Thursday, November 10, 2011

Knott translated by Transtromer: from "Sapristi" blogsite

två dikter av Bill Knott i översättning av Tomas Tranströmer

från Lyrikvännen 2/72:
Död
Innan jag somnar lägger jag händerna i kors på bröstet.
De ska lägga mina händer så.
Det kommer att se ut som om jag flög in i mig själv.

 *
Sömn
Vi stryker längs den andra, osynliga månen.
Dess grottor kommer fram och hämtar in oss.


*
*

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

  All these rock'n'rollers propped up by publicists and the media with the honorific title of "poet": 

how many times have you read or heard, 'Oh yeah, he/she's not just a singer-songwriter, he/she's a real poet.'   

Oh yeah, well make Joni Dylan and all those other supposed "poets" actually live on the monthly average paycheck budget of even the most successful poem-writing poet, 

and see how how many days before they start screaming 

"No, no!  I'm not a poet, I'm a popstar!  Gimme back my limo!  Bring back my maid chauffeur bodyguard cook! where's my PA?!"

// 

Friday, October 28, 2011




///

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

free

*
Rich poets like Louse Glukk and Friedrich Seedle and Russle Edsin


don't give their poetry away free, you have to pay cash buy their books,


but me,


me living month to month on Social Security checks,


I'm supposed to give mine away free?


///

Of course I HAVE to give mine away free, because nobody will buy the damn things.

licensed to kill

/
a footnote to my post from a couple weeks ago: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2011/07/uh-this-first-poem.html


*
I imagine the hierarchs at Poetry Magazine were disappointed that their attempt to assassinate me in 1972 failed,

which is why thirtythree years later they hired the lit-rump Meghan O'Rourke to give it another try—

And this time they succeeded.

Their second murder plot did me in:

after this latter "review" appeared in 2005,

I had to retire from my teaching position,

I lost what little professional standing and esteem I had in the poetry world, all of its venues have blacklisted me,

and since then I have been forced to self-publish my books thanks to the poisoning of my reputation with everyone in the legitimate poetry-publishing field—

No doubt the despots at Poetry Magazine have rejoiced these past 6 years over my decline;

how they must relish my downfall and the final ruination of my career:

to know that their vendetta against me has triumphed in the end,

to know that their vicious attacks have finally finished me off.


*
And their hired assassin, Agent Double O'Rourke? Well, following this

termination-with-extreme-prejudice,

The Paris Review appointed her as an editor.

If anyone reading this is looking for a scheme to boost their career in PoBiz,

I recommend kicking my corpse around: look at what it did for her.


///

Saturday, August 20, 2011

thoughts on a poem by Traci Brimhall

*
this is a very good poem in terms of its content, but the form, specifically the linebreaks,
detracts from its effectiveness, i think:—


http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15206 

look at the beginning of it:

Via Dolorosa

We have been telling the story wrong all along,
how a king took Philomela's tongue after he had taken
her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale

so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets
wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned
on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday's heat,

pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir until
they hear music below them. Inside, a woman warms up
the organ and sings Via Dolorosa about a Messiah

who wanted to save everyone from the wages of pleasure.
But how can I keep a man's fingers from my mouth?
How can I resist bare trees dervishing on the sidewalk?
...

why not:

We have been telling the story wrong all along,
how a king took Philomela's tongue after
he had taken her body, and how the gods
turned her into a nightingale so she could tell

the night of her grief.  Even now the streets
wait for her lamentation—strays minister
to bones abandoned on a stoop, a man sleeps
on the ghosts of yesterday's heat, pigeons rest

on top of the church and will not stir until
they hear music below them.  / etc.

/
the poet begins with 12-syllable line, then a 15- , another 15- ,
then a 14- , a 16- , a 14- , a 14- , another 14- , then a 17- , a 14- ,

and then, suddenly, abruptly, back to 12:
 But how can I keep a man's fingers from my mouth? 

—but why?  having established a strong first line, why not stay with it in terms of flow, of feet?

—the soundlinks and pairings are well-done:  the ng-rhymes of telling/wrong/along/king/tongue/nighting,

and the l's: tell/all/along/Phil/mel/gale/tell . . .  and: had/body/gods . .
 .

but if you're doing a brief burst of internal rhymes like had/body/gods, isn't it usually (if not always) better to place them in the same line:

he had taken her body, and how the gods

—but it seems as if the poet's ear hasn't even attended to sounds like those, and can hear instead only the hard t's: tell/story/took/tongue/taken/turned/night/tell/night— 

hitting your reader on the head repeatedly can be effective at times, i guess, but the crudeness of the measure is counterproductive in assisting the subtle plot-thrusts and turns in this poem—

/

(the dash between 'lamentation' and 'strays' should be a colon, by the way)— 

i think the clunkiness of "he had taken" in Brimhall's second line is just terrible—and the following lines also feel forced and awkward in their extrusive lengthiness—

ah, well.  the content, as i say, is very good, awfully good, extremely good,

and perhaps that compensates for the ineptitude of the form—


///

Sunday, August 7, 2011

you gotta be kidding

*
"I think Bill Knott is a great poet, one of my favorite American poets of the second half of the 20th century. I also think he’s incredibly important: important in the sense of very influential. I see his influences on heaps of poets. Yet, Bill Knott is also a poet who’s almost never mentioned as an “important poet.” When people mention their “influences,” he’s very seldom on the list, even when he’s an apparent influence. I don’t think that’s an unimportant point to make about Knott: it’s part of his authorship." —Johannes Goranski, Montevidayo blog, May 16, 2011


"[T]he remarkable poet Bill Knott is not the type to win prizes, become the pet of academic critics or cultivate acolytes. But this thorny genius has added to the art of poetry." —Robert Pinsky, Washington Post, 2005


"Bill Knott is our contemporary e.e. cummings . . . . Like cummings, he is brilliant at both micro and macro." —Cindra Halm, Rain Taxi, Fall 2004


"For the past thirty-five years Bill Knott has shown himself to be one of our very best poets and perhaps the most original. . . . I think he is one of the few poets of my generation who will remain with us." —Stephen Dobyns, Harvard Review (Spring 2002)


"Bill Knott is a meld between Gerard Manley Hopkins and MTV, producing poems with the former's violent beauty and the latter's largely ironic postmodern presence." —Mary Jo Bang, Lingua Franca (May 2000)


"Knott was an incredibly important poet to me and still is; I think Bill Knott is a genius and probably the least known great poet in America. It's really kind of pathetic that he's not as well known as he was even thirty years ago because he's even better now." —Thomas Lux, The Cortland Review (August 1999)


"Bill Knott is one of the best poets writing in America. Without question, he is the most original." —Kurt Brown, Harvard Review (Spring 1999)


"Bill Knott is a genius." —Tom Andrews, Ohio Review (1997)


"It is no accident that the major British and American poets of the 19th and 20th century were outsiders. . . . The most original poet of my generation, Bill Knott, is also the greatest outsider."
—Stephen Dobyns, AWP Chronicle (1995)


"Bill Knott is the secret hero of a lot of poets. . . . [P]oets who differ radically from Knott look to his work for the shock of recognizing themselves." —David Kirby, American Book Review (1991)


"Bill Knott's poems . . . are the poems Beckett's Gogo would write if he were among us." —Sharon Dunn, Massachusetts Review (1990)


"[Knott's 'Poems 1963-1988' is] a powerful and original book, a record of one of the most disturbing imaginations of our times. Few people can create a world so completely and concisely as Knott does time and time again." —Kevin Hart, Overland (1990)


"Knott is no parlor poet. His work is the most sharply original of any poet in his generation." —Jim Elledge, Booklist (1989)


"Among people who know his work, Bill Knott is regarded as one of the most original voices in American poetry." —Charles Simic, blurb for Poems 1963-1988 (1989)


"Knott sets up principles far outside most of those we know, and he always writes up to and beyond those standards." —Sandra McPherson, blurb for Outremer (1989)


"Bill Knott is an American original. No one else could have imagined what James Wright once referred to as Bill Knott's 'indispensable poems.'" —Stuart Dischell, Harvard Book Review (1989)


"I think Bill Knott is the best poet in America right now." —Thomas Lux, Emerson Review (1983)


"Bill Knott's first book, 'The Naomi Poems,' published in 1968, established him instantaneously as one of the finest poets in America. Subsequent publications deepened and reinforced that reputation." —Andrei Codrescu, The Baltimore Sun (1983)


"[Knott's poems are] shrouded almost always in the glaring and polluted light William Burroughs foresaw with such brilliance in 'Naked Lunch.' In fact, Knott, Poet of Interzone, is the poet Burroughs seemed to call for in his seminal novel. . . . Knott is one of a handful of original poets working today. His genius suits the times better than any poet I've read . . ." —Robert Peters, Los Angeles Times (1983)


