream & in my email. Thank you.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
I’ve been mulling over the old question of what Walter Benjamin called aura. During the few days we were down in Virginia, DC & Baltimore last week, I noted that some of my largest adrenalin rushes – of some decidedly different types – came not from seeing the work of Marcel Duchamp or George Grosz at the National Gallery, or even the breathtaking array of artifacts at the National Museum of the American Indian (nor, for that matter, from its architecture, all southwestern on the outside and a direct ripoff of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum on the inside), but from a relatively small woman and two flying machines.
The woman was Sandra Day O’Connor, whom Krishna and I and the boys almost walked right into as she was posing for some photos in front of the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian. She was smaller than I’d imagined & impeccably dressed – she could have gone on television with no further make-up. We stopped so as not to interrupt the photo shoot – the camera man had serious equipment, so I presume he was a professional – and after two or three shots, she climbed into her limo and was driven away.
The flying machines were out next to
One of the two machines that did cause an immediate visceral reaction from me was the Enterprise, an early “test” version of the
The other is the Enola Gay. Pictured above as it sits in the Air & Space museum, this is the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on
All of these sightings involve complex emotions. Sandra Day O’Connor was a rightwing politician, both before and on the U.S. Supreme Court. She is the reason that George W. Bush became president of the
The space shuttle evoked pure awe in me – its scale feels so large and the project of making such a complex human object is so daunting, especially when the slightest error in an o-ring or bit of foam sends astronauts to instant death, that you can’t look at it without sensing the scope of human ambition it represents. There certainly are times when I think that space exploration is the one legitimate use of our military, even tho NASA itself is curiously positioned astraddle the military-civilian line. But it’s not an accident that the first thing we did when we got to the museum was sit through an IMAX movie on Roving Mars, featuring footage from robots doing exactly that.
But the most complicated – conflicted – response I had came to the Enola Gay. From a distance, this B-29 Superfortress doesn’t stand out in a space that contains the Shuttle, the Concorde, a Stealth Bomber, several racing jets from the 1920s & ‘30s, some very early helicopters, even a FedEx airplane. By World War 2 standards, however, a B-29 is huge – 99 feet front to back with a wingspan of more than 141 feet. The name Enola Gay carries with it so much terrible history, tho it is worth noting that the devastation unleashed upon
Restored, literally glistening as if it just came off the Boeing assembly line, the Kelly green leather seats of its cockpit thoroughly polished, the Enola Gay is a bizarre monument to find in a museum that celebrates the potential of flight, as if to remind us of its worst possible consequences as well (there are some missiles & drones alongside the Shuttle in the next wing, tho next to it they look like toothpicks). The Enola Gay fills you – or fills me anyway – with wave after wave of emotion, ranging from the most abstract – numbers, images from documentaries – to others very personal (the fact that when I was born, my parents lived in Navy housing constructed for the Manhattan Project, or that my father was sent to Nagasaki a month after the bombing there, bringing in aid to a now captive nation).
Benjamin associates the object’s aura with presence, a kind of immanence, but I’m not so certain. What separates Sandra Day O’Connor from the next white-haired lady I pass on the street is what I know about her, even if the impeccable presentation, the perfect hair & royal blue dress suitable for meeting heads of state, separates her out visually from her immediate surroundings. It is also true that what I know about the Enola Gay is what separates it from any other vintage aircraft. Only the scale of the space shuttle, itself something of an optical illusion – there’s no 747 here, the Concorde’s half-hidden in the next bay by other aircraft, you first see the shuttle nose pointing directly at you – really creates that visceral sense I think of as recognition combined with presence.
It’s thoroughly arguable, of course, that my reactions prove Benjamin’s point in the first place. Aura, as Benjamin outlines it in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is something much closer to a Zen experience: be here now with this humble stone, petal, spider, whatever. Of all cities in
Perhaps this is what Larry Fagin is getting at when he argues that it would be good for poems to be published anonymously, in that it would erase that discursive layer. You couldn’t tell whether a poem were by Jim Behrle or Curtis Faville. But my experience, both in Virginia & DC last week & here when I confront a poem on the web or on paper is that these layers, even tho they may be discursive, are not extraneous. History is integral to experience. The rose is itself a product of history, the Mayans turned corn from something akin to a foxtail or bur into the great grain crop of
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Andi Olsen
One of the “problems” of outsider art is its reliance on biography, an “externality” not unlike the referential issues of identity and/or social justice that turn so many political texts into instrumentalist sausage. Is Howard Finster, Henry Darger, Simon Rodia or Grandma Moses half the artist they’re made out to be if, say, they had a degree from Cal Arts or the Rhode Island School of Design? Maybe yes, maybe no – my guess is that it would depend on the artist & that each such case would turn out to be a long discussion with no conclusive resolution to be had at the end of it.¹ It’s an issue I confront, it seems, each time I go to the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) in
The same question comes up again this year first in the obvious personage of Rosie O’Donnell – yes, that Rosie O’Donnell – who has a few works in this year’s show, dedicated to considerations of race/color/gender.² Among other items, O’Donnell has a portrait of her grandmother, and a photo collage of two older women holding hands as they walk out of the ash of devastation on 9/11. O’Donnell’s work is not bad at all and while it may be evident that she had no formal or professional training in the arts, there is no question that she is completely arts-savvy.
