the trick

*
“The trick naturally is what [Robert] Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us — not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. . . . There is really no single poem.” —Jack Spicer

*
I don't totally disagree with what Spicer says:

—his "trick" obviously works for some poets—Frank O'Hara for example—

but not for others,

whose trick is indeed "to search for the perfect poem"—

Bishop and Mallarme, to name a couple—

Many perhaps most poets oscillate (Octavio Paz's term) between these either-or choices,

compare the "perfected" poems of Robert Lowell versus his Notebook sonnets . . .

But ultimately the poets from both these positions

—or "temptations" as Paz summarized them:

"The history of modern poetry is that of the oscillation between revolutionary temptation and religious temptation." (Children of the Mire, p. 37.)—

ultimately, don't both temptations—the religious (Bishop et al) and the revolutionary (O'Hara et al)—

no matter what "trick" they employ—

end up, finally, pared down to their most perfect poems, confined to a Selected,

even the greatest Revtemps,

among whom I would place O'Hara—

even they will get reduced to their best; most of their verse will be winnowed away—

we living can never know which O'Hara poems will continue to thrive,

just as Tennyson's contemporaries could not have foreseen what his Selecteds would include/exclude—

future academic specialists will study specific poets in their entirety, of course—

and androids/cyborgs will upload every poem ever published, in 0.3 seconds—

but most readers, human readers anyway, will stick to that Selected—

I haven't read all of the Collected O'Hara, but some of the poems I've read donkeydozens of times with renewed appreciation—

"Mary Desti's Ass" made it into the 213 (page-through printed) pages of Donald Allen's Selected O'Hara,

but will it survive in the smaller Selecteds to come—

it's not a "perfect poem" perhaps, and will probably never appear in general anthols like the Norton etc.,

but it leaves me stunned stammering with admiration after every reading—

*
Peculiar loves like mine for "Mary Desti's Ass" are of course marginal, and bear less import than the consensus that accumulates and creates the canon of

those singled-out poems which enter the various Selecteds that follow in the wake of a great poet like O'Hara—

Anyway, considering it over I think I disagree further with Spicer's quote above: I think he misses the point.

Because perfect poems do get written by significant poets, whether they're Revtemp or Reltemp, it doesn't matter.

Spicer's formula—"let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths"—is probably a good description of O'Hara's practice,

and his injunction—"not to search for the perfect poem"—inveighs against what Bishop and say Philip Larkin sought to do in their work—

Pick up the Larkin or the Bishop Collected in one hand and the O'Hara Collected in the other,

and feel the weight of their ways.

But my disagreement with Spicer's (or is it Duncan's) dictum, is simply this:

if O'Hara truly tried "not to search for the perfect poem," he failed.

Because he did write some perfect poems, and so did Bishop and Larkin.

(And Duncan, he failed too, if his aspiration/intent really was to eschew "the perfect poem"—two of his (at least) seem pretty perfect to me: Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar, and Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow—)

The trick is to write perfect poems using the trick that works best for you,

even the trick that tricks you into thinking your goal is "not to search for the perfect poem"

is a good trick if it helps you to write some perfect poems,

as presumably it did for O'Hara.

Revtemp, Reltemp, whatever the hell.

***

THE SILENCED GENERATIONS

*
Below are excerpts from a few of the negative notices that greeted my first two or three books. These are just a sample of the bad reviews those volumes received.

To say that I was discouraged and disheartened by these vicious hostile words is to put it mildly. In fact, I was so hurt and crushed that I stopped writing entirely.

How many other fledgling artists have suffered similar injury—generation after generation of new writers at the dawn of their careers, brutally assailed, cut down in their premiere years, felled in their first steps, balked before they'd barely begun, undermined and destroyed by the malicious oppugnacy of critics—

How tragic that young poets should be treated so cruelly!

