*
Recently I received a solicitation to submit something to this:
"[A]n anthology titled A Long and Winding Road which will contain around 200 writers of all genres and world cultures, all born 1940 through 1960. The intent is to provide glimpses into what makes the generation unique, what influenced and shaped, what perspectives emerged and evolved."
. . .
Twenty years of writers, and none of them, the poets prosewriters playwrights, essayists et al,
not one of them wrote a phrase which could be appropriate for the title of this book?
It has to have that clicheish tagalongline, that inane refrain from a pop song?
Why?
I protest.
If the editor were taking for his title a phrase from Sharon Olds or David Mamet or Carol Ann Duffy or Robert Hass, to name just a few of the important writers from this generation,
if the editor were using a quote from any significant "world culture" author born 1940-1960,
I would be willing to submit something for his consideration.
After all, I don't get solicitations for anthologies every day.
In fact, I never get asked to be in any anthologies—
if you're ever in Groliers in Cambridge, Mass, or at Open Books in Seattle, or in a big library, look at their walls of contemporary USA poetry anthologies, all so unalike in their demarcations,
yet all so similar in that none of them include my verse.
—The only exception being the two edited by Billy Collins!
(Collins transcends the in-house standards of PoBiz, which most other anthologists are required to obey: he can include a pariah in his anthol and not suffer reprisals, whereas the other compilers fearful for their careers must exclude blacklisted writers like me or face negative consequences in their professional currency.)
*
But I digress.
///
Monday, April 4, 2011
pobizarre
*
Here's another bizarre entry in the absurd column of pobiz—
http://www.poltroonpress.com/submissions.html
—
if you linked to that page, you'd see this:
***
Surely, if you're a publisher of poetry, you have to have some standards, some esthetic principles?—
You can't promiscuously publish anybody and everybody, this kind of verse and that kind of verse, all schools without discrimination,
not without compromising whatever artistic values you're trying to maintain and manifest in your choice of projects,
not if you're serious.
*
I am not thrilled at my appearance on that list of poets whom Poltroon would "welcome poetry manuscripts from,"
since I feel no affinity with the other poets mentioned. What I've seen of their work I dislike—
I find it depressing that Poltroon Press (or anyone else) would associate me with them,
as if my verse were compatible, as if I were one of that avantcrowd,
all of whom, I assume, bear the Silliman-Approved stamp.
And I would guess they (those other poets) are as insulted to see my name alongside theirs as I am to read mine there.
///
Here's another bizarre entry in the absurd column of pobiz—
http://www.poltroonpress.com/submissions.html
—
if you linked to that page, you'd see this:
Poltroon Press Projects 2011
Thank you for your interest in Poltroon Press. We are not currently reading any unsolicited manuscripts. We have unpublished material by the authors dear to us that we would like to publish and hope to get around to in the near future. We would welcome poetry manuscripts from Rae Armantrout, Tinker Greene, Bill Knott, Joanne Kyger, or Steven Lavoie, but if that's not you, please do not send us your manuscript.***
Surely, if you're a publisher of poetry, you have to have some standards, some esthetic principles?—
You can't promiscuously publish anybody and everybody, this kind of verse and that kind of verse, all schools without discrimination,
not without compromising whatever artistic values you're trying to maintain and manifest in your choice of projects,
not if you're serious.
*
I am not thrilled at my appearance on that list of poets whom Poltroon would "welcome poetry manuscripts from,"
since I feel no affinity with the other poets mentioned. What I've seen of their work I dislike—
I find it depressing that Poltroon Press (or anyone else) would associate me with them,
as if my verse were compatible, as if I were one of that avantcrowd,
all of whom, I assume, bear the Silliman-Approved stamp.
And I would guess they (those other poets) are as insulted to see my name alongside theirs as I am to read mine there.
///
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
free at last
*
wouldn't ya know it, my nemesises at PoChiMag posted a note about my vanity volumes on their "Harriet" website,
and naturally they neglected to mention even in passing that all my books can be downloaded
FREE—
they "forgot" to note the most important aspect of my self-publishing activities,
which is the fact that I GIVE MY FUCKING BOOKS AWAY FREE!!!
But of course they don't want anybody to know that, do they,
they and every other online poetry website do not want their readers to know that
I GIVE MY BOOKS AWAY FREE—
*
As usual Poetry Magazine continues its vendetta against me,
continues to insult and denigrate me as they have done throughout my career—
I wouldn't expect anything else from them.