But the work that really raised this issue for me was also the most powerful, and perhaps most subtle, in this year’s collection, a short black-&-white video entitled Where the Smiling Ends, filmed by Andi Olsen. The premise of the work is both social & formal, and the two dimensions powerfully reinforce one another. At Trevi Fountain in
Andi Olsen not only has a masters in art history from the
There are examples in the current AVAM exhibit of professionals whom I would be more willing to place on the far side of that categorical marker, such as Linda St. John, the daughter of a Ph.D. who grew up to become a lawyer, but really a daughter of alcoholic abuse, who, seven years after getting her J.D., turned instead to making elaborate little dolls out of pipe cleaners, clothed in even more elaborate little outfits. And AVAM has, both in its permanent collection and elsewhere in this year’s exhibit, instances of personal or folk art carried out to an extraordinary degree – Ku Shu Lan’s wonderfully complicated paper cuts, which seem even more amazing when you realize that this artist from the Chinese province of Shaanxi who died in 2003 at the age of 84 lived during the early years of her marriage in a cave, a not atypical peasant life registered, if not exactly documented, in these breathtaking patterns. Or Nek Chand, the Indian sculptor from Chandigar, still active at 82, whose rock and debris sculptures of figures is, the AVAM wall text claims, the largest visionary environment in the world and the second largest tourist attraction in India. When the state discovered his hidden garden of these figures tucked away on government property, a vast village of figures made entirely from refuse, it gave him several dozen assistants and now turns over all the junk Chand could possibly need.
But ultimately the whole rationale of this museum seems framed most clearly by Olsen, precisely because she seems to be the ringer. What this little film is doing is both important and powerful & it instantly makes you aware of all the other films one might make in a similar mode – e.g., men & women walking down a street aware that they are under the gaze of a camera, people about to do something specific, like walk into a church or doctor’s office or just cross the street or leave a cinema. Perhaps these are films that no longer need to be made because Olsen has shown so deeply what can be done simply by focusing on the smallest of social spaces, that instant when the “official” shutter has closed and the posing is over. The film is not formal in the sense of a Michael Snow film, but rather in its focusing on the form of the filmed event, repeatedly so that you can’t miss that this is the focus of the piece. It’s not obsessive in the way that lifelong federal civil servant Ted Gordon’s drawings, invariably composed of circles upon circles, creating rounded almost three-dimensional characters, are, but rather mimes such obsession rather coolly.
So Olsen is an indirect test of the thesis that good art is good regardless of context, although I’m not at all certain that just any major artist would similarly look credible if his or her work were suddenly dropped into AVAM. The irony at the heart of Jeff Koons’ material, for example, would come across instead as smarmy & condescending there, the worst kind of deliberate shallowness. But artists as diverse as Keinholz and Guston, say, would do just fine. So even would a Warhol, precisely because his works, even in their most pop mode, carry an earnestness within them that would resonate with the likes of Mr. Imagination or the Baltimore Glassman or any of the other more “primitive” artists on display at AVAM. If anything, it is the sincerity at the heart of that, which in Olsen’s video occurs less on the side of the auteur than in the eyes & expressions of the filmed, that joins Where the Smiling Ends with the giant pink poodle boat/car that has become an icon of AVAM’s annual Kinetic Sculpture Race – to be held this year on Saturday, May 6.
Poetry of course has its own equivalents for outsider art, whether it is the writing of psychotics, from Hannah Weiner to John Wieners, the use of dialect from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Linton Kwesi Johnson, or the street lyrics of slam & rap. And all of these same issues apply here as well. Indeed, the instant you see sincerity as the link between Olsen & the other work at AVAM, it’s hard to shake the phrase that technique is the test of sincerity from one’s mind. But, I want to note, it’s not the only such test here. Abstraction is another charged area & it is worth noting where in a place like AVAM one finds it, in obsessive patterning or giant nonsense sculpture’s like the museum’s signature Vollis Simpson whirligig, standing three stories high just a block from
Looking at the smiling headshot of Andi Olsen above (linked over from her own website), I wonder what expression she made next.
¹ Actually, I think Rodia’s work would survive far better if you learned he had an elite arts education than it would if you concluded that the Watts Towers were, in fact, conceived as “sails” and that the project as a whole was a cartoonish sculpture of a schooner.