:

"[Bill Knott's] poems are so naive that the question of their poetic quality hardly arises. . . . Mr. Knott practices a dead language." —Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books, May 7, 1970

"[Bill Knott's poems are] typically mindless. . . . He produces only the prototaxis of idiocy. . . . Rumor has it that Knott's habit of giving his birth and terminal dates together originated when he realized he could no longer face the horror of a poetry reading he was scheduled to give."
—Charles Molesworth, Poetry Magazine, May 1972

"[Bill Knott is] malignant."—Christopher Ricks, The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1970

"[Bill Knott's work] consists almost entirely of pointless poems, that say disgusting things. . . . [His poetry is] tasteless . . . and brainless."
—Michael Heffernan, Midwest Quarterly, Summer 1973

"[Bill Knott is] incompetent."
—Alicia Ostriker, Partisan Review (date? 1972?)

"Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake." —Ron Loewinsohn, TriQuarterly, Spring 1970

"Bill Knott should be beaten with a flail."
—Tomaz Salamun, Snow, 1973

***

fascist

*
Pierre Joris, on his blog today, states:

"Pound, the man, was clearly fascist — but his major work, The Cantos, are not."

*
A different, perhaps opposing view, from Laurie Smith's essay from 2002, "Subduing the reader," in Magma magazine:

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

:—Here's the 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.

*
Certainly 'The Cantos' would seem to be a prime example of what's "difficult, accessible only to the educated few."

Smith is protesting against those "writers who claim that good poetry must" needs be over the head of most readers, must be difficult—

make your own list of those writers.

*
I remember hearing famous poet S complaining about famous poet A, saying in effect,

If someone as deeply-grounded in the esthetic theories of Modernism as me, if someone as intelligent and well-read as I,

can't understand much of A's verse, who the bloody hell can—

*
I've never been able to appreciate 'The Cantos' (not even the ones that appear, flooded with footnotes, in the Norton Mod),

it's over my head. Too "difficult" for me. That doesn't mean I think it's 'fascist.' Laurie Smith's assertion is intriguing and worth considering,

but as I said in earlier posts on this blog, I'm of two minds about the question—

*
In any case, I can read, and do read, with great enjoyment, Pound prior to 'The Cantos,'

those lyric satiric poems which perhaps find their culmination in the masterpiece, 'Mauberley'—

And I would rather read my early Pound,
true texts that need no sage-expanding, / truth-expanding
/pages that need no sage commanding,
which needs no footnote page expanding/ extending
that needs no footnote's countermanding
sharp/high/whole notes that need no foot-expanding
that needs no footnote's underhanding/
where footnotes need not rise demanding
where footnotes need not add demanding
where footnotes dare not flock demanding
where footnotes need not come demanding
where footnotes intrude not their demanding
where footnotes come not eye-demanding
which footnotes don't damn with demanding/
than wade those wallow Cantos round
till I drown in understanding.

And I would rather read the early Pound,
where footnotes demur/still/fade/ebb their shrill demanding,
where footnotes hide their damned demanding,
which footnotes need not face demanding
where footnotes offer no demanding
where footnotes rise not eye-demanding
than wade those page-swamped Cantos round
till I drown in understanding.

/those sargasso / critic-swamped /

And I would rather read the early Pound,
texts that need no exegesis,
than wade those footnote Cantos round
till I drown in underthesis.

/tart texts that need no exegesis
/taut texts that need no exegesis
smart texts / high texts
start texts / tough texts that need
neat texts that / complete/ replete
plete texts that need no exegesis
whole texts / full texts / rife texts
clear texts / sheer texts

his texts there/then need no exegesis,
with texts that need no exegesis,



till I drown in footnote thesis / pieces/ chaos/ mire/
terebis / teresis / catachresis./ mimesis/
till I drown down underthesis/

And I would rather read the early Pound,
'high deeds' that need no exegesis,
than wade those footnote Cantos round
till I drowned in underthesis.
.....

high deeds that need no quote-expanding,
than wade those footnote Cantos round
till I drown in understanding.

/no quote-remanding

high deeds that need no down-me-handing

'high deeds' that need no critic-handing

'high deeds' that need no critic-tending, / critic-panding,

sanding, shanding, ganding, banding, handling, branding

*
And I would rather read the early Pound,
'high deeds' that need no critic's branding,
than wade those footnote Cantos round
till I drowned in understanding.

///

stranding / pand(er)ing
...
branding? arm-branding (armbanding
label-branding school ism-branding/ scholar's branding
/scholar-scanding


**

*
Give up these everlasting complaints about love; show these poets how to use a whip.

—Karl Marx, to Heinrich Heine.

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."

**