*
Many anthologies
published by Penguin in England are issued simultaneously here— but the
Penguin Book of Socialist Verse wasn't— why? why are there no
anthologies of Socialist or Communist poetry published in this
country? Every year USA publishers somehow find the money to issue
endless anthologies of "spiritual" poetry, but there is not (to my
knowledge) ever an anthol of atheist verse— why? Who puts up the money
for all these religious anthols? Who funds this vicious christer
crapaganda?
The CIA promoted the New York School of
artists in the 1950s and reportedly helped finance The Paris Review and
Encounter and who knows how many other literary magazines. . . and if
there is one characteristic shared by all secret intelligence agencies
since WWII, isn't it the imperative to expand, to increase both their
budget and their number of personnel (the size of which are always
classified), to grow, to gain ever greater power and prestige, and to
continue to impose their ideological agendas and to spread their
influence and domination into every aspect of society . . .
So why would the CIA (or the NSA or how
many other acronymic bureaus of faceless conspirators) not continue
funding cultural entities from the 1950s right up to the present? I
mean: Why would they stop? Have they ever stopped intervening in any
other domain? Have they ever stopped for one second their constant
efforts to manipulate and control every sociopolitical / economic arena
around the globe? Does anybody believe they don't expend billions to
coerce every aspect of the media? And if the media, why not the arts?
—Really: why wouldn't they? What's stopping them? Having once created
an extensive program and set in motion departmental protocols to
interfere in the realm of the arts, and having established significant
inroads there, why on earth would they cease and desist? Given the
historical trajectories of most such clandestine bureaucracies, does
that seem likely?
And,
given the CIA's choice in the 1950s to promote and fund the New York
School of Painters, wouldn't you expect it to continue supporting
similar offshoots of the Avant-Garde? Remember that the Agency's chief
James Angleton was a disciple of Ezra Pound (and probably ran the Op
that saved Pound from being prosecuted for war crimes). Therefore,
assuming the CIA had continued its involvement in the Arts (and I
repeat: why wouldn't it?), wouldn't it also continue its investment in
the Avant-garde? Imagine which poets it would have favored (Pound . . .
Avant-garde . . . any names come to mind?)
USA poets know that writing innocuous
'spiritual' or 'psychological' or 'existential' or 'elliptical' or
'aleatory' or 'memoiristic' or 'postmod' or 'flarf' or 'newthingist' or
massmedia-dictated 'pop' verse and other inoffensive brands of poetry
will be beneficial to their careers. Out of fear of persecution or
censorship, most USAPO suppress any wayward urge to write political
poetry or 'protest' verse.
They know where their bread is buttered,
who pays their bills, and indeed how the State sponsors and supports
them with its agencies—
of which the CIA is not the least beneficial:
because not only is Langley rumored to have
founded and funded litmags like the Paris Review, it also and perhaps
more importantly takes on the onerous task of going into foreign
countries and eliminating the potential competitors of USA poets . . .
For example: How many young Chilean poets were murdered or suicided or
impoverished or exiled by the CIA-installed Pinochet regime? Think of
the chagrin and embarrassment USA poets suffered some decades ago when
they compared their work to the great Chilean poets like Neruda and
Parra, how solipsistically small and provincial and futile their poems
seemed in contrast to those Latin American masters. . . but now, in the
succeeding years, hasn't that situation improved thanks to the CIA?
It's not just Chile, of course. Imagine
how many other South American poets have been killed or quashed and
quelled by CIA black-ops. Not to mention Africa, Asia et al.
Think of it: all those foreign poets who
right this minute might be writing better poetry than our native
versifiers: thankfully that ongoing threat is being countered daily by
the CIA.
USA poets know (though they rarely if ever
acknowledge it) how much the CIA and other government agencies help
promote the health and prosperity of AmeriPoBiz Inc!
They know that the majority of their
publications, most of the magazines and books their exciting
breakthrough verse appears in, are largely funded by the CIA or, if not
directly by the CIA, then through the distributive channels of other
indirect pipeline organizations via the standard "cut-out" methods,
funding which then is managed and administered by the executives of AmeriPoBiz Inc—
which USA poets are for the most part devoted or subservient employees of.
And most USAPO are grateful to be subsidized and supported thus.
And to show their gratitude they write all
these poems about how their mom and dad were only human but they love
them anyway, or how mystically moved they are by the apparitions of
tangency as it transpires in the treetops or their laptops.