² With the work of Andrew Logan, a sometime collaborator of Divine, highly visible in the show, one might almost see the current show as an homage to
Monday, April 17, 2006
Margaret Brown’s Be Here to Love Me: A Film about Townes Van Zandt has been having its theatrical release this past month in
Booze. That & quite probably a psychiatric disorder that was badly handled back in the days of electroshock-as-therapy, plus, just here & there, some additional fun with heroin, guns & jumping off of four storey buildings in order see what it felt like. As recounted through film clips & the remembrances of friends and colleagues, Van Zandt was high maintenance even when he was in school but the addition of addictions, primarily to alcohol, gave everything a toxic edge from which no one in his sphere could ever quite escape. Even his death, which I’ve seen described as due to heart failure after hip surgery, is more than a little tinged with booze. Steve Shelley, the drummer of Sonic Youth, wanted to give Van Zandt a more serious recording experience than he’d had before but Van Zandt showed up at the studio in
In his biography of Frank O’Hara, Brad Gooch suggests that the poet might have survived his run-in with the dune buggy had only his internal organs not been so compromised by a lifetime of alcohol. One can only wonder what might have happened had Van Zandt stayed in the hospital, but the deeper reality was that the singer spent over 30 years abusing his body in every way possible – the number of references to glue sniffing in his prep school yearbook are eyebrow raising, especially for the class of ’62.
The film is free form and more impressionistic than historical in tone. It proceeds chronologically, but with such a light touch you’re almost not aware of it. We see Townes interviewed outside the trailer that was his home in Austin while a friend fires a rifle repeatedly at unseen targets – we see him explain, in a painfully shy fashion, to a TV host how he dreamt he was performing If I Needed You & then woke up & wrote down the words & tune. We get to watch Guy Clark drink tequila & explain how he always felt that Townes was putting moves on his wife (while she denies this). We see Van Zandt’s second wife Cindy as a fresh-faced hippy barely out of her teens & then, many years later, looking as though she’s lived a hard life indeed. Townes’ oldest son explains how angry he is at his father’s addictions & Steve Earle recount a story of watching Townes play Russian roulette with a loaded pistol, pulling the trigger next to his forehead three times before setting the weapon down. We meet a friend from his stay in the psychiatric ward, explaining the profound impact of electroshock on personalities and lives.
We hear multiple people explain that they thought that Townes was the best song writer they’d ever seen/heard/met. But at no point in Brown’s film does anyone attempt the kind of close reading that one gets, routinely even, with Dylanologists. From my perspective, that’s the weakest point of the picture. We get to hear the songs, sometimes by Townes, other times by Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard – we even learn a little about how they feel about them (Harris and Townes’ first wife both say that If I Needed You was written “for” them, an explanation at odds with Van Zandt’s own.) If you look at the actual lyrics –
If I needed you
would you come to me,
would you come to me,
and ease my pain?
If you needed me
I would come to you
I'd swim the seas
for to ease your pain
In the night forlorn
the morning's born
and the morning shines
with the lights of love
You will miss sunrise
if you close your eyes
that would break
my heart in two
The lady's with me now
since I showed her how
to lay her lily
hand in mine
Loop and Lil agree
she's a sight to see
and a treasure for
the poor to find
– they’re quite simple. While they tend toward certain patterns, they’re not at all rigid in their structure. Thus the ABBC format of the first quatrain is not repeated in the second, which is BABC. The next two stanzas both contain two quatrains, but now the rhyme scheme has become more regularized – AABC. Only in the final stanza do we find a second rhyme – the last line of each quatrain. What this scheme really sets up, tho, is a critical pause that occurs at the end of the third line in each quatrain. Listening to recordings of either Van Zandt or Harris, it often sounds as if two short lines lead to a longer third, e.g., to lay her lily hand in mine, and that ambiguity – to my ear at least – is the key to this song’s measure.
Also worth noting are the number of syllables per line here – a number that in the song itself means that shorter lines possess words that will extend over the music. Each stanza contains six five-syllable lines, and two shorter ones. It’s worth noting where in the three stanzas these condensed lines fall, again in a pattern that is both intentional & not systematic.
Above all else, this is a text dominated by one-syllable words, a device that harkens back to poets like Larry Eigner & Lew Welch. In these 24 lines, just ten words have two syllables and none have more. The only moment of difficulty, to even call it that, is the reference to two persons,
A final – and my favorite – touch is the use of the word or syllable for, which occurs exactly once in each stanza, always at a critical point. That’s a tiny detail, but it says a lot about Van Zandt’s formal imagination, which is hardly as haphazard as we’ve come to expect from popular song. Did this come to him in a dream as he claimed? We should all be so lucky.
If Brown’s film misses an opportunity to seriously explore the construction of his works, it does go a long way to humanize Van Zandt. People went out of their way forever to accommodate his quirks & patent disabilities not just because he could vary rhyme schemes with such elegance. He had a likeable puppy-dog air that must have brought out the Protector in a lot of people – that’s not a quality you see in the likes of a Dylan or Neil Young, but they’re comfortable with being in charge in ways Van Zandt never was.
