Repost from my old blog: originally published May 15, 2006
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QUEL (WHICH IS TOO MUCH)
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An anecdote re Mallarmé (quoted from Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, Volume 4, p. 117-18):
"The closest friends of the poet knew that he owned a working instrument for poetry in the form of a card file. It was made up of little slips of paper. No one knew what was written on them, and questioning him achieved nothing. One day, Viélé-Griffin entered Mallarmé's study and surprised the poet consulting one of his slips. Mallarmé's gaze lingered on it briefly, then he murmured pensively to himself: "I no longer dare tell them even that. Even that would give too much away." Viélé-Griffin stepped closer. Peering over the poet's shoulder, he saw a single syllable written on the paper: quel [which]."
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Here's Selden Rodman, from the introduction to his 1949 anthology, One Hundred Modern Poems, briefly pondering the future of poetry: "Whether the future belongs to the Brechts or the Rilkes is a question beyond the scope of this preface. . . ." Earlier in the intro he cites Brecht as "the one poet. . . whose contribution to the poetry of collective faith may be as momentous as that of Rilke at the opposite pole."
The question then as today seems to be, what "faith" should one aspire to "contribute" one's artistic efforts toward the furtherance of: individual (spiritual) or collective (socialist)?
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Well, we're in Rodman's future: does it belong to the Brechts or the Rilkes? Has Adrienne Rich ever bared her thoughts about Ashbery? Great poets don't waste their time on the other great poets of their time, it's only we minor hacks who worry our time with these questions. Great poets are elephants; they don't scratch that itch: they don't even feel it.
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Benjamin (op. cit., page 169): "The elaborate theorums with which the principle of "art for art's sake" was enunciated—not only by its original proponents but above all by literary history (not to mention its present devotees)—ultimately came down to a specific thesis: that sensibility is the true subject of poetry. Sensibility, by its nature, is involved in suffering. If it experiences its highest concretization, its richest determination, in the sphere of the erotic, then it must find its absolute comsummation, which coincides with its transfiguration, in the Passion."
This is what Paz calls "the religious temptation." Poesie pure. Autotelicism. The poem as an end in itself. The absolute poem. Flaubert's dream of writing a book about nothing, sustained only by the virtuosity of style; Cezanne's apples; Williams' wheelbarrow.
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No, the apples and the wheelbarrow are not nothing, but are they ancillary to the artist's quest? They're objects along the way, not the sought-for prize, unless. Gustave Moreau painted the Grail, the golden cup held up high enough to dazzle any streamlight. Will Moreau's content ever be seen as more important than Cezanne's form? Will the individualistic hero of form recede before the collective craftwomanship of content? Capitalism depends on the stubborn stylist, the ego-Van-Gogh, the andro-Cezanne whose myth can be marketed beyond its intrinsic value, hyped to the heights. Consumed.
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"Individual faith" versus "Collective Faith." Capitalism (Religion/Fascism) versus Socialism. Or: Style versus Content. I don't have the exact quote, but Alfred Hitchcock said that critics who complained about the trivial or tawdry low-brow content of his films were like a museum-goer wondering whether Cezanne's apples were sweet or sour. They miss the point, he insisted. It's not content that's important, it's style. Any old apple or wheelbarrow or pistol poking out of a pocket will do for a subject. Content is irrelevant, or should be: the viewer or reader must focus first and most on the artist's stylistic choices and methods. WHAT the artist says or shows is secondary to HOW he or she does it. In fact, in this dispensation, in this scale of esthetics, the more insignificant the ostensible subject is, the better. Better because we can't be absorbed in apples or wheelbarrows for very long, their intrinsic lacks the sake we seek in art, they can't in and of themselves hold our interest for any length of time: and therefore when the framed thrust forward work bristling with certification confronts us with such inferior drab objects, we must of necessity look for something beyond the bare fact of them, and our attention shifts away, is shifted away from its initial focus on content, toward the stylistic mannerisms of the presentation. The more boring the content, the more intriquing the form (theoretically).
To retroactively backtrack and try and view the artist's hand in its decisive motions, before it has completed its act. There is no completed act, no boundwork of art in which the present might find its face, there is only the retrospect, the beforemath: as Lowell put it, "my eyes have seen what my hand did."