Everybody knows that USAPO who write
apolitical verse are rewarded for it, they win the top prizes and
grants, their books are foisted into libraries everywhere and their
careers are glide-pathed. Louise Gluck and Charles Wright are two
egregious examples of what I mean, but really most of this country's
"leading poets" are similarly components in the con. The construct.
Bought-off, co-opted by endowment patronage
from the state's cultural authorities, USA poets know it doesn't pay
to write political poems, and ergo most of them don't—
///
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
two very good poems—
*
—two poems by a poet I haven't read before, to me they seem very well-written, impressively imaginative, worthy of rereading:
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Paula-Bohince-Two-Poems/
/
of course poets whose work I praise are embarrassed and hate being lauded by me—they wish I had kept my keyboard shut—no poet wants a blurb from me—a good word from me can only harm their career, not help it . . .
in fact, if I were conniving enough, if I had the guile-style to do it, I would write posts praising the poets I loathe—Charles Wright, for example—knowing that my approbation would taint and undermine their reputations—
///
—two poems by a poet I haven't read before, to me they seem very well-written, impressively imaginative, worthy of rereading:
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Paula-Bohince-Two-Poems/
/
of course poets whose work I praise are embarrassed and hate being lauded by me—they wish I had kept my keyboard shut—no poet wants a blurb from me—a good word from me can only harm their career, not help it . . .
in fact, if I were conniving enough, if I had the guile-style to do it, I would write posts praising the poets I loathe—Charles Wright, for example—knowing that my approbation would taint and undermine their reputations—
///
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Rutger Kopland dead at age 77
*
I see that Rutger Kopland died this past week:
http://romenu.skynetblogs.be/archive/2012/07/15/in-memoriam-rutger-kopland.html
/
Here is a reprint of my earlier "appreciation" of a sonnet by the Dutch poet:
*
appreciation: Rutger Kopland's "Breughel's Winter"
...
I admire James Brockway's translations of Rutger Kopland's poems . . .
This Dutch poet is (was? I hope he's still alive, born in 1934) much
honored in his native country. Brockway before his own death did
2 or 3 books of selections in English.
Here's my favorite:
Breughel's Winter
Winter by Breughel, the hill with hunters
and dogs, at their feet the valley with the village.
Almost home, but their dead-tired attitudes, their steps
in the snow—a return, but almost as
slow as arrest. At their feet the depths
grow and grow, become wider and further,
until the landscape vanishes into a landscape
that must be there, is there, but only
as a longing is there.
Ahead of them a jet-black bird dives down. Is it mockery
of this labored attempt to return to the life
down there: the children skating on the pond,
the farms with women waiting and the cattle?
An arrow underway, and it laughs at its target.
*
A sonnet. With a truncate-jolt volte after an octave in which repetitions of words and phrases (at their feet, at their feet, grow and grow, landscape, landscape, there, there) act to lengthen or delay our progress, to pause us as the hunters have been halted for the static moment of Breughel's depiction,
caught upon his crest.
The jet-black bird, the crow, the raven, harbinger of mortality, or symbol of its post-predatory ease.—
It doesn't have to trudge down that slope with feet aching from the endless trek, lugging the heavy slay on sag shoulders, it can dive down zoom, as fast as the skating kids.
Does this swoop mock their laborious attempts to return to the down-there life of children farms women cattle?
These adult males stand there suspended, the wild at their backs and the domestic before them;
their duties as savage hunterkillers and their duties as tending-to fathers farmers husbands and stockbreeders hang in the balance,
poised at this schizophrenic midpoint. Here, there (four "theres" in the poem), it's split—
The bird is an arrow of course, but so is the artist's brush, the feather at its front instead of at the tail; the hairthin threadstrands of the brushpoint are feathery in their effect.
The target—the work of art—can rarely or perhaps never be reached by this arrow's flight.
The artist's paintbrush is always underway.
Underway, halfway between the willed desire of the artist to stalk down his/her feral-furred nature, to haul it baked into the cozy parlance of the anthology—
It hunts its target to feed our needs, but what are these hungers; and where do they achieve rest, cave-wall or salon?
Does it laugh to demean, to dehumanize its victims for the abattoir: worldhistory's pogrom patrons and patriarchs stationed, armed with grins, at their torture posts and burning stakes—
Does it laugh at what it aims to pierce, it laughs at its prey, risus sardonicus laughs at us.