"With the death of Berryman, Knott seems to me to be the chief embodiment in language today of Mallarmé's spirit. . . " —John Vernon, Western Humanities Review (1976)


". . . Knott's originality as a poet: he is absurd and classical and surrealist all at once. A marvelously impossible animal." —Paul Zweig, Contemporary Poetry in America (1974)


"At his best, Knott is a kind of surreal classicist. . . . He is already a formidable poet." —Karl Malkoff, Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (1974)


"[Knott's] images are astonishing. Whatever you may think of Knott's poems, they have not been written before by anyone else. . . . Poetry such as this strikes me as extending our awareness." —Louis Simpson, New York Times Book Review (1969)


"Bill Knott is one of the most remarkable poets to appear since James Wright and James Dickey."—Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Poetry (1969)


"I think [Bill Knott] is one of the best poets I know." —James Wright, blurb for The Naomi Poems (1968)


"I think the most significant group of young poets are those published in Choice and The Sixties, and the most impressive of these is certainly William Knott." —Kenneth Rexroth, Harper's Magazine (June 1965)

///

Friday, August 5, 2011

injustice

*
Seems like there would be a facebook page or an online petition sign-up drive for

JOHN ASHBERY DESERVES A NOBEL, IN FACT HE SHOULD HAVE ALREADY GOTTEN ONE!

but if there is, I couldn't find it.

Add my name to the list demanding that this injustice be rectified.

///

Edward Hirsch, PoBizPro

*
MacArthur Genius Fellow Edward Hirsch is a PoBizPro

and one of the worst poets alive.

His poetry is total worthless garbage,

which makes it about average for a MacArthur poet,

since most of the poets who have received the MacArthur

are mediocre at best. With a few exceptions.

But each of them of course is a consummate PoBizPro.

///

Sunday, July 31, 2011

uh this first poem


the horror

*

I've whined and complained earlier on [a previous] blog about the demeaning coverage my last theoretically-real book received from Poetry (Chicago) Magazine.

Until that hackpiece appeared in early 2005, they had not critiqued any of my books for 33 years, in fact since the May 1972 issue where my book “Nights of Naomi” was savaged as part of an omnibus review by Charles Molesworth.

Anyway, between 1972 and 2005, between the time of these two bookend reviews by Molesworth and Meghan O’Rourke,

I published what, 6 or 7 books, none of which Poetry Magazine deigned to take notice of.

Different editors, yes: Daryl Hine in 1972, and Christian Wiman in 2005: but it’s interesting to note that the magazine’s editorial policy (or perhaps vendetta is the more appropriate word) toward me did not change in that time.

Just as they used the 2005 “review” to spread vicious gossip about me, so they did the same in 1972. The 1972 review set the tone for the 2005 one.

Here’s an excerpt from the Molesworth:

“Rumor has it that Knott’s habit of giving his birth and terminal dates together originated when he realized he could no longer face the horror of a poetry reading he was scheduled to give.”

So, here’s the sequence:

in 1972 Poetry Magazine prints a rumor that says in effect that I’m afraid to give (I can’t face the horror of) poetry readings—

And guess what happens then, after that "review":

My reading invitations dry up.

No one asks me to read. From that point on, for the next 3 decades (actually at this date it's more like 4),

I barely manage to get an average of about one reading a year.

I receive almost no requests to give readings because everybody knows,

everybody has heard that I can’t “face the horror of a poetry reading.”

Hey: it said so right there in Poetry Magazine.

After they printed that nonsense

—oh yes, they labeled it a “rumor,” but everybody knows how such floaters spread and take on the facsimile of fact—,

after Poetry Magazine used the venue of what was ostensibly a book review to, to,

what’s the term I’m looking for . . . well, what would you call it?

One thing's for sure: after that May 1972 issue appeared, my reading career was destroyed.

*
There is an alternative truth to this tale:

perhaps my "reading career" was aborted/ thwarted not by this review in Poetry Magazine,

but by the fact that no one liked my crummy lousy poetry enough to invite me to read:

or by the fact that I was no good at giving poetry readings—

I can remember hearing, as I eavesdropped from bathroom stall or around a corner, audience members agreeing about how boring and bad my reading was:

I can never remember being praised by anybody in those minuscule groups who attended my infrequent readings,

those scowling scattered-seat-fillers who scuttled so quickly once I had grimaced out my final words—

. . . in fact, the more I think about it, I realize that the reason I didn't get invited to give any (or hardly any) readings

was simply that people hated (hate) my poetry, ergo why should they invite me to read . . .

In fact, I probably got as many invitations as any other fourth-rate poet like me.

*
Just one question: Poetry Magazine has in its long history published hundreds maybe thousands of reviews of poetry books:

have they ever, in the text of any of those reviews,

printed rumors and gossip about any (living) poet other than me?

Is there a single instance, can you remember a similar case

where the reviewer paused in the course of his or her consideration of the book under review,

parethetically paused to share some precious oddment of rumor gossip about the poet whose work they were supposedly objectively appraising—

can you recall another such incident in the pages of Poetry Magazine?

I haven’t read all those reviews, so I can’t say for sure, but I think not.

I think I am the only one to have been so honored.


*
I imagine the hierarchs at Poetry Magazine were disappointed that their attempt to assassinate me in 1972 failed,

which is why thirtythree years later they hired the lit-rump Meghan O'Rourke to give it another try—

And this time they succeeded.

Their second murder plot did me in: 

after this latter "review" appeared in 2005,  

I was forced to retire from teaching, 

I lost what little professional standing and esteem I had in the poetry world, 

and since then I have been forced to self-publish my books thanks to the poisoning of my reputation with everyone in the legitimate poetry-publishing field—

No doubt the despots at Poetry Magazine have rejoiced these past 6 years over my decline; 

how they must relish my downfall and the final ruination of my career:

to know that their vendetta against me has triumphed in the end, 

to know that their vicious attacks have finished me off.

///

just a tremendous poet

*
in the TLS (p.16, April 17/09), Hugo Williams relates how Ian Hamilton, in one of his USA pobiz-crawls, encountered, quote:

a certain professor who had gone on about the work of Clayton Eshleman. "Just a tremendous poet", he said. Surprised by this, Ian asked for the title of a good poem by Eshleman. "Oh, I don't know", said the professor. "Taken as a whole, you see. Just a tremendous poet." Ian insisted on knowing the name of a single decent poem so he'd be able to understand what the professor was talking about. "Oh for God's sake", the man said. "What is this anthologist's approach to literature?"

*
see the advocates of poetry—call them "the professors"

versus

the advocates of the poem—call them "the anthologists"

*
as one of the latter, i am as amused and bewildered as Hamilton was

by the poetry-profs . . .

*
for "Eshleman" you could substitute almost any name from the Avantipoo list (spicer kelly howe et al) and the joke would still apply . . .

///

Friday, July 29, 2011

avantgarde=fascist

*
a couple quotes:

from the TLS, 07/98/11, page 9, Tim Blanning reviewing an anthology of European Romanticism notes that many Romantics sought

'an alliance that was populist . . . . for cultural value in any society was not to be found among the classically educated elites, with their sophisticated but artificial culture, but with the common people. . . . The Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi proclaimed: "folk poetry is indeed the true poetry. Let us set about making it supreme!" He was writing in 1847, the year before a wave of revolution swept across Continental Europe and gave retrospective piquancy to his further observation that "if the people rules in poetry, the day cannot be far off when it will rule in politics too." '

and:

from Laurie Smith's essay, "Subduing the reader," in Magma magazine—

(http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=14974)

:— the last sentence from its penultimate paragraph:

"We need always to be alert to writers who claim that good poetry must be difficult, accessible only to the educated few, and see this claim for what it is - fascist."


///

Monday, July 18, 2011

I AM NEW YORK CITY by Jayne Cortez:



*
I'm posting this great poem by Jayne Cortez as a jpeg

because I can't figure how to type it into this blogger page and keep

her indentations—

please click on the image to see it larger and then click the magnifying-glass tab to see it in closeup,

to read it—

This poem appeared in the "International Women's Issue" in the magazine Mundus Artium, Vol. VII, 1974,

and was reprinted in the same magazine's omnibus anthology (Vol XII and XIII, 1980/81),

from which I've scanned it.

Jahan Ramazani didn't consult me about which poems to include in his Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,

nor did Helen Vendler ask me to offer suggestions for her Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry,

and Michael Waters hasn't sought my advice about his anthology Contemporary American Poetry,

not to mention every other editor of anthologies that cover this period of USAPO—

but if any of them had,

I would have recommended this poem by Jayne Cortez.

