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.

*

*
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.

*
*
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.

*

*

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.

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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.


*
. . . 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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matthew dickman

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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.

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>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.

**

*
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?"

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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 . . .

*

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.

**

*

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?

*

///////


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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