Silliman's Blog

Please unpack your idea that an anthology of sonnets, or a review of such a book, is a "Monument to Quietude."

I get that the sonnet as a poetic form has been around awhile. And thus that you, Ron, might suggest that modern poets who use it are not to use your terms, post-avant. Is that it?

Can't one argue that to write a sonnet, with its strictly defined form, is a kind of Oulipian exercise?

By the way, the review doesn't mention that the acknowledged inventor of the sonnet form is Giacomo de Lentini, the 13th century Italian (Sicilian school) poet.
 

A study of the contemporary sonnet that does not begin with the work of Ted Berrigan and include significant examinations of Bernadette Mayer, Laynie Browne, Lee Ann Brown and others active in the formal resurrection of the genre is either (a) incompetent or (b) so biased that it should qualify as "(a)" on those grounds alone. Which one is this?
 

gee ron
thanks for that picture this morning
something to go with the coffee

you're trackin in the morbid booths of late

j
 

did "we" fail to mention "Mr. bones" (Henry) and

that Petrarchan Sonnet-terre JOHN BERRYMAN

His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (The Dream Songs

like it was 'yesterday' that the news reached us that he had jumped off of
a bridge and died

Psalms/Songs sung...
 

I'd agree that not including examples of Berrigan's sonnets would stink, if the anthology premise encompassed such uses of the form (and it should).

But I can't find the anthology's table of contents anywhere on-line. So I'm not yet sure who's in it, and who's not. It wouldn't surprise me if Berrigan and others were left out (Norton anthologies tend toward the staid), but I'd just like to see verification.
 

I agree about the dearth of info online. I looked at the book in the local B&N the other day, tho, and didn't see any such mentions then.
 

The links to the Tibetan debacle were really good: I didn't know about Woeser and the ideological trial she has been under. That certainly sounds like Maoism to me, even though the goofball who signed his name "David" a few days ago on your Tibet entry claims that everything is now about capital, and there is nothing else, and there is certainly no Maoism...


I especially liked this sentence in the article about Woeser:

"It is unthinkable in any society to define "reverence to, and belief in, religion" as serious mistakes in a writer's political stance and viewpoint."


There IS something besides capitalism, Virginia.


At any rate, a boycott of China could become a cause celebre that Lutheran Surrealists would sign on to. (We called for a boycott yesterday on our blog, but so far it hasn't taken on an international dimension or had the devastating economic impact that we expect it to have, and which, issuing from your pen, would have a far wider reach. The poem by Watten doesn't go that far. Would he sign on to an economic boycott of Chinese products?)

Buying something, anything, that says Made in China, should be considered the same as buying a lamp made from human skin that says, Made in Auschwitz.
 

Thanks Ron for explaining how you know the Norton includes no Ted Berrigan sonnets.

I regret being so legalistic about such things.

Under the law regarding search warrants, two of the criteria traditionally used to determine the reliability of information provided by a source are (1) how did the person know, and (2) why should we believe him/her.

Here, I couldn't figure out how you knew that Berrigan wasn't included in the anthology.

Forgive me, please, for being legalistic about such stuff. My training, and self-nature, often compels me in that direction.

However, I believe it would help if more people explained how they know something that isn't readily apparent, or easily discovered, by others. And Ron, you actually tend to set out your the basis of your knowledge; in the particular matter here (the anthology), we are both riffing off a post that was (if I may be somewhat cheap about it) a Drudge-style slogan-link. And maybe that's an inherent problem with such slogan-links.
 

Pardon me, boys, but the Norton book is in front of me and it has two sonnets by Ted Berrigan, numbers L and LXXII (A Sonnet for Dick Gallup).
 

Oh - the Norton also has Bernadette Mayer's sonnet, "You jerk you didn't call me up..."

I have no brief for this book or this type of book or even sonnets, but thought it only fair to say that it does have Mayer & Berrigan in it.
 

I stand corrected.

3 poems makes all the difference in the world dot dot dot

or else it underscores exactly what I was suggesting.
 