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Which is too much. Content/subject/intent are excrescences that burden the work with extraneous matter. Meaning and message must be wiped away like dust that accumulates on the canvas. The Louvre even if it had only one painting in it would be too much; ergo Hitler's orders to burn Paris. (Marinetti: "Let us burn down the museums.")
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In the NYTimes of March 12, 1999, Grace Glueck reviews the show "Painter's Poet: Stephane Mallarme and His Impressionist Circle'' (Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery of Hunter College), and says of the poet: "His closest friends were painters: Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and James Whistler. He defended their work in his critical writings, and they did portraits of him and illustrations for his books. Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon, Auguste Rodin and Felix Vallotton, among others, also produced Mallarmean images and tributes." Glueck goes on for several paragraphs about the poet's connections and interactions with his Impressionist contemporaries. But she doesn't mention Puvis de Chavanne once, even in passing. (I didn't see the show, so I don't know if Puvis was included in it. . . .)
Mallarmé wrote a sonnet to honor Whistler, but he also wrote a "Hommage" to Pierre Puvis de Chavanne. Not his "close friend" Manet, not Degas, not Renoir etcet, but Puvis.
Glueck: "Mallarme wrote in praise of Manet's work and in 1874 produced a clever defense of the artist when the government-chosen jury for that year's Salon turned down two of four paintings—three oils and awatercolor—he had submitted. After subtly mocking the jury's conservatism, Mallarme predicted that public taste for Manet's work would eventually prevail. Two years later he published a more important discourse, ''The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,'' an eloquent paean to the new painting and the man he saw as its master."
Yes, but the fact remains that Mallarmé wrote a poem in praise of Puvis de Chavanne. Isn't there a distinction evident here? Doesn't his choice to praise Puvis in verse indicate the depth of his feeling for and his affinity with this overlooked and neglected painter? Art historians or journalists like Glueck who toe the party line, who confine their interest to the canon of established names, must wince and feel embarrassed for Mallarmé when (if) they read the following:
Hommage.
Toute Aurore même gourde
À crisper un poing obscur
Contre des clairons d'azur
Embouchés par cette sourde
A le pâtre avec la gourde
Jointe au bâton frappant dur
Le long de son pas futur
Tant que la source ample sourde
Par avance ainsi tu vis
O solitaire Puvis
De Chavannes jamais seul
De conduire le temps boire
À la nymphe sans linceul
Que lui découvre ta Gloire.
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Form versus Content: Impressionism versus Symbolism.
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Form vs. Content. Was it Robert Creeley who wrote: "Form is never more than an extension of content."
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Form is never more than an extension of breakfast. As shown in this poem by Jacques Prévert, trans. by the forgotten poet Selden Rodman:
LATE RISING
Terrible
is the soft sound of a hardboiled egg
cracking on a zinc counter
and terrible is that sound
when it moves in the memory
of a man who is hungry
Terrible also is the head of a man
the head of a man hungry
when he looks at six o'clock in the morning
in a smart shop window and sees
a head the color of dust
But it is not his head he sees
in the window of 'Chez Potin'
he doesn't give a damn
for the head of a man
he doesn't think at all
he dreams
imagining another head
calf's-head for instance
with vinegar sauce
head of anything edible
and slowly he moves his jaws
slowly slowly
grinds his teeth for the world
stands him on his head
without giving him any comeback
so he counts on his fingers one two three
one two three
that makes three days he has been empty
and it's stupid to go on saying It can't
go on It can't go on because
it does
Three days
three nights
without eating
and behind those windows
paté de fois gras wine preserves
dead fish protected by their boxes
boxes in turn protected by windows
these in turn watched by the police
police protected in turn by fear
How many guards for six sardines . . .