Watching this film made me wonder what a comparable project with regards to Jack Spicer might feel like. Hardly anything is more predictable – or more painful to watch – than a person in the last stages of alcoholism as they crash & burn. Be Here to Love Me ends with performances by Guy Clark & Lyle Lovett at Van Zandt’s funeral, poorly shot home-movie footage that is shown running on a TV set within the screen (a device Brown uses often). “I’m not sure I can get through this,”
Sunday, April 16, 2006
To celebrate ten years of its Poet’s Choice column, commemorate National Poetry Month and because nobody reads the paper on Easter Sunday, the Washington Post Book World focuses this week on poetry, with reviews of…
Dark Wild Dream, by Michael Collier, Houghton Mifflin, reviewed by Francis Phillips
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, by Donald Hall, Houghton Mifflin, reviewed by Billy Collins, who calls Hall “
Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey, Houghton Mifflin, reviewed by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, Edited by Jason Shinder, Farrar Straus Giroux, reviewed by Eric Miles Williamson – he doesn’t like it
Political poetry: Dreaming the End of War, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz,
Sinners Welcome: Poems, by Mary Karr, HarperCollins, reviewed by Judith Kitchen
District and Circle, by Seamus Heaney, Farrar Straus Giroux, reviewed by New Criterion regular Anthony Cuda
Parallel Play: Poems, by Stephen Burt, Graywolf, reviewed by Jennifer Grotz
Poetry on Audio, which mentions the CD series from the Academy of American Poets, ShoutFactory’s Poetry on Record, and At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, reviewed by Katherine A. Powers
The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, translated by Aliki Barnstone, Norton, reviewed by the Post’s primary reviewer, Michael Dirda.
“The Top Ten Poets,” a listing based on hits at the
1. Langston Hughes
2. Emily Dickinson
3. Robert Frost
4. Walt Whitman
5. E.E. Cummings
6. Sylvia Plath
7. Maya Angelou
8. Dylan Thomas
9. Shel Silverstein
10. William Carlos Williams
A tip of the hat to Steve Burt for somehow having snuck onto the Titanic here. And to Passager for representing the truly small presses that represent 99.9 percent of all American poetry. And to William Carlos Williams for almost catching up to Shel Silverstein. In all fairness, tho, I should mention that the feature on the web includes audio by Ginsberg, Whitman, Yeats, Tennyson, Browning, Sharon Olds, Rita Dova and Mary Oliver.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
There is an instant – tho only that – immediately prior to the “live” performance of George Antheil’s Le Ballet mécanique in the National Gallery, an adjunct to the current Dada show there, when, all 16 grand pianos, four drums, three xylophones, gong, siren and assorted alarm bells are silent. An instant later all are in motion, governed by a computer program, the siren piercing but no more so here than the xylophones, the pianos revealing themselves as instruments of percussion – is this where Cecil Taylor first heard that? – and the entire audience hops back about two inches. It’s almost deafening & brilliant in ways I’d never previously suspected, having only heard the piece recorded. It’s worth going to the show for this alone. The piece plays twice daily on weekdays, at 1 and 4 pm, and at
The other news is that it is the only reason for attending the Dada Show, unless you have an interest in seeing examples of specific works gathered by their cities of production – a gallery for Zurich, another for Berlin, another for Paris, another for New York, one for Hanover, one for Cologne – an approach not unlike the Impressionism retrospective of a few decades back that broke everything down by salon so that you could see the painters thinking in their work. This one doesn’t work, because the examples in each gallery are too few, ultimately, and the city-by-city approach is ahistorical – you don’t get to see them thinking, save maybe for the large selection of George Grosz paintings. The real news is just how moribund this show proves to be. The great workers – Duchamp primarily – continue to look really great, and the little alcoves set aside for sound poetry are – next to the Antheil – the most exciting parts of the program, tho only a couple of recordings are new. Otherwise, this could be a retrospective of American poetry pre-Poe. There is no there here.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Last May and June, I ran a couple of notes (here, here and here) on the idea of what one might include in a selected poems for Louis Zukofsky. I was thinking out loud, at the time, because Charles Bernstein encouraged me to do so, since he was then in the process of going through what I took to be an impossible task directly, editing a Selected Poems of Zukofsky’s for the Library of America (LOA). The volume is now out and it’s instructive to see the different decisions Bernstein made in shaping the final book.
It took me three run-throughs to get down to an LOA length, because when you’re aiming for a 150-page representation from a career that has left us with some 1,100 in total, the cutting has to be more than just brutal. You end up having to choose which Zukofsky (or whomever) to present to a broader reading audience. And with Zukofsky, the question is not just which poems will be included & which – inarguably essential – ones have to go, but also how to represent his master work, “A”. What percentage of the selected would be given to it, for example, let alone which sections, which passages?