(Or maybe not. The thought is moot, a fantasy of the moment.)

///

reprint from May 20, 2009:

Saturday, July 16, 2011

*
The elitist avanthack clique on the UCal Poetry list

must be feeling sad today, following

announcements that the U of C press is suspending its stupifyingly mediocre

program of poetry publishing—

due to financial pressures.

Despite its books being shoved for wildly-inflated prices into higher-ed libraries across the country,

I can just imagine how poorly this series of unreadable obscurantics

has sold over the years—

the only "market" for the boring twaddle UCal publishes is a marginal subgroup of

avantgardistes, and librarians too dumb or indifferent to know what a waste

of money these volumes are—

UCal could have tried to find and promote poets the public might actually

want to read, poets in the tradition of Billy Collins and Jane Hirshfield and

Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds, poets whose books might have sold enough copies to break

even, to justify its budget—

Or, why not seek out those California poets now writing in the style and manner

of the great parlando populists Ferlinghetti and Bukowski?—

Are there NO Californian poets striving to carry on the native legacy of those two luminaries,

whose works have been appreciated by a widespread audience, by a public that will indeed buy and enjoy poetry which is directed to and meant for a larger readership,

not for a privatized snob coterie of gradschoolist initiates—

If UCal had found and promoted even one current poet in the popular mode of Ferlinghetti and Bukowski,

even that one poet—him or her—might have saved its ass.

It didn't have to publish nothing but a numbbunch of generic avantclucks.

And if money is the problem, if UCal doesn't have the cash to carry a series which is in the red, a financial drain/disaster,

if it can't rig up some tax scam to write-off its losses,

why doesn't it just move to a POD model, which would cost practically nothing?

It could still publish and promote those avanthick tomes (and offer free pdf downloads of them)—

there's no law says it has to stick to ye old archaic deadtree traditional "trade publishing" practices—

///

p.s.

Thinking of Ferlinghetti, a poet I have read with admiration
since my teens,

it occurs to me that some of the foreign poets he published early
on in the Pocket Poets series from his press City Lights—

particularly Prevert (whom he translated so brilliantly and with such affinity),

and Parra, and Enzensberger,

populist parlando poets like these 3—antipoets, to use Parra's phrase—

how his poetry, Ferlinghetti's, has much more in common with their work

than it does with most of the USA poets he published and promoted—

Duncan, Ginsberg, Levertov et al—

I don't doubt Ferlinghetti admired them, but

his own verse is closer in its predilections

to Prevert's and Parra's

than to theirs,

isn't it?

///

Monday, July 11, 2011

good poets are worthless or Elizabeth Bishop is worth a Hiroshima so to speak

*
I'm collating/editing/revising for book publication a selection of my prose—here's another piece from it:


*
GOOD POETS ARE WORTHLESS OR ELIZABETH BISHOP IS WORTH A HIROSHIMA SO TO SPEAK

*
Interesting article in the May 14 2007 issue of The New Yorker: "Crash Course," by Elizabeth Kolbert, concerning CERN and its efforts to build a supercollider . . .

*
two paragraphs from page 74:

Particle physicists come in two distinct varieties, which, rather like matter and antimatter, are very much intertwined and, at the same time, agonistic. Experimentalists build machines. Theorists sit around and think. "I am happy to eat Chinese dinners with theorists," the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Samuel C. C. Tang once reportedly said. "But to spend your life doing what they tell you is a waste of time."

"If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it's not because I've forgotten," Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs [particle]. "It's probably because I hate him."

*
Is there an analagous split in poetry, "two distinct varieties"?

I think the Langpo or Post-Avant would say, if I understand them correctly, and I'm not sure I do,

that no poetic activity can occur in a theory-free state,

and that those poets who try to proceed as if it were otherwise are deluding themselves,

no matter how loudly they assert the process is essentially an empirical experience . . .

But are there poets who have tried to follow the intricate measures of Harold Bloom's six-step recipe for the Great Modern Poem, the Great Post-Wordsworthian Poem ("the High Romantic crisis-poem model of six revisionary ratios"):—

especially since Ashbery's masterpiece Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror seems to have been (coincidentally?) baked to those specifications . . .

or is Nobelist Tang right: "to spend your life doing what [the theorists] tell you is a waste of time" . . .

*
If Nobelist-by-rights Ashbery neglects to cite Bloom, is it probably because he hates him?

*
To quote from page 76 of Kolbert's article (I've slightly altered some of the preliminary text):

Asked to explain how their work, supported by public funds, contributes to the public good, particle physicists often cite [the words of Robert Wilson, in his testimony before a Congressional Committee in 1969] . . . a Senator wanted to know the rationale behind a $250 Million government expenditure for a new collider:
Did it have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?
Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Senator: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Senator: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

*
Three things strike me about his last answer there, which I've quoted verbatim as the New Yorker prints it:

First, the way Wilson takes the Senator's use of the word "respect" and shifts its meaning . . .

Second, [given this nation's] celebrations and glorifications of War, the irony of his saying that painters sculptors poets are among "all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about."

Third, his use of modifiers here: "good painters, good sculptors, great poets."

*
Why GOOD painters, GOOD sculptors, but not GOOD poets?

I don't think the distinction Robert Wilson offers here is wrong.

Intentionally or not, whether he knows it or not, he is being rather scientifically or at least historically correct in his assessment of relative value:

good painters and good sculptors are respected and venerated, but not good poets . . .

only great poets (like Ashbery) make our country "worth defending."

Elizabeth Bishop is worth a Hiroshima, so to speak.

*
The works of good painters and sculptors can increase in value posthumously: if you've ever seen the Antiques Roadshow, you know that even artists who were "regional" or ignored during their lifetimes can generate higher market prices eventually.

The work of art, the object produced by a deceased artist can still function as merchandise . . . and therefore can survive.

But the work of a good poet?

Prior to the current two-volume Norton Modern/Contemporary,

the one-volume edition (termed simply Modern) contained poems by James Stephens: he's no longer in this Now Norton,

which does "rescue" theoretically, for the moment, a few obscurantes, specialcases

whose refurbished verse has displaced Stephens and others . . . :

or for a dollar from usedbook venues you can obtain Oscar Williams' anthologies of "Modern Poetry":

they're filled with good poets whom no-one reads anymore,

whose efforts may perhaps never be resurrected by the Antique Po-Show . . .

*
But surely the harsh truth is that Wilson and Harold Bloom are right: only GREAT poets count. The good ones are worthless.

///

Saturday, July 9, 2011

from my forthcoming book of prose:

*
I'm putting together for publication a collection of my prose writings, tentatively titled "Where Modern Poetry Began and Other Conjectures." Here's a piece from it:

*
NO COMMENT

We poets of the USA should be grateful for all the support we receive from our state institutions.

Take just the CIA: not only do they found and fund magazines like the Paris Review for us,

but they also take on the dangerous task of going into foreign countries and eliminating our potential competitors . . .

For example: How many young Chilean poets were murdered or suicided or impoverished or exiled by the CIA-installed Pinochet regime?

Who remembers today the chagrin and embarrassment

that North American USA poets suffered in the past when we compared our poetry

to that of the great Chilean poets like Neruda and Parra,

how solipsistically small and provincial and futile our poems seemed when set next to theirs . . .

but now, in the succeeding decades, hasn't that situation improved thanks to the CIA's intervention?

It's not just in Chile, of course.

Imagine how many other South American poets have been killed or otherwise quashed and quelled by CIA-funded activities.

Not to mention Africa, Asia et al.

Yes: All those poets who might have produced better poems than us, whose poems might have put ours to shame, we don't have to worry about them now, do we,

because they've all been offed for us by the CIA.

We should bow our heads every day in the direction of the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, and say a silent thanks for their benefactions.

We have been blessed. We are the Langley Poets.

*
Yes, every USA poet owes part of our endowment to the CIA. Whether the Paris Review has published us or not,

we've all benefited from the CIA's worldwide pogroms. Indeed—

Just as USA business cartels pay the CIA's mercenaries to assassinate and undermine and destroy their foreign competitors,

so the Academy of American Poets has commissioned similar sorties from Langley:—

"There's this poet in Sierra Leone, and . . . she writes sort of Tony Hoagland, only political, and ten times better . . . can't you do something, you know, the usual, make it look like an accident . . . prison maybe . . . okay, that's great . . . Tony can breathe easier thanks to you . . . ah if the Tonys only knew all the things you do for them, and for all our poets . . . thanks so much . . . yes, the Charles Wright first edition is in the mail to you, I had him inscribe it as always . . . no, no, thank YOU, Director Bush-Plimpton!" . . .

*
(My understanding of the CIA is amateurish, based on novels and movies.

