faith and power: the struggle

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A poet who believes in the worthiness of his or her work

may, in the end, turn out to have been wrong in that belief—

but a poet who doubts the merit of their own work will almost always

turn out to be right.

(Maybe it's not just poets this applies to.)

**
This is in line with the terror expressed by (presumably) Delmore Schwartz, as it appears in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift (1975), page 120, where the narrator summarizes a frequent lament of Humboldt (a character based on Schwartz) regarding the "profession" of poetry:

[Humboldt always said] that poetry was one of the frantic professions in which success depends on the opinion you hold of yourself. Think well of yourself, and you win. Lose self-esteem, and you're finished. For this reason a persecution complex develops, because people who don't think well of you are killing you. Knowing this, or sensing it, critics and intellectuals had you. Like it or not you were dragged into a power struggle.

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Whether this was said by Schwartz himself, or concocted by Bellow for his character Humboldt to voice,

I think it's one of the truest things I've ever read about the frantic experience of being a poet—

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saint robert of hassisi

(reposted from an earlier blog)...

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The Canonization of Robert Hass

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Some of you may not remember an essay that appeared in the American Poetry Review sometime in the early 1990s, entitled "The Spiritual Progess of Robert Hass."—

Surely by now, almost two decades later, he must have spiritually progressed even futher, to the point where he's achieved sainthood?

Saint Robert of Hassisi. The Mother Teresa of American Poetry.

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I start with a quote, and don't Dan (the Assassin) Chiasson's words here confirm my quibble (below) that Halfhass should really be writing novels?

Here's the excerpt I found apropos (google Chiasson/New Yorker/Hass for the full text):

"Then Time" is a magnificent new poem, probably Hass's best ever. The "girl" in "Meditation at Lagunitas" (or one like her) has become a woman ("Twenty years older, / She is very beautiful. An astringent person. She'd become, / She said, an obsessive gardener, her daughters grown"). Where once Hass might have located all the sentience in his own head, now, as in late James, sentience is collaborative, something people make together:

He's listening,
Studying her face, still turning over her remark.
He decides that she thinks more symbolically
Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her,
For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain.
She finds herself thinking what a literal man he is,
Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure
In the menu, and the cooking, and the architecture of the room.

. . . . "Then Time" shows how lyric poetry can do what novels do so well, if at excruciating length: track the paths of consciousness and counter-consciousness across plots and characters.

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But what kind of poet would WANT to write like the late James?! Is that a sine qua non any poet should shoot for?

Really? You're a poet and you want to write like a novelist?

(You're Halfhass and you are a prose-writer. A novelist in disguise. Playing the poet role. Hollywood always works for the Californian writer.)

Even Pound when he aspired "Mauberly" to be a boiled-down James novel didn't desert verse for his desire.

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Frustratingly a lot of my books are in storage, so I can't go to the exact quote from an essay out of Jonathan Galassi's superbly-translated-and-edited selection from Montale's prose writings, "The Second Life of Art,"

in which the Italian Nobelist says something to the effect that ever since Browning poets have tried to incorporate prose into their verse—

Surely this trend this tendency explains his success, Hass's, yes?

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As Oscar Wilde put the matter: "[George] Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning."

*
"The Nineties tried your game": the sneering taunt which successful novelist Mr. Nixon tries to quash the young Mauberly with . . .

*
I don't see how Chiasson-the-Assassin can chide and chivvy Jane Hirshfield for her lax prosification of verse, and then turn around and praise Hass for the same thing . . .

yes, I understand he's rating the quality of their respective CONTENT, but isn't prose prose,

whether it's Jamesian or How-to-Build-a-Better-Buddhist . . .

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The American Poetry Review [Sept 07 issue] includes another chapter in their ongoing canonization of Robert Halfhass, whose careful-to-be-a-bit-bashful face photogs the cover.

There are a dozen or so new poems by him, followed by an obsequious essay devoted to his work: an extended advertisement for his new book which is certain to garner one or more of the major prizes.

[Note: my squib here was written before he won the National Book Award 07, on his way to the Pulitzer and or the National Critics Circle? Is he primed to be the first poet since Ashbery to take the Triple Crown? PPS: he nabbed the Pulitzer, but not not the NatCritCirc] . . .