///
wouldn't ya know it, my nemesises at PoChiMag posted a note about my vanity volumes on their "Harriet" website,
and naturally they neglected to mention even in passing that all my books can be downloaded
FREE—
they "forgot" to note the most important aspect of my self-publishing activities,
which is the fact that I GIVE MY FUCKING BOOKS AWAY FREE!!!
But of course they don't want anybody to know that, do they,
they and every other online poetry website do not want their readers to know that
I GIVE MY BOOKS AWAY FREE—
*
As usual Poetry Magazine continues its vendetta against me,
continues to insult and denigrate me as they have done throughout my career—
I wouldn't expect anything else from them.
///
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
edwin muir
*
Edwin Muir's Collected Poems was published in 1965 (Oxford U. Press)—
with a preface by T. S. Eliot, which ends by noting
"that great, that terrifying poem of the 'atomic age'—The Horses."
That 'atomic age' seems quaint, but the Times Book Review this past Sunday quotes a new book claiming that even a limited nuclear war in the mideast would cause the famine death of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. I wonder if Colonel Ghaddafi is reading Muir this morning.
Midway in the book (p. 142) is this sonnet:
THE RIDER VICTORY
The rider Victory reins his horse
Midway across the empty bridge
As if head-tall he had met a wall.
Yet there was nothing there at all,
No bodiless barrier, ghostly ridge
To check the charger in his course
So suddenly, you'd think he'd fall.
Suspended, horse and rider stare
Leaping on air and legendary.
In front the waiting kingdom lies,
The bridge and all the roads are free;
But halted in implacable air
Rider and horse with stony eyes
Uprear their motionless statuary.
//
Edwin Muir's Collected Poems was published in 1965 (Oxford U. Press)—
with a preface by T. S. Eliot, which ends by noting
"that great, that terrifying poem of the 'atomic age'—The Horses."
That 'atomic age' seems quaint, but the Times Book Review this past Sunday quotes a new book claiming that even a limited nuclear war in the mideast would cause the famine death of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. I wonder if Colonel Ghaddafi is reading Muir this morning.
Midway in the book (p. 142) is this sonnet:
THE RIDER VICTORY
The rider Victory reins his horse
Midway across the empty bridge
As if head-tall he had met a wall.
Yet there was nothing there at all,
No bodiless barrier, ghostly ridge
To check the charger in his course
So suddenly, you'd think he'd fall.
Suspended, horse and rider stare
Leaping on air and legendary.
In front the waiting kingdom lies,
The bridge and all the roads are free;
But halted in implacable air
Rider and horse with stony eyes
Uprear their motionless statuary.
//
Monday, March 7, 2011
alessandrelli
*
these poems seem interesting to me:
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue14/alessandrelli.htm
...
though I have questions:
are they a sequence? or separate poems?
and why are the poems so disparate in form?
since the tone, the voice is the same throughout (consistent) why the warping shapes?
maybe the poet is struggling against his consistency—
i.e. his content.
//
these poems seem interesting to me:
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue14/alessandrelli.htm
...
though I have questions:
are they a sequence? or separate poems?
and why are the poems so disparate in form?
since the tone, the voice is the same throughout (consistent) why the warping shapes?
maybe the poet is struggling against his consistency—
i.e. his content.
//
Thursday, February 24, 2011
good poets are worthless (repost from my old blog, mid 2007
*
GOOD POETS ARE WORTHLESS
*
Interesting article in the May 14 2007 issue of The New Yorker: "Crash Course," by Elizabeth Kolbert, concerning CERN and its efforts to build a supercollider . . .
*
two paragraphs from page 74:
Particle physicists come in two distinct varieties, which, rather like matter and antimatter, are very much intertwined and, at the same time, agonistic. Experimentalists build machines. Theorists sit around and think. "I am happy to eat Chinese dinners with theorists," the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Samuel C. C. Tang once reportedly said. "But to spend your life doing what they tell you is a waste of time."
"If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it's not because I've forgotten," Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs [particle]. "It's probably because I hate him."
*
. . . is there an analagous split in poetry, "two distinct varieties"?
I think the Langpo or Post-Avant would say, if I understand them correctly, and I'm not sure I do, that no poetic activity can occur in a theory-free state, and that those poets who try to proceed as if it were otherwise are deluding themselves, no matter how loudly they assert the process is essentially an empirical experience . . .
