Patricia Smith voices my sentiments better than I could:

*
Bravo kudos to Patricia Smith telling the truth (Harriet blog):

" . . . I am not so willing to grant amnesty to poems that confound me or the poets who pen them. In fact, I detest those inscrutable little nuggets of fleeing meaning. I have worked tirelessly to equip myself with all the emotional, cultural and technical tools I need to understand every poem ever written (I ordered them during a late-night TV binge–they came with a really cool set of ginzu knives), and I will not be bested by some stealthily giggling wordsmiths touting themselves as “language” poets. The very moniker suggests an unquestioned mastery–”language” poets. What are the rest of us using in our poetry? Ham sandwiches? Baby ducklings?

You say, “…a part of me does like the idea that sometimes poems don’t want to have meaning and that somewhere out there, there are people who find pleasure in the absence of meaning.” I’ll grant you that. But I think those people rejoicing about the absence of meaning are the poets writing those little ditties, and the thousands of hangers-on who love them. These are the poets who copy bus schedules and give them a title. They write poems consisting only of names of deodorants that were available at Woolworth’s in October of 1955. They dare to introduce a piece by saying “I wrote this on an odd Sunday in winter, using only three fingers of my left hand and writing with one eye taped shut. You’ll notice that the whole poem is composed of every third letter in the word “whirligig.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will be shouting the poem from another room. In Swahili.”

I am convinced that these tricksters know exactly what they are doing (nothing) and count on us being convinced that they are doing it all.

I used to be one of those pretenders, nodding soulfully while some wordsmith dramatically chanted his grocery list into a staticky microphone. I’d encounter the language-driven flava-of-the-month and turn the page upside down looking for meaning; I’d read backwards, sleep with the poem resting on my head, sneak up on it when it wasn’t looking. I was convinced that if I couldn’t grasp the worth of a poem something was wrong with me–I had failed as a student of the canon. So I was content to wait on revelation. While secretly hissing “What the hell…?,” I clawed my way through three-word sonnets and poems shaped like bears. I nodded knowingly and soulfully. Meanwhile, the creators of all this deepness laughed all the way to the bank. (You may take a moment to ponder the idea of a poet with enough money to open a bank account.)

I uncovered this words-too-deep-for-thou scam when I was asked to introduce someone whose poetry utterly mystified me. I felt small and unworthy. This person has a fandom that is fierce and protective of her/his unquestioned brilliance. (Sorry about the gender-waffling, but I’m being VERY careful here. One of his/her dedicated posse could stalk me and douse me with a steaming chai latte.) I studied the person’s work dutifully and encountered crazed capitalization and random hiccuping. I went to see said person. No clues there. I approached said person’s posse–when I began to ask questions, they stiffened and closed ranks around said person. They sniffed dolefully at my ignorance like a salesperson on Rodeo Drive after you’ve questioned the price of something with no visible price tag: If you’re supposed to know, know.

I then widened my query, challenging everyone who touted the value of language poetry to give me just a surface explanation: “Tell me what it does for you.” I heard endless variations of “The meaning is primal, like breathing. Open, and it will enter you.” When the questions became pointed and more insistent, their inner-Rodeo Drive diva made her appearance: Perhaps this just doesn’t come in your size.

Well, bull bits. I have never breathed a bus schedule, or been entered by a pig-Latin sestina. People who make their livings serving up this dribble count on our egos to sustain them. We’ve rather sit through 33 minutes of silence entitled “Noise” or 12 pages of white space called “Black” than admit we don’t know what the hell’s going on.

By the way, there’s nothing going on. Nil. Nada. Zero. The emperor is buck-naked, and the throngs lining the parade route are applauding his fashion sense."

***

conning the nundrum (cont.)

post from the past (two or three years back)

*
I recommend Laurie Smith's essay from 2002, "Subduing the reader," in Magma magazine:

(http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=14974)

:—Here's his penultimate paragraph:

One can dismiss [Geoffrey Hill's] Speech! Speech! as the last gasp of Pound's influence, but in every generation there are poets who try to tell us that the present is worthless compared to the past, though they rarely have the talent of Pound or Hill. A current example is the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg who is much admired by the New Republican Right and, surprisingly, by Bloodaxe Books. We need always to be alert to writers who claim that good poetry must be difficult, accessible only to the educated few, and see this claim for what it is - fascist.