Ultimately, I argued that “A” ought to be presented as the key text, given perhaps two-thirds of the 150-page format, but I also argued that, rather than presented in a single solid whole, it ought to be spread throughout in roughly chronological order. Here is the first part of that discussion:
Working with a predetermined page count, I would take basically that same stance, setting 100 pages aside for “A,” giving the rest to the short poems. Further, using the Library of America as a model, I would reverse my adjustments for page size in the opposite direction. That is to say, to get to 100 pages in the LoA format, I would have to limit myself to something like just 80 pages of the UC Press version of “A.” My basic premise with regards to that longpoem would be to keep complete sections, but if I choose the one that I think show off Zukofsky at his strongest – 1 through 3, 7, 9, 15 & 16, 22 & 23 – I have ten pages too many and, save for the Poundian opening of the first three numbers, I don’t really include any of the passages in which Zukofsky lets his thinking air out, developmentally. This would be exactly the sort of impossible trade-off that a project like this would entail. If I were to think of the book less as a Selected and more as an introduction to Zukofsky’s work, I might be inclined to go the other way – excising 22 and maybe including some passages (the same material I noted on May 31) from “A” – 12. Yet dropping “A” – 22 would probably cause me to cry myself to sleep that night.
I don’t know whether or not Charles wept, but his ultimate selection is not so radically different. Instead of representing two-thirds of the final selection, Bernstein's excerpts from "A" take up slightly under half of the book. “A”-22 is not there, but all of the rest are, save for the 2nd & 3rd, passages, while Bernstein has added portions of 11 and 21. That de-emphasizes Pound’s role in Zukofsky, while emphasizing Shakespeare’s – it’s an argument I can listen to, even if ultimately it would not be my own. Most important of all, all of “A”-23 is here, Zukofsky’s finest piece of writing. It is, in fact one of two pillars around which this book is gathered.
The other pillar, to my mind, is more surprising – it is the 38-page “short” poem, “4 Other Countries,” originally published in Barely and Widely, a poem I’d rejected as “simply too long to consider.” I still think that, particularly since it is a poem that makes Zukofsky seem more of a Williams’ clone than he ever really was. And it forces Bernstein to make some other hard choices, most notably the exclusion of “’Mantis’” and “’Mantis’: An Interpretation” & “Motet,” two pieces that strike me as foundational for Zukofsky’s practice, as well as “Atque in Perpetuum A.W.,” a work that was very nearly Zukofsky’s anthology piece during his lifetime. In addition, “Poem beginning ‘The’” is excerpted down to three movements. I suspect that “’Mantis’” – note the quotation marks in the original, a la “A” – may have been the book’s final cut, the poem Bernstein is most likely to have wept over the exclusion of, since it is the work, outside of “A,” discussed in the greatest detail in the introduction¹, with but a “not included in this edition,” aside to suggest a scar of omission.
Bernstein also makes the decision not to put “A” first, but rather after the selection of poems from LZ’s shorter collections prior to Catullus. This has the advantage of emphasizing the importance of “A,” but of de-emphasizing the evolution of his writing. “4 Other Countries,” for example, appears before the early sections of “A” when in fact it was penned in the mid-1950s, after all of “A” 1 – 12. I can sort of understand this, tho I felt a closer chronological order would give the Selected an additional rationale that is indicated here only by approximate dates in the table of contents.
I should note that Bernstein includes two poems not found in either “A” or the Collected Short Poems, “A Foin Lass Bodders,” an ‘outtake from “A”-9,” in Bernstein’s words, that Zukofsky himself appears to have rejected, and “Julia’s Wild,” from Bottom: On Shakespeare. Both are great works, and the thorough Zukofsky aficionado will own this book for “A Foin Lass Bodders” alone. The other primary reason to do so is Bernstein’s introduction, which is remarkable in its own right, and will be the standard introductory essay going forward.
So this is a less dense Zukofsky than readers of his larger corpus will recognize, just maybe a little less forbidding to the casual reader who fears the idea of effort in reading. But it leaves open the possibility of another, lengthier selected a decade or two down the line, one that is more chronological, and ultimately more representative.
¹ “A”-22 is discussed in some detail as well.
Monday, April 10, 2006
The cover story of this week’s Publishers Weekly is on poetry’s engagement with the web, with some references to this blog. Special thanks to Craig Teicher! We’re still trying to figure out why Craig is hiding under that table.
Redell Olsen & Drew Milne gave a smashing reading at Slought on Tuesday evening. It was a short event – maybe 45 minutes total for the two readers combined – followed by a brief & very informal Q&A session led by Bob Perelman. It was a great blast of fresh air, getting to see & hear two poets, both quite different from one another, fully engaged in a poetics that was (a) global in its ambition & scope (what I mean by that I will get to in a minute) and (b) utterly content to be understood as intellectuals & critical thinkers. None of the “Aw Shucks” b.s. one gets from so many American writers when pushed on the question do poets think?
It’s been a decade since the Scottish-born Milne co-edited a volume with Terry Eagleton called Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader. He’s subsequently published a volume on critical thought and has another volume on Marxist literary theory as well as a volume of conversations with Eagleton in the works. He edits Parataxis.