*
///
I see that Rutger Kopland died this past week:
http://romenu.skynetblogs.be/archive/2012/07/15/in-memoriam-rutger-kopland.html
/
Here is a reprint of my earlier "appreciation" of a sonnet by the Dutch poet:
*
appreciation: Rutger Kopland's "Breughel's Winter"
...
I admire James Brockway's translations of Rutger Kopland's poems . . .
This Dutch poet is (was? I hope he's still alive, born in 1934) much
honored in his native country. Brockway before his own death did
2 or 3 books of selections in English.
Here's my favorite:
Breughel's Winter
Winter by Breughel, the hill with hunters
and dogs, at their feet the valley with the village.
Almost home, but their dead-tired attitudes, their steps
in the snow—a return, but almost as
slow as arrest. At their feet the depths
grow and grow, become wider and further,
until the landscape vanishes into a landscape
that must be there, is there, but only
as a longing is there.
Ahead of them a jet-black bird dives down. Is it mockery
of this labored attempt to return to the life
down there: the children skating on the pond,
the farms with women waiting and the cattle?
An arrow underway, and it laughs at its target.
*
A sonnet. With a truncate-jolt volte after an octave in which repetitions of words and phrases (at their feet, at their feet, grow and grow, landscape, landscape, there, there) act to lengthen or delay our progress, to pause us as the hunters have been halted for the static moment of Breughel's depiction,
caught upon his crest.
The jet-black bird, the crow, the raven, harbinger of mortality, or symbol of its post-predatory ease.—
It doesn't have to trudge down that slope with feet aching from the endless trek, lugging the heavy slay on sag shoulders, it can dive down zoom, as fast as the skating kids.
Does this swoop mock their laborious attempts to return to the down-there life of children farms women cattle?
These adult males stand there suspended, the wild at their backs and the domestic before them;
their duties as savage hunterkillers and their duties as tending-to fathers farmers husbands and stockbreeders hang in the balance,
poised at this schizophrenic midpoint. Here, there (four "theres" in the poem), it's split—
The bird is an arrow of course, but so is the artist's brush, the feather at its front instead of at the tail; the hairthin threadstrands of the brushpoint are feathery in their effect.
The target—the work of art—can rarely or perhaps never be reached by this arrow's flight.
The artist's paintbrush is always underway.
Underway, halfway between the willed desire of the artist to stalk down his/her feral-furred nature, to haul it baked into the cozy parlance of the anthology—
It hunts its target to feed our needs, but what are these hungers; and where do they achieve rest, cave-wall or salon?
Does it laugh to demean, to dehumanize its victims for the abattoir: worldhistory's pogrom patrons and patriarchs stationed, armed with grins, at their torture posts and burning stakes—
Does it laugh at what it aims to pierce, it laughs at its prey, risus sardonicus laughs at us.
*
///
Saturday, July 14, 2012
as good as or better than
*
just left a couple comments praising this poem at "e-universe":
http://www.everseradio.com/fancy-jehanne-dubrow/#comment-422379
/
Please go take a read at it if you can. The poet's name is Jehanne Dubrow. She writes this kind of poem about as well as or better than any contemporary who comes to my mind, including some Pulitzer Prize winners.
///
just left a couple comments praising this poem at "e-universe":
http://www.everseradio.com/fancy-jehanne-dubrow/#comment-422379
/
Please go take a read at it if you can. The poet's name is Jehanne Dubrow. She writes this kind of poem about as well as or better than any contemporary who comes to my mind, including some Pulitzer Prize winners.
///
from bad bad to worse
*
I have become the epitome of everything wrong in writing—
For example,
when the moralist Craig Morgan Teicher wants to insult a young poet, he uses his pulpit at Publishers Weekly to tar him or her with me—
2 examples: the first from his review of Chelsea Minnis's book "Bad Bad":
"Petulant,
clever, sometimes funny, sometimes irritatingly flippant, Minnis's
poems will inspire questions as to whether this work qualifies as
poetry at all, though some readers — fans of, say, Bill Knott, at his
silliest — may find much to like."
The second, again from a review in PW:
"[Karl]
Parker is one of the oddest poets you're likely to meet. . . No poet
has had this kind of simultaneous reverence for and disregard of the
poetic tradition since Bill Knott."
/
—and here from another censurer, this tweet:
Daniel Casey
Bill Knott is Tao Lin in 30 yrs
/
Daniel Casey must really despise Tao Lin to say something this vicious. To forecast such a horrible fate for this or any young writer seems kind of hardhearted and punitively pessimistic wouldn't you say.
