Saturday, September 29, 2007
Ron Silliman
West Coast
Tuesday, October 2
Mills Hall Living Room
Mills College,
5000 MacArthur Bld
Free & open to the public
§
Wednesday, October 3
Meese Auditorium
Center for the Visual Arts
Free ($5 donation suggested)
& open to the public
Labels: Readings
Friday, September 28, 2007
Jimmy Rollins is not just
the best shortstop in the NL,
he deserves to be the MVP
159 games into the major league baseball season – with just three days remaining – and the Philadelphia Phillies finally are tied for first place in the National League East. For the first time all year. Perhaps they will make it to this year’s play-offs, something they have not done once since I arrived here in 1995, or perhaps not. But regardless of the ultimate outcome, the 2007 Phillies represent one of the strangest & most fascinating experiments in the history of the game.
Baseball & poetry have a long, complementary history in the
Baseball was the only thing my grandfather and I could discuss without devolving into a baleful clash of generations. He worked most of his adult life at a paper recycling plant in Emeryville (there is a condo highrise there now), and for a time Chick Gandil, first baseman of the infamous 1919 Chicago Black Sox, was a plumber there. One local
According to baseball lore, and baseball lore is powerful juju, pitching is 90 percent of the game. There are dozens of clichés that all say pretty much the same thing: good pitching always beats good hitting.
But this year the Phils, the team with the longest history in the same city and with the same name & only one World Series Championship to show for it, have put together one of the most productive lineups in the history of the game. But they also have perhaps the worst pitching in the majors. It’s almost a schizophrenic dissociation of the two parts of the game, so dramatically different that it looks like a middle school science experiment. With the exception of third base, where the team has had a not entirely successful three-way platoon going all year, the lineup from catcher all the way around the infield and across the outfield all the way to right is perhaps as strong – if not stronger – than any single team I’ve seen in my lifetime. They remind me more than anything of the mid-1950s New York Yankees or perhaps the Big Red Machine of a couple decades later. Five players have more than 20 home runs each. They have last year’s Most Valuable Player at first base in Ryan Howard & Jimmy Rollins – J-Rol in local parlance – at shortstop figures to be a top vote-getter this year. He deserves to win that award. They have the best second baseman in baseball, the best really since Joe Morgan was still a Red. Their center fielder made the All-Star team, their left fielder has 30 home runs, and right field has seen two regulars, in serial fashion, Shane Victorino (“The Flyin’ Hawai’ian”) & Jayson Werth work so well that the aforementioned center fielder is almost certainly going to be gone after this season, freeing up big dollars so that the Phils can afford to sign Howard to a long term deal and begin to address the problem of pitching.
Ah, but their pitching. While most teams carry 12 pitchers these days, the Phils have had only three all year who have been consistently reliable – starters Cole Hamels & Kyle Kendrick & closer Brett Myers. They've used maybe 30 different players as pitchers all season, once using 13 in one game (albeit some a pinch runners & even pinch hitters - it's what happens when you have to carry that many arms). Hamels & Myers have both been on the disabled list (DL) for part of the year, and Kendrick started the season in the minors where he wasn’t even rated among the Phils’ top ten prospects. Myers was the opening day starting pitcher, but then last year’s closer, Tom “Flash” Gordon, started the season hurt. So Myers got pulled into the pen and Jon Lieber, the team’s “ace” just two years ago, was brought back out of the bullpen to start. Lieber was soon injured himself and was out almost all year. The two big money pitchers the Phils acquired last winter – Freddy Garcia & Adam Eaton – have been similar busts. Garcia’s been on the DL most of the season – you can see this is a theme – while Eaton has the worst Earned Run Average in the league. During the first part of the season, he would have one decent start followed by a dreadful one. As it wore on, however, the ratio has gone to one good start followed by two bad ones. The one other starter remaining from the opening day rotation, Jamie Moyer, is ancient by baseball standards, 44. He is the only major leaguer left from the same rookie crop that included Barry Bonds. Moyer’s a smart junkballer & obviously a good influence on the younger players, but he no longer has great stamina. Although he grew up nearby in
This, as you can see, is the sort of pitching staff you might expect from an expansion team, one newly added to the league. Somehow, this patchwork staff has managed to enable the team to finally gain a share of first place, with just three games remaining in the season. It’s quite amazing really.
This has been a year in which no team has dominated the National League – at this late date, no single team has clinched a playoff berth in any of the league’s three divisions. When you realize that the Phils have blown perhaps 20 games this year in late innings that they should have won because their relievers couldn’t hold a lead or because manager Charlie Manuel left the starter in longer than he should have out of lack of confidence in whatever would come next, you begin to understand that this team – which also has won some four dozen games in come-from-behind fashion – is the one that should have finished 15 games ahead of the rest of the league. Instead, they’ve struggled all season long. It was really just three weeks ago, when they swept a series from the Mets, then did it again just a week later, that the Phils have begun to look like they could do this.
Supposedly, the wild card team is the one that “shouldn’t have made it” to the playoffs, because it was not strong enough to finish first in its own division. Yet in recent years, wild card teams have had a better than average chance of taking the whole enchilada. That’s usually because they’re performing at playoff intensity for two, maybe three weeks before the playoffs even begin, while the teams that coasted to a division championship find they have a hard time ramping up to the level needed for baseball’s so-called second season. The Phils, who have a shot at the wild card as well as the National League championship, have been at that white-hot intensity level now for the better part of a month. The obvious smart money would say that if they make it to the playoffs, they should be roadkill against a better pitching staff in the first round, and ditto for each succeeding one. If the Phils should go beyond the first round, it will upset a whole lot of long-term baseball junkies, stats geeks and more than a few bookies. If they win the whole thing, it's the end of the world as we know it. It’s sort of like asking, can Frankenstein’s monster not just stumble around in the graveyard, but hop into this jet plane, glance at the instrument panel & fly? It’s going to be fun finding out.
Labels: Baseball
Thursday, September 27, 2007
While the little tempest in a comments stream over the use of source materials was raging, or at least microraging, in reaction to David Giannini’s redeployment of other poet’s first lines, I went to see a film that raised some of the same issues, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, a musical tale of love in the 1960s set entirely to songs written (but not here performed) by the Beatles. As an attempt to reinvent the musical for our time, it’s basically Hair with better music as one droll critic put it, a shadow of a film alongside John Carney’s brilliant Once. It certainly is the most political film I ever saw where the audience was required to check its left brain at the door. If you can do that, it’s a visually stunning & often quite wry music video that trots through its paint-by-numbers narrative of the love between Jude & Lucy, Maxwell’s unfortunate adventure in
By pinning so much of its narrative to actual events of the period – Kerouac is mentioned by name, Jo-Jo is propelled to leave Detroit after the riots there & the student radicals blow themselves up in a New York brownstone turned bomb factory a la the Weather Underground, before the final triumph of the heroes’ performance atop a New York City roof – Across the Universe (the title of a Beatles song that has grown in importance in its role in their canon, thanks largely to Rufus Wainwright) seems almost anxious about its sources. Source anxiety is, I think, an interesting, if curious, phenomenon. Giannini criticized my review in part because I omitted quoting his two-paragraph prefatory note with its obligatory
All quotations used in this work fall under the ‘fair use’ convention, but remain the copyright of the individual authors…. A specific intention is to honor individual poets in new community. (Ital. in the original)
Lately, I’ve been seeing source commentary in a lot of books of poems & not always where I would think to find it – Jean Day’s Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium is one such, Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets is another. Giannini lists all of his sources & one of the games you can play with his book is “guess where that came from.” And, at the behest of my editors, even The Alphabet will include a few terse notes, albeit mostly having to do with the dates of composition. Still, I had to track down in
But asking for source data on a 900 page manuscript like The Alphabet is not so far from inviting a 2,000 page response. I suppose some day some enterprising grad student is going to comb through Ketjak and identify just how many sentences there were lifted directly from Quine – it could be done. But I’m not in the slightest inclined to think that doing so would tell you any more about the poem. In that same vein, the various annotations for works like Ulysses, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake always strike me as telling me a little about what the author may have been thinking about around the time of composition, but they are almost mute on what the works themselves actually say. Annotating, reading & interpreting are, after all, three different acts. Everyone who has ever written about 2197 has done so with a sense of a science fiction framework & what that might mean to those texts. I can’t think of anyone who has as yet noticed that the number is 13 cubed, which means that it represents the total of sentences in the work. From the perspective of reading, does that matter? I suspect not.
Labels: Film, Source Anxiety
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Kay Rosen, Blurred
Transcendental
one-liners
§
Talking with
Pattie McCarthy
§
An obit of
Bill Griffiths
§
A fractal reading
of
Spring and All
§
§
A profile of
Kay Ryan
§
Alan Wald’s
proletarian modernism
§
Talking with
Stuart Hall
§
An English view
of Muldoon’s ascent
(More Irish need apply,
indeed)
Muldoon
on writing songs
“Most of the Time”
sung by Muldoon’s band,
Rackett
(MP3)
§
§
Actor portrays
Bukowski
in solo show
What memorial
for Bukowski?
§
A poet’s walk
already in
§
Lee Herrick
& the
SoQ tradition
of Valley Poets
§
The social value
of writing
§
Talking with
Staceyann Chin
§
Poetry & film
in Bollywood
§
§
Remembering
Tamizh Oli
§
Translating
Kamal Khujandi
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore article
concerns Librería Lectorum
§
Borders in the
is bought
§
The British Library
fights for funding
§
What Shakespeare
looked like
as a boy
§
The Kenyon Review
launches
literary fest
§
Two poets profile
their own work
§
§
Which is the takata
& which the malooma?