Olsen jokes that she was born in “the wrong
Both poets seem to be participants in a post-national post-avant scene in which English is the currency, but where the meaning of that term is something quite different from it would appear to be, say, in the hands of Larkin or a Heaney, or, for that matter, an Olson or a Ginsberg. How2, for example, may have been started by poets for the most part in the San Francisco Bay Area, but she does her work as managing editor from her post at the
It’s one that Olsen addresses directly in her “Minimaus Poems,” a series that works off her name-sake – that Olson with an “o” – and the curiously double fact for each of them of
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood
jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance
Here, in contrast, are the first lines of Olsen’s first lines of “I, Minimaus of Gloucester, to You”:
Inland, by
jewels & discounts, I, Minimaus
sitting on hot metal, boiling in a vest,
ask you who speeds obediently
are we past ENTRANCE?
Reading Olsen’s passage, it is useful to recognize Iceland as the British retailer specializing in frozen foods & kitchen appliances. Olsen’s piece is both a reading of, and a reading through, that other Olson, some wryly satiric, as above, much of it quite brilliant. It is not, repeat not, that classic student exercise of imitation, but rather a meditation on the roles of influence, not simply of the Projectivists on subsequent post-avant poetry, particularly in the U.K., but of brands altogether & branding, the replacement of Maximus of Tyre by Minnie Mouse, alternately of Orlando & Anaheim, which is how anyone not at the center, wherever that might have migrated, could claim, as does Olsen,
even the trees are bigger
in
Each, it is worth noting, are dealing with the question of how best respond to those “who advertise you / out,” but, for Olsen, the problem of Olson is a recursive one – he might identify the problem, but cannot quite ever become apart from it.
While Olsen read only the first of this sequence during the event at Slought, the questions beneath it reverberated not just through the remainder of the event, and beyond. I’d wished she’d read more & longer, Milne also. It is not just that one loses a minute or two at the head of any reading in which there is a notable (read: difficult) accent – think of how often the first speech or two in any Shakespeare play is a “toss off,” there really just so that the audience can adjust to listening at that distance, and to that rhetorical form. That adjustment alone meant that each poet had, at most, 17 or 18 minutes to get across functionally the whole of a life’s work.
Bruce Andrews used to joke that you could always tell a poet from
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Kamu Brathwaite, Michael Palmer, Sylvia Legris & Erin Mouré are all shortlisted for Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize.
§
And a Flarf Fest.
§
Francophones will want to note that Nicole Brossard will be talking and reading on Monday at Swarthmore en francais. Lecture from 2 to 4 in room 330 of Kohlberg Hall, reading at
§
You can still bid on (and win) Michele Buchanan’s portrait of me as a baby as part of WSKG’s fundraising auction. Bidding closes at
§
I will be traveling off & on this week, mostly without the notebook. If I can post from where I am, I shall, but it may be spotty. Mostly I just need to chill.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Thursday, April 06, 2006
This one is for
Friends ask us why
we decided to get married,
friendly puzzlement
reflecting true affection.
As close to a love poem
as I'll ever get.
Your daddy sits on our sofa,
blue checked golf pants
and orange sweater, rereading
Ice Station Zebra. Mom's
white blouse
on a hanger in the sun
from the padlock's clasp
to the shed door.
I wake by water's edge
Willingly I'll say
there's been a sweet marriage,
seabirds loud with dawn
in the harbor. Last night's
boneless breast of roast duck
topped with apple,
strong sweet aftertaste
lingers on. I won't forget your eyes,
the way they saw, tears
streaming, as you recited
words of Robert Duncan
and I my Zukofsky, and I
would fill your arms
as if with flowers
with my forever being there.
from What
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
It was only when I began to put together this note that I realized that Zach Barochas’ book, Among Other Things, was not published by Flood Editions, but in fact by his own press, Cultural Society. It has the look and feel of a Flood Editions book, both print wise and design wise, and – most important of all – in terms of the poetry contained therein. Indeed, Peter O’Leary (whose brother Michael co-edits Flood) is one of the collection’s three blurbistes. It’s an interesting – perhaps telling – association for a poet who has made a living, it would seem, as a post-punk drummer for much of the past 15 years, but who lists Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov & Muriel Rukeyser among his “heroes” on his MySpace page.
But it’s not the design of the book that made read it as tho it were a Flood Edition effort, it’s the values expressed in the poems themselves. Here is a case in point:
On
Pick a color, any
color (remember, black
is not a color; white,
too, is not a color).
Keep your selection in
mind & on the tip of
your tongue; hold it, let it
sit, savor its warmth or
cool. Make it primary
& don’t blend it away.
Know oblivion’s no
place for color. Vivid-
ness is key, clarity
is key, exactitude,
like purity, is key.
Right down to the use of the semi-colon to structure a complex, joined statement & the use of the ampersand to nod to his post-avant heritage, this poem enacts the very values for which it argues. It is, in that sense, almost perfect.