*
After reading the Smith piece, you might look at two replies (neither of which directly address his final sentence above) appearing in the next issue, Magma 24, especially the one by Robert Potts. (all these are online at the Magma site)

Potts quotes Hill:

"In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. If you write as if you had to placate or in any way entice their lack of interest, then I think you are making condescending assumptions about people. I mean people are not fools. But so much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together …”

*
It's one of the conflicts poets struggle with:

if we are, in Smith's words, "difficult, accessible only to the educated few," as HighModernists like Eliot/Stevens/et al and the AvantGarde (lango/post-avant/cambridge/etcet) tend to be—

if that is our esthetic, shouldn't we expect to face and to deserve the condemnation of "fascist"—

In our defence we can (and do, endlessly) offer variations on Hill's words above to justify our narcissistic solipsistic intramuralistic verse, but . . .

*
My personal problem is that, while intellectually and theoretically I'm on Smith's side of the argument as opposed to Potts and Hill—

philosophically, politically I'm opposed to elistist verse of whatever stripe (Academic=Avantgarde)—

In theory I'm in favor of those poets (the ones Hill is too chickenshit or rather too arrogant to name the names of: what he condescendingly calls "the populist poetry of today" )—

in theory I favor these Accessible poets, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, et al, because their work strives to refute the fascist esthetic that says, to quote Smith, "that good poetry must be difficult, accessible only to the educated few."

(What's worse is when 'fascist' (using Smith's term for the sake of hyperbole) poets write verse which is difficult, accessible only to the educated few——and then issue loud manifestos proclaiming the opposite, boasting that their autotelic practices will overthrow the hegemony of bourgeois discourse and bring about a socialist revolution)—

My problem is that while in theory I support Smith as opposed to Potts,

in practice I often fail to achieve what I profess. I don't (or don't always) practice what I preach.

I try to: whenever I start a poem,

my intent is never to write something which is "difficult, accessible only to the educated few," and yet, unfortunately, disastrously, all too often I wind up

with a tattered mess which is so convoluted and clotted and dense with allusiveness and so perverse in its obliquity

that it fails my intent and reveals in its sprawled condition a tragic falling off from the moral highgound of my ostensible allegiance.

(If my failure to maintain the courage of my convictions, my cowardice, invalidates my position, so be it—)

*
The Smith-Potts debate in Magma followed a piece in the Guardian by Potts condemning the judges of the TS Eliot Prize for choosing Anne Carson over Geoffrey Hill (you can find all this online). . .

The Guardian published 3 replies to Potts. I quote the one by Peter Forbes:

Robert Potts raises big, timely issues in his attack on the Eliot Prize for missing the best book. He is one of the most independent poetry critics around today, and his dissent from the log-rolling praise heaped on the Eliot winner, Anne Carson, is justified and brave. But why, casting about for something solid after having been let down by reading Anne Carson, he should light upon Geoffrey Hill, of all people, I don't understand.

Geoffrey Hill is perhaps Eliot's truest disciple, and he shares many of Eliot's faults, plus, as Larkin might have said: "some extra, just for you". Potts praises Hill's "learning" and castigates poets who claim that he is too difficult. But there is no such thing as "learning" in the abstract. What is Hill saying, what are his arguments?

Hill's prime intellectual obsession is with a kind of Englishness, ecclesiastical and rooted in the Tudor period. With the best will in the world, his monkish preoccupations are not likely to resonate with many serious people living today. Speech! Speech! has much in common with the letters of obsessive cranks: the enemy is constantly harassed in capital letters; for the writer everything seems to add up, but to the reader the connections are arbitrary. Why claim for Speech! Speech! that it is poetry when there is a more plausible reading: that it is a series of notes-to-self penned by someone in the throes of a great intellectual confusion? One section has Hill bragging that he can outrap the rappers. This is pathetic. Old men who quarrel with the innovations and fashions of their late years always cut a sorry figure.

*
(I didn't intend to quote the whole reply of Forbes, but it was just too yummy not to. )

***

Patricia Smith says it for me

*
Bravo to Patricia Smith writing at the Harriet blog
for testifying to the truth:

". . . I am not so willing to grant amnesty to poems that confound me or the poets who pen them. In fact, I detest those inscrutable little nuggets of fleeing meaning. I have worked tirelessly to equip myself with all the emotional, cultural and technical tools I need to understand every poem ever written (I ordered them during a late-night TV binge–they came with a really cool set of ginzu knives), and I will not be bested by some stealthily giggling wordsmiths touting themselves as “language” poets. The very moniker suggests an unquestioned mastery–”language” poets. What are the rest of us using in our poetry? Ham sandwiches? Baby ducklings?

You say, “…a part of me does like the idea that sometimes poems don’t want to have meaning and that somewhere out there, there are people who find pleasure in the absence of meaning.” I’ll grant you that. But I think those people rejoicing about the absence of meaning are the poets writing those little ditties, and the thousands of hangers-on who love them. These are the poets who copy bus schedules and give them a title. They write poems consisting only of names of deodorants that were available at Woolworth’s in October of 1955. They dare to introduce a piece by saying “I wrote this on an odd Sunday in winter, using only three fingers of my left hand and writing with one eye taped shut. You’ll notice that the whole poem is composed of every third letter in the word “whirligig.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will be shouting the poem from another room. In Swahili.”