Then he comes to the lunch counter
coffee-with-cream buttered toast
and he begins to flounder
and in the middle of his head
blizzard of words
muddle of words
sardines fed
hardboiled eggs coffee-with-cream
coffee black rum food
coffee-with-cream
coffee-with-cream
coffee crime black blood
A respectable man in his own neighborhood
had his throat cut in broad daylight
the dastardly assassin stole from him
two bits that is to say
exactly the price of a black coffee
two slices of buttered toast
an a nickel left to tip the waiter
Terrible
is the soft sound of a hardboiled egg
cracking on a zinc counter
and terrible is that sound when it moves
in the memory
of a man who is hungry.
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Sunday, June 7, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
as always, the French say these things with more flare
poetry archive
Un blog utilisant Le Blogue du Québec
on the predominantly. on the predominantly. Mr. Knott practices a tatty not at home phraseology.-Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books, May 7, 1970[Bill Knott's poems are] typically fatuous. on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. He produces not the prototaxis of idiocy. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
. Rumor has it that Knott’s garb of giving his parturition and maximum dates together originated when he realized he could no longer clone the detestation of a metrics reading he was scheduled to be reduced.-Charles Molesworth, Poetry (Chicago) Magazine, May 1972[Bill] Knott’s het up b prepare tends today to excite solvent sacking. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [He's] been artificial to self-publish some of his late books. on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [B]ad-not to imply offensively grotesque-poetry. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
appalling on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. maddening on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. wildly uneven on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. unfinished, or obsessively constant on the predominantly. on the predominantly. grotesqueries on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. [His] phraseology is like solid, intimate maquillage on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. his poems give birth to a class of crawly accrual that’s less decorative than also leary or layered on the predominantly. on the predominantly. emotionally distancing on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. uncomfortable. Knott on the predominantly. on the predominantly. is a willful on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. irritating on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
contrarian.-Meghan O’Rourke, Poetry (Chicago) Magazine, Feb 2005[Bill Knott's books are] filled with spitefulness. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. Knott seems to antipathy himself on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
and he seems to antipathy his readers.-Kirk Robinson, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine, dated?)[Bill Knott's work] consists not clearly of asinine poems, that about vomit-provoking things. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [His metrics is] crude on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
and brainless.-Michael Heffernan, Midwest Quarterly, Summer 1973Knott is making capitol on epic methodology, attempting belatedly to a postcard the canon of the Language poets miserly reviving the cant of Ezra Pound. on the predominantly. [His poetry] so successfully defies communicating anything that singular wonders what [his publisher] had in fancy. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. Knott, it may be recalled, killed himself in the primeval 1960s.-R.
. S. Gwynn, The Year in Poetry, DLB Yearbook 1989Consider Bill Knott, a lyricist who writes lots of sheer straightforward poems that are nothing but gasconade pretending at being the share of singular crying in the wilderness.-Josh Hanson, Livejournal, 28/06/07: http://josh-hanson.livejournal.com/26249. htmlEccentric, uneven on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
. lyricist Bill Knott is not [fit] to carry off prizes on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [His het up b prepare is] controversial on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
rebellious, additional on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.-Robert Pinsky, Washington Post.com, April 17, 2005[Bill Knott's metrics is] queerly unfinished on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. sheer outlandish.
. on the predominantly. bodily to the highlight germane of ingloriousness. on the predominantly.
. on the predominantly. his idiosyncrasy has grown formulaic, his inconspicuous poems more inconspicuous, his brief observations so brief they scoot miserly without leaving much of a dent in the reader. on the predominantly.
. There is a petulance at het up b prepare [in his poetry]. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
[H]is set has grown covet in the tooth. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
. In in highlight germane of fact, [at least singular of his poems is] unethical.-Marc Pietrzykowski, Contemporary Poetry Review (http://www.cprw.com/Pietrzykowski/beats.htm)Bill Knott’s [poetry is the equal of] scrimshaw. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [He's] either self-consciously worrisome or it is reasonable that a fake too slangily up-to-date.-Stephen Burt, New York Times Book Review, November 21, 2004Bill Knott['s] hoary, hypothetical ramblings are in the main of what’s off the beam with metrics today. on the predominantly.