§
The home of
James Whitcomb Riley
§
Comparing Cate Marvin
to Hopkins & Yeats
§
In search
only of
uplifting arts
§
Mark Strand
returns to
Salt Lake City
While
Richard Wilbur
reads at
Bryn Mawr
§
The value
of an agent
§
In the
that a Pamela Anderson clone
outsells
the entire Man Booker shortlist
(Note the chart in that
first article in the Telegraph,
showing that five
of the six Booker finalists
have sold just 10,000 books
between them)
§
Black women philosophers
§
The designers hired for
the “new Barnes”
§
MassMoCA wins
right to show
disputed installation
§
Nan Goldin
photo
(owned by Elton John)
busted as porn
§
Germaine Greer
on
Jane Bown
§
Mr. Freud
has a lady
on the couch
§
Philip Glass’s epic
Appomattox
debuts in SF
October 5
§
Sasha Frere-Jones
on
Miles Davis’
Complete On the Corner Sessions
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
My general reading style is to be in the middle of ten to twelve books at one time, switching back & forth as the whim strikes me. It can take me literally years to finish a major work – The Cantos, for example, or more recently Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts in its various volumes – and usually I think I get more out of a work from the prolonged engagement. Don’t ask me how long it’s going to take to finish Ted Berrigan’s Collected Poems – at the rate I’m going, I’ll be lucky to get it done before my 70th birthday. I intend to enjoy every second.
But occasionally a book pulls me in to the exclusion of all others, demanding that I read it straight through. The sensation almost feels like a drug. I find myself looking forward to my next possible moment with the book and experience intense pangs of sadness once I’ve completed it, as though a friend has passed. I put everything else aside and go with the experience. If I come across one book like this per year, I’m extremely fortunate.
Jean Day’s Enthusiasm:Odes & Otium is just such a volume. Reading it is one of those knock-down take-the-top-of-your-head-off experiences, exactly as Tom Mandel promised when he started raving about the volume to the Grand Piano collective:
It's one of the best books of poetry I've read in a decade;I'm blown away by it.
Tom is exactly right. Enthusiasm contains 13 poems organized into an introductory piece, plus two major sequences, the first, “Odes,” consisting of nine poems, the second & longer, “Otium,” consisting of three works. It’s an index of just how unsettling this book can be that two of the first descriptions of the book I came across put such a different emphasis on the balance of its composition:
The work is divided into two parts, the first descriptively titled “Odes” and the second “Otium,” a Latin word meaning peace, ease, repose, which occurs as a leitmotif in one of Horace’s most famous odes.
That’s Lyn Hejinian on the rear cover of the book itself. The publisher’s website casts it differently:
A book of nine "newfangled" American odes together with three extended poems written in the tragi-comic intersection between leisure and work.
Neither depiction strikes me as being entirely correct. “Odes” consists of nine poems, eight of them in the four pages or under category. The ninth ode, however, “Hat Schism,” consists of eight chunky paragraphs printed one to a page, their distinctness underscored by a two-line drop cap to start off each paragraph, but then later undercut by the fact that all paragraphs but the last conclude with an em dash —
Here is the first stanza from one of the earlier odes, the second one, “Prose of the World Order”:
This blue
is nothing but elastic
sound everlasting a relapse
improbably neither vegetable
nor animal
not even personal but
sonorous as lexical hash
hypothetically
a novella by a fellow guest here
left finally dead
as matter might
stick to a wall
virgin in shape or exquisitely
scrawled
the gist of which is
We exist in places
otherwise strange and probably
impassible.
Yet here
yours is not the first face
to appear
surrounded upright
on two feet awake
stunned from the sleep of a Nobody
This stanza is the instant I knew that this book had hooked me. The variation in these free verse lines is as exact and muscular as any I’ve read in ages – just hear the contrast between virgin in shape or exquisitely and scrawled. There is also a palpable balance here between intelligence & humor – these are generally sunny works, much more so than my memory of Day’s earlier books. My immediate reaction, reading the above, was that I wanted stanzas like this to go on forever. And in general, tho Day plays with line length & works that let go of the left margin, they generally do, at least for the first eight odes. Here’s the first stanza of the title poem, “Enthusiasm”:
Ideas presuppose us
not the head
hand or facture
What is facture
the wander of two
shooting the blue
breeze figured in friends
Lull and Hum
Clam and Grass
ear to foot and finger
to ground the word
world
haunting the sky red
and blinking
comes disclaimed the size
our bodies are
plus one
hysterically numbered
now standing in
a short row
whose tune lasts
til newts disband
or originality proves
our idea
in the first place
The organizing term in this passage is world, already italicized, positioned so that you can’t miss the echo of word immediately prior any more than you could miss it in the title five odes earlier (there it was the schema of prose that carried the implication). That other italicized term, facture, of course means execution, especially in the sense of performance, the execution of an art object, of which this work is again setting out a brilliant demonstration. Whether this passage & ode is, as I read it, about the creation of families, the idea of family, politically charged concept in these perilous times but when was it ever not thus, or something else altogether really is not the point here nearly so much as the heightened awareness that occurs throughout this structure of language at play.
“Hat Schism,” the ninth ode, feels at least partially like a bridge to the three longer pieces gathered under “Otium” that make up the greater two-thirds of this manuscript. Here is just the first paragraph or page, sans the drop cap which I've been unable to reproduce here:
For I would not be a slave if I could help it under a hat the lack of whose shade would leave me smart naked in the rain. For what I want are dry pants and an early start tomorrow. I hate the unreaped fields, its over-reasoned surplus now doffing to a dream of opposability. For it is an indolent sinking sun falling on the fox I admire alone in hiding. Do I sing too loud? I am a child who’s forgotten all about it, but having heard the forbidden anthem begin to long for home again myself. For any god’s quantity of fiddlers you may make up a feather bed I’d be glad to lie in. For I am composed of calculation and little holes. For this land is my limb. Such are the unravished prisoners the larks these states—
You can hear almost instantly the change in tone, even more the shift in focus, created by these hard stops of periods. Where the verse stanzas of the poems before do not posit a persona per se, these paragraphs sure do, with a wry satirical hand.
The three poems of “Otium” – the title is Latin & Hejinian on the book jacket describes it as meaning “peace, ease, repose,” where Merriam-Webster Online defines it as “leisure with dignity” (are these the inverse of poetry?) – play with this same range between abstraction & comedic immanence, each one quite different in its approach. Here is the third (of 44) sections of “Romantic Fragments,” each printed as with “Hat Schism” one to a page:
on the way to ear. The crude cosmopolitan is
like me, finite on the way to infinity, is why
the boomerang wind (there, I said it again), is how
revolution hates eruptions
of the past, commuter train
in its own mouth. My [illegible]
ukulele’s broke on a North
we neither know nor lament
since suffering the cruelty of rust, the zip
fastener acts out its increments, ever smaller
coded instructions spooling inside her
Each fragment has a title like the above, a line in italics in which one sentence ends & another begins, tho to say that it actually continues in the ten-line stanza that follows often requires, as here, something of a leap of faith. The idea that this first line is a title is itself a presumption, one that I revised about halfway through these dense (albeit compact) structures, seeing it finally as the link between the prior fragment and the one that follows. That’s all but impossible in this one, in that the second fragment actually ends with a question mark, one of only two to actually end with what appears to be the conclusion of a sentence. The first phrase in the title of the next piece – the world presupposes. – neither verifies nor negates a connection. A difficult balance.
What’s really happening here are these serpentine sentences whose logic often gives way right at the line break. It’s like reading a Faulkner for the 22nd century. Cumulatively, “Romantic Fragments” is every bit as sensuous a reading experience as “Odes,” tho in a very different way. But if the first eight odes tend toward a stylistic center, the three works of “Otium” are each very different. The poem “Otium” itself replicates some of the typographic features of the final ode – paragraphs that begin with drop caps, but here without any punctuation whatsoever save for words in the Text that appear in capital letters and Boldfaced, maybe a dozen per paragraph. The effect is lush, witty and often dazzling, but run together rather than giving each paragraph it’s own page, the piece feels shorter in comparison to the others than it really is. In comparison, the final sequence, “Sixteen Lucky Dreams (Epical Pictures),” offers one stanza works, each with its own spelled out number and title (always in parentheses), presenting in what appears to be lyric form the same line/stanza relationships that governed the book’s first pages. While the 16 vary in length, they hew close to the 14-line benchmark of the sonnet, and often entail some pointed use of quotation marks. Possibly because it was the line/stanza work of the first poems that sucked me through the looking glass of this book, I find myself tremendously heartened by the return to this relationship here in the volume’s final pages. It gives the work a sense both of closure & of optimism.
Optimism, indeed Enthusiasm, are not words I would normally associate with Day’s past writing, which has always struck me as having a dark thread. The experience of this book is not unlike, say, that of first reading Opening of the Field in the early 1960s when Robert Duncan, already a well-known poet, kicked it up a notch to produce three great books in a row. I have no idea just how far Jean Day can take her new work, but I do feel that she’s operating now on a whole new level. It’s thrilling to read.
Labels: Jean Day
Monday, September 24, 2007
Warning: spoilers abound below.