I am convinced that these tricksters know exactly what they are doing (nothing) and count on us being convinced that they are doing it all.

I used to be one of those pretenders, nodding soulfully while some wordsmith dramatically chanted his grocery list into a staticky microphone. I’d encounter the language-driven flava-of-the-month and turn the page upside down looking for meaning; I’d read backwards, sleep with the poem resting on my head, sneak up on it when it wasn’t looking. I was convinced that if I couldn’t grasp the worth of a poem something was wrong with me–I had failed as a student of the canon. So I was content to wait on revelation. While secretly hissing “What the hell…?,” I clawed my way through three-word sonnets and poems shaped like bears. I nodded knowingly and soulfully. Meanwhile, the creators of all this deepness laughed all the way to the bank. (You may take a moment to ponder the idea of a poet with enough money to open a bank account.)

I uncovered this words-too-deep-for-thou scam when I was asked to introduce someone whose poetry utterly mystified me. I felt small and unworthy. This person has a fandom that is fierce and protective of her/his unquestioned brilliance. (Sorry about the gender-waffling, but I’m being VERY careful here. One of his/her dedicated posse could stalk me and douse me with a steaming chai latte.) I studied the person’s work dutifully and encountered crazed capitalization and random hiccuping. I went to see said person. No clues there. I approached said person’s posse–when I began to ask questions, they stiffened and closed ranks around said person. They sniffed dolefully at my ignorance like a salesperson on Rodeo Drive after you’ve questioned the price of something with no visible price tag: If you’re supposed to know, know.

I then widened my query, challenging everyone who touted the value of language poetry to give me just a surface explanation: “Tell me what it does for you.” I heard endless variations of “The meaning is primal, like breathing. Open, and it will enter you.” When the questions became pointed and more insistent, their inner-Rodeo Drive diva made her appearance: Perhaps this just doesn’t come in your size.

Well, bull bits. I have never breathed a bus schedule, or been entered by a pig-Latin sestina. People who make their livings serving up this dribble count on our egos to sustain them. We’ve rather sit through 33 minutes of silence entitled “Noise” or 12 pages of white space called “Black” than admit we don’t know what the hell’s going on.

By the way, there’s nothing going on. Nil. Nada. Zero. The emperor is buck-naked, and the throngs lining the parade route are applauding his fashion sense."

**

two scenes from Ian Hamilton

*
If you were as bored as I was by that arrogant hack Michael Hofmann's pathetic efforts to lump himself with the Legend of Ian Hamilton via the Jan 2010 issue of Poetry (Chicago),

here are a couple Hamilton squibs by much finer sources:

first, from the TLS: Hugo Williams' column (p.16, April 17/09), recounting a story from one of Hamilton's USA pobiz-crawls wherein he 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?"
...

and here, from Simon Gray's "The Smoking Diaries," page 29, where Gray, after confessing his lifelong dislike of Auden, ruefully acknowledges:

". . . anyway, I've got to face it, almost everybody I like and a lot of people I admire, like and admire Auden, I used to admit as much as I nagged away at Ian [Hamilton], nagged frenetically away, even claiming once I had evidence to prove Auden was autistic—what evidence? Ian asked,—well, I said, he liked to pick his nose and eat it in front of people, and then, well, the poems! I said triumphantly, take 'In Praise of Limestone' and off I went— 'Actually, Auden stinks,' he said, out of nowhere, during one of our very last conversations, 'but his forms, you see, the way he could play about with forms'—and that was it, for him, as a practising poet there was an astonishing skill to be admired and studied. If you weren't a poet and were after meaning, sense and feeling you [wouldn't look to Auden], but if you had a technical interest in rhyme schemes, etc., for their own sake, and for the sake of your own practice, then Auden was worth your while—and so we left it at that, for the rest of his [Hamilton's] life, or at least of my time with him."

...
Gray's book has other evocative pages re Hamilton . . . Gray knew/was friends with him from university days:
one of his most successful plays, The Common Pursuit (subtitled 'Scenes from the Literary Life'), features as its key character ('Stuart') a simulacrum of Hamilton.

*
Inexpensive copies of The Common Pursuit are available at Amazon—the used hardcover page has copies for under a dollar—if it's the same hardcover edition I have, it will have a four-page insert of photos from the first USA production (with an exuberantly-young Nathan Lane in 3 of the pics)—

it's a great play, a fun play to read, and should be particularly fascinating to anyone who's ever aspired toward 'the literary life' . . .

