*
Some pobloggers are so hostile and condescending; their arrogant academic attitudinizing scares away many potential readers:
According to [insert the name of whatever experts you click to],
I can't for example simply enjoy reading Matthew Dickman's verse,
no, I have to prove its merit, I have to present a "critical argument" to justify my admiration, i have to try to persuade those opposed:
screw that—
I refuse to apologize or offer "critical discussion" to justify or authenticate my preferences and pleasures——
and if that means I'm not "serious," so be it.
*
>some thoughts from my blog of three years ago (I was writing about Olds, but since Matthew Dickman is in the Olds mold, I think it's relevant):
I don't see anything wrong with writing about one's self, though it seems like there are always those who stand ready to condemn the poets who do it too passionately (re Olds).
Sadly this type of poem has now fallen into disfavor—not with the larger poetrybook-buying public, but with a growing segment of younger poets.
The first-person narrative, the realist-autobiopoem of Olds and Levine [add Matthew Dickman to this lineage], has been subverted and refuted and or ignored by many younger poets.
These new poets know they've grown up into a regime where poetry is ruled over by Theory, where the poem is a slave to Poetics.
In the ancient quarrel between poets and philosophers, the balance of power has shifted to the latter:
"[T]he philosophical critique of poetry is ascendant. In the provinces of literary criticism, Plato's heirs have apparently won out." (Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida / A Defence of Poetry).
These poets have internalized this cruel critique and sublimate it via the usual strategies of auto-punishment. Snatch the whip from Master and lash yourself.
In any case their seemingly-on-the-surface-disparate modes of servile irony have to a certain extent seized the floor. The Confessional poem has been pushed offstage.
*
I'm glad to see the return of the Levine/Olds style poem as exemplified by Matthew Dickman,
and I applaud Tony Hoagland and Marie Howe for bringing him to the attention of readers like me who will appreciate and buy his book——
*
If the success of Matthew Dickman indicates a trend back
to the modes of Confessional poetry,
what good news . . .
Hopefully his courage and genius will embolden others of his generation
to stop writing poetics and start writing poems.
**
Thursday, June 4, 2009
*
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 squib would still apply . . .
*
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 squib would still apply . . .
*
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Jarrell's Rilke
*
Going through the 18 versions of Rilke in Randall Jarrell's Collected this morning,
I thought of how convenient it would be to read these 18 poems if they were printed together in a small volume,
and I remembered seeing oh decades ago a squib about how some press was planning to publish Lowell's and Snodgrass's versions from Rilke in a single volume with illustrations by Klee—
a book which to my regret never appeared.
But why was it never published?
And why for example has their publisher Farrar Straus and Giroux
never put out a Rilke selection with all the Lowell and Jarrell versions in it?
And then I thought: well, what's stopping me from publishing that book?
What's stopping me from scanning all the Rilkes from the Lowell and Jarrell Collecteds into a print file,
and then privately printing (via some P-O-D place) copies of it
for myself and my friends?
The print quality of books produced by POD services equals or betters that of most publishers—
( the Farrar Straus Giroux printjob of Lowell's Imitations for example is blurred and muddy in every edition of it I've ever owned)—
Yes, what's stopping me from creating and printing out for myself a book I want to read,
a book which should exist—
I can't be the only one who has realized that with the new availability of private "print on demand" venues,
anybody anywhere can create
their own personal edition of any author they want to—
Via the private POD process, I can publish and have my own copy of Philip Larkin's Complete Sonnets
(at a cost of around five bucks)
and to hell with the executors/publishers who "own" the copyright!
As I say, I can't be the only one who's come to this realization:
there must be many readers out there who have collated edited and privately p-o-d'd
such books for their own pleasure and purpose . . .
I wonder how many "books" of this sort already exist!
An underground movement of such readers must exist out there already—
I can't be the only one.
**
Going through the 18 versions of Rilke in Randall Jarrell's Collected this morning,
I thought of how convenient it would be to read these 18 poems if they were printed together in a small volume,
and I remembered seeing oh decades ago a squib about how some press was planning to publish Lowell's and Snodgrass's versions from Rilke in a single volume with illustrations by Klee—
a book which to my regret never appeared.
But why was it never published?
And why for example has their publisher Farrar Straus and Giroux
never put out a Rilke selection with all the Lowell and Jarrell versions in it?
And then I thought: well, what's stopping me from publishing that book?
What's stopping me from scanning all the Rilkes from the Lowell and Jarrell Collecteds into a print file,
and then privately printing (via some P-O-D place) copies of it
for myself and my friends?