Ignore the intimate bastard.-Collin Kelley (from They Shoot Poets Don’t They blog, August 08, 2006)Bill Knott bores me to tears.-Curtis Faville, http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/05/moore-formalism-post-avant-part-three.html[Bill Knott is] inadequate on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.-Alicia Ostriker, Partisan Review (date? 1972?)Bill Knott’s poems are on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
rhetorical blunder on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
and counterfeit.-Ron Loewinsohn, TriQuarterly, Spring 1970Bill Knott on the predominantly. on the predominantly. is so lousy singular can not lament in rejoinder.-Peter Stitt, Georgia Review, Winter 1983Bill Knott [is] the area prince of lousy judgment. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.
>>>>>
joke
from page 8 of the New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007,
Julian Barnes recounts:
A British Euro-joke tells of a meeting of officials from various countries who listen to a British proposal, nodding sagely at its numerous benefits; the French delegate stays silent until the end, then taps his pencil and remarks, "I can see that it will work in practice. But will it work in theory?"
Substitute "SOQ poetry" for "British proposal," and "SON poet" for "French delegate" and the joke still works, I think.
But while the School-of-Quietude poet does value Practice, and the School-of-Noisiness poet valorizes Theory, this is (like the British/French characterization) overall a generalization, and can't apply to every individual case—
For example, thinking of jokes, humor: surely the SOQ Bidart and the SON Palmer are clones in their droneful solemnity, their drastic seriousness, their complete omission of the comic muse?
(Palmer of course inserts a double space inbetween his lines so his poems can kill twice as many trees as the normal poem (Lebensraum, Lebensraum, his cramped lines cry); and Bidart: sometimes he too spreads his lines sparsely and straggledy-taggledy down the page to blitzkrieg the margins of poetry's Maginot line . . . )
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joke
from page 8 of the New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007,
Julian Barnes recounts:
A British Euro-joke tells of a meeting of officials from various countries who listen to a British proposal, nodding sagely at its numerous benefits; the French delegate stays silent until the end, then taps his pencil and remarks, "I can see that it will work in practice. But will it work in theory?"
Substitute "SOQ poetry" for "British proposal," and "SON poet" for "French delegate" and the joke still works, I think.
But while the School-of-Quietude poet does value Practice, and the School-of-Noisiness poet valorizes Theory, this is (like the British/French characterization) overall a generalization, and can't apply to every individual case—
For example, thinking of jokes, humor: surely the SOQ Bidart and the SON Palmer are clones in their droneful solemnity, their drastic seriousness, their complete omission of the comic muse?
(Palmer of course inserts a double space inbetween his lines so his poems can kill twice as many trees as the normal poem (Lebensraum, Lebensraum, his cramped lines cry); and Bidart: sometimes he too spreads his lines sparsely and straggledy-taggledy down the page to blitzkrieg the margins of poetry's Maginot line . . . )
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reposts from 06 blog:
...
the furies
"The plagiarism Furies, idle for a time as the more clandestine and irreproachable forms of literary borrowing and imitation continue from day to day, have been unloosed again. . . . This time, the context is the British literary world, and the accused is one of its leading lights, so the indictment has taken on a moderate, even decorous tone. Ian McEwan has been called to account for using some brief wording in his best-selling novel "Atonement" that some feel was drawn too directly from, rather than merely inspired by, a memoir by the romance novelist Lucilla Andrews."
The above quote comes from the NYTimes of Dec 3rd, 2006; [a few days later] the Times reported that "heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and . . . Thomas Pynchon [have] arisen in defense of Mr. McEwen. Most of the writers said that [they had] done the same thing themselves."
It's interesting when these "Furies" erupt in the world of prose, as they occasionally do: because it never or almost never happens in poetry. There are certain poets who assimilate and appropriate biographies, and then present that culled material, sometimes with little or no alteration, as poems. Yet no one ever confronts these poets, no one ever asks Frank Bidart where the plagiarism ends and the poetry begins.
Prose is important, prose writers are important, and so what they do is covered and reported on by the major media. But poetry? Nobody cares. The New Yorker, which is what, supposedly the mag every literate USAer reads, pays infinitely more attention to pop music than to poetry. Almost every music event in NYC appears in their listings, and almost none of the poetry events. . .