I think it does underscore what you were suggesting, but again - there's only one sonnet by Wilbur, one by Merwin, one by Wordsworth, and, indeed, only one each by any number of SoQ poets. What this means for me is that the idea of an anthology consisting solely of sonnets is the real problem, and perhaps paying for permissions to compile such a big "blockbuster" sort of title blurs the difference between a sonnet by one poet and one by another. Instead of considering individual poems by individual poets we get catch-alls (and there are a number of other anthologies of the sonnet I presume this book is trying to displace in the "market").

Still, the students and general readers for whom such a book is probably intended will now possibly see and be transformed by those 3 or so poems. So if not all the difference in the world... maybe some difference, somewhere.
 

Don Share, thanks much for letting "us" know the facts. The facts here are important, as they almost always tend to be. My inference, now: the anthology ain't so bad as the post made it out to be.
 

Someone told me that the crime of telling Tibetan folktales within Tibet is met with a punishment of 3 years in prison.

We're talking about the attempt at a total extermination of the world's most beautiful culture.
 

Maybe there is such a book and I missed it (I know Lehman's Ecstatic Occasions, an initial gesture), but one useful book someone should certainly edit (Ron?) is an anthology (post New American Poetry) of poems that make innovative/transgressive use of traditional forms.

By the way, one of the most unusual and demanding practitioners of the "sonnet" is the hardly ever discussed John Clarke, whose In the Analogy gathers over 200 of them (those with access to issues of the great, late Temblor journal can also find therein extensive sonnet sequences by him).

Kent
 

I completely agree about John Clarke.

An anthology like that would be interesting, but I will not be editing it (I'm not the right person, to begin with),

Ron
 

Ron,

I believe you meant "Klink," not "Link," in your link to the review of the lovely Joanna Klink.
 

Dear Ron,

I tried to leave a comment a few days ago, but I think that it got caught up in a technical glitch. I've been in the hospital since then (complications after more cancer surgery), and this is the first time I've had internet access.

First of all, I wanted to thank you for linking to my review of Joanna Klink and Geoffrey G. O'Brien, though as Josh Hanson pointed out you misstyped "link" for "Klink" (which is a kind of pun), and also "Geoffry" for Geoffrey.

I realize that by now I'm a bit late to the party, but most of the poets whom (I think) you would consider "School of Quietude" couldn't write a sonnet if their lives depended on it. And the sonnet's, or any fixed form's, foregrounding of the poem's verbal patterning works against the aesthetic of transparency. Or so it seems to me.

I still hope that you'll be willing and able to contribute to my postmodern poetics critical anthology project.

Take good care.

all best,

Reginald
 

Thanks for the Woeser links, Ron.

Kirby Olson, I wasn't arguing at all that "everything is about capitalism" at all and I certainly wouldn't make such an argument in an attempt to somehow justify Chinese domination of Tibet.

But look, your take on the situation strikes me as being way off, with an overemphasis on an ideological model--"Maoism"--that presently exists in most of China in a very attenuated and overdetermined form. Maybe you simply mean "authoritarianism"?

Hu Jintao, after having proved his hard-liner credentials by crushing the last Tibetan uprisings, came to power in Beijing on the promise of continuing Deng's de facto reversal of actual Maoist policies, while retaining Mao as a near-mythical figure of national liberation (with "liberation" mostly meaning liberation from Western dominance, not adherence to a Western notion of personal liberty).

That of course *doesn't* mean that the powerful ideological current of Maoism or the enduring cult of Mao (the dude is on *all* the paper money) no longer has any power, but you write as if Maoism were still the primary ideological driver in China, which it's not.

China is an authoritarian capitalist state, primarily, that dresses up its abuses of power and corruption in bizarre blends of corporate speak and socialist (with "Chinese characteristics") cant. But yes, they do fall back on Cultural-Revolution rhetorical formulas and methods, for example with the current stated policies of "educating" monks and coercing them into renouncing the Dalai Lama.