*

creatively unoriginal

*
—is Lowell’s “Imitations” a model for the cre­atively uno­rig­i­nal era some perloffs and profs are hail­ing the advent of . . .

if all verse con­sists of vari­ant recom­bi­na­tions of past verse, as the first pla­gia­rist Orpheus liked to claim, then

aren’t Lowell’s bril­liant recon­fig­u­ra­tions of Leop­ardi et al

to be espe­cially admired and emulated—

but can anybody/everybody follow his exam­ple with equal success—

or is it Lowell’s unique expertise/craft/handling that makes these trans­la­tions so brilliant—?

(con­cep­tion or exe­cu­tion? con­tent or form? Koons or Hock­ney?)

you can’t down­load his tal­ents, or at least not yet—

as brilliant young poet and critic Michael Rob­bins observes of Lowell: “he could sculpt a stanza with a pre­ci­sion of tone, dic­tion, imagery, sound, & meter. . . ”

maybe stanza-​sculpting soft­ware will per­form that task for poets in the near future?

let the app do the cot­tage indus­trial dirty­work of composition—

com­put­ers can already prob­a­bly write more skil­fully than most poets . . .

*

geeze wheeze

*
. . . the disputations of eras—

often when we older poets look at the verse of those younger we're befuddled or hostile—

on those rare occasions a young poet asks me to write a blurb, it puzzles me why: why would they want the approbation of someone my age: really?

(it may be cynical, but I can't believe they honestly want my approval in any case—)

*
It's not just that I don't have the energy or time to "keep up" with their work: it's that if I were their age I wouldn't care what that 70-year-old fade what'shisKnott thinks,

so if I wouldn't care, why should I?

*
(Hey, yo-po, if I like your stuff, that should warn you there must be something wrong with it—)

*
The merciful dispensations of time allow us oldsters to be placated and distracted somewhat when considering the horrible fact of our oh so imminent demise, by looking at the young and gloating to ourselves, Well I certainly wouldn't want to be in their shoes! I'm glad I'm not like them! etc.

A poem about it from a couple years ago:

THERE'S THE RUB

Envying young poets the rage
You wish you could reverse your night
And blaze out born on every page
As old as them, as debut-bright.

Child of that prodigal spotlight
Whose wattage now is theirs to wage—
What gold star rite you wish you might
Raise revised to its first prize stage.

But listen to my wizened sage:
He claims there's one disadvantage
Should time renew you neophyte—

There'd be one catch you'd hate, one spite:
Remember if you were their age
You'd have to write the way they write.

*
Obviously the young differentiate themselves from their predecessors in order to further their own development and sense of worth,

but might their rebellions or deviations also be motivated by kindness and pity for those of us who must soon die—

by unselfishly choosing to alienate and outrage us,

they help us dose our daily dread: how palliative the muttering placebo of contrastation with, and ritual protestation at,

their wrongness—

but do we appreciate how compassionate this errancy may be?

***

maybe book after a no way book

*
I'm trying to edit together a book of my poems "for young readers", which I'm hoping to complete, but—

it's proceeding from a collection of "whimsical" poems which I was unable to collate or cohere—

something of my confusion regarding the latter can be seen in the "afterword" I wrote for it:

*
Backass Note

My whimsical poems are for the most part conceptual rather than linguistic. . . I'm too inhibited and puritanical to indulge in sound for sound's sake. I admire those who can write nonsense verse, but that whole wibblety wobblety world of wordplay is beyond me. . . (Roger McGough for one can do both the sound and the sense equally brilliantly; I envy his genius.) Puns, if they occur, are usuallly derived from metaphor rather than sound-association; indeed, I am usually surprised when people point out a "pun" in one of my poems, because I rarely intend them; they're mostly inadvertant. I make a conscious effort to work from the synonym: my thesaurus is always at hand. For me the content comes first; plot is always uppermost in my thoughts: though after that's set, formal concerns of style or sound-patterns may evolve in a further elaboration.

What do I mean by whimsical? Is it a category separate from others, a genre? Its subject matter is often trivial: kites, balloons, umbrellas, barbershops or hair in general, honeymoons and drinking fountains. And maybe the whimsical poem never tries to be funny (!), it's too complacent for that. Halfway between a-mused and be-mused. Smug-like, it doesn't care. It doesn't show off with insouciance and lyrical dandyisms (for the most part). Indeed, it often has an air of earnestness, though towards what end is not always evident. It thrives on its arbitrariness, but it does seem to have a purpose in mind. It doesn't want to be ironic or satiric, I think. But even if I have somewhat successfully defined the whimsical poem here, have I managed to (ever) actually write one?

.....