Think of the sad miserable future Casey is predicting for this young writer Tao Lin: 30 years from now he will be detested, scorned and ridiculed by everyone in the literary establishment, his books will be rejected by every publisher, his work will never appear in anthologies, he will be blacklisted, declared persona non grata, etc., etc. He will be unemployable. He will never be invited to give readings or participate in conferences at the AWP or the PSA or Poets House or any other locus of lit-world power. No magazine will publish his work. His name will be a curse-word used to condemn other writers. In short, his life will be the same as mine has been for as long as I can remember.
/
It seems the worst insult you can apply to a young writer is to associate them with me.
Imagine how hurt and humiliated Minnis and Parker and Lin and others must feel to read such a cruel invidious comparison.
/
And then of course there's this:
/
Daniel Casey must really despise Tao Lin to say something this vicious. To forecast such a horrible fate for this or any young writer seems kind of hardhearted and punitively pessimistic wouldn't you say.
Think of the sad miserable future Casey is predicting for this young writer Tao Lin: 30 years from now he will be detested, scorned and ridiculed by everyone in the literary establishment, his books will be rejected by every publisher, his work will never appear in anthologies, he will be blacklisted, declared persona non grata, etc., etc. He will be unemployable. He will never be invited to give readings or participate in conferences at the AWP or the PSA or Poets House or any other locus of lit-world power. No magazine will publish his work. His name will be a curse-word used to condemn other writers. In short, his life will be the same as mine has been for as long as I can remember.
/
It seems the worst insult you can apply to a young writer is to associate them with me.
Imagine how hurt and humiliated Minnis and Parker and Lin and others must feel to read such a cruel invidious comparison.
/
And then of course there's this:
"Bill Knott, the crown prince of bad judgment."
—Ron Silliman, Silliman's Blog, June 26, 2007
/
Yes:
if you want to slashtag the wrongness and badness of any writer, just
invoke my name. You can't damn them worse than that.
///
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
ad/verse
*
A poem by Glenn Shaheen, from the Spring 2012 issue of Ploughshares:
ISRAEL
Steam lifting from the highways, ascending
to the heavens beneath the misery of commute,
fires below the pavement. I have become
a better driver by the standards of Houston.
I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt.
No, ok, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All
this blinding steel and glass, we’ve made
the world a brighter place. They tell me Israel
is a great problem. I don’t care. They tell me
it is our final hope. The world is a maze of
definitions and borders, problems, signs painted
in an array of colors scientifically chosen to
arrest the vision. Israel is a place that rolls
from the tongue. There are no enemies unless
you make it so, unless you inch menacingly
over the paint. The album is criticized for its
lack of structure, for the singer’s refusal to
repeat herself. Hold me, hold me, the heater
is broken, cars are being pulled over outside.
Adults are in the park, groping casually over
glasses of wine they’re not supposed to have.
It’s all true, I am weak. Give me a nation
to hate, to love, to touch and trust the borders of.
Come here, entreat me - inside of you, on you,
what difference does it make. Nobody to call
and nobody who would come out. Come forth,
fond wrench, and do something different to me.
/
I hope to write some thoughts about this poem in an upcoming post . . . thanks to Mr. Shaheen for allowing me to reprint it here.
///
A poem by Glenn Shaheen, from the Spring 2012 issue of Ploughshares:
ISRAEL
Steam lifting from the highways, ascending
to the heavens beneath the misery of commute,
fires below the pavement. I have become
a better driver by the standards of Houston.
I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt.
No, ok, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All
this blinding steel and glass, we’ve made
the world a brighter place. They tell me Israel
is a great problem. I don’t care. They tell me
it is our final hope. The world is a maze of
definitions and borders, problems, signs painted
in an array of colors scientifically chosen to
arrest the vision. Israel is a place that rolls
from the tongue. There are no enemies unless
you make it so, unless you inch menacingly
over the paint. The album is criticized for its
lack of structure, for the singer’s refusal to
repeat herself. Hold me, hold me, the heater
is broken, cars are being pulled over outside.
Adults are in the park, groping casually over
glasses of wine they’re not supposed to have.
It’s all true, I am weak. Give me a nation
to hate, to love, to touch and trust the borders of.
Come here, entreat me - inside of you, on you,
what difference does it make. Nobody to call
and nobody who would come out. Come forth,
fond wrench, and do something different to me.