Yet they're trying to "educate" the monks not only into accepting a Han historical narrative that claims Tibet has somehow "always" been a part of China (this claim really goes back at least to the Yuan Dynasty, a bit pre-Mao, really, and ironically twisted, seeing as how it was the Mongols, not the Han, running the show at the time). And they're pushing a "development" model on Tibet that has far less to do with "Maoism" than with straight-up capitalism (albeit with "Chinese characteristics," which pretty much means high degrees of authoritarian control devolving into massive local corruption). And then yeah, it's all dressed up in a bunch of rhetoric about "socialism" that means less than the word "democracy" in the mouth of Dick Cheney.

But the primary driving factor is indeed capital, and the primary reason the US and EU are unable to do more than protest a bit is because the nature of capital at the moment binds China and the West together in ways that are enormously profitable for transnational corporations. But again, I'm not arguing that capitalism is the end of the argument--if you came to China and talked to its citizens, you'd find a lot of them eager to find out about "Lutheran Surrealism" because many are turning to Christianity in various forms to try to find meaning in a rather brutally materialistic culture; others are resuming the often-interrupted engagement with Western art & literature & philosophy.

But back to the really ugly stuff: The most fucked-up instance of the aforementioned "socialist" rhetoric has to be the recent statement by Zhang Qingli, a Han CPC Tibet hack (Secretary of the something-or-other), who said:

"The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people, and it is always considerate about what the children need. The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans."

There is indeed a bit of "Maoism" in there, but it's just one ingredient--there's a whole lot more going on, and a lot of it is the firm belief on the part of most Han Chinese that China has helped benighted Tibetans by developing the economy, building roads and hospitals, educating the kids in better schools, etc. The typical imperialist set of justifications, really, which can be dressed up in any number of ideological robes, from "democracy" to "socialism" to "communism" etc. And behind the ideological screen and horrible rhetoric is, indeed, capitalism (albeit with "Chinese characteristics," to repeat the Party's favorite excuse for doing whatever they're doing the way they want to do it): The Mandarin word for Tibet, Xizang, translates to "Western Treasure House." There you go. And "development" screens cultural genocide, as the DL has argued. Slavoj Zizek put it well:

"In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?"

I know its easier to establish a nicely labeled position (especially an idiosyncratic movement of one's own such as "Lutheran Surrealism") and then critique other isms that also construct simplified models of the world, but really, contemporary China is nothing like you seem to think (it's probably worse). If the economy collapses and environmental degradation plays out to the hideous extent that it quite likely will, then I wouldn't be surprised at a resurgent Maoism (of a sort, and in historical line with previous peasant rebellions like the Taiping Rebellion) in China as hundreds of millions of pissed-off poor Chinese yank the Mandate of Heaven from the present incarnation of the CCP, and at that time what's left of Tibet (the glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau are probably gone by the middle of this century, Chinese cultural and economic imperialism will, by then, probably have *really* done a number on what's left of traditional Tibetan culture).

But please do try to refrain from mis-characterizing people's ideas and then calling them silly names--it's very CCP! I only wrote that you *sounded* like a dope. Finally, thanks for providing a spur to write this comment and think through this mess in writing.
 

Nice comment David. Nice to read you again Kirby.

BTW, the HP is linking here via comments. Strange to stumble upon RS in Mainstream media.
 

david

i for one am grateful to backtrack on this blog and read your world assessments

to have that spelled out is
a mind-full

recently read peter hessler too
despite the contained mayhem
it still seems like an amazing place china

i do find it odd that
power stemming from religion
is so threatening
to the chinese political lords

a friend of mine had her blog censured there

all we are saying
is give peace a chance

thanks

and the reformation iconoclast
peace on dude
 

Thanks, David. I do not have a very in-depth view of what's taking place in Tibet, by any means. I only have an inkling, and I also have a propagandistic axe to grind against Maoism (I see the last gasp of Maoism in the American academics' mentality as set by Barthes, Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir, and others including Foucault and Derrida who signed on to Maoism at one point or another and I see this as the impulse behind political correctness).

I know that many Chinese are attempting to convert to Christianity (it's forbidden). 140 million Bibles were sold in China last year alone, and there is a greater demand than there is supply, esp. in western China where the bookstore distribution system is not yet in place.