The essayist quotes several banal (and typically clunky) lines from his poem "Bush's War"

(which was reprinted in the following year's BAPbatch, natch)

and then comments that these lines are "deliberately unsubtle . . . "

Deliberately unsubtle! What a revelation.

And here I was all these years thinking his poems were bad because he was a bad poet.

Here I was thinking his poems were filled with stale platitudes and pretentious apothegms;—

that they were, essentially, professorial or essayistic or diaristic prose, belletrist vignettes, chopped up into arbitrary lines.

Now I learn that he was being deliberately pretentious, deliberately obtuse, deliberately clicheish, deliberately prosaic—

I thought his verse-craft was amateurish at best: and that its incompetence showed he lacked any talent for or was unable to master the skills necessary to write poetry,—

and that if he wanted to be an author, novels were the answer . . .

But!— if all those defects were "deliberate"!?

Shouldn't that change my mind? No, sorrry: after reading his new poems in the new APR, I can only repeat:

All his new poems are boring; in this they resemble all his old.

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I can't of course deny that he has achieved a degree of popularity in the USA poetry community, and that he is held in high regard by some poets . . .

I don't think his books will ever be bestsellers like those of Mary Oliver or Billy Collins or Jane Hirshfield et al, though.

On the whole his work can have no interest for the larger general public that buys and reads poets like these.

He's a poet for poets, not for readers.

I must admit that some of his lines, some of his phrases, could be adapted for commercial use:

Imagine a Hallmark card whose front text reads: Longing, we say, and then you open it, and on the inside it continues: because love is full of endless distances . . .

Homilies like this one (from his famous "blackberry" poem) could be excerpted for greater gain and distribution.

But in trying to account for the acclaim and admiration granted him by some of his fellow poets, I have a theory as to why that might be—

Based on the poems of his I've been able to muddle through and or start to read, I speculate that the reason he is appreciated by those poets is, quite simply, his subject matter.

Or not subject matter, actually: subject singular, because as far as I can see his poetry only deals with one subject—

What is this recurring subject and why does it make his work so appealing to other poets (and there are certainly enough of them to establish his reputation)—

It's a theme that is as old as poetry: or rather, a sub-theme, an ancillary topic:

a subordinate leitmotif that can always be found to a greater or lesser (usually lesser) extent in all poetry, Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth's Prelude,

and summarized in these lines from Milton's Lycidas:

Alas what boots it with uncessant care
To ply the homely slighted shepherd's trade
And strictly meditate the thankless muse . . .

The proposition that can be spied poking its head up from time to time in all poetry of the past and present, is this:

being a poet/writing poetry is difficult.

This gripe and grumble lament reappears throughout the centuries of verse, but normally it only emerges overtly in a limited measure—

The genius of Halfhass has been to take this heretofore minor issue and to make it his main, indeed as I perceive it, his only thesis:

All his poems are Complaints.

Every poem he writes is about how hard it is to write the poem he's writing.

Everything else in his poems is ostensible, mere occasion.

Or is Apologia the right term.

Anyway, that's his secret:

that's what makes (some) other poets respond

with such empathy and recognition (or self-recognition) to his work—

The whine of it all is never far from many poets' hearts.

The drudgery, the defensiveness, the diffidence, the doubts, the day-after-day

of trying to write poetry is (as every poet knows, and every writer who ever aspired to write poetry, and golly even failed poets like me)—

is, to say the least, demanding. Or damned—

What is that ancient Welsh curse Robert Graves quotes somewhere: It is death to be a poet.

All the D-words. Whereof come in the end Despondency and Madness—

Not to mention Masochism, which is another aspect of it that pleasures the poets who esteem this theme above all others.

This perversity—this breastbeating of the bard over the troubles of his task—is a minor vice, albeit a seductive one.

Yes, it persists, it subsists as a flaw poets fall heir to, a fixation in the blood, a bittersweet urge that has proved irresistible to poets of all eras; who among them has not paused to scratch that itch.

But in the drama of poetry, it is an Aside. A brief interruption in the flow. Extraneous—

A bit part, not a star role.

Think of it as a pocket of self-pity whose acid bubbles up under stress, in resentful momentary spurts.