Rather by accident, no, entirely by accident, I found myself watching what I take to be the most profound film meditation on the meaning of marriage I’ve ever seen, 51 Birch Street, directed by Doug Block on the subject of his parents & their relationship. Like a lot of indie documentarians, Block is one of these guys who wanders around filming everything, so when he starts shooting footage of Mike & Mina & the rest of his family around his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, hardly anyone thinks twice about it. As one of his sisters puts it on a “response” film included on the DVD, even when Doug tells them this is going to be a film, their reaction is “this is a really expensive home movie.” At that point in his career, he’s directed just two other films that got to release, neither of them a serious hit, even by documentary standards. One senses that Doug’s father is a little perplexed at this non-career his son seems to have chosen, tho this is underscored by the fact that Doug & his father barely know how to talk to one another. Doug’s real emotional connection is to his mother, Mina, an intense, beautiful woman even as she pushes into her eighties, while his mechanical engineer dad seems almost a stereotype of the distant, aloof parent.
Then three things occur that completely change this not-very-promising drama. First, Mina dies rather suddenly, after a three-week bout of pneumonia. We quickly realize that both Doug and his two older sisters had simply assumed that it would be Mike who went first. They’re not at all sure what this will portend for their father.
He, on the other hand, doesn’t miss a step. Mike takes a trip from his suburban home in
The kids are completely aghast. Has dad been cheating on their mother? Has he been doing so for 40 years? They’re nowhere through their own grieving processes & suddenly Mike shows up with “Kitty or Carol or whatever her name is,” they go through a wedding at the temple that features a 12-second on-screen kiss – “eleven seconds longer than I’d ever seen him kiss my mother” – and begin to pack up the house in Port Washington, which they’re selling in order to return permanently to Florida. The children are completely stunned.
It’s during the moving process that Mike decides to hand over Mina’s diaries to his son Doug, having already agreed that Doug can “help” with the move by filming and interviewing him as they pack – the largest single part of the motion picture consists of these conversations. The diaries take up three file-drawer sized cartons, and consist over both handwritten and typed diaries going back 40 years. It’s a massive writing project, thousands of pages.
Does Doug really want to read them? Would you? He sticks his nose in them just far enough to realize that they’re loaded with commentary about the marriage itself – it’s Mina’s primary subject as a suburban stay-at-home housewife – and that she is none too glowing in her descriptions of Mike and the marriage. Doug, who (also in the vein of indie documentarians) supports himself by doing wedding videos, asks the rabbi of one of the services if he can come talk to him. Should he read these deeply personal documents? He also talks with Mina’s best friend, Natasha, who tells him emphatically that he should. The rabbi agrees.
Reading them is a revelation. The happy marriage of his parents turns out not to have been happy at all. Mina is angry & often bitter in her descriptions of it. She goes into therapy and has a deep transference with her therapist, whom she literally begs (to no avail) to sleep with her. She has an affair with one of Mike’s friends, but takes care that there is no evidence in the diary to indicate which friend that might have been. (We later meet some of them at a farewell party for Mike at the temple & wonder if maybe one of these octogenarians could have been Mina’s secret lover.) Mike & Mina discuss divorce, but never act on it. Mina even writes about Kitty, decades ago, wondering if her relationship with Mike is sexual, deciding that that is irrelevant, but concluding that “nice, pliable little Kitty” is the kind of woman Mike would or should have married if he had known what kind of an adult he was going to be. Coming, as he did, out of the service right at the end of World War 2 and marrying quickly, he and Mina never have dealt with the fact that they have different psychic & emotional needs.
Discovering his mother’s affair is at least as big a shock as his father’s quick second marriage. Natasha reminds him that their generation – now in its eighties – went through the sixties just like everyone else and discusses spouse-swapping parties, three-ways and drug use very matter of factly, tho it’s not clear whether Mike & Mina ever flirted with sex, drugs or rock-n-roll in quite the same way.
Mike tells Doug that Mina never really new how to love him. Her highest compliment ever was “You’re sort of okay, you’re better than most of the men I know.” And he knows about what he calls her fantasy sex life, her emotional identification with actors or politicians, her intense feelings for her therapist, etc. Mike admits that he doesn’t miss her, tho you can see the toll that recognition has on him.
Doug finally asks his father the question. Had he ever cheated on Mina? There is a long, awkward silence that could be interpreted any number of different ways, followed by Mike’s saying no, he never had, he’d had opportunities, but had never acted on them.
So the narrative frame of seeing their father as the cheater and Mina as the cheated-upon turns out to be exactly the opposite of what you end with in the film. Doug is still reeling from seeing his father suddenly full of life, looking to the future in his mid-80s, and obviously happy as this film draws to a close. But the process has allowed him – and his two sisters – to come to accept Kitty for the very warm, solid person she is. And it’s enabled Doug to really communicate with his father. They literally end up, at film’s end, holding hands.
I don’t think this film could have been done as fiction – so much of it depends on Mina’s diaries – Doug quotes them at length, tho you only see key phrases highlighted on the screen. It would look just too convenient a narrative in a “made-up” story – but as a documentary you get a sense of both Mina & Mike as good, warm people of great depth, who clearly had different needs and never were able to address that gap in their lives. Was Mina clinically depressed? She certainly seems so, and yet her story is not a diagnosis, any more than Mike was the automaton of an engineer his son appears to have feared going into the film. If they weren’t the picture-book happy marriage envisioned by the anniversary party at the start of the movie, they certainly chose to hold together, so that their regrets – both had plenty – don’t appear to include the decision to stay a couple even as they realized their differences.
What this film does better than any I can remember – the closest “cinematic” equivalent I can think of is perhaps Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage – is give you a sense of the depth and complexity of these two people, and of the incredible difficulty posed by the task of somehow joining two such complicated beings into a single unit. Is their marriage “a failure”? I don’t think that Doug would say yes to that. One of his sisters, on the response film, comes very close tho and breaks down at the thought that Mina might have “found happiness” had she left the marriage a quarter century earlier. My own sense is that this film does a much better job suggesting just how responsible each one of is for his or her own happiness – it’s not so much something you find as it is something you build. Mina doesn’t seem likely to have built hers anywhere else, even if being with the “wrong” man all those years couldn’t have been easy. Mike on the other hand seems to have suffered in silence – Kitty makes a point of noting that he’s a good listener and that this is his primary attraction – but he has far less difficulty in moving on, taking precisely that responsibility. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this film is that Mike, Mina & Kitty all end up presented as complex, admirable people – Doug Block avoids all the narrative pitfalls that would have pitted one against another. Instead, you get a sense of what 50-plus years actually means for two individuals not magically suited one to the other. That’s an enormous amount to convey in just 90 minutes.
Labels: Film
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Ron Silliman
West Coast
Tuesday, October 2
Mills Hall Living Room
Mills College,
5000 MacArthur Bld
Free & open to the public
§
Wednesday, October 3
Meese Auditorium
Center for the Visual Arts
Free ($5 donation suggested)
& open to the public
Labels: Readings
Saturday, September 22, 2007
New Yorker promises
Paul Muldoon as poetry editor
does not represent
”some sort of radical
aesthetic or theoretical shift”
§
Rae Armantrout
reading at
Writers House
last Thursday
(MP3)
§
§
A suite of poems
by
Terence Winch
§
On Barbara Cole’s
”Foxy Moron”
§
Sucking:
Ariana Reines & The Cow
§
All about
Lorenzo Thomas
§
Charles Simic
discusses his plans
as Poet Laureate
§
§
Bookstores in Kyiv
(a.k.a.
§
The new Russian
pulp fiction
§
Rushdie:
blogs are not the enemy
§
The case of
the vanishing book review
§
The case of
the vanishing hyphen
§
Stephen Greenblatt
on critical writing
as an
ethically adequate object
§
Poets & militarized cyberspace
§
A poet from Cameroon
§
Indie bookstores
in Pittsburgh
§
A test of translation:
Miyazawa Kenji
§
Talking with
Benjamin Zephaniah
§
The most influential
novel
of the past
half century?
§
The life & impact of
H.L. Mencken
§
The global evolution
of
intellectual property rights
§
§
Talking with
Justin Vitiello
§
More on dying languages
§
A book of poems
from Palestinian filmmaker
Hind Shoufani
§
A bookstore owner
in
Southern Spain
§
Brain surgery
alters accent
§
Joshua Corey
goes for
baroque
§
School
as the enemy
of literature
§
Imagining Heather McHugh
as not being a member of
the School that Dare Not
Speak its Name
§
Religion in prison
imprisons religion
§
The poet laureate
of
§
Wittgenstein
& the limits
of radical poetics
§
Imagining slams
as
performance art
§
Double-speak
vs.