Think of the money spent by governments/societies to support music, as opposed to poetry. They support music because music supports them; it facilitates their tyrannies. In the case of the USA, the Pentagon's budget as opposed to human services; the NEA's stipends for music compared to what it piddles out to poets.
Scientists who tolerate their enemy, religion, have a death-wish; poets who don't attack the hegemony of music, who don't protest against its disproportionate and unwarranted dominance of the cultural sphere, are similarly defeatist. The assets available for the arts are limited, and music gobbles up more resources than it deserves. Poets who support this, and who make excuses for the sovereignty of music over poetry, are suicidal traitors. Just as scientists like Richard Dawkins and others have begun to actively oppose and combat the evil of religion, so poets must work against the dictatorship of music, and must use every means to denounce and denigrate it.
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The New Yorker manages to review prose books every week; why can't they review at least one poetry book per week? If poets weren't such lickspittles and wimps they would boycott and refuse to submit their work to The New Yorker until it paid regular attention to poetry. And boycott every other semi-literary journal, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Bookforum, the TLS, the LRB etcetera, until they start giving regular attention to verse. Hell, the New York Review of Books reviews more music than it does poetry, and more books about music than books about poetry. Why do poets put up with such neglect and disregard? Why don't they fight back?
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The disparity between the funding for music and the funding for poetry is insane. Poetry is the most important art. Ergo, poetry should receive more funding than any other art. More attention should be paid to poetry than any other art. For every printpage and webpage devoted to music, a dozen should be allotted to poetry. For every dollar that goes to music, poetry should collect a hundred, a thousand!
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In reality, of course, poetry is the most abject, the lowest of the arts. The most ignored, the least recognized and honored, the least rewarded. Count the millionaire novelists around the globe, the millionaire painters and scriptwriters, the multimillionaires of music . . . the wealth that accumulates around all the arts but poetry. And ask yourself, poet, what you have in common with them. They hate you, you know it: they despise you. They have nothing but contempt for you. All the other arts look down with disgust at poetry. When will you turn that contempt back at them? When will you scorn them, and deny them the commendation they refuse you. (Oh yes, they all offer lipservice specious praise to poetry, smirking behind their hands at the hypocrisy of the gesture that costs them nothing.) Even poets (you know this too) hate poetry, and disdain poets. How can we not hate ourselves and hate each other; we're poets, we're slaves: Genet said it best, in The Maids: "When slaves love each other, it's not love they feel." Poetry is the slave of the arts, and poets are slaves to the prosewriter and the painter, and even more to the molochs of music. What kind of slave reveres and worships its oppressors? The masochist kind portrayed by Genet: the poet kind.
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But what's the real plagiarism story here, the one that won't be covered by the Times or any other organ of the Masters? Plagiarism: theft. In the realm of the arts, who are the ones most stolen from? who are the ones robbed everyday of the prestige and recognition and respect they deserve? Whose true-earned recompense is snatched away by fictionwriters and painters and musicmullahs? And more than that, more criminal than that, whose ideas and concepts are historically and always and still today are the most plagiarized? Daily, hourly, poet-slaves produce goods which are expropriated and exploited by the other arts. That's the ongoing plagiarism scandal hushed-up and suppressed by every media. No famous novelist or filmmaker or rockstar or painter is going to do an Op-ed about that inequity, or band together (like those "heavyweights" mentioned in the Times article quoted above) to write letters of protest against that iniquity. These are the crooks who steal the work of poets, and they aren't going to confess or atone or make reparations. They're going to keep on plagiarizing poets every chance they get, yesterday today and tomorrow. (Have prosewriters ever been capable of original thought; haven't they always stolen all their ideas from poets.)