But it's a capillary, not a vein. A rivulet, not a river. Etcet—

And most poets have seen it for what is: a self-indulgent luxury, a chocoholic spree, an intramural solipsistic tic, an autoerotic fetish of interest to others in the biz but no one else.

All poets are susceptible to it; an unfortunate few become addicted.

Ultimately it remains a trivial subject, and Halfhass remains a trivial poet.

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—Back to that earlier fawning piece in APR, the one entitled "The Spiritual Progress of Robert Hass" . . .

Regarding which I responded in an earlier blog post:

Yeah, spiritual progress, I mean he's a fucking saint, right?

Unfortunately there has been no corresponding poetical progress.

All his new poems are pretentious and cliche-riddled; in this they resemble all the old.

Even when he tries to write a 'political' poem it turns as usual into maundering piffle.

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After reading (or failing to read) that "Spiritual Progess" essay, I wrote the following poem:

AT THE "FEDERAL CENSORSHIP AND THE ARTS" SYMPOSIUM

Just as the Nazis never proscribed Rilke
(he was no Expressionist, no Degenerate,
no Art-Bolshevik), so most of us poets
are thought no threat by those in authority—

Halfhass, for instance, his books won't get banned:
his Rilkemanqué wins awards, his "spiritual
progress" and "earned words" (—to paraphrase Wilde,
his genius gives good guru Po-Biz style while

his talent brooks those so serious ergo poems)—
what might please our fuehrers even more is
his patriot's part in The American Poetry Series.

Better silence than that? Better to hide, to write
for one's cabinet? (To paraphrase Benn,
the aristocratic form of publication.)

Note:
This poem was deleted from my collected comic poems by the publisher, BOA, whose chief fund-raiser at the time was Robert Hass. . . .

I've wondered if the BOA editors censored this poem on their own initiative, or whether they were ordered to do so by Hass.

If Hass had my poem suppressed, it wouldn't surprise me, prima donnas like him are notoriously touchy.

Their facades are sensitive, these sainted ones.

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Knott translated by Transtromer: from "Sapristi" blogsite

två dikter av Bill Knott i översättning av Tomas Tranströmer

från Lyrikvännen 2/72:

Död

Innan jag somnar lägger jag händerna i kors på bröstet.
De ska lägga mina händer så.
Det kommer att se ut som om jag flög in i mig själv.

*

Sömn

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

*
*

In defence of imitation

IN DEFENSE OF IMITATION

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No, I'm not capable of such; I can't defend the indefensible practice of imitation.

Bad habit picked up in childhood or adolescence, wasteful act that must be outgrown.

Immature artists imitate; mature artists steal.

To paraphrase Eliot's injunction judgment.

It's not just that mature artists don't imitate, they initiate:

They create (synthesize, fashion) a mode their own—

each mature artist is unique, a continent split off from the mythical

Pangaia . . .

And those of us drowning daily in the oceans that separate the Land of Rich from the Domain of Ashbery,

salvation have we none.

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As many Truthsayers have pointed out (see the comments appended below for some of their axioms)

my poetic process seems fixated stalled at an adolescent stage . . . .

The Verdict is in. The Jury finds me immature.

If I could only learn—if I had only learned—to steal!

Thievery is the path to maturity, the road I failed to take.

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I don't know if Charles Tomlinson is a great poet, but by Eliot's measure he is a mature one.

He did forge a singular style, a work that's reckon in its pace and placements.

I value his verse, and,

being the stunted stripling I am, was drawn to do my doom,

i.e., ape it.

Of course I always try to dignify-deny this shameful predilection with the term, "homage" . . .

(I even vanity-published a book of such poems under that rubric).

Anyway, here's my attempt at Tomlinson,—

puerile mimickry: call it callow, juvenile,

(parodies are permissible, but not this:)

condemn me for deliberately trying to write like someone I admire:

—the worst heinous a poet can commit, the prime crime, the original sin of unoriginality—

:

ON A DRAWING BY CHARLES TOMLINSON

By a swath of inks the eye
thinks it sees solidities
which alter with the watercolor
way his brush washes its dye

in distance, though even this
finds a faraway fixed not
by the surveyor’s plumb but
by the action of the thumb

delaying all the fingers meant
to draw out of the paper,
splashed dry. The clean grain

catches what it should retain
if enough pressure pleasure
is applied to the stain to lie.