double meanings
§
Agi Mishol,
a “major minor poet”
in
§
“a horrible story
of the poet”
§
Four
poetry/poetics
jobs
§
Meanwhile,
in an alternate universe
§
A New York Times
profile of
François Truffaut
§
§
Abstract expressionism
at the Met
§
The artist known as
Richard Prince
§
§
A profile of
Frankie Valli,
the last great voice
of 50s doo-wop
Labels: links
Friday, September 21, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
William Allegrezza, Fragile Replacements, Meritage Press,
Tim Atkins, Horace, O Books, Oakland 2007
Tim Atkins, Translations of Horace, Matchbox (no. 6),
Ivan Blatný, The Drug of Art, Selected Poems, translated by Matthew Sweney, Justin Quinn, Alex Zucker, Veronika Tuckerová & Anna Moschovakis, edited by Veronika Tuckerová, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2007
John Bloomberg-Rissman, No Sounds of My Own Making, Leafe Press,
John Bloomberg-Rissman, World0, Leafe Press in conjunction with Bamboo Press,
Noah Eli Gordon, Novel Pictorial Noise, Harper Perennial, New York 2007
Nathan Kernan, Lunch. A Poem, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2007
Susan Landers, Covers, O Books, Oakland 2007
Alan May, Notes toward an Apocryphal Text, Port Silver Press,
Chris McCabe, Tongue (BUGJAR), Matchbox (no. 10),
William Michaelian, Winter Poems, Cosmopsis Books, San Francisco 2007
William Michaelian, Another Song I Know: Short Poems, Cosmopsis Books, San Francisco 2007
David Mutschlencner, Sign, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2007
Alice Notley, In the Pines, Penguin,
Michael Peters, Vaast b1n, n ephemerisi , Calamari Press, New York 2007
Sarah Riggs, Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling, Reality Street Editions,
Jerome Rothenberg, Triptych (Poland/1931, Khurbn, The Burning Babe), New Directions, New York 2007
Frank Sherlock, Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show, Night Flag Books,
Heidi Lynn Staples, Dog Girl, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2007
Scott Thurston, Hold, Shearsman,
Spring Ulmer, Benjamin’s Spectacles, Kore Press, Tucson 2007
Carol Watts, Brass, Running, Equipage,
Carol Watts, Wrack, Reality Street Editions,
Books (Other)
Eileen R. Tabios, The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography, Marsh Hawk Press, New York 2007
Journals
Action Poétique, 189, September, 2007,
Cue, A Journal of Prose Poetry, vol. 4, issue 1, Winter 2007, Tucson, AZ. Includes John Taggart, CA Conrad, Julia Bloch, Monca Youn, Rodney Phillips, Ryan Eckes, Gabriel Gudding, Michael Snediker, more.
House Organ, no. 60, Fall 2007,
Parser, no. 1, May 2007,
The Pulchritudinous Review, no. 1, no location given. Includes Alice Notley, Eleni Sikelianos, Ken Mikolowski, Renee Zepeda, Ron Silliman, Faye Kicknosway, more.
All books received since September 7
Labels: Recently Received
Thursday, September 20, 2007
David Giannini responds to my blog on his book, Other Lines:
Dear Ron Silliman:
Thank you for reviewing Others' Lines. These days, one is grateful for almost any notice!
You have certain agenda items of your own throughout most of the review, and I needn't agree with you. You do end the review with a tidy handshake and nod – much appreciated! You mentioned nothing about the Note (at the beginning of O.L.) indicating my overall intent and attempted honoring of a diversity of poets coming from many "campsites" and how they become, one line with another, intimately linked. There is no "game" involved, the whole process was quite organic for me. There is also the matter of the simple gap-narrative one may discern throughout O.L., one reason why I felt it was necessary to place three triads to a page in most cases, a matter of 'fluidity'. My hope is that the process in O.L. will be built upon by others.
I want to provide you, here, with another poet's response, one who is also a university professor and a Buddhist. I copy a portion of his response verbatim:
It is wonderful to see Your (for you've done something no other has here!) Lines as a book now – and fitting that Ganick bring it out.
You 'call into question' so many assumptions about poet and poem in a delightful way, show how a poem, any poem, is made out of poems, renew the idea of, well, I'd say sangha for want of something better.
There's so much pontification these days about 'authorship' and 'intellectual property' – all of it nonsense and all of it because people want to hold onto something unreal. They want, figuratively if not literally, their royalties. To be royal. And all worked up because they're not, because no one is. And you've made something here that transcends it all, shows us something lovely 'on the other side.'
Quite a felt response, I'd say, one quite different from most of the seven responders to your review, people who are judging and even attacking the integrity and veracity of approach in Others' Lines WITHOUT HAVING READ THE BOOK ITSELF! At first I thought to stick the prongs of my pitchfork of contempt into the mess of them, but why bother? Their own words betray them. Nor is this a matter of 'sour grapes' on my part – I respond to what is obviously and innately various ego-stances of uninformed pronouncements. I am, then, grateful for Edward Baker's response, and for "nate the writer", his openness.
Thank you, again, Ron Silliman.
David Giannini
P.S. If you think, for some reason, that this letter might hold interest if placed within your blog site, go right ahead!
Labels: David Giannini, Responses
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Tom Devaney’s review
of Charles North’s
Cadenza
§
“Please welcome
John Ashbery”
§
Christian Bök
on Writing & Failure
(part 1, part 2, part 3)
§
Perry Anderson
on
depicting Europe
Alice Kaplan’s Paris
§
The collective work
of a single author
§
This time
it’s Barnes & Noble
that closes
§
Ange Mlinko
on
the materiality of language,
Modernism Concentrate
& what Romanticism lost
§
Joseph Hutchison
takes me to task
for not picking
Larry Eigner’s
more ”luminous,
energetic” work
for my blog yesterday
§
The Nobel Prize-winning poet
you never heard of
§
That “tight-ass,”
Ron Padgett
§
A weeklong poetry fest
in Edmonton
§
Poetry
takes it to the station
in
§
Sawako Nakayasu
gets an NEA grant
to bring the poems of
Sagawa Chika
into English
e-books
in translation
§
The New York Times
is now
free online
§
§
Where was
Kerouac going?
On the road
on the web
Kerouac
in Queens
§
The next generation
of Bukowski
wannabes
§
Preserving
Philip K. Dick’s
legacy
§
Can Shakespeare
save theater?
Can blogging
save theater criticism?
§
Les Murray
in
The New Yorker
§
Derrida vs. Jerry Lewis
(this is actually
a much better movie
than its reviews)
§
One more goes
every two weeks
§
§
Make your enemies
vanish
§
A profile of
Tess Gallagher
§
Time, Space & Motion
in the Age of
Shakespeare
§
§
Indie bookshops
in
§
Judging
the Man Booker Prize
§
Poetry & duck noodles
in Hat Yai
§
Joni Mitchell,
poet
§
Poetry
”is the Darfur
of twenty-first century
literature”
§
With a little help from
Tyson Foods & Lucinda Williams,
the
announces
The Miller Williams Poetry Prize
§
Pinsky
on
poetry & the academy
§
The poetics
of
dog training
§
Zoe Brigley,
a feminist poet
in
§
Remembering
Shahriar
§
A review of
Sheri Benning
&
Glen Downie
§
Gambling on
Eugene Gloria
§
A young adult novel
from
Sherman Alexie
§
The most hated
philosopher
writing in English
§
Talking with
Big Poppa E
§
Camille Paglia:
gauging gender studies
from books on sperm
§
Wistful
about Wystan
§
§
§
§
The legacy of
Allan Bloom
§
§
A story about
Coltrane’s work
§
Ansel Adams
& technology
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
It took me a long time – seven years – to read Larry Eigner’s last works, readiness / enough / depends / on. Green Integer is the post-avant press least likely to send me a review copy of anything, and I never see its wares in bookstores unless I happen to be visiting Small Press Distribution in
It’s no accident that In the American Tree is dedicated to Larry. His impact on my generation was enormous. While he’d originally become known in the 1960s as one of the Projectivist Poets – he’s included in the “Black Mountain” section of the Allen anthology, tho he never visited the college to my knowledge & certainly couldn’t have been scoring his own speech for the printed page, given the impact that cerebral palsy had on his capacity to form words – Eigner really was a philosopher of consciousness who used poetry almost architecturally to sculpt the most marvelous observations of the particular, even when he chose the simplest categorical terms to plot this out. There is one poem in this relatively slender volume that is perhaps the apotheosis of this approach to the poem. Like most of Eigner’s works, it has no title other than the date of its composition, “
hills
earth
sky
night
clouds
Five nouns, no waiting. It proceeds from the particular to a more general category – hills are a synecdoche for earth, and one might say further that sky performs the same role for night. But not really. We have shifted from the physical to the temporal. That shift is in fact one of the meanings of the final term clouds. What is the relationship between the observable and these larger categories in our lives? If sky leads us to night (or alternately day), where does clouds take us? What ultimately do clouds mean? Is there a storm brewing or are these the lollipop puffballs of a serene evening? Eigner doesn’t answer that question.
It’s not unreasonable for a person unfamiliar with Eigner’s work to counter, when they hear a reading like the one above, that I’m getting an awful lot from five of the blandest words in the English language. To which really the only answer would appear to be that if you read all of Eigner, all two or three thousand poems that have appeared in books & journals, that he would type into his letters (or, worse, write with the faintest of pencils – his penmanship was worse than his speech, and for the same reasons), you’d realize that this text above can’t really be read any other way. Eigner’s economy of vocabulary and means may have once been prompted by the physical challenges of his palsy, but I think he must have understood almost at once the limitless power of brevity. He is, as a result, the most exacting of poets – if a word is two spaces to the right, there is a reason for it. Nothing is casual here, even for a poem that can be read in fewer than five seconds.
This also accounts for the sometimes strangely torqued grammar that, for example, can be found in this book’s title. I’ve always thought of this as what Eigner learned from Charles Olson in much the same way that his conciseness owes a debt to Robert Creeley. The key term in that sequence is in fact its last: on. Readiness enough depends on. What is that state of dependency, of contextuality, that lurks in this preposition? It’s as tho these maximally taut first three terms were driving through that last one – it’s no accident that the syllable count here moves steadily downward: three, two, two, one.
I was surprised to discover that Larry wrote just six poems in the nine months after I moved to
nice and how many times
Written on November 17, it’s one of the rare ones with a title, “Might Gertrude Stein Lie Open to Criticism?” to which the poem sounds like a joke response until you start to allow all the possible meanings of nice to filter in, that extra space between it and the four remaining words all the punctuation in the world. To this Eigner appended a note which editor Robert Grenier proves wise enough to leave in: I guess this is / what I had, though / now, dec. 9, it / seems to be. This is indeed what Larry Eigner had at the end of a long and fruitful life. As you permit all the possible connotations from that last phrase – it / seems to be – rise up & drift away, you realize just how very much that was.