For example "The Good Shepherd" (2006) presents a film historical version of one Company hierarch,

who first appears as a poetry student at Yale before his recruitment into espionage.

Some of the poetry students at Yale became CIA, and some of them became poets: the question remains whether some of them became both.

Maybe that should be present-tense: become. What kind of Skull-and-Bones blood-oath do they make you swear to get your Yale Younger Poet badge—

There's a secret society someone should investigate.

I pledge allegiance to Louise Gluck and the [CLASSIFIED] for which she stands.)

*
So I have this paranoic-critical vision of the CIA as being upperclass Ivyleague on its higher levels at least (not all that different from Po-Biz, when you come to think of it),

arrogant rich snobs with anglo-names . . . it's not much like that in reality, I suppose, but this is my fantasy,

my fictional version—

So, above, when I have the CIA's "asset" at the Academy of American Poets phone Langley to request a termination-with-extreme-prejudice on an alien po-threat to Tony the Hoag,

I imagine them coalescing with Director Bush-Plimpton, head of the CIA's Cultural Affairs Division,

And the latter being "repaid" with an addition to his collection of Charles Wright books.

Why Wright? Is that fair?—

After all, Bush-Plimpton's Virginia estate is probably larger than Charles Wright's manse . . . I don't doubt his income is higher than Wright's . . . plutocrat/poetcrat—

but despite their payscale diffs and divides,

I picture B-P as honoring the capitalist merit-system of Success that spiritually unites the two of them,

and I can see him acquiesce with nods and doffs of admiration at the bravura displays of Wright's tradecraft,

the skillful delays and declensions of that author's elegantly tepid variations:

how a diaristic prose is made to seem almost poetic by the strategic use of inflated introversions and drop-lines;

and how Wright has distinguished himself by singlehandedly elevating the Allusion to an entelechy:

how he has raised Namedropping to a modality.

And especially since Bush-Plimpton himself, in his day to day occupation

of masterminding coups and kickbacks and assassinations in the cultural camps of the world,

he too must shoulder the task of creating Phantom Identities:

no wonder he appreciates the poet's flair for it.

And all of Wright's bucolic backyard musings on the Big Questions of Nature and Fate and Art,

they echo his, B-P's,

as he too, like the poet, lounges in the garden behind his mansion

and gazes out over the vales and values of his desmesne and lets the second vodka turn his thoughts into blink-eyed chin-scratching damps and ramp-ups

not dissimilar to Wright's ponderistic longueurs . . .

Remember that B-P's scion at the Agency, James Jesus Angleton, was a reverent disciple of Ezra Pound (I assume Angleton ran the Op that saved Pound from a treason trial) . . .

Bush-Plimpton following JJA's lead favors the non-Leftist poets (or the non-political poets, the apolitical poets).

///

Saturday, July 2, 2011

ipso

I have a choice: when I look at the walls and walls full of anthologies which present selections of contemporary USA poetry (USAPO for short),

when I think of the hundreds of USAPO anthologies published over the past 30 or so years,

and when I reflect that my verse appears in almost none of them,

I have a choice:

A, I can say all those editors excluded my work because I have been (and continue to be) blacklisted by the USAPO-Biz power centers—

or

B, I can say that all those editors excluded my work because it is unworthy of being anthologized—

so which do I choose to say to myself:

A or B?

If it's A, I'm a paranoid;

if it's B, I'm a failure:

B means my poetry is worthless, my lifetime of effort has been in vain, and indeed I should stop trying to write, stop publishing my junkverse, I should go away somewhere and shoot myself or at least cease and desist from ever showing my wretchwords in any venue,

including my blogs . . .

So either I'm crazy, or I'm a failure.


///

Friday, July 1, 2011

right choices

*
I wonder how many of the Whiting Award winners

have turned out to be worthwhile? Percentage wise.

You probably couldn't include Sylvia Moss in that count, right?

Sylvia Moss, one of the earlier Whiting recipients,

she got the Whiting after having her first book published

via Dan Halpern's National Poetry Series.

She was a double winner that miracle year, first gaining book-publication

in the National Poetry Series—

the judge who selected her for that prize was Derek Walcott—

and then, soon after that, she got the Whiting. 40 grand, right?

I think (if I'm not mistaken) that the judges for the Whiting (and
perhaps the nominators also) are anonymous, unknown,

right?

Since achieving those magnificent awards—

(so-eagerly-sought-for-by-so-many-of-us-lesser-lights)

since acing those prestigious honors two or more decades ago, Moss has been

missing—

I mean she's never put out (at least to my knowledge) another book, a second book

(or if she did, it must have been issued by a press small enough to escape my notice)—

I've never seen her verse in any magazine since that time. (Has she ever been BAP'd?)

She has (if I'm mistaken, shoot me) quite vanished from the menu

of contemporary USAPO.

(Where is Sylvia, where is she, whom superbards at once commended?
Ask Derek and Dan. Her day, it seems, has long since ended.)

Derek Walcott, Daniel Halpern, and all

those mysterious hidden
secret (skulking in their pelf-lined chambers) muckamuck judges

at the Whiting Foundation,

they're all intelligent professionals, right? They know what they're doing.
There they are: fair, equitable, open-minded, even-handed.

So aboveboard, so scrupulous (especially Walcott, right?)—

so circumspect
, so unbiased in their deliberations.

Paragons—

So astute—so percipient—so prescient!

How authoritative their verdicts. How sagacious—

In short, they know which horse to put their money on. Most of the time, anyway—

One thing's for sure:

they didn't put it on me.

The National Poetry Series and the Whiting Foundation rejected all my efforts—

Which proves they made at least one right choice, doesn't it?

Right.

///

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

reconciliation

*
Josh Corey has an interesting column here about Robert Duncan's reliance on/adherence to the ubermythological:

http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/2011/06/all-duncan-all-time.html

...

And here John Latta in his blog yesterday is noting:

[Frank] O’Hara’s remarks (to Edward Lucie-Smith, in 1965) about Creeley and control (versus “the sort of tumultuous outpouring of images which then get themselves together into being a poem, somehow” wherein “you do have the excitement of seeing whether you’re really going to get it to be a poem or not”). O’Hara complains how the minimalisms of Creeley (and Levertov) end up “making control practically the subject matter of the poem. That is your control of the language, your control of the experiences and your control of your thought.”: And: “the amazing thing is that where they’ve pared down the diction so the experience presumably will come through as strongly as possible, it’s the experience of their paring it down that comes through more strongly and not the experience that is the subject.”

*

O'Hara the maximalist perceives correctly how very different his practice is from Creeley's—

And Creeley (or so it seems to me) unlike Duncan is not stuffing his verse with mythological figures or references—

is not constantly plucking items from the "myth-kitty" as Philip Larkin calls it—

both O'Hara and Creeley are doing what Larkin advocates: taking their matter, their subjects from the daily life around them, what lies before their immediate eyes—

waylayers of what Bonnefoy calls

herméneutique sur le vif
....


/

Maxi versus mini is one way of arranging your poets in contrast:

another might be pro-myth versus anti- .

Which would place Larkin closer than Duncan to Creeley/O'Hara (and bring the latter nearer together) . . .

///

p.s.

Today (Thursday June 30) the Harriet blog is quoting Charles Bernstein:

"everyday life, that great Creeley theme ..."

—Exactly. Everyday life. Couldn't have phrased it better myself—


"Everyday life" is the great theme not only of Creeley but also O'Hara and Larkin—

but can anyone claim the same of Duncan? Surely his great theme(s) transcended (or sought to) the everyday, the quotidian—

the myth-kitty was never far from his hand, was it?

/

p.p.s.

of course O'Hara stuffed—or peppered might be the better verb—his poems with all kinds of referents, from movies to myths—

but can you imagine him writing something like Duncan's "Achilles' Song"— a persona poem, a dramatic monolog spoken as the Greek hero,

especially as seriously as Duncan does it on page 100 of his Selected Poems (New Directions, 1993)?

"Duncan," the backcover of this book proclaims, "was a poet of cosmic imagination."

Duncan: cosmic;
O'Hara: cosmopolitan.

Not to mention the mask of 'comic,' which surely O'Hara/Creeley/Larkin all wear at times in their work,

but Duncan? Ironic, sardonic, satiric, yes, perhaps, occasionally, but does his verse ever stray into the lowbrow demotic of slangbent humor
?

...

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

reprint from old blog—though the question is still relevant, i think

*

Regional, racial, ethnic, gender, generational, thematic, etcet:

if you look at the dozens and hundreds of anthologies of contemporary USA poetry published over the past two/three decades,


you'll find compilations of poems or poets gathered and linked to represent many categories of differentiation and distinction,


with one exception. There are no anthologies based on class.