But perfect – in this sense – is not necessarily a superlative. Rather, it’s a desire for precision that reminds me of nothing so much as certain bug fanciers’ preference for pinned specimens under brilliant lighting to the whizzing critters of the garden. The result, as in this piece, is an open poetics striving for a closed – which is to say highly finished – poem. There is a tension in all this that can be – as this is – fascinating, precisely because Barocas’ sense of craft is so high that the strain of the impossible comes through as compressed energy. It’s a dynamic I find in a lot of the poems in this book & my reaction to it is positively visceral – I’m compelled to read the poems but almost want to shout No as they come to their hard-edged conclusions. I can’t think of a poet whose work has set off quite this same reaction in me since William Bronk.
It’s as if Barocas has tapped into this contradictory vein one finds in certain members of the post-avant, notably along the Zukofskyan side of things. On the one hand, here is a poet with considerable skills and a great sense of craft. On the other, the focus of all this feels so constrained as to be maddening. Just as Zukofsky himself bemused & befuddled his admirers with both his willingness to pursue open-ended innovation with great rigor, but proved so anal retentive that each copy of every book his house is said to have been stored separately in its own clear plastic cover, Barocas seems to be heading in two directions at once. In general, in Among Other Things, the person who would think to equate exactitude and purity is the one who wins outs. But in fact, I think the more interesting Barocas is (or would be) the other, the writer who would use this sense of craft to kick out the jams and boogie more.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations, just out from Subpress, is a slender project for a perfect-bound book, containing really just eight short poems apiece by James Thomas Stevens & Caroline Sinavaiana, but it also is quite a bit more than that. What that is lies all in the setting. Stevens is an Akwesasne Mohawk poet, teaching now at SUNY Fredonia. Sinavaiana is a Samoan-born poet, teaching now at the
Both are poets one might easily associate with the post-avant – Stevens, who carries the Mohawk name Aronhiotas, has an MFA from Brown & studied at Naropa, Sinavaiana has published before with Subpress, the small press collective whose 19 editors commit themselves to putting one percent of their annual income into a series of book projects, and which grew originally out of the efforts of some SUNY-Buffalo grads. But what I don’t sense here is much interest on the part of either writer with how she or he fits into any western frame or literary traditions. If anything, both have more in common with the great poet of the Sioux nation, Simon Ortiz, himself a one-time student of Charles Olson who has gone on to situate his poetics fully into his community in the American Southwest.
But what this book isn’t, and what makes it so interesting, is a simple celebration of community as such, so much as a recognition that these very different communities share more than a few things in common. The book is divided into two sections, with some front- and back-matter as well. The first, “From the Mohawk,” consists of four poems by Stevens with four “answering” poems by Sinavaiana. The second, “From the Samoan,” reverses the process. In each section, surrounding each set of poems is a traditional verse of some sort, both transliterated and translated into English. Stevens’ topics, to think of them like that, include songs concerning canoes, mosquitoes, cornbread, and thunderers. Sinavaiana’s include rats, funerals, pigeons and sarongs. Facing each right-hand page of text is a drawing by Stevens, who is really superb at this, “illustrating” the page. Thus, for example, we find roughly the same mosquito opposite both his and Sinavaiana’s poems, save for some patterning on whatever it is – an arm? – that the mosquito rests on. For his own poem, the pattern (which shows up in multiple places in this book, including on its cover) is of an Iroquois celestial dome design. For
Sinavaiana’s, it’s a Samoan tattoo pattern appears to be a variation on Pandanus blossoms, that being the plant used in so many Samoan mat-plaited woven products.
The text for the opening sequence will give you a better idea of what’s going on. The section is titled “Kahonwe:ia Kare’na / Canoe Song,” the translation of which reads:
The canoe is very fast. It is mine.
All day I hit the water.
I paddle along. I paddle along.
Opposite an illustration of a canoe (kahonwe:ia) is Stevens’ poem:
I am the hull – rapid against your stream.
Birch beneath the ribs
circumnavigating your body.
Endless propeller of my arm
as it circles to find the flow.
I move this way against you.
I move this way.
Opposite a second illustration – it’s not clear if this is a Samoan craft or not – labeled “Va’aalo” – is Sinavaiana’s text:
Fly canoe to blue reefs
Sing to bonito
swimming in green
shadow.
Let your chant angle
through the deep water.
A hook for the ear
of fish, a line
of cadence to mark
the time.
From your hull
I will strike the beast.
I will mark it.
The approaches taken by the two poets is quite different, with Stevens using the occasion to create a metaphor for intimacy, Sinavaiana the more Objectivist in her fishing song – I really love the idea of singing to the tuna as one goes out to meet them. Both poems end focused on the speaker, Stevens in the present tense, Sinavaiana in the future.
This is pretty much the range of this book, which is at once its strength & its limit. The poems are not overly ambitious, but all are well crafted & one has the sense of being present almost at a gift exchange between the two poets. The poems themselves are only implicitly collaborative, as each responds to the other, but always framed within their own hand – it’s a model that reminded me, actually, of the way Leslie Scalapino & Lyn Hejinian mark their sections of the book Sight with their initials (which I know has set some readers on edge, tho I found I liked it, that it seemed completely appropriate to the project at hand).
Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations is a hopeful token of globalization as it can be, positively, experienced by individuals. As such, it’s a far cry from the term as it shows up these days in the Wall Street Journal, but ultimately it’s much closer to the dream that Marx himself voiced some 150 years ago, of people – he would have said workers – from radically different communities and histories offering a literary equivalent to mutual aid.
There are other layers here that one might contemplate – the connection of Samoan experience to Native American culture, literally that of any native peoples engulfed in the historic expansion of American imperialism over the past two centuries, or of Stevens’ appropriation of multiple Native American songs & cultures – for example the Iroquois – and how that does/does not differ from the ways in which European culture adopted & adapted much that it found here to its own purposes, Stevens’ tendency in his poems to sexualize experience – he’s a very male writer in that regard – which I don’t find at all in Sinavaiana.
By itself, this isn’t a book that proposes to change the world. Yet, in itself, it offers a vision of a much more healthy planet, of sharing & exchange & finding that place in the context of another’s experience in which one’s own perspective resonates. It would be great to have a lot more books like this in our lives.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Thursday, when I got back from
Reading – devouring, really – these last few poems, less than three dozen in all, virtually all in the characteristic halting gait of Creeley’s late poems, not all that different from a sense of line & stanza that evolved from the late 1940s up to the early ‘70s, after which it seemed content to serve almost as a homing device. One thinks in one’s poems & never is that reality more evident than in Bob’s work, but Creeley’s line, so identifiable he could have patented it, seems finally not so much how as it is who is thinking:
Here
Up a hill and down again.
Around and in –
Out was what it was all about
but now it’s done.
At the end was the beginning,
just like it said or someone did.
Keep looking, keep looking,
keep looking.
One might argue, with some justification, that this is a poem that Creeley has written before, and yet it seems clearly so beside the point. Approaching this work, possibly any work, with an air of judgment ultimately will tell you so very little about what is going on when there is so much more to be gained by not doing so, by reading through that old nagging sense, getting beyond it to see what the poet was sensing, was after. I find this poem, as I do several others here, absolutely compelling, memorable in ways that forced me to commit so many of the poems in For Love, the first of Bob’s books I owned some 40 years ago, to memory. Is this a great poem? I don’t care – it certainly for me will be a touchstone of what I personally love about poetry going forward.
The concerns of the poem are not a young person’s, and this is a book filled with elegies, with saying goodbye, recalling regrets:
Paul
I’ll never forgive myself for the
violence propelled me at sad Paul
Blackburn, pushed in turn by both
our hopeless wives who were spitting
venom at one another in the heaven
we’d got ourselves to, Mallorca, mid-fifties,
where one could live for peanuts while
writing great works and looking at the
constant blue sea, etc. Why did I fight such
surrogate battles of existence with such
a specific friend as he was for sure?
Our first meeting NYC 1960 we talked two
and a half days straight without leaving the
apartment. He knew Auden and Yeats
by heart and had begun on Pound’s lead
translating the Provençal poets, and was
studying with Moses Hadas at NYU. How
sweet this thoughtful beleaguered vulnerable
person whose childhood was full of
England
often absent poet, Frances Frost! I wish
he were here now, we could go on talking,
I’d have company my own age in this
drab burned out trashed dump we call the
phenomenal world where he once walked
the wondrous earth and knew its pleasures.
Four of the 26 lines here break on the word the, an enjambment that calls up Robert’s familiar rasping voice immediately to mind, yet the stanza that is so often a defining pulse in his writing has been set aside for the wealth of detail about Blackburn, aspects that might seem odd to us now – who recalls the poetry of Frances Frost, best known to poets of my generation for her work as editor of the children’s book edition of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, a commonplace in the 1950s?
The last few times I saw Bob read, he invariably spoke openly about the approach of death, concerned more with the loss of others, particularly of his own generation, who were going ahead of him. No more than a dozen of the poets in the Allen anthology are still living, fewer still who continue to write. Even the essay that concludes On Earth, ostensibly on Whitman but wide-ranging ultimately, focuses on the questions of age:
I could go on quoting. Age wants no one to leave. Things close down in age, like stores, like lights going off, like a world disappearing in a vacancy one had no thought might happen. It’s no fun, no victory, no reward, no direction. One sits and waits, most usually for the doctor. So one goes inside oneself, as it were, looks out from that “height” with only imagination to give prospect.
Given all this, it is not surprising, I suppose, that the poems in this book, perhaps to a degree not seen in Creeley’s earlier books, have a harder time closing – the last line of the poem for Blackburn, which feels forced, is a case in point. Similarly, the longish (five pages, even tho these pages, at 4.5 by 7 inches, are small) anti-war poem “Help!,” and even the final “Valentine for You,” one last echo of Zukofsky, seem not so much to finish as to be turned, finally, aside. What else, after all, is there to do but keep looking, keep looking?