Labels: Larry Eigner
Monday, September 17, 2007
3:10 to Yuma has gotten some rave reviews – four stars from Roger Ebert for example – and there is no doubt that it’s a good movie with what may be the best acting Russell Crowe has ever done. But just as that latter detail isn’t necessarily great praise in itself, much of the positive reaction this film has garnered to date (this morning, viewers were ranking it among the 150 best films ever made over at IMDB) has, I fear, been tainted somewhat by its context as the first sorta serious “big” film to arrive in theaters after a particularly barren summer. Once the kiddy action blockbuster flicks that kick off each summer season were out, there was frankly not much to watch. Often the later weeks of the summer are filled with “problematic” movies, jinxed
But
It’s been too many decades since I saw the original version of this film, with Glenn Ford of all people in the Russell Crowe role and Van Heflin as the crippled civil war vet who is desperate enough to agree to take this murderer to the train that is supposed to send him off to his trial & subsequent hanging. The late Halsted Welles, who adapted Elmore Leonard’s short story for the 1957 film, is listed here as a screenwriter as well and surely some of the dialogue that is too corny for words, such as the son’s speech to his dad in the final scene, must have carried over from 1957’s idea of positive family values. These are lines that would have made more sense in The Simpson Movie, where Bart’s contentious relationship with his father would given such silliness an ironic edge. Here it’s like watching a sound crane loom suddenly at the top of the screen – an element of the film-making intruding into the narrative, but without any of the flair of a Brechtian gesture. There is an almost identical moment earlier in the film in which the father addresses Doc after the veterinarian saves them by causing a railroad tunnel to cave in. It makes you wonder just what the hell director James Mangold (Walk the Line; Girl, Interrupted) could have been thinking.
We have a ritual in our family whenever such nonsense appears on screen. When they were younger, my kids would want to know why this Pinkerton, who should have died from blood loss before he ever got to the vet, or from septic shock once he got there, is sassing Ben Wade as they ride through the postcard perfect desert landscape. “How did he live, Pa?” they would ask. “Narrative,” would be my response. “With narrative anything is possible.” For example, a one-legged man might outrun bullets while running, jumping & all but somersaulting over rooftops even as he returns gunfire. You bet.
It’s one thing for such “miracles” to occur in a film involving wizardry & muggles, quite another in a historical drama. When I was a lad of about ten, my favorite TV show was Rin Tin Tin, about a German shepherd in the old west, an odd enough choice for a boy terrified of dogs. Set in a fort somewhere in the last half of the 19th century, each show involved some problem with Indians or rustlers that the dog invariably solved. Rinty, as everyone called him, was more than just the “run and get help” type pup that made Lassie seem ever so wimpy – he could go into K-9 force mode and knock baddies off their horses. But it was disconcerting to watch the action while, in the background, a jetliner clearly traversed the 19th century sky, which happened more than once.
Almost Brechtian in its own challenge to the viewer, Roy Rogers, another one of my childhood TV favorites, set half of its episodes in the 19th century, and half in the present. Sometimes the only way you could tell was that
Wade’s character is crucial to the story, which calls on him to make some surprising choices, more in line with Inspector Renault at the airport in
Labels: Film
Sunday, September 16, 2007
The book as sculpture:
Brian Dettmer
§
Draft 85: Hard Copy
may be the best
in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’
great work
to date
§
Talking with
CA Conrad
§
What is
alternative poetry?
§
Talking with
Sheila E. Murphy
§
Best-selling books
of Korean poetry
§
A profile of
Talking Leaves Books
in
Another of
Hue-Man Bookstore & Café
in
§
Four independent bookstores
in Sag Harbor
§
Good books & bad art
in
§
Documentary
on
isn’t
Fully Awake
§
After
The Last Intellectuals
§
Words don’t mean
what they say
Unless it’s a parrot talking
§
Reaganomics
& the future
of university presses
§
PCs vs. books
in library budgets
§
Some light by which to read
a hidden text
§
Computer poetry
and the future
of reading
§
Who won
the canon wars?
A right-wing
reading list
§
John Hollander’s
(PDF)
§
A profile of
Miyazawa Kenji
§
§
A new translation of
Andrea Zanzotto
§
Talking with
Kevin Young
§
Tom Cuson,
poet, photographer,
for director of Intersection,
died in
§
Dasuram Majhi
who wrote in Kui
has died
of cholera
at 35
§
Phil Frank,
who drew
what may have been
the only local
newspaper comic strip
in the country,
has died
§
Sarah Lantz
has died
§
More on the poetry
of Gitmo
§
A Quietist memorial
of September 11
§
Amy Lowell,
hiding eroticism
in plain site
§
Kajal Bandyopadhyay,
Bengali poet & neo-Marxist
§
Alan Boyd,
Australian “anti-poet”
§
Poetry & public art
in
§
Don’t get
all snitty
about what’s in
the dictionary
§
Measuring
Sam Hamill
§
Discrimination against men
in literary awards??
§
Was Byron
the Britney Spears
of his day?
§
Anthony Thwaite,
escaping Larkin’s shadow
§
James Fenton
calls for a crackdown
on “unprofessional” readings
§
A Quietist Paul Valéry
§
Walter Benjamin
as muse
§
Alan Moore
on porn
& its contradictions
§
A debate over
crime & memoir
that recalls neither
OJ’s If I Did It
nor Arlo’s
Alice’s Restaurant
§
Faux memoirista
concocts
true novel
§
The landscapes
of Raymond Carver
§
The Mass MoCA mess
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
Brian Calvin’s Half Mast is the cover image
for Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger
This started out as a rave review for Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger, a book that certainly warrants that response. Over successive books Foust has demonstrated that the easy brilliance of his first works was not in any sense a fluke, and that he is one of the best younger poets now writing. But then I thought about what I take to be the real risk in his work, that of recognizability. Foust’s works do things with language that are not quite like anything I’ve read before, but the poems themselves feel immediately familiar as text. Consider “Huffy”:
August, the thick end
of summer where I’m
from. I’ve a grill, shrewd
tools, a bag of glue,
some Neil Young. (The world
eats what it orders.)
My neighbors cough and
wave and wave and frown.
Your youngest cousin
weaves by on a shit-
to-bed ten-speed, two
crutches tucked under
her too-white right arm.
This is to refer
to almost falling
from falling. It’s a
dream I’m not ashamed.
What in this poem makes me feel that it’s special? (Which I do feel.) Certainly poems have presented dreamscapes before, even if not particularly this accurately. Poets have been writing this sort of single-stanza free verse affair now for decades. Think of David Ignatow and Alan Dugan, both masters of the form. Yet there are details here that seem out of place, or not explained by this readily recognizable framework. What’s the bag of glue for? It’s emphasized by running the vowel-consonant combination by in reverse order in the word tools, that same central vowel at the heart also of the prior adjective shrewd. Note even the hard g and trilled l in the earlier grill. That’s an awful lot of a set-up for a detail that goes by in passing with no further mention.
Similarly, the reiteration of the phrase and wave, this time mid-line rather than over a linebreak alters the syncopation of the poem – it also sets up the later falling / from falling. Foust is brilliant with these little details that foreground certain elements almost in passing – it creates a tone to the poem that you can’t ever quite put your finger on, which is important in a text where the subject is never quite announced. Consider, for example, just how long the sentence goes that introduces the cousin before it gets to her gender, present only in a pronoun: five freakin’ lines.
There is, I think, a possible sequence of connotation that then builds from too-white, taken symbolically rather than, say, as an allusion to a recently removed cast, tying to the poem’s final word ashamed. The number of plausible schema available to the parsimony principle here is not small, ranging from having caused an accident that resulted in broken limbs all the way to child sexual abuse, real or simply imagined. One could likewise build back from that rather opaque title, “Huffy” – is that a description of the girl, I first thought, of the neighbors? – to the bag of glue (glue doesn’t come in bags, silly, unless you’re planning to sniff it), that suggests that the hidden word here is huffing, the process of getting high from fumes.
Foust’s poems often present just this sort of conundrum – at one level a suburban still-life, on another a tale of depravity just below the surface – the economy with which all this is accomplished can be startling, and is why I feel no hesitation in praising this work to the skies. Yet the frame of this poem, its presentation of a lyric dreamscape, something akin to a daydream, is so familiar that you can’t tell if Foust is the most avant-garde of writers, packing meaning in as densely as any writer we have, or the quietest of the
This is an aspect of Foust’s work that he shares with Rae Armantrout, the poet of whom he most reminds me. (The one time I met him was at one of Rae’s readings.) It’s something I see as well in the writing of Michael Palmer and Fanny Howe, among those of my own generation. I’m sure it’s why Billy Collins seems so ravishingly fond of the work of Ron Padgett, among the poets in the generation immediately before mine. Or why many readers and more than a few critics preferred Robert Creeley or Denise Levertov among the
It’s a question that Armantrout gets at obliquely in her famous essay, “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?” which leads off her new Collected Prose just out from Singing Horse Press. The implication in that question, of course, is that her work is comprehensible, whereas the likes of myself or Bruce Andrews will drive a reasonable reader to tears. Armantrout’s essay is hardly any longer than this note as she demonstrates how Susan Howe, Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian all write work that brings “the underlying structures of language/thought into consciousness.” Their work is no less “language-oriented” than David Melnick or P. Inman, it just takes something of a different form.