Why is there no anthology of rich poets, poets who came from a background of wealth and privilege. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Louise Gluck, William Matthews, Richard Howard, C.K. Williams, Russell Edson et al.


Class is the most important influence on the lives of USAers,


the significant marker which defines who each of us is.


Our culture at its deepest level is founded on class, on its financial and educational inequalities.


We face and interact daily with the continuities and conflicts of class.


It touches and permeates us in every way, in every aspect of our public and private systems.


But in poetry it doesn't matter?—why? because Art exists in a realm separate from Life?


*

Maybe one of the reasons there has never been such an anthol would be the prohibitive cost of obtaining rights, since, not so ironically, rich poets like Gluck and CK Williams demand exorbitant fees to reprint their verse; your average anthologist has to pay through the nose.

Though of course with POD, anyone anywhere can publish rather cheaply a book collection of Gluck's poems as a private pirate edition and distribute copies of it to the void without ever paying a cent to her richness, if anyone anywhere were of a mind to, that is.

///

these pages are from about 4/5 years ago:

*
some of the worksheets from my transversion of a Follain poem, with a brief preface:

*
. . . . from Clive Wilmer's review (TLS June 1/07) of the new Ted Hughes compilation Selected Translations. . . . :

"Daniel Weissbort, who edited this selection, tells the story of Hughes taking another poet's translation of a work by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhasz and, without any knowledge of the original language and no Hungarian speaker to advise him, turning that version into a thrilling poem that drives the existing versions off the map."

*
Like Hughes in the case of Juhasz, my transversions are based not on the original, but on translations. . . .

But of course my parlor pastiches will hardly "drive the existing versions off the map." Nor is that their aim, really . . . they're more like exercises, as painters and composers will often attempt "variations on" . . .

*
In the case of this poem "by" Jean Follain, I have worked from translations by Merwin and Romer (they are appended here below my drafts). I'm assuming both their versions are accurate literal renderings of the original's content. Reading them, you can see what I've changed or added, in particular how I've "put back in" references to the biblical characters Adam and Noah, which Follain carefully left out.

It may seem odd that I've taken a poem which is not rhymed even in the original French version (I don't have the Follain text, but based on every poem of his I've ever seen I'm confident this one is similarly not end-rhymed)—why have I taken a vers libre and done this to it. But his poems are often sort of sonnety in their way. Stephen Romer writes: "[Follain's] poems, very rarely more than fifteen lines or so in length, are vignettes . . . " This is from the Introduction to 20th-Century French Poems (Faber, 2002) edited by Romer (see below for more Romer-on-Follain). That "fifteen lines" phrase struck me, and I suddenly wondered if the typical Follain could be read as a sonnet in subterfuge, and if so why not try doing a transversion in that mode . . .

As a further incentive, I worked to make each line decasyllabic.

*
Note: the drafts appear here in reverse, sort of, with the most recent ones above the earlier . . .


*
THE RETURN (after Follain: from Merwin/Romer)

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
in ways for the stranger who's late to come,
but he whose force was never sure of home
may not even pause when faced with its gates.

Clothed wholly in the mendicant's threadbare,
his headwear the tin lid of a trashcan,
he will know to announce himself as man
the prodigal:
Hey guys it's me! But where

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat burrs dark
and the pig guards the last milk it laps at,—
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can augur storms, they have formed their own ark.

Unyielding the response to him must be;
the same it has been since edenity.

*
*
Perhaps for the stranger who's late to come,
It seems for the stranger
At times for the stranger
In ways for the stranger who's late to come,

Ostensibly the stranger late to come,
The one whose force was never sure of home,
Who may not even blink before its gates—

Will he know to announce himself as man
He will dare to announce himself as man
Will he dare to

May not even wince/smirk as he nears its gates—
May not even wince to approach its gates
May not even pause to approach its gates
May not even wink or pause at its gates
May not even pause or blink at its gates
May not even blink at breaching its gates
May not even blink as he gains its gates
as he goals its gates
entering passing
May nonchalant pose before its gates
May strike a nonchalance before its gates
May not even blink when faced with its gates
May not even blink as he nears its gates
May not even blanch when faced with its fates
May not even care when faced with its gates

*
the mule grubs for food, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule mulls root-cud,
the mule cuds up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
thorn-roots/ weed-roots / wheatshoots /
the mule grazes grass /
the mule drools cudstuff,
the donkey drools cud,
the mules grubs for / spuds for grub
the mule digs / probes / roots for fodder /
the mule gnaws barley, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps root-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps herb-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses herbs, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule sniffs herbage, the mare's coat burrs dark

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat grows dark,
the pig guards the meager milk it laps at,—
the pig guards the milkcurd it laps at,—
where the pig guards the weak milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the bare milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the meek milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the mild milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the last milk it laps at

The mule chews herbs and the mare in her dark
Coat broods, where a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
Can foretell storms, they have formed their own ark.

can augur storms, they have made their own ark
they have cast their own ark.
they have borne their own ark.

where the dog bears a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms, they have found their own ark.

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare's coat grows dark—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms—they have formed their own ark.

the mule gnaws grass and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig slurps the milk it sips at—
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms—this farm is like an ark.

coat nods and the pig smears the milk it laps at;
coat broods and the pig laps at a milkmat
coat broods and the pig licks at lumps of milkfat

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig swigs curds of milkfat—The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
can foretell storms: they have formed their own ark.

the pig laps up a milklet;
the pig laps a milk tricklet
the pig drinks at a thin spigot

coat broods and the pig licks a butterpat
the pig drinks thin its milkfat
Coat broods a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Coat broods and a meager milk is lapped at:
Coat broods and a meager milk gets lapped at;
Coat broods and a meager cream goes lapped at;
where the pig finds meager milk to mouth at
where the pig looks for meager milk to lap at
where the pig pursues a meager milk to lap at—
where the pig finds/has a meager milk to slurp at/splurge at
to lunge at/ to surge at/gush at / gnash at / nosh at/ gorge at
where the pig roots a/roots for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig has a meager milk to nose at—
where the pig roots out meager milk to lap at—
where the pig drools for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig hogs the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig hunches over
where the pig hoards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig defends the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is afraid someone will steal the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is jealous /cautious/ wary/

*
The donkey nibbles through sweets/hills/mallows of thistle
And the mare in her dark coat deepens/becomes/
The mare as her dark coat grows to leather;
the pig burps after milk in a trickle,
the starfaced dog, the cat uninured to weather . . ./

the starfaced dog, the cat who weeps at weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to weather . . .

the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to storms.

Coat broods and the mild pigs-milk is lapped at
and the mare in her dark coat—and the pig
who burps his meager milk—and then the dog
with starred brow—the cat sensitive to storms.

the donkey nibbles thistle and the horse
stands in its dark coat and the pig burps at
his meager milk and the dog and the cat
bare starry foreheads and bark at storms.

can fore-sense storms and the dog's forehead
bears a star.

the cat can fore-sense storms
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms

the donkey nibbles grass and the mare _____
in her dark coat and the pig's milk mustache

*
WELCOME

The sun has washed with white the farm too late /of late
Always for the stranger at last to come, /too late to come

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
Stunned if the stranger should finally come
But he whose roots were /force was /never here at home
May not even blink as he nears its gates—

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

*
So their response to him will be the same
It has been for ever before he came.
It has been ever since before he came.

These animals' response/answer to him will be
The same it has been since antiquity./eternity.

So therefore/even their response to him will be
So the only response to him will be /must be
The same it has been since they left that sea.
The stark response to him will be
The stolid response to him will be

*
/the stranger of me to /that stranger of mine to come
Always for the stranger I am to come
/ never mine

Wearing a rubbish-bin's tophat/tin cover as crown,
Wearing a trash can's tin cover/ coverlid as crown,
He will know to enter/declare the scene his own,
Declaring again/in first-person Friends I am here. Where
in first-person Friends I am here. There where
Declaring Friends your Noah's here! Where
Loud prodigal: Friends I am here. But where
Mere prodigal:
Forked prodigal:

He will know to announce himself as man
The returning prodigal: I'm here! Where
Comeback prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and proud: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and loud: Friends I am here! Where
The prodigal pride: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal with pride: Friends I am here! Where
Pride and prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Pride prodigal:

/
THE RETURN (after Follain: from Merwin/Romer)

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
in ways for the stranger who's late to come,
but he whose force was never sure of home
may not even pause when faced with its gates.

Clothed wholly in the mendicant's threadbare,
his headwear the tin lid of a trashcan,
he will know to announce himself as man
the prodigal: Friends I am here. But where

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat burrs dark
and the pig guards the last milk it laps at,—
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can augur storms, they have formed their own ark.