Thanks, David, for your reasonable tone in this comment. I appreciate the opportunity to get your viewpoint.

That said, I still think that the financial viewpoint is WAY over-rated. The Tibetan monks are crying because they realize they are in the midst of an unparalleled cultural genocide.

This isn't about food and housing.

It's about something much deeper, something in fact that poets ought to understand, since poetry has almost nothing to do with the economy and is almost always a lost cause in economic terms. In economic terms poetry should have no right to exist since almost no one makes any money at it.

The fact that it nevertheless thrives points to the fact that we are not really homo economicus or whatever the Marxists and capitalists would claim.

We are something else. We are a spiritual animal.

The monks crying out here are not doing so because of a lack of money or a lack of beverages. Their thirst is for something else for which we have perhaps forgotten the words, and even perhaps for which poetry itself has forgotten the words:

WSJ.com/Video
 

Hi back to Derek.

Maybe this video link can speed up the link to the Wall Street J. video coeverage, which takes an annoyingly long time to open:

http://online.wsj.com/public/page/8_0006.html

Because the Maoists (ok, just call them Marxists, if you like) have a stranglehold on freedom of expression I can't see how holding the Olympics there can possibly be good for the Olympics, which should be about pluralism, and about grace and beauty, about which Marxists understand nothing.

Footage is distressingly rare due to the very tight restrictions on reportage. It seems to be easier to get footage of what's going on in North Korea than to see what's going on in Tibet.
 

Hi Kirby,

I quite agree that "The monks crying out [in Tibet] are not doing so because of a lack of money or a lack of beverages." One of the things many Chinese (almost all Han) commentators love to point out is that the PRC has significantly *improved* the economic conditions in Tibet and built up the infrastructure and built schools and so on. And they have, though what they've done is, of course, way pumped up by propaganda.

The thing is, much of that development is actually part of what the DL and others often call "cultural genocide" because it brings in ethnic Han settlers from the super-crowded east who then set up shops, sell tourists stuff, open restaurants and hotels and make money while Tibetans look on, often stuck with menial tasks.

The gov't however does reward Tibetans when they stop acting too "Tibetan"--so, for example, bright Tibetan kids are rewarded with a chance to go to a better school in another part of the country, where they'll learn fluent Mandarin and become fully "modernized."

So economic development is in a lot of ways a carrot-stick machine that punishes recalcitrant Tibetans by "rewarding" them (for example, forcing nomadic peoples off their traditional lands and making them live in modern apartment compounds or by making a better job dependent on speaking and writing Mandarin well).

And also much of Lhasa has been fundamentally globalized, in that a monk *can* easily get a can of Coke and a mobile phone, and Chinese-style bars and clubs (along with the same rampant prostitution that you see all over China and that Maoism was really very effective at stamping out, for what that's worth) are all over Lhasa.

So Tibetans have numerous strong reasons to resent the "gift" of prosperity that the Chinese have brought/imposed, even while some of them profit (the gov't apparently thought the monks who protested to the journalists recently were safe because they're on government stipends, a fact which had caused a lot of regular Tibetans to distrust those monks and their temple; they've quite redeemed themselves on that last count, clearly).

But anyway, yes, it's true that it's not all economics, but it's also true that economics is now the primary means of waging a far-less-violent but often far-more-successful campaign of cultural transformation (and yeah, there's a real element of "cultural genocide," just as there was with, say, Australia and the Aborigines or the US & Canada with so many indigenous peoples, though, believe me, the gov't now sees "authentic Tibetan culture" as a source of economic growth and as they develop Tibet as a tourist attraction, both for Westerners in love with the romance of it all and for Han Chinese, who also get off on how "exotic" the Tibetans and other "ethnic minorities" living in China are.)

Well, one hopes China will have to stop demonizing the DL and enter into reasonable talks regarding higher degrees of autonomy for the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but I'm afraid that's about as likely as it would have been for Andrew Jackson to have woken up one morning and suddenly decide to let the Cherokees do things their way in Georgia.