So it’s not an accident that Armantrout and Fanny Howe have appeared in The New Yorker and The Nation, where Foust also recently turned up. While I don’t think it’s impossible any more for the likes of a Christian Bök or Kenny Goldsmith to turn up in these venues, it’s certainly less likely. And P. Inman or Geof Huth? Don’t hold your breath.
There are two kinds of risk at play here, perhaps more. The first is that a young poet who discovers in him- or herself the capacity to write in such a manner that their work succeeds in reaching both traditions in American letters will decide ultimately to do only that, which then turns into a kind of holding back, atrophying the writing. This is, I think, the problem with the later work of George Oppen, for example, which is sentimental & lax in comparison to his earlier books. And I think it’s what ultimately kept Gustaf Sobin from becoming more than a footnote to expat literature. It’s an active element in the increasingly rapid production of self-similar books, all modeled on The Double Dream of Spring, in the writing of John Ashbery, and why, I think, his poetry is most likely to known not for that, but for the exceptions, the earliest books plus Three Poems, Vermont Notebook, Flow Chart, even Girls on the Run.
The second of risk is broader and effects us all. As MFA programs pop up like mushrooms in a damp forest climate, and the number of publishing poets in the USA moves beyond 10,000 toward the 20,000 mark or thereabouts, nobody will have any hope whatsoever of reading even a fraction of what is being written and American verse, which has suffered from its two competing visions now since the middle of the 19th century, will fragment that much further, so that there will be one audience that reads only the likes of Graham Foust, Lee Ann Brown, Laura Sims & Linh Dinh, another that reads only the next generation of Quietists, some of whom – take Daisy Fried and Alice Jones as examples – are terrific, while a third lives entirely in a world of performance, flash poetics & vispo. Plus a hundred or so metro scenes, poets who prefer their audiences face-to-face. Etc. Etc.
To some degree, what I see as the promise of a Graham Foust is that I think he works from any perspective. If you’re a fan of Wendell Berry, you will like Foust. If you’re a fan of Billy Collins, you will like Foust. If you like C.D. Wright, or Charles Bernstein or Lynne Dreyer, you will like Graham Foust. In this sense, he is one of the younger poets who strikes me as having moved toward a post-militant American poetics, neither post-avant nor Quietist. Which in a way is what
One of the more interesting moments in the history of the School That Shall Not Be Named is the revolt of many of its younger stars in the 1950s when confronted with the reality of the New American Poets. Look, for example, at the poems Robert Bly published in Poetry in the early 1950s, or the first books of Bill Merwin or Adrienne Rich, or the magazine verse that James Wright was turning out until Bly recruited him. All were clearly little Lowells, little Wilburs & then, whammo, they were penning The Lice, discovering surrealism, doing all manner of things not heretofore admissible on the campuses of Kenyon or Harvard. The one book I know that really touches on this is David Ossman’s The Sullen Art, published by
I don’t know what either “school” is supposed to consist of, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of either.
That’s disingenuous to the point of dishonest, but in fact Merwin’s already trying to imagine something beyond, tho he’s not very clear exactly what that might mean.
It’s interesting that the only one of this first generation of disaffected Lowell protégés to ever come close to the New American Poetry, as such, has been Adrienne Rich, who has long been a friend and advocate for the work, editorial & literary, of Clayton Eshleman, not necessarily whom you might think of if you were free associating from the conjunction of “New American” and “feminist.”
The others, including the non-Brahmin Quietists at
Ramke’s problem is exactly the opposite of Foust’s: Ramke seems to have become unrecognizable where Foust’s recognizability is apparent to any reader even if he turns out not to be quite what he seems.
Labels: Bin Ramke, Graham Foust, recognizability, Schools of poetry
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Perhaps the most shocking revelation in Hannah Weiner’s Open House, out this past spring from Kenning Editions, comes in the very last sentence of Patrick F. Durgin’s excellent introduction. It’s not the fact of just how many of Weiner’s books are out of print, nor how lucid & unpsychotic Weiner’s pre-“clairvoyant” writing is, nor even how lucid & unpsychotic some of her later work is (Cf. “If Workshop,” a proposal it would seem from the late 1980s), not even how little actual space, just ten pages from 156 given to her work, that the excerpt Clairvoyant Journal, Weiner’s signature volume, takes up in this impeccable version of a selected works.
The real shocker is that Patrick F. Durgin never met Hannah Weiner, who’s been gone now for only ten years. This is a shocker because Durgin would appear to have become the best friend Weiner ever had. Durgin has done more than anyone to make her writing accessible, thus to enhance her reputation. Now with Hannah Weiner’s Open House, he gives us the big picture, the book that shows the overall arc of this remarkable poet’s entire career. It’s a wonderful collection, even tho (or perhaps because) it’s going to send many of its readers to AddAll or Abebooks.Com to find whatever remains available of the original texts.
In the past I’ve characterized Weiner as a militant & precise realist of a distinct reality, one conditioned by her schizophrenia. Nothing in HWOH makes me want to step back from that description, tho this volume does a far better job than any of her previous books in placing Weiner’s writing and its development into a larger framework, one that includes the downtown
One might have expected Weiner to have been closer, in fact, to the first round of the
Weiner was even slower to begin publishing, with her first book, Magritte Series appearing in 1970. Clairvoyant Journal, the volume that made Weiner famous (or at least notorious) with its claim to have had portions of the text transcribed from language Weiner saw on people’s foreheads, on walls, or simply hovering mid-air, at times in elaborate textures, such as dog fur, is published by Angel Hair in 1978. It’s only her second book – Weiner was already 50.
This is a problem as much of the performance art scene as it was a question of the difficulty women still had getting into print in the 1970s. Jackson Mac Low, Weiner’s friend in that scene who likewise later gravitated toward language poetry, didn’t publish his first big book, Stanzas for Iris Lezak, until he was 48. It was only his fourth book.
Happily, both writers are now acknowledged as the major poets they were, and with HWOH, we finally have a good first step toward presenting her work in print in the same kind of comprehensive & intelligent fashion that has so transformed Jack Spicer’s influence & reputation in the four decades since his death. Durgin has done an especially good job dealing with the typographical challenges presented by Weiner’s texts, which can included many an undotted i and uncrossed t, can slide down the page or over other type. He treats the page as Weiner did, as a compositional field, reproducing some texts directly from books where Weiner herself had an opportunity to approve the final setting, and setting others “with comparable but uniform typefaces.” It’s the antithesis of the disaster than
Patrick Durgin here has accomplished something major. It makes you realize just how much a poet like
¹ Paul Mariah, Lew Ellingham, Lori Chamberlain, John Granger, Steve Abbott, the editors of Acts, even Kevin Killian, just to name a few.
Labels: Hannah Weiner
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Talking with
Nick Piombino
§
Talking with
Charles Bernstein
(a Bengali interview)
§
Talking with
Steve Vincent
§
Reading books
in the digital age
Linking readers
via social networking
Google
& the end of
fair use
§
A review of
Peter Gizzi’s
Outernationale
§
Talking with
Mark Wallace
(a Bengali interview)
§
Short reviews of
Stephen Paul Miller,
Eileen Tabios
&
Murat Nemet-Nejat
§
A profile of
Lana Darkac
§
New life
for Kerouac
§
Talking with
Joseph Lease
§
New York Post
cuts book reviews
§
Robin Blaser
returns
to SF State
§
Talking with
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
§
Not being a poet
§
as
”Professor of Poetry”
§
A review of
Peter O’Leary’s
Depth Theology
§
The selected poems
of
José Kozer
§
Trying to shut the door
on open access
§
Talking with
Tracy K. Smith
§
Poetry & podcasts
§
Dylan as poet
one more time
§
Keeping the Beats
in their box
A week of
mostly “not getting it”
at The Guardian
including
Bukowski as Beat
§
Poetry &
September 11
§
Where are the war poets
of today?
§
§
Naipul on Walcott,
Walcott on Naipul
§
& Bielspiel too
§
Age & gender
variations
in the blogosphere
§
Cowboy poetics
and the oral tradition
§
The killer
who turned it
into a novel
§
Poetry & bats
§
When the poet is a doctor
§
The latest in the
Who Wrote Shakespeare
nonsense
§
Plus what’s new in
fantasy theory
§
“
an unnatural act.”
§
Melbourne Writers Festival
briefly described
§
The Poetry
International Festival
§
8 easy steps
to understanding
bestsellers
§
§
CEO retires
at
Simon & Shoe Store
§
First Carolyn Kennedy
& Garrison Keillor,
now Che
§
§
Talking with
Billy Collins
§
David Amram,
writing for the giants
§
Documenta
on the ropes
§
A profile of
Peter Young
§
Last shot
to save the Barnes
Barnes picks architects
to complete the theft
Expanding
the Philadelphia Museum of Art
§
A tribute to
Elizabeth Murray
§
Hirst’s bling
goes boing
§
What’s become of
Turner Prize winners
§
Philosophy & sexism
§
Ranking the philosophy schools
Labels: links
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
It was a Tuesday, just like today. I had an appointment for my annual physical later that morning and Bob Dylan was releasing a new album so I turned to listen to WXPN’s New Release Tuesday when the newscaster for the
Everyone of us has our own memories of that morning, where we were, what we felt & thought. I can’t explain to you the anger & despair I feel today knowing that our president used this catastrophe to lie his way into an unwinnable war in Iraq that had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, even letting al Qaeda & Osama Bin Laden largely off the hook through the diversion of resources into the sinkhole of this conflict.