Unyielding the response to him must be;
the same it has been since edenity.

*
*
Perhaps for the stranger who's late to come,
It seems for the stranger
At times for the stranger
In ways for the stranger who's late to come,

Ostensibly the stranger late to come,
The one whose force was never sure of home,
Who may not even blink before its gates—

Will he know to announce himself as man
He will dare to announce himself as man
Will he dare to

May not even wince/smirk as he nears its gates—
May not even wince to approach its gates
May not even pause to approach its gates
May not even wink or pause at its gates
May not even pause or blink at its gates
May not even blink at breaching its gates
May not even blink as he gains its gates
as he goals its gates
entering passing
May nonchalant pose before its gates
May strike a nonchalance before its gates
May not even blink when faced with its gates
May not even blink as he nears its gates
May not even blanch when faced with its fates
May not even care when faced with its gates

*
the mule grubs for food, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule mulls root-cud,
the mule cuds up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
thorn-roots/ weed-roots / wheatshoots /
the mule grazes grass /
the mule drools cudstuff,
the donkey drools cud,
the mules grubs for / spuds for grub
the mule digs / probes / roots for fodder /
the mule gnaws barley, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps root-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps herb-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses herbs, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule sniffs herbage, the mare's coat burrs dark

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat grows dark,
the pig guards the meager milk it laps at,—
the pig guards the milkcurd it laps at,—
where the pig guards the weak milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the bare milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the meek milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the mild milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the last milk it laps at

The mule chews herbs and the mare in her dark
Coat broods, where a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
Can foretell storms, they have formed their own ark.

can augur storms, they have made their own ark
they have cast their own ark.
they have borne their own ark.

where the dog bears a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms, they have found their own ark.

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare's coat grows dark—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms—they have formed their own ark.

the mule gnaws grass and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig slurps the milk it sips at—
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms—this farm is like an ark.

coat nods and the pig smears the milk it laps at;
coat broods and the pig laps at a milkmat
coat broods and the pig licks at lumps of milkfat

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig swigs curds of milkfat—The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
can foretell storms: they have formed their own ark.

the pig laps up a milklet;
the pig laps a milk tricklet
the pig drinks at a thin spigot

coat broods and the pig licks a butterpat
the pig drinks thin its milkfat
Coat broods a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Coat broods and a meager milk is lapped at:
Coat broods and a meager milk gets lapped at;
Coat broods and a meager cream goes lapped at;
where the pig finds meager milk to mouth at
where the pig looks for meager milk to lap at
where the pig pursues a meager milk to lap at—
where the pig finds/has a meager milk to slurp at/splurge at
to lunge at/ to surge at/gush at / gnash at / nosh at/ gorge at
where the pig roots a/roots for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig has a meager milk to nose at—
where the pig roots out meager milk to lap at—
where the pig drools for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig hogs the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig hunches over
where the pig hoards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig defends the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is afraid someone will steal the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is jealous /cautious/ wary/


*
The donkey nibbles through sweets/hills/mallows of thistle
And the mare in her dark coat deepens/becomes/
The mare as her dark coat grows to leather;
the pig burps after milk in a trickle,
the starfaced dog, the cat uninured to weather . . ./

the starfaced dog, the cat who weeps at weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to weather . . .

the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to storms.

Coat broods and the mild pigs-milk is lapped at
and the mare in her dark coat—and the pig
who burps his meager milk—and then the dog
with starred brow—the cat sensitive to storms.

the donkey nibbles thistle and the horse
stands in its dark coat and the pig burps at
his meager milk and the dog and the cat
bare starry foreheads and bark at storms.

can fore-sense storms and the dog's forehead
bears a star.

the cat can fore-sense storms
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms

the donkey nibbles grass and the mare _____
in her dark coat and the pig's milk mustache

*
WELCOME

The sun has washed with white the farm too late /of late
Always for the stranger at last to come, /too late to come

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
Stunned if the stranger should finally come
But he whose roots were /force was /never here at home
May not even blink as he nears its gates—

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

*
So their response to him will be the same
It has been for ever before he came.
It has been ever since before he came.

These animals' response/answer to him will be
The same it has been since antiquity./eternity.

So therefore/even their response to him will be
So the only response to him will be /must be
The same it has been since they left that sea.
The stark response to him will be
The stolid response to him will be

*
/the stranger of me to /that stranger of mine to come
Always for the stranger I am to come
/ never mine

Wearing a rubbish-bin's tophat/tin cover as crown,
Wearing a trash can's tin cover/ coverlid as crown,
He will know to enter/declare the scene his own,
Declaring again/in first-person Friends I am here. Where
in first-person Friends I am here. There where
Declaring Friends your Noah's here! Where
Loud prodigal: Friends I am here. But where
Mere prodigal:
Forked prodigal:

He will know to announce himself as man
The returning prodigal: I'm here! Where
Comeback prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and proud: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and loud: Friends I am here! Where
The prodigal pride: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal with pride: Friends I am here! Where
Pride and prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Pride prodigal:

*
*

W. S. Merwin:

Welcome

On the farm in its full color
it is on a day of bright sunlight
that one awaits the stranger.
Dressed in fine black fabric
and wearing a top hat
he will push the gate open
saying friends here I am.
The donkey nibbling the blue thistle
the mare in her dark gown
the pig drinking sour milk
the dog with the starred forehead
the cat who can sense a storm
before him will be the same
as in hard Antiquity.

*
by Stephen Romer:

Welcome

In the freshly whitewashed farm
it is a sunny day
to be waiting for the stranger.
Clad in thin black cloth
and wearing a top hat
he will push the gate
and say friends here I am.
The donkey grazing on blue thistle
the mare with a dark coat
the pig drinking thin milk
the dog with the starred forehead
the cat sensitive to storms
will be the same before him
as in hard Antiquity.

*
*
Here's Stephen Romer on Follain:

Follain catches the instant and preserves it in aspic, or behind glass that is absolutely transparent: the speaker casts no shadow on his poems, which are rigourly impersonal in presentation—not once does Follain use the personal pronoun 'je', preferring always the neutral 'on'. . . . Perhaps no other poet of the century can suggest, with equal economy, such vertiginous and often desolating temporal perspectives. Follain is also a crucial figure in providing a viable alternative to Surrealism, which he claimed to 'admire' but knew to be inimical to his own genius. . . . By reasserting the possibility of a poetry anchored in the world, and by inventing a new type of lyric poem, scoured of sentimentality and subjectivity, Jean Follain may prove, indeed, to be the major influence on the best [French] poets of the latter part of the century. . . .

(quoted from pages xxxiii/xxxiv of Romer's introduction to 20th-Century French Poems)

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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

if knott, then not

*
here's Luke Hankins protesting a review by Joan Houlihan, over at the Contemporary Poetry Review site:

Luke Hankins says:


". . . I am quite surprised to hear your idea that end rhyme shows up mostly in light verse today, which I’m guessing must be based more on what you personally choose to read than on objective observation (exceptions, off the top of my head and in no particular order: Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, A. E. Stallings, Paul Muldoon, Ernest Hilbert, Ashley Anna McHugh, Melissa Range, Natasha Trethewey, Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Adam Kirsch, Geoffrey Hill, Fred Chappell, Gjertrude Schnackenberg, Sherman Alexie . . ."


*
Gee I wish my 128-page book "Ear Quire: Selected Rhyming Poems" was good enough to have Hankins add me to that list of contemporary poets who use rhyme, but of course it's not.
Besides their poor quality, my rhyming poems can also be downloaded free (in PDF form) via Lulu.com, as can many other of my books,
and in a capitalist society merit/value is based on price:
if my books cost nothing, then ipso facto they're worth nothing.
Luke Hankins knows my rhyming (and nonrhyming) verse is worthless, and he's right.
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update: by not including me in hits lst Hankins made me realize how worthless my book of rhyming poems was, and so I deleted it from Lulu,

//

Sunday, June 5, 2011

thanks to Johannes Goranski for posting this on his blog

*

Atrocity Kitsch: Bill Knott and Daniel Borzutzky

by Johannes on May.16, 2011, under Uncategorized

This will be a short post but I wanted to say something about Bill Knott, not so much because he’s left grumpy comments on this blog but because I think he’s a fantastic poet and I wanted to join Kyle Minor’s Bill Knott Week at Htmlgiant, but I couldn’t because I was bogged down in work.