/
I hope to write some thoughts about this poem in an upcoming post . . . thanks to Mr. Shaheen for allowing me to reprint it here.
///
Saturday, July 7, 2012
addendum to previous post:
/
I don't know what I can write or if I will be able to ever write again before I die. Many poets are quelled by old age, I think many or perhaps even most poets do slow down or cease in their 8th decade, which is where I am—
Philip Larkin couldn't write any in his last years. Old age dries one up, you don't see many poets my age (72) or older publishing new books. The body wears out, the mind loses its sharpness.
The willpower that sustained me even 2 or 3 years ago is diminishing with every day it seems.
The artwork I'm trying to do is a substitute effort to stay in a creative mode, and hopefully that urge will yield some verse, but I just don't feel the force that propelled me in the past to wake up every morning and go to my typescripts and notebooks and from those drafts work up lines and stanzas. The stamina is not there anymore, nor the desire.
(And why write poems whose reception will inevitably be this:
http://knottpoetry.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=20,
and this: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/03/critany.html
)
/
Probably successful poets are more immune to these inertias of old age—
C.K. Williams has an interesting essay entitled "On Being Old" in the current American Poetry Review about his similar situation of being an aged poet, and about how good he is at coping with it:
but he doesn't mention the one thing which I think is most relevant in his case, the one impetus which eases and facilitates his ongoing career, and which endows him with the strength and the confidence to keep writing, to continue practicing his art: surely that unique privileging factor is his spectacular success as a poet—
I quote verbatim the bio note below his essay:
"C.K. Williams has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; The Singing, which won the National Book Award for 2003; and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets."
/
I envy Williams his success, which I think is the ameliorating mitigation that most enables him to persist as a valued poet with important work still to contribute,
in contrast to me and other lesser talents contemporaneous to him in years.
And of course I wish the poetry I wrote over the past half century had been good enough to merit the honors his work has—
but it wasn't, it isn't. I wish that final outcome weren't so, but—
The verdict is in. The poets of my generation have been evaluated and ranked. Williams is in the top tier, and I—
well, I'm somewhere further down.
(Trying to estimate the exact level of mediocrity on which my poetry has been shelved is a waste of time because in the long run, historically, only the uppermost poets remain in name: all of us below-fellows are soon forgotten, gone, goodbye.)
///
I don't know what I can write or if I will be able to ever write again before I die. Many poets are quelled by old age, I think many or perhaps even most poets do slow down or cease in their 8th decade, which is where I am—
Philip Larkin couldn't write any in his last years. Old age dries one up, you don't see many poets my age (72) or older publishing new books. The body wears out, the mind loses its sharpness.
The willpower that sustained me even 2 or 3 years ago is diminishing with every day it seems.
The artwork I'm trying to do is a substitute effort to stay in a creative mode, and hopefully that urge will yield some verse, but I just don't feel the force that propelled me in the past to wake up every morning and go to my typescripts and notebooks and from those drafts work up lines and stanzas. The stamina is not there anymore, nor the desire.
(And why write poems whose reception will inevitably be this:
http://knottpoetry.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=20,
and this: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/03/critany.html
)
/
Probably successful poets are more immune to these inertias of old age—
C.K. Williams has an interesting essay entitled "On Being Old" in the current American Poetry Review about his similar situation of being an aged poet, and about how good he is at coping with it:
but he doesn't mention the one thing which I think is most relevant in his case, the one impetus which eases and facilitates his ongoing career, and which endows him with the strength and the confidence to keep writing, to continue practicing his art: surely that unique privileging factor is his spectacular success as a poet—
I quote verbatim the bio note below his essay:
"C.K. Williams has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; The Singing, which won the National Book Award for 2003; and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets."
/
I envy Williams his success, which I think is the ameliorating mitigation that most enables him to persist as a valued poet with important work still to contribute,
in contrast to me and other lesser talents contemporaneous to him in years.
And of course I wish the poetry I wrote over the past half century had been good enough to merit the honors his work has—
but it wasn't, it isn't. I wish that final outcome weren't so, but—
The verdict is in. The poets of my generation have been evaluated and ranked. Williams is in the top tier, and I—
well, I'm somewhere further down.
(Trying to estimate the exact level of mediocrity on which my poetry has been shelved is a waste of time because in the long run, historically, only the uppermost poets remain in name: all of us below-fellows are soon forgotten, gone, goodbye.)
///
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