It might be that international pressure to support the DL's non-independence-but-greater-autonomy position would have more effectiveness than the "Free Tibet" line, which is just not going to happen unless China somehow falls apart at the seams (which is precisely what the CCP is afraid of deep down inside, and so are a lot of regular people, who remember how nasty it got last time China went through a civil war and who saw how the former USSR suffered under "shock therapy" and territorial fragmentation).

Too bad "support expanded religious and human rights, increased political autonomy and more direct economic control over Tibet's resources for Tibetans!" doesn't fit so well on a bumper sticker. I think the DL wishes it would, right now.

And hey John Hansen,

"despite the controlled mayhem still sounds like an amazing place" is a really good way to put what I've seen of China! And my blog is blocked, too, within China, though it's easy enough to access with a proxy or VPN. The gov't can't really control the internet... they're really up against it with the Olympics coming on... interesting times. And Hessler is good, I think--I really enjoyed Oracle Bones. He's really good on the Muslim Uighur and their delicate (and not as popular in the West) political situation vis-a-vis Beijing.
 

David, you had lots of good information in your post. Your comparison of the Cherokee under President Jackson and the Tibetan situation startled me.

I am not so sure the principles involved are the same, and I'm not sure they're not.

But ultimately the Cherokees were able to enjoy life in a democracy, although I don't know much about their status today. Many Native Americans enjoy a kind of autonomy within America, which they subsidize with gambling houses, which is similar to the tourist trade that partially subsidizes Tibet. Perhaps ultimately the Tibetan temples will be transformed into gambling/prostitution houses.

Will Tibet survive in any but a costume-drama tourist-trap format?

The Marxists of Beijing have a lot to answer for if they succeed in reducing Tibet to that level. The Black Book of Communism puts the number of dead at 300,000 during the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. That's a low figure. Some go as high as 1,5 million, out of a total population of 2,5 million.

Tibet on the other hand seems to be largely pacifist.

Could we judge a people based on their history? The Cherokee themselves drove out the Creek Indians and worked with Jackson to drive out other Indians before themselves being uprooted. Jackson's trail of tears killed about 4000 Cherokee, mostly from disease.

Tibet did have a military past. One of the Dalai Lama's was a descendent of one of the Khans, and it's not as if they got where they did without a few military adventures.

And my own passing acquaintance with Tibetans (at Naropa Institute) was less than stellar. I basically thought that Choygam Trungpa was a psychotic. He was at the very least continuously drunk, and verbally abusive.

(So was Gregory Corso, but on the other hand, Corso was hilarious, and was a very good poet... It's sometimes difficult to draw distinctions, but no one took Corso seriously as a model for behavior, and everyone knew of his troubled upbringing, but he never pretended to be anything more than a poet.)

At any rate, I suppose that I continue to hold on to the principle governmental distinction that democracy (however imperfect) has a leg up on the absolute power of a king or of a small group such as the Communist Party, or of any given hereditary theocracy.

The Dalai Lama has claimed he wants to give up the notion of a theocracy and move toward a pluralistic democracy.

He also wants at this point only his culture, not necessarily his government, to survive.

But down deep what's going on for me is that I completely hate the tyranny of Marxists. So I'm hoping that this interface between Tibet and one of the last surviving Marxist regimes will help our academic Marxists in America to drop their affiliation with Maoism, and to somehow see that religion (at least in some contexts) is better than their violent materialism.

But that's only the beginning of my agenda.

On a simpler and somehow more honest note, I think the Dalai Lama is really a wonderful Romantic figure. And I want him to be happy. I'm afraid he is the last in a line of a fascinating and exotic group. I still see poetry as linked to the exotic...

And it seems that the French are now backing him in an official way? This will help, I believe, too, in resuscitating the beauty of the Tibetan culture.

But the more you look at the situation in Tibet the worse it gets. A total news blackout followed by a bloody purge is probably what's in store. That's how communists do things. And then it's lights out for Tibet.
 

in the same "stream"

this Tibet dialog/conversation AND
you
note the reissue of Reznikoff's HOLOCAUST

is David yet alive and still doing Black Sparrow?

from Holocaust:

"...on which the dead were burnt to ashes."