1.
First I’m going to make some generalizations about Bill Knott. I think Bill Knott is a great poet, one of my favorite American poets of the second half of the 20th century. I also think he’s incredibly important: important in the sense of very influential. I see his influences on heaps of poets. Yet, Bill Knott is also a poet who’s almost never mentioned as an “important poet.” When people mention their “influences,” he’s very seldom on the list, even when he’s an apparent influence. I don’t think that’s an unimportant point to make about Knott: it’s part of his authorship.

2.
At the Htmlgiant special, there was a lot of comments made about the fact that Knott self-publishes his books and booklets. In fact, I first came across his work when one of my grad school classmates handed me a booklet. Perhaps this method of distribution could be said to be beside the point, but I think it does suggest something like an approach to writing/publishing that has something to do with his work.

Sure, a lot of poets have and continue to self-publish, including the best ones ever (Whitman, Rimbaud etc), but something that interest me about Knott’s self-publishing is the way it is done in such a make-shift way. Though the poems are great, the booklets look pretty un-fancy. Further, by self-publishing he kind of takes himself out of the “respectability game” – as a very influential and – to a lot of people – awesome poet, Knott should probably instead of going self-publishing (and in such a large quantity) try to edit himself and get people to write about him etc. This is especially true in this age of “too much”. But instead Knott aligned himself with the “plague ground.” (This can be seen as the opposite to say Kenny Goldsmith who’s made his anti-kitsch opposition to the shit, the “creative writing” and “expressionist” poetry of this plague ground a central argument for his own special-ness, his admirability.)

3.
I wanted to pick up on a few things Kathleen Rooney says in her interview about Knott. To begin with, she notes that Knott “kills” himself in his poetry; at first by inventing a persona (who not only dies but is also a virgin); and he names one of his books “Corpse and Bean,” further suggesting the deathiness of writing. For Knott Art and Death are fundamentally intertwined. It seems to me this deathiness, this self-killing is part of an engagement with kitsch, a disposability, an anti-immortality.

4.
Rooney also points out that Knott’s writing is fundamentally in bad taste in many regards. I agree: it’s maximalist, it mixes atrocity and kitsch (art is not only tied to death but violence). At the same time as it’s incredibly fun and interesting to read, it’s not the kind of poetry that people refer to as “the Greatest” or “Most Influential” (though personally I would pick it over just about any living poet’s work any day). It simply is “too much.”

Rooney points to the following piece of poesy:

Nuremberg, U.S.A.

In this time and place, where “Bread and Circuses” has
become “Bread and Atrocities,” to say ‘I love you’ is
like saying the latest propaganda phrase…’defoliation’…
‘low yield blast’.
If bombing children is preserving peace, then
my fucking you is a war-crime.

I love this poem too. Rooney thinks comparing killing children to fucking is in questionable taste, and I obviously agree. But I’m not interested in taste, in fact most great writing is pretty tasteless (Genet’s maximalist baroquery about smelly transvestite criminals with religious names is obviously the best example of this!). Part of what makes this of questionable taste (though this isn’t necessarily the same as “tasteless” which is usually easier to deal with, easier to discard or embrace, more stable) is that it makes this extreme comparison between sex and war crime – but, perhaps more so, because there is an implicit pedophilia in the statement. If Killing children equals fucking, then perhaps it also equal fucking children. And in the insistence on metaphors and comparison, the baroque literariness of it, there seems to be a connection too between art and pedophilia; art is crime, artifice – as JonBenet Ramsey with her adult make-up and Michael Jackson with his fake face showed us – is equal to a kind of molestation.

5.
Here’s another of my favorites:

(Poem) (Chicago) (The Were-Age)
‘My age, my beast!’ – Osip Mandelstam

On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You’ve heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can’t go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through
Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death’s monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
The manshriek of flesh
The lifeless sparks of flesh

Covering the deep drums of vision
O new era race-wars jugular-lightning
Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future
Know we are not the smilelines of dreams
Nor the pores of the Invisible
Piano with rabies we are victorious over
The drum and the wind-chime
We bite back a voice that might have emerged
To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes

American poetry obviously has a long and troubled relationship to politics, to atrocities etc. The New Critics had no problem with commemorating the confederate dead, but they didn’t care for “the excesses of the 1920s” (see Cary Nelson’s famous Repression and Recovery). By the time Knott wrote these in the late 60s it was definitely OK to write political poetry. But one things that separates this from a lot of the poetry is that it doesn’t provide a clear place to stand, in fact it implicates art in violence (Another post: why Bly can write some awesome poems about atrocities but then turn around and write some awful nature poems.).

Art is atrocious in Knott’s poems, and in part (like Genet’s Our Lady of Flowers) this comes from its incredibly commitment to literariness, to artistry, to the baroque.

6.
But now I’m making it seem like I like Bill Knott for his transgressiveness or something like that. That’s not exactly true. It’s more like I love the way – as in Genet – the shitty, kitschy stuff intermingles with just stunning sentences and images. As I’ve said before, both the shittiness and the baroque or maximal have long been the most troublesome aesthetics to American poetry – literary devices used out of control is a kind of kitsch. His poetry goes all the way, it’s too much, too beautiful, too literary, at the same time as it gives us shit and corpses.

7.
For example in the “Were-Age,” he asks the reader to become intimitely involved inside Art that reproduces the kind of grotesque baroque of American atrocities: The constellation of sperm on our bodies is both vast/outer space and physical and sticky on our bellies; both historical and metaphorical and physical.

And in all of this: an utter awareness of media and its speed – “death’s monogram,” 10,000 men.” Or as Velvet Underground put it around the same time: “The dead bodies pile up in mounds.” In that song (“Heroin”) media enters the body through a heroin needle (or at least a “spike”); in Knott’s poem media enters like blood going into “wounds.”

And with media we’re back to self-published booklets. Bill Knott as the poet who entered the plague ground with every baroque gesture, and has come out – not as a famous poet of standing and taste – but one of the greatest jesters of the corpse heaps this shitty world has produced.

8.
Knott’s body is a very post-freudian body. These are bodies that are part of history, intertwined with history, but there is no “interiority,” no soul or essence there. Unlike Billy Collins – whom Knott supposedly loves – poetry is not an escape into a truer sphere (compared to swimming often or some other natural space). The bodies pile up like porn or horror movies. And it’s perhaps this that makes his poetry most tasteless of all: not only is there no place to stand, but we are not granted our own beloved interiority, our agency; instead we are piled up and intertwined with the unsavory violence of our world (and the crassly literary).

9.
Also wanted to mention a recent book that I find very much in line with this – Daniel Borzutzky’s “The Book of Interfering Bodies.”

In her (favorable) review of the book on Htmlgiant, Lily Hoang wrote about Borzutzky’s questionable taste: “For instance, I think pulling skin from flesh is something pretty cliché. The first poem in this collection, “Resuscitation,” closes with skin being pulled from the body. I started to read. I rolled my eye.”

There is something unquestionably tasteless about involving torture and art. And yet the two seem inextricably intertwined (see Abu Ghraib):

The soldier had taken my pants and all I had left was skin

I wanted to peel off my skin and dissolve into the tiniest voice

I started to peel the skin off my arms and worked my way up to my shoulder across my neck to the other shoulder along the arms down to the hand

Or:

Its impossible to read the Book of Glass without spilling blood. The reader pulls it out of the tower with special tongs.

Like Knott, history becomes involved with art and kitsch (in Borzutzky’s case a steadily accumulating heap of “books”). And the thing I hadn’t thought about until I compared Borzutzky and Knott was how they speak in a kind of bureaucratic grotesque. Bureaucracy is generally considered indeed kitsch and “banal evil” etc, but in both Knott and Borzutzky bureaucracy becomes very evil, grotesque and beautiful, seductive and repulsive at the same time.

10.
About this bureaucracy, Borzutzky has the greatest epigraph I’ve seen in some time:

“It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of the imagination.” (The 9/11 Commission)

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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

an interview

otoliths

a magazine of many e-things

ISSN 1833-623X

20110531
Tom Beckett


An Interview with Kirsten Kaschock

Tom Beckett: Where did/does poetry begin for you?

Kirsten Kaschock: Where did it begin? Second grade, a haiku—the idea of compression combined with the idea of power. My haiku was hung up in the hallway beside my drawing of a willow tree, and the school counselor called me out of the room to tell me how deeply it had moved her. She was foreign—an adult—and my memory is memory and thus, inaccurate, but my memory tells me she was tearing up as she told me this. She had brassy hair clearly done up with large rollers and big, thick glasses that magnified her glassy eyes. This story continues to define my writing: my first poem gave me an intense face-to-face audience-experience with a heretofore stranger. The potency of that.