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But hey, don't let me stop you, poets. Go on, go ahead and kiss-ass praise the millionaire Pynchon, the millionaire Jasper Johns, praise all the success-practitioners of the Master arts, the crumbs from their tables may fill you yet. It's your duty as slaves to curry favor with those above you, to flatter and obsequiate your betters. And praise most those writers who began as poets but abandoned poetry, who betrayed poetry for the chance to move up the foodchain of the arts, after all if you could hum a tune you too might get rich like Leonard Cohen and fuck moviestars; you'd do it if you could, wouldn't you. Of course you would. Because, let's face it, who would want to be a poet when they could be a novelist or a songwriter or a screenwriter or a rockstar or a Cindy Sherman or a what's his name, that Brit artist who cuts sharks in half,—who would want to remain a poet, the lowest puke on the cultural totempole? Only a fool, a masochist, a scumbag, who can't weasel their way into any of the real arts, who has to sink to the bottom of the bard-barrel, the pegasus-dregs. Poetry, the most ignored, the least compensated of the arts. . . but you already know this; why am I wasting my time telling you what you already know.
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December 07, 2006
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December 17, 2006
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The world of Art mirrors the world of Society. Just as the latter is based on hierarchy, on
a class system, so is the former.
And in the world of Art, poetry is the lowest class.
In the world of Art, poets are the proles, the slaves.
Just as slaves in the world of Society are bullied and beaten, treated as subhuman, so in the world of Art poets are similarly abused.
All the wealth/value produced by Society's slaves is stolen from them by those in the higher classes. The latter grow rich on the former's misery.
Every idea or good generated by poet-labor is also stolen, plagiarized by the higher classes of Music, Painting, Film and Prose. They prosper on the poet's back. All their wealth comes from stealing and using what the poet-slave produces.
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As slaves, poets internalize their inferior status. We grovel before the Masters of Music Painting Film and Prose. We become their lickspittles, their toadies, their dogs, obsequiously grateful for the least crumb falling from their fat tables.
We flatter kiss-ass praise these Masters for their greatness, forgetting that every good every gram of worth they possess, every virtue, was stolen from us.
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From time to time the slaves of Society have risen up against their evil Masters, have rebelled against their oppressors.
But the slaves of Art, the poets, have they ever revolted against their oppressive Masters?
Never.
We have never tried to rip off our chains. We have never protested against the Prosewriters the Filmmakers the Musicmucks the Painters,
the Masters who daily steal our resources, we have never tried to expose their criminal acts of theft and exploitation.
No, we never even dream of rising up in fury to confront and attack these overlords whose cabals conspire against our welfare, whose cultural institutions and media are designed and operated to keep us in penury and abject submission. Whose statutes of power stand ready to cripple and punish and murder us. As they have done so often.
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Friday, June 5, 2009
notes and nubs
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Anxiety can pluck feathers from an egg.
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Like most corny jokes, it has a few kernals of truth stuck in its toothy grin.
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If it was labeled, tagged with
one letter set upon each tooth,
what would your smile spell out—
whose mouth can find the word
to speak its name to mine.
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All I'm asking is that the Academy of American Poets requisition a supply of suicide capsules from its bosses at the C.I.A., and issue one to me. And to other elderly poets who likewise seek a quick demise. The AAP should be shamed and blamed that it does not offer this most humanitarian of services to the poetry community.
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The Father's business success: each floor he rises drives another elevator shaft into his children's heart.
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Like a needle sipping an eel.
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The doorkey that melts in the lock gets exhibited; Jasper Johns' brush sticking out of the paintcan: impotency on parade.
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There's another war every 20 years or so because there are new poets every 20 years or so, and war exists in order to kill poets.
The purpose of war is to kill poets.
But it's not the enemy's poets each country wants to kill, it's their own.
Thus in the Great War the British soldiers were murdering Oscar Wilde; the German soldiers were killing Rilke; the French, Rimbaud/Verlaine.
The USA troops in Iraq today all aim their weapons at Ashbery.
(Yes, Wilde was already dead then, and R/V too. Even posthumously they still had to be killed.)
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Bookstores and libraries put fictional prose in a separate section from nonfictional prose.—
Why shouldn't books of poetry be similarly segregated?
My poems, which are fictional, should not be on the same shelf with poets who write nonfictional (autobiographical, biographical) poetry.
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Chekov: the antithesis of poetry. The enemy of poetry. The writer poets turn to when they begin to hate themselves in their art.
I don't know if Konstantin in "The Sea Gull" is Chekov's only portrayal of a poet, but it's such a cruel epitome.