Note:
Tomlinson is not only a distinctive poet, but a visual artist of repute. His graphics grace the covers of many of his books. This Homage attempts to imitate his verse style, or one of his verse styles.


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Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

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Dipalma, Raymond (Ray) ed.
Doones Volume 1 Numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 (all published).
Bowling Green, Ohio: Raymond Dipalma, 1969-70. First edition. 8vo. Wraps. All four numbers of Dipalma's little magazine of experimental poetry, published in Ohio before he moved to New York City. Contributors include Ted Berrigan, Merrill Gilfallan, Ted Greenwald, Darrell Gray, Anselm Hollo, Robert Kelly, James Tate, Bill Knott, Ron Silliman, Larry Fagin, etc. Condition is near fine to fine with minor toning. Price: $125.00

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What can I say—

it was the Sixties, man.

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suspect

...
"ActionYes" is an always-interesting webzine that publishes poetry in translation as well as English originals—

reading its latest issue the poet whose work I was most struck by is Andrew Lundwall . . .

I suspect that if I were his age I'd probably be trying to write this sort of thing:

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4 Poems by Andrew Lundwall CAMP YEAH petals will plug porno depths fueled in hammers of look which frogs on the shadows of camp yeah — delirium will you enter me now? the elect scuffed — pepsi midnight is a voracious socket squirts on immortality clinically like that hungrily fuck taped using in rodeo trance to the immense smile — camouflage lambs are lying to seem out some new throbs and confusion a new lion of scrawled eye-catching shackle of want the jazzy spurted fissures — high-speed binoculars of arthritic champagne session engulfed in microwaved captivity — is that a way to wait? asked sacrifice cob i have sold a fir to your eyelids and rationalized their crumbs — bewitchments smoked cyan taillights dragged so nevertheless that it made industrial-strength missionary corridor silver to sound — whimper chewed with painted heartbeat more metaphysical than a bellyful of toes chose * ZEROS intense minutes of zeros unfolding only the curious mysteries are kissed to it made of horny hallucination in tulip state of squirt — robotic electric typewriter to fix this time unwinds the flakes of star-capital flickered with toy pump turntables about the nerves — walls on which clock knots huddle and painters with magnifying stripes fix over half-inch omen machines — cheekbones all worried to please this powerful hologram musky sewage edges carved with strangers — vise of breath is beautiful in dirty playroom weeks of half-grown details where dancing interferences steer the skeleton of blur about — this mathematical delirium pussy is amazed beyond the hurrah of files * BLACKOUT apnea of a trolley orgasms in a load of distress — ecstasy squirmed becomes known into lost clitoris — scared croissants and twisted visitors in galleries of synapse — porno-hurried curtains that province icicles — pee erupted like a stiffening eavesdropper — mermaid phones skull you blew it at desire you fug like a scarf where were you when you sam jesus had a picture of arithmetic? — twisting out incense smudged high-pitched cassettes — thighs are down so much for geographic limbo of the pleasure laser * SURVEILLANCE tower rumbles a mechanical moonlight it passes fast to understand feeds more like a yearning with italian alarms — clothing smoked apart between catholic helicopters and throbs these routes will electric for such blonde galaxies — mnear some shrieked gutter of unconscious rose a brow of shock it is not a waist deciding its frequencies — mouth card burbs transient-colored halloween of windshields — jolts do frantically provide snails of satellites — some perverts in bubble daisy me from your box skin job like a vacuum-sealed consciousness about scrape — gloves wiggling up negative twang of cosmetic steel — searchlights skewered thigh-high squeeze this optic record — crazy-looking someplace of surgical cram opera all that ever icons

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don't you dare

. . .

Please don't stick me on any list with Russell Edson.

I've seen my name included alongside Edson's in groupings by various critics and commentators re the USAPO scene, and it gripes me . . .

because I have zero in common with that wealthy gentleman Russell Edson.

Rich poets, upperclass poets, huh—

Edson, Louise Gluck, William Matthews, C.K.Williams, Mark Strand, Richard Howard et al,

money rolling out of their childhoods,

cash propping their educations at the best schools,

trustfunds supporting their poetic practices—

I hate them all. I curse them for a penny—

They are nothing to me.

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