Where does it begin? Need. The need to rework experience with tools. I’ve learned two tools in my life fairly well, my body and my language. I’ve worked through all sorts of experiential knots with both. Living with others (my husband, my children) is also a working through. I wish sometimes I could just be, but then I don’t think I’d make as much. Probably if I were okay with just being, I wouldn’t mind that—but as it is, I’m not. My need to make is not shelve-able. I find it odd that the things I make are not concrete. Like maybe this is an accident. Like my choreography, and especially my poems, should actually be small carved blocks of would. (That typo is probably more accurate than its correction).

TB: To know one’s body and one’s language well strikes me as huge. And, in our culture anyway, rare. It’s a large part of what attracts me to your work—your ability to entwine these realms. Could you speak to how this works in terms of your practice?

KK: Experimenting with language and with movement is something children do until they are told to use those tools “more appropriately.” The disciplines of dance and writing as I learned them were about going deep enough into technique to earn that experimentation back. Later, I began to question if one needed to go through the rigidity to get to the freedom, but for me that path provided me with a sense of confidence as well as a needed attitude of surrender. Both. I know now I must be confident enough to surrender, to trust in unknowing.

Dance and writing have beautiful divergences, but retaining some of each while inside the other is my way to threaded-ness. So when I give a prosepoem circular or inverted phrasing, it is a formal device I’ve used in choreography. Even better are strategies that can’t be translated directly: to try to repeat a poetic phrase at different levels; to attempt a poetic line with a different facing; to attenuate the phrase in time. In dance, one might try to tighten-the-gestures, or to use the white space, or to converse, or to pun. Really, the crossovers are endless: form, content, approach, theme, philosophy. I don’t know if I write coherently about my desire to fuse these worlds.

TB: Tools and moods, beside having the commonality of double ohs, seem to me to be what we—as artists—don’t talk about enough. I really want to explore your sense of process. I get the sense, in reading your work, that motion and emotion exist on the same plane. I don’t know if this is a coherent observation, but it’s my excuse for something like a continuation of our conversation.

KK: Motion and emotion on the same plane—I like that. And the double oo (I have a list of double oo words that will eventually become parts of a poem). Making lists of words is part of my process. Insistent ideas are easier to express when I have a formal constraint—pressed through a narrower tube things flow more forcefully. Of course, I both create the tube and discard it if it proves unhelpful.

I like tasks. Games. So these small exercises (tools) I use to help me get into a state (mood) where what could be termed the content of my work is not so heavy, so molasses... I noticed in your aphoristic work, “Andswearving Fragmeants” in Otoliths, that short, almost-didactic statements seemed to send you flying forward into ideas that proceeded one-on-another’s heels. There is so much momentum in these numbered questions, answers, statements of belief. The form, in this case, not only allows but propels one into a contradiction of self—a way “to contain multitudes.” Of course, that’s just my take.

Form is not something I am precious about... it is the paces I put myself through to get beyond the formal. How to use words to try to break/get beyond language, to use movement to get beyond the body. By testing the specific limits of the media I try to find where those media are porous—transcendent...

TB: There’s a lot of stuff going on in your response, but I’m going to be a little reductive. On the one hand, you’re extolling the practical value of constraints—of creating, say, a constellation of vocabulary as a basis for establishing boundaries to react to/against. On the other hand, you’re trying to get beyond materials/media to something unknown, something beyond what you know. What I think you’ve described is the foundational dialectic of poetry writing—at least the kind of poetry writing I care about.

What makes you itch to write poetry? What gets you going?

KK: Frustration. Pain. I wish I could write out of joy, but usually when I’m joyful (I have brief spurts)—I don’t do much writing. Poetry is also a place where I bash heads. My own. Meaning: I find I disagree with myself often, and that I carry associative links around with me that bother, nay, obsess me. I sit down with these internal conundrums and try to play out a rhythm—multiple rhythms—hoping they will overlay into something I can live with. Right now, I am working on this connection that has been with me for a decade: domesticity and rectangles. I’ve written 26 poems so far about the shape of the rectangle (book, window, room, computer screen, Volvo, stage proscenium, bathtub, the family unit...) and how this elongated square relates to... women? the family? capitalism? I swear there is something there. I haven’t hit the root yet (another double oo—a favorite), but it’s lurking. I write also because when I stop writing for any length of time I am not myself. Writing accesses and coalesces thought in a way I am incapable of without it. I am a devotee. An addict. I don’t think I know any writers who do not suffer from this need. Are you free of it?

When I am not writing, I dance more. When I am not moving—my writing is more tortured. Balance escapes me. I am constantly making peace with my own asymmetry.

TB: I suffer too when I can’t write. I note in “Andswerving Fragmeants” that poetry is a form of substance abuse and that connections can’t be found often enough.

Domesticity and rectangles. Wrecked angles/angels? Is it a matter of exploring the ways in which our experience of the world is framed? The ways in which we are framed?

I love the way you create generative contexts to work from, the way you worry a line into revealing its rich associations. Your piece in the most recent Otoliths worked with the sentence “Time is a quality of movement.” Somehow I suspect you’re not yet done with that line of thought.

KK: Yes, framing. All art is incompletion. That is how art works for me—either by sculpting (a revealing by removal) or collage (revelation by juxtaposition of fragments). Creating something and saying “this is done” is an illusion and an act of violence, of isolating things/objects/ideas and pretending that they are whole, can stand on their own. I feel the same way about the concept of family in our culture. How family is used as a credo for greed rather than as an impetus for connection with a larger world. And yet I participate in both art and my family with fervor. I am a violent animal.

“Time is a quality of movement” is science (I am married to a scientist—an act of generative collage?). Meditating on this statement is yet another act of accretion—trying to think through its anti-intuitive ramifications on my life. On others’ lives. Physics is personal. As you wrote: “Lists and collage are my syntax and grammar. I come alive within active juxtapositions.” This is perhaps the fix. Finding the connections... how they light up when we do our work well... how the synapses crackle. You are right that I am not done with this phrase—I am in fact worrying it to death, as part of an attempt to braid my entire fragmentary life together: movement, motherhood, language.

TB: You have a novel coming out in a few months. What was its impetus?

KK: The impetus?—an art form that doesn’t exist: sleight. Sleight has no content (or at least none of which the creators nor performers are consciously aware). The art form is empty. There is no there there. Sleight is the setting, and in some ways also the main character. The novel is about the people who take part in such a thing, whose lives it is. It is about how everything they do, all their relationships, their identities—how all of it is colored and altered by something they can’t ever quite define or capture or understand.

It’s a tad autobiographical.

TB: I’m looking forward to reading it.

Do you see your writing as, in any sense, a social project? Are politics and/or philosophy important to you?

KK: Very important. I’m an unhappy capitalist. I think our democracy is failing, but I don’t know the remedy. I’ve read more pages of philosophy than poetry or fiction in the past three years. But I have a problem with philosophy, politics, and art— the creators of it do a hell of a lot of preaching to the choir. And nitpicking. And infighting.

My politics and philosophy provide of course a substrate for my work, but I try not to speak out of ideology. I’m not even sure what mine would be... transcendental-empathy maybe. I try not to be paralyzed by ideas. For example: any categorical word I know to be inaccurate at best (a box that bleeds), but I don’t want to fear using words. Break them a little bit, so that I can see the blood, smell it. But not shatter them beyond use, because I believe in communication. Imperfect though it is, any faith I have is in our ability to learn from one another and our world. (I just used the first person plural—daring, no?)

How could putting out ideas not be a social project? I do not want a boutique audience. I like engaging with people different than I am, who think differently than I do but also deeply and with love. Those people are not only poets, so I make an effort not to sequester myself inside my poetics.

TB: Who do you think of as your artistic forebears?

KK: Caveat: our ancestors do not always provide us with dominant traits but are inside us nonetheless. Some of mine are Rilke and Ponge, Basho and Bausch (Pina, a choreographer), Robyn Hitchcock, Marguerite Yourcenar, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Bill Knott. I have many other, current influences—but these are some of my longest standing associations, and they have marked me in the way family does.

TB: What, as an artist, worries you the most?

KK: Everything. Or, everything that worries me at all worries me as an artist. But I also find hope in art—art provides a skill set for re-invention when things go terribly curvy.

I worry sometimes that the art-I-love is invested in freedom-without-limit, in contagion and plague-states. Wanting to “make something happen” so badly it doesn’t matter what the something is. (This freedom seems akin to a new enlightenment-rationality—unquestioned in that way.) I worry about the ethics of artists, about my ethics.

I believe in mindful action, but I desire reaction. So I worry about contradiction, and being paralyzed by contradiction, and also, of course, I adore contradiction.
So I worry about madness, I guess—and the tyranny of sanity. And how to balance action with thought. And how to raise good people... and be one... everything.

TB: Thank you, Kirsten, for taking the time to do this interview.


Tom Beckett lives and works in Kent, Ohio.

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