Mocked and humiliated throughout, his lover seduced and stolen away by a prose-writer, poor Konstantin by the end of the third act is finally reduced to a mere ploypuppet in a coup de theatre, an offstage prop murdered and remurdered to provide a Hollywood "shock ending" climax.
As if being cuckolded and killed off to effect a plot-twist weren't bad enough, Konstantin is forced to suffer during the course of the play an even more evil and demeaning fate,
as the sadistic Chekov turns him, the aspiring young poet, into a short-story writer!
You can always tell when poets are going through a period of self-hatred and doubt about their art: they write poems about Chekov.
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. . . going back to Pater: think how very different our (contemporary) relation to music is from his, compared to his experience of it. how often would he have heard music? I ask that literally:
how often and under what conditions would he in his daily life have physically heard music, ie real music as opposed to any tune humming in his head?
i would guess to answer that question by saying : not very often: on special occasions, concerts, recitals, probably church bells more than anything else, a street musician perhaps, though it's hard to imagine Pater walking on streets where such creatures thrived . . .
Now compare that to our current experiencing of music, how it ubiquitously presses in us relentlessly from every medium, my god you can't make a phonecall without being assailed by it,
every store you go into blasts your ears with it, every street is boomboxed and car-stereoed to death with its intrusive noise. . .
there is no escape from it. It greases the gears of consumer capitalism as much as the oil our government is currently killing everybody it can to gain control of. . ..
If Pater had to hearsuffer what what the average USAer is deluged with on a daily basis, I doubt he would reverence music quite as highly as in his pre-massmedia'ed cloistered Oxford. . .
Anyway, my tirades against music are hyperbole, and not meant to be taken entirely unsatirically.
But I can't be the only poet in the last hundred years who has chafed at Pater, and has resented the fact that poetry is not ranked first among the arts.
And yes, I'll say it again, the complacency and arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable.
Compare poets to musicmakers, and their respective self-doubts. Poets are constantly questioning the value and the validity of poetry; do composers and conductors ever do that?
It boils down to economics of course: music makes money and poetry doesn't. So poets have to keep justifying themselves in the face of a commercialized world——
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THE NOTES
given the fame
surrounding
the recent book
of unfinished or
abandoned writings
by Elizabeth Bishop
won't someone
plan another
consisting of her
(and the concept
might work as well
with Robert Lowell
or James Merrill)
penned instructions
to the maid
the menus she
handed the cook
the lists she left
for her secretary
and what about
her stockbrokers
the screeds they got
regarding assets
and every scrap she
(or Russell Edson
or Louise Gluck
or Richard Howard)
wrote should be in it
all the notes
to the chauffeur
the wine steward
the groundskeeper
the butler
the manicurist
the psychotherapist
the poolboy
the hairstylist
the dressmaker
the wigcomber
the authorized
biographer
the pillwrangler
the gardener
the cleaning staff
the masseuse
and what about
the servants
we don't know about
the flunkies
whose functions
remain hidden
whose arcane chores
are kept secret from
us the public
unimaginable
to us lowerclass
unbelievable
the sponge-wringer-outer
the sexologue
the doubled-over doters
the astro-prefixed kneelers
and of course
the lawyers on retainer
not to mention
the critics on retainer
*
Anxiety can pluck feathers from an egg.
*
Like most corny jokes, it has a few kernals of truth stuck in its toothy grin.
*
*
If it was labeled, tagged with
one letter set upon each tooth,
what would your smile spell out—
whose mouth can find the word
to speak its name to mine.
*
All I'm asking is that the Academy of American Poets requisition a supply of suicide capsules from its bosses at the C.I.A., and issue one to me. And to other elderly poets who likewise seek a quick demise. The AAP should be shamed and blamed that it does not offer this most humanitarian of services to the poetry community.
*
The Father's business success: each floor he rises drives another elevator shaft into his children's heart.
*
*
Like a needle sipping an eel.
*
The doorkey that melts in the lock gets exhibited; Jasper Johns' brush sticking out of the paintcan: impotency on parade.
*
*
There's another war every 20 years or so because there are new poets every 20 years or so, and war exists in order to kill poets.
The purpose of war is to kill poets.