Since then, I have written of three works that I’ve looked to as the most articulate instances of poetry related to this tragedy. The first of these is James Sherry’s booklength prose poem, Our Nuclear Heritage, published by Sun & Moon in 1991. Which is to say before even the first attempt at bombing the
The second work was the poem, “The Dust,” in Michael Gottlieb’s Lost and Found, published (by no coincidence) by James Sherry’s Roof Books. Actually this is true of all three works in this great book, but the elegiac ”The Dust” is the poem that stays with me, and to which I return. Its placement in the center of this suite of poems is, as I noted when the book came out, perfect. The poem is blunt and terrible and gorgeous and sad all at once.
The third is the poem “Kneeling Bus” in Fanny Howe’s On the Ground, from Graywolf. Like Lost and Found, the entire book is woven through with this experience, which makes for an intense, even exhausting book from a poet who is sometimes mistaken as an instance of the ethereal lyric. It differs from Lost and Found principally in being a later confrontation with the same events, so that it reflects a further moment in the grieving process. As I noted here, On the Ground is “wonderful, simple, terrible, and unfathomably complex.”
There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands of other books already that address September 11. But these are the three that I find I need, and to which I return for exactly the same reason William Carlos Williams once noted, because I can find here news at a level nowhere else available. It sounds corny as all hell to say that these are three works not just for the heart but for the whole person, but it’s true as well.
Labels: September 11
Monday, September 10, 2007
David Giannini’s Others’ Lines (Series I and II) * Tricollage, published by Peter Ganick as a small chapbook, really nothing more than a saddle-stapled photocopy, is a fascinating if flawed attempt at a new form. As envisioned by Giannini, the tricollage consists of three lines, each taken from the first line of a poem by another poet. Thus, for example,
As a child
In cold hell, in thicket, how
I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful
comes Paul Pines, Charles Olson & Howard Nemerov.
Make passage an age
As under a vast squatting woman
You come back to life pissed off
brings together Ronald Johnson, Robin Magowan & Anne Waldman. Potentially, the combinations here are infinite: any poem by any poet in any combination of three would seem to be the game, tho I don’t believe that in practice Giannini uses translations in any of the seventy examples given here. Just from the first lines of these 70 poems, you could generate 9,129,120 possible tricollages (210 x 209 x 208). To these, you can another variable: spacing. While Giannini appears to preserve the indentation within the line of the material he recycles, he presents at least five different variations of the three-line poem. Thus, one might generate over 45 million different texts just from the lines in this slim chapbook alone. That puts a fair amount of pressure on the author to ensure that he or she has gotten the best 70 combinations to present.
There are, I think, two problems that Giannini doesn’t compellingly solve here. The first is the problem of famous or even just recognizable poems – the Olson in the first example cited above is a case in point. Olson actually pulled the title for one of the early Maximus volumes from that line. The impact over the space of three lines is like a giant foot kicking the gyroscope. It’s really a celebrity effect, like seeing a visual collage in which you suddenly recognize a context. While you might say that this is an effect that will vary from reader to reader, my sense is that the poem itself never survives the event.
The second, and more interesting, problem is that of first lines themselves. There’s a logic, even a violence, in breaking silence, a threshold the first line of any poem must cross, regardless of which school, what topic, which period, even which language it may involve. In fact, relatively few of the first lines Giannini has chosen work so well as second or third lines. This in turn gives Others’ Lines much more of a static feel than it might otherwise have. I’d’ve loved to have seen this project use the second & third of poems, even of the same poems as Giannini is using here. It would be a completely different book &, I suspect, both more subtle & quiet than the version here.
A third question – I wouldn’t call it a problem – has to do with the nature of the literary itself. Why quote poems, say, rather than newspaper copy, advertising, things heard in the street? While Giannini’s text doesn’t have the precious feel, say, of John Cage’s literary tourism through James Joyce, it still carries the air of the book. If tricollage as a form is to have as much chance as hay(na)ku, people other than Giannini are going to need to explore all these realms. Still, here is a mode whose moment (and source) of origin you can point to.
It’s a shame that this collection isn’t printed one to a page or given a cover with real cover stock, given really the much broader distribution it warrants¹ in an edition with perfect binding. Giannini’s “dynamic triads” may not be quite the revolution in verse his own preface implies. But I don’t see how any close reader won’t come away learning a great deal about the potential in quotation, the distinctness of firs lines & the possibilities of form. That’s a lot for a project of this scope to accomplish.
Labels: David Giannini, tricollage
Saturday, September 08, 2007
A history of lighght
§
Taking
The Grand Piano
literally
§
William Gibson:
countering the antibuzz
Node:
website for
a non-existent journal
§
Creative writing
& surveillance
after Virginia Tech
§
A sober assessment
of the “crisis”
in newspaper book reviews
Plus
Morris Dickstein
on
the future of criticism
§
A State Department history
of American poetry,
from the problematic
to the completely whack!
§
A wonderful review
of Reed Whittemore’s
memoirs
§
Simon DeDeo
on the
practicalities of blogging
(on not all of which
I agree)
§
Talking with
(and reading)
Ryan Eckes
§
on
Democracy Now!
§
An obit for
Mary Rising Higgins
§
This week’s
New Thing
§
Even tho he was a right winger,
Kerouac drives The New Criterion crazy!
Plus a libertarian
for Kerouac
(note what other book
has its 50th anniversary
this year)
§
Who owns the rights
to
Beckett & Ionesco?
§
James Laughlin
&
Brendan Gill
in conversation
§
§
Whitman’s novel
§
Just saying no
§
Auden’s lost poems
§
There’s going to be
a conference on
Thomas Merton
§
More on
Mrs. Shakespeare
§
Serializing your novel
on Facebook
§
Library tourism
§
Talking with
Ornette Coleman
§
Minimalism
to the max!
§
Damien Hirst’s
cash register
goes bling!
Labels: links
Friday, September 07, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Angela Ball, Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh 2007
Gary Barwin & derek beaulieu, frogments from the frag pool: haiku after bashō, The Mercury Press,
Jack Collom, In the Wind: Busking Poetry on the Downtown Boulder Mall, Summer 2006, Baksún Books, Boulder 2007
Brenda Coultas, The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2007
Thomas Devaney, A Series of Small Boxes, Fish Drum, New York 2007
Jim Harrison, Letters to Yesenin, Copper Canyon, Port
Pura López-Colomé,
Helen Losse, Paper Snowflakes, Southern Hum Press,
Justin Marks, [Summer Insular], Horse Less Press, Providence 2007
Garry Thomas Morse, Transversals for Orpheus & The Untitled 1-13, Line Books,
Michael Nicoloff, Punks, Taxt, Oakland 2007
Ron Padgett, How to be Perfect, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2007
President of the United Hearts, The Big Melt, Factory School, no location given, 2007
Martha Ronk, Vertigo, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2007
John Sakkis, The Moveable Ones, Transmission Press, San Francisco 2007
Mathias Svalina, Why I am White, Kitchen Press, New York 2007
Andrew Schelling, Caribou & Others, Track & Field,
Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Otherhow, Kitchen Press, New York 2007
Laura Solomon, Blue and Red Things, Ugly Duckling Presse,
Catherine Wagner, Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large, Bonfire Press, Fort Collins, CO 2007
Barrett Watten, Plasma / Parallèles / «X», translated by Martin Richet, Le Quartanier, Montréal 2007
Books (Anthology)
The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, edited by Andrew Schelling, Wisdom, Boston 2007. Includes Will Alexander, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Diane Di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Norman Fischer, Sam Hamill, Jane Hirschfield, Lawson Fusao Inada, Robert Kelly, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Harryette Mullen, Hoa Nguyen, Shin Yu Pai, Pat Reed, Janet Rodney, Leslie Scalapino, Gary Snyder, Arthur Sze, Nathaniel Tarn, Cecilia Vicuña, Philip Whalen, more.
Books (Other)
Stephen Burt, The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence,
C.T. Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, The
Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, Viking, New York 2007
Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, Penguin, New York 2007
Jennifer Moxley, The Middle Room, Subpress,
Charles Potts, Valga Krusa, A Memoir of Berkeley, Vol. 1, The Yellow Christ, Green Panda Press, Cleveland Heights, OH 2007
Charles Potts, Valga Krusa, A Memoir of Berkeley, Vol. 2, Laffing Water, Green Panda Press, Cleveland Heights, OH 2007
Selah Saterstrom, The Meat and Spirit Plan, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2007
Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, Dalkey Archive,
Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Copper Canyon, Port
Journals
MiPoesias, Vol. 21, No. 4, September 2007,
The New Review of Literature, Vol. 5, No. 1, Fall 2007,
The Tiny no. 3,
All items received since August 21
Labels: Recently Received
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Kerouac –
“It was the sentences”
Where
On the Road
was written
The Guardian
is doing a week of articles
on Kerouac
& The
has several articles
On the Road
in Lowell
Of stamps
&
high-school textbooks
& the attention of
Newsweek
The Jack Kerouac Quiz
AbeBook.Com’s
Kerouac feature
The
new collections page
§
A big birthday bash
for
John Ashbery
John Ashbery
at home
The Boston Globe
on Ashbery & MTV
Slate
on
how to read
John Ashbery
§
Talking with
Roberto Harrison
§
Samuel R. Delany’s
Dark Reflections
§
John Timpane
on
Eshleman’s Vallejo
§
The
on
Roberto Bolaño
§
§
The poet as specialist
§
Publishing poetry
in India
§
Finding Charles Simic
in
Plus a profile
of the new laureate
§
Inventing Shakespeare
§
§
A room of one’s own,
Bush style
§
Nazim Hikmet
wrote half his poems
in jail
§
The prison poet
of Malawi
§
The legend of
Alexander Penn
§
Poet of the Underworld,
Mumbai chapter
§
Talking with
Chuck Stebelton
§
The writer as recluse
§
Jay Parini
reading
Margaret Atwood
§
Slaying the
”Dylan is a poet”
claim
one more time
§
Gutting libraries
in the
§
Talking with
Christian Wiman
§
How Dante
got to
§
Celebrating
Christopher Okigbo
§
Make room
for Rumi
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore piece:
Eugene, Oregon
while another bookstore
opens in
Lawrence, Kansas
§
§
A profile of
Don “Cookie” Collup
§
Poetry in emotion
§
§
The Clive James phenomenon
From Auden
to Alison Croggon
(with more Clive James)
§
Bombast
with David Kirby
§
Breadloaf admin
wins
Rona Jaffe Prize
§
§
§
A profile of
Charles Wright
§
Bringing Attar
to
§
Remembering
Norman MacCaig
§
Frieda Hughes
on
Simon Armitage
§
A profile of
James Wood
§
The “Artful” Edit
§
§
Do publishers matter?