The print quality of books produced by POD services equals or betters that of most publishers—
( the Farrar Straus Giroux printjob of Lowell's Imitations for example is blurred and muddy in every edition of it I've ever owned)—
Yes, what's stopping me from creating and printing out for myself a book I want to read,
a book which should exist—
I can't be the only one who has realized that with the new availability of private "print on demand" venues,
anybody anywhere can create
their own personal edition of any author they want to—
Via the private POD process, I can publish and have my own copy of Philip Larkin's Complete Sonnets
(at a cost of around five bucks)
and to hell with the executors/publishers who "own" the copyright!
As I say, I can't be the only one who's come to this realization:
there must be many readers out there who have collated edited and privately p-o-d'd
such books for their own pleasure and purpose . . .
I wonder how many "books" of this sort already exist!
An underground movement of such readers must exist out there already—
I can't be the only one.
**
Monday, June 1, 2009
*
quote from the CPR (Contemporary Poetry Review) website:
—The reviewer, Kathleen Rooney, is writing about several books of poetry published by rocknroll stars, including Billy Corgan's "Blinking with Fists." It's a very interesting piece in its entirety, but here's the bit that struck me:
"Not merely . . . bad, but blatantly irresponsible, both politically and artistically, Corgan's book demeans him, FSG [Farrar, Straus and Giroux], and poetry as a whole. The already abysmal quality of his writing appears to sink even lower when one considers that Corgan is, on FSG's list, in the estimable company of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, Bill Knott, and John Ashbery, not to mention Rilke, Lowell, Lorca, Bishop, and Brodsky."
*
—Ever play that game, 'What doesn't belong and why?' If you're going to make such a list, Heaney Walcott Muldoon Ashbery et al, what you shouldn't do, if you want anybody to take it seriously, is include the name of a nullity, a naught-but-nothin', a nobody, a nonentity, a nil, a nix, a nope-ster, a nom de nonce of nihility, a nit-what, a Knott, right?
*
quote from the CPR (Contemporary Poetry Review) website:
—The reviewer, Kathleen Rooney, is writing about several books of poetry published by rocknroll stars, including Billy Corgan's "Blinking with Fists." It's a very interesting piece in its entirety, but here's the bit that struck me:
"Not merely . . . bad, but blatantly irresponsible, both politically and artistically, Corgan's book demeans him, FSG [Farrar, Straus and Giroux], and poetry as a whole. The already abysmal quality of his writing appears to sink even lower when one considers that Corgan is, on FSG's list, in the estimable company of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, Bill Knott, and John Ashbery, not to mention Rilke, Lowell, Lorca, Bishop, and Brodsky."
*
—Ever play that game, 'What doesn't belong and why?' If you're going to make such a list, Heaney Walcott Muldoon Ashbery et al, what you shouldn't do, if you want anybody to take it seriously, is include the name of a nullity, a naught-but-nothin', a nobody, a nonentity, a nil, a nix, a nope-ster, a nom de nonce of nihility, a nit-what, a Knott, right?
*
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
///////
inviolate
Mallarme's Commandment: "Everything that wishes to remain sacred must surround itself with mystery."
Poets must surround their work with an aura of obscurity.
A moat of mist.
Like the mouth of Avernus they must exude a miasma.
They must remain unapproachable, hidden behind the cloud of their strange verbiage.
*
Here's how Lawrence describes the nameless Christ-figure in The Man Who Died:
"So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours wound the strangling of their fear and bullying around him. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him, and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion on a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him. For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a compulsion. And already he had been compelled into death. The nausea of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with repulsion, dreading its mean contacts."
*
Given this world of mean contacts, the mania of societies and hosts to compel a mass mindless allegiance,
is it any wonder poets recoil in self-isolation from that "mad assertion"?
Better the dreamstate of our semi-somnolent rhymes,
our hallucinatory lulls of glossolalia,
our REMpoems, than that "dread insomnia" . . . .
Noli me tangere, unless you're a disciple: didn't Mallarme say somewhere he would be content with a readership of 12?
(Every poet gets to be his own Judas, of course.)
*
inviolate
Mallarme's Commandment: "Everything that wishes to remain sacred must surround itself with mystery."
Poets must surround their work with an aura of obscurity.
A moat of mist.
Like the mouth of Avernus they must exude a miasma.
They must remain unapproachable, hidden behind the cloud of their strange verbiage.
*
Here's how Lawrence describes the nameless Christ-figure in The Man Who Died:
"So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours wound the strangling of their fear and bullying around him. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him, and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion on a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him. For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a compulsion. And already he had been compelled into death. The nausea of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with repulsion, dreading its mean contacts."
*
Given this world of mean contacts, the mania of societies and hosts to compel a mass mindless allegiance,
is it any wonder poets recoil in self-isolation from that "mad assertion"?
Better the dreamstate of our semi-somnolent rhymes,
our hallucinatory lulls of glossolalia,
our REMpoems, than that "dread insomnia" . . . .
Noli me tangere, unless you're a disciple: didn't Mallarme say somewhere he would be content with a readership of 12?
(Every poet gets to be his own Judas, of course.)
*
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