But it's not the enemy's poets each country wants to kill, it's their own.
Thus in the Great War the British soldiers were murdering Oscar Wilde; the German soldiers were killing Rilke; the French, Rimbaud/Verlaine.
The USA troops in Iraq today all aim their weapons at Ashbery.
(Yes, Wilde was already dead then, and R/V too. Even posthumously they still had to be killed.)
*
*
Bookstores and libraries put fictional prose in a separate section from nonfictional prose.—
Why shouldn't books of poetry be similarly segregated?
My poems, which are fictional, should not be on the same shelf with poets who write nonfictional (autobiographical, biographical) poetry.
*
*
Chekov: the antithesis of poetry. The enemy of poetry. The writer poets turn to when they begin to hate themselves in their art.
I don't know if Konstantin in "The Sea Gull" is Chekov's only portrayal of a poet, but it's such a cruel epitome.
Mocked and humiliated throughout, his lover seduced and stolen away by a prose-writer, poor Konstantin by the end of the third act is finally reduced to a mere ploypuppet in a coup de theatre, an offstage prop murdered and remurdered to provide a Hollywood "shock ending" climax.
As if being cuckolded and killed off to effect a plot-twist weren't bad enough, Konstantin is forced to suffer during the course of the play an even more evil and demeaning fate,
as the sadistic Chekov turns him, the aspiring young poet, into a short-story writer!
You can always tell when poets are going through a period of self-hatred and doubt about their art: they write poems about Chekov.
*
. . . going back to Pater: think how very different our (contemporary) relation to music is from his, compared to his experience of it. how often would he have heard music? I ask that literally:
how often and under what conditions would he in his daily life have physically heard music, ie real music as opposed to any tune humming in his head?
i would guess to answer that question by saying : not very often: on special occasions, concerts, recitals, probably church bells more than anything else, a street musician perhaps, though it's hard to imagine Pater walking on streets where such creatures thrived . . .
Now compare that to our current experiencing of music, how it ubiquitously presses in us relentlessly from every medium, my god you can't make a phonecall without being assailed by it,
every store you go into blasts your ears with it, every street is boomboxed and car-stereoed to death with its intrusive noise. . .
there is no escape from it. It greases the gears of consumer capitalism as much as the oil our government is currently killing everybody it can to gain control of. . ..
If Pater had to hearsuffer what what the average USAer is deluged with on a daily basis, I doubt he would reverence music quite as highly as in his pre-massmedia'ed cloistered Oxford. . .
Anyway, my tirades against music are hyperbole, and not meant to be taken entirely unsatirically.
But I can't be the only poet in the last hundred years who has chafed at Pater, and has resented the fact that poetry is not ranked first among the arts.
And yes, I'll say it again, the complacency and arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable.
Compare poets to musicmakers, and their respective self-doubts. Poets are constantly questioning the value and the validity of poetry; do composers and conductors ever do that?
It boils down to economics of course: music makes money and poetry doesn't. So poets have to keep justifying themselves in the face of a commercialized world——
*
*
THE NOTES
given the fame
surrounding
the recent book
of unfinished or
abandoned writings
by Elizabeth Bishop
won't someone
plan another
consisting of her
(and the concept
might work as well
with Robert Lowell
or James Merrill)
penned instructions
to the maid
the menus she
handed the cook
the lists she left
for her secretary
and what about
her stockbrokers
the screeds they got
regarding assets
and every scrap she
(or Russell Edson
or Louise Gluck
or Richard Howard)
wrote should be in it
all the notes
to the chauffeur
the wine steward
the groundskeeper
the butler
the manicurist
the psychotherapist
the poolboy
the hairstylist
the dressmaker
the wigcomber
the authorized
biographer
the pillwrangler
the gardener
the cleaning staff
the masseuse
and what about
the servants
we don't know about
the flunkies
whose functions
remain hidden
whose arcane chores
are kept secret from
us the public
unimaginable
to us lowerclass
unbelievable
the sponge-wringer-outer
the sexologue
the doubled-over doters
the astro-prefixed kneelers
and of course
the lawyers on retainer
not to mention
the critics on retainer
*
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