§
The lives of
Rem Koolhaas
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Is there any dynamic in the construction of meaning more powerful than the parsimony principle? The principle, which is derived from the linguistics work of Paul Kay, states that the reader, viewer, listener, consumer will – or perhaps should – incorporate the fewest extraneous details needed for the creation of coherence. It does this by presuming, to use the formula I first employed in a discussion of Joe Ceravolo & Rae Armantrout in my book The New Sentence, that
whenever it is possible to integrate two separate schema into a single larger frame-structure by imagining them as sharing a common participant the reader will do so. (ital. in the original)
The example I give in that book is of a section of Armantrout’s poem “Grace”:
a spring there
where his entry must be made
signals him on
Whenever I’ve asked students to “tell me what this means,” whether at San Francisco State in 1981 or at Naropa as recently as last summer, I’ve been offered a variety of narratives – I mention three in the book that were given at SF State, two of which I’ve come across repeatedly over the years, one being the idea of a diver in that instant leaving the board before the arc & splash of the event, the other that of the “step into character” that comes over an actor or actress as they make their entrance from backstage. Never in 26 years has a student offered the narrative Armantrout herself gave me when asked, that of vaginal lubrication.
But this doesn’t make any of these narrative scaffolds wrong. All three, in fact, line up the key terms in this passage into roughly the same configuration, tho Armantrout’s own version is the most intimate. New Criticism, wild child of 1930s academia, insisted on something akin to a Lou Dobbs approach to the parsimony principle – Brooks, Wellek, Warren, Tate, Ransom, Jarrell et al hoped to build a border wall around the text that would keep all of those migrant nuances on the far side. They had about as much success as Dobbs is going to have with his wall against undocumented Latin American workers.
Thus by the 1950s poets were already playing with the possibilities of just this dimension of reading: Creeley’s famous “I Know a Man” derives much of its power from precisely the fact that the reader situates the key verb, drive, into two possible contexts, one in which the word belongs to the narrator, the other in which the word belongs to John “which was not his / name.” Creeley himself said that the former was his original intent, but even he had to acknowledge that readers everywhere could hear both. The ambiguity in the term drive ties right back into the two narrative figures of compulsivity – “because I am / always talking” and this journey through the dark, which somehow is not now occurring in the necessary “goddamn big car” – rendering this a text about primal need in an existential universe, one hell of a lot to get into just 12 lines.
I saw a really interesting use of the parsimony principle while I was vacationing in a recent film by Jim Jarmusch, Broken Flowers. In the narrative, retired computer exec Don Johnston (played by Bill Murray doing his best Buster Keaton impression) has his live-in girlfriend (Julie Delpy) walk out on him just as he receives an unsigned letter from a prior one informing him that he has a teenage son who may be on a road trip trying to find him. Thanks to the machinations of his next door neighbor (Jeffrey Wright), an amateur sleuth,
That Jarmusch knows he is doing this, and wants you to pay attention as well, is underscored by the use of names in the film. Everyone Don Johnston meets thinks it’s funny that he has the same name as the star of
The scene on the biker farm is where the use of the parsimony principle reared up for me.
I’m not going to tell you how Jarmusch resolves this conundrum, or even if he does, but one detail that I picked up during the DVD’s extras that fit right in – besides Jarmusch’s claim that he’s not responsible for the meaning of his films, that’s the audience’s job – is the fact that Jarmusch had each of his major women characters, in rehearsal, write the original pink note, in character, to Murray, and then combined elements from all of them in the final version. Which is to say that every key actress was led to believe that she was the mother & thus played her scenes with this back story somewhere in her head. Never were the silences between characters so pregnant.
A second film that I saw just last night at the local art house in Phoenixville – the same theater that appears in the cinema scene of The Blob – is John Carney’s Irish indie musical Once, starring Glen Hansard, the lead singer of The Flames, and Markéta Irglová. Personally, I abhor musicals & am not a big fan of the sweet little romance genre either, but this film is an almost perfect argument for what can be done with these. It won an award this year at Sundance & totally deserved it. While it doesn’t have any of the meta-narrative shenanigans that Jarmusch loves, Once does make superb use of the parsimony principle in how it lets out details about the girl’s life over the course of the film. Who she is and what is possible between the two main characters transforms dramatically over the length of this film (just 96 minutes) – if we knew everything we understand at the end at the very beginning, there would be almost no dramatic tension, so the elaboration of details about her is every bit as much the narrative of this story as is the tale of two kids, the busker & the maid, and how they got together & made a demo disk of their music.
Labels: Film, parsimony principle
Monday, September 03, 2007
John Ashbery,
poet laureate of MTV
§
Blogging
and book promotion
§
Kerouac, the author
vs.
Kerouac, the hype
§
Robert Pinsky
ad Hoch
§
Woody Guthrie’s
new music
§
A memoir
of gay lit
in the Village
§
While I was away,
both Grace Paley
&
Mary Rising Higgins
passed away
Sunday, September 02, 2007
It’s worth thinking about this, five years later:
I have never thought of myself as an experimental writer, but this project is clearly a step into un- (or at least under-)charted territory. My idea is to write briefly from time to time mostly about my writing and whatever I might be thinking about poetry at the moment. Other subjects (music, politics, etc.) may enter in, as they do in life.
Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven't seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry, so it may prove that there is no audience for such an endeavor. But this project isn't about audience. The fact that the blog has the potential to carry forward the best elements of a journal and seems inherently prone to digressive, if not absolutely plotless, prose gives me hope that this form might prove amenable to critical thinking.
Ron
That was my first blog,
Five years hence, the audience question appears to have been answered – by the size of my blogroll more than the number of visits I’ve had here. It’s no longer even remotely possible for me to keep my list of other blogs up-to-date. My presumptions – that this format was conducive for critical thought and (not clearly stated above, I see now) that there was a hunger among poets for the ability to discuss craft, books, trends, politics, whatever, outside of the funneling framework that is the academy – were correct.
Another unstated presumption – that I would be able to do what I wanted in notes no longer than the one above – has proven shakier, to say the least. I had during the previous year tried a few such notes, modeled after Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a book that’s haunted me for 25 years, but my sense of the “finished” essay had me polishing single paragraphs for weeks. Few were ever completed & I never published any of them, even here. The looser, more ad hoc template of blogging proved far readier to get across what I was after.
My world in 2002 was very different. My twins were just ten years old, for example, and we could vacation in a two-room cabin, a considerable change from the five-bedroom manse we had last week in North Carolina. Gil Ott, Robert Creeley & Jackson Mac Low were all around. All were poets whose wisdom I looked to as a guide for my own actions. The Iraq War referred to something that happened during Bush I. Bush II was saying bellicose things about the government of
Blogging, it turns out, has changed the world of poetry in ways that I don’t think we fully realize just yet. There are poets who have begun their careers through blogging, at least one literary genre – flarf – that has its roots there, more than a few collections of physical books that have grown out of blogs. Blogging embodies, more than any other phenomenon I know, the web’s ability to erase or otherwise transform the limits of geography. Poets are linking up on the basis of mutual interests, which is a great thing, especially if you live somewhere other than
Of the various concepts and phrases I’ve come up with here over the past five years, none has generated more wrath than the School of Quietude. Perhaps the two most common complaints are that the idea is too simplistic and that it describes poetry as it existed at some moment in the past, but not now. Both criticisms are largely correct. There is a project – one for which I have no stomach, personally – filling in a far more adequate mapping of the conservative tradition(s) of poetry, first in the
I will, of course, continue to note the depredations of the School of Quietude where they seem apparent – every single American poet laureate, with the sole exception of William Carlos Williams in 1952 (who was appointed but never served, largely for reasons of health), has been a member of this same small coterie dating back to its creation as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1937, endowed by Archer Huntington, the semi-legitimate heir to Collis Huntington, one of the railroad barons of the 19th century. That sort of institutional oligarchy may not be as prevalent as it was, say, in the 1950s, but it has hardly disappeared. On the other hand,
¹ With the sole exception of 2001, the year he hit 73 home runs, Bonds’ numbers from 1993 through 2004 are absolutely consistent. The idea that Bonds suddenly “got powerful” outside of that one year is a fiction.
² Some other guides suggest a value as high as $5 million.
Labels: blogging, Personal, School of Quietude