. . . are there poets who have tried to follow the intricate measures of Harold Bloom's six-step recipe for the Great Modern Poem, the Great Post-Wordsworthian Poem ("the High Romantic crisis-poem model of six revisionary ratios"): especially since Ashbery's masterpiece Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror seems to have been (coincidentally?) baked to those specifications . . .
or is Nobelist Tang right: "to spend your life doing what [the theorists] tell you is a waste of time" . . .
*
If Nobelist-by-rights Ashbery neglects to cite Bloom, is it probably because he hates him?
*
from page 76 (I've slightly altered some of the preliminary text):
Asked to explain how their work, supported by public funds, contributes to the public good, particle physicists often cite [the words of Robert Wilson, in his testimony before a Congressional Committee in 1969] . . . a Senator wanted to know the rationale behind a $250 Million government expenditure for a new collider:
Did it have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?
Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Senator: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Senator: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
*
Three things strike me about his last answer there, which I've quoted verbatim as the New Yorker prints it:
First, the way Wilson takes the Senator's use of the word "respect" and shifts its meaning . . .
Second, [given this nation's] celebrations and glorifications of War, the irony of his saying that painters sculptors poets are among "all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about."
Third, his use of modifiers here: "good painters, good sculptors, great poets."
*
Why GOOD painters, GOOD sculptors, but not GOOD poets?
I don't think the distinction Robert Wilson offers here is wrong. Intentionally or not, whether he knows it or not, he is being rather scientifically or at least historically correct in his assessment of relative value:
good painters and good sculptors are respected and venerated, but not good poets . . . only great poets (like Ashbery) make our country "worth defending." Elizabeth Bishop is worth a Hiroshima, so to speak.
*
The works of good painters and sculptors can increase in value posthumously: if you've ever seen the Antiques Roadshow, you know that even artists who were "regional" or ignored during their lifetimes can generate higher market prices eventually.
The work of art, the object produced by a deceased artist can still function as merchandise . . . and therefore can survive.
But the work of a good poet?
Prior to the current Norton Modern, the edition before this latest one was edited posthumously by two dead Irish guys, therein you can read James Stephens: he's no longer in the Now Norton,
which does "rescue" theoretically, for the moment, a few obscurantes, specialcases to replace Stephens et al . . . :
or for a dollar from usedbook venues you can obtain Oscar Williams' anthologies of "Modern Poetry": they're filled with good poets whom no-one reads anymore, whose efforts will never be resurrected by the Antique Po-Show . . .
The harsh truth is that Wilson (and Bloom) is right: only GREAT poets count. The good ones are worthless.
///
GOOD POETS ARE WORTHLESS
*
Interesting article in the May 14 2007 issue of The New Yorker: "Crash Course," by Elizabeth Kolbert, concerning CERN and its efforts to build a supercollider . . .
*
two paragraphs from page 74:
Particle physicists come in two distinct varieties, which, rather like matter and antimatter, are very much intertwined and, at the same time, agonistic. Experimentalists build machines. Theorists sit around and think. "I am happy to eat Chinese dinners with theorists," the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Samuel C. C. Tang once reportedly said. "But to spend your life doing what they tell you is a waste of time."
"If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it's not because I've forgotten," Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs [particle]. "It's probably because I hate him."
*
. . . is there an analagous split in poetry, "two distinct varieties"?
I think the Langpo or Post-Avant would say, if I understand them correctly, and I'm not sure I do, that no poetic activity can occur in a theory-free state, and that those poets who try to proceed as if it were otherwise are deluding themselves, no matter how loudly they assert the process is essentially an empirical experience . . .
. . . are there poets who have tried to follow the intricate measures of Harold Bloom's six-step recipe for the Great Modern Poem, the Great Post-Wordsworthian Poem ("the High Romantic crisis-poem model of six revisionary ratios"): especially since Ashbery's masterpiece Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror seems to have been (coincidentally?) baked to those specifications . . .
or is Nobelist Tang right: "to spend your life doing what [the theorists] tell you is a waste of time" . . .
*
If Nobelist-by-rights Ashbery neglects to cite Bloom, is it probably because he hates him?
*
from page 76 (I've slightly altered some of the preliminary text):
Asked to explain how their work, supported by public funds, contributes to the public good, particle physicists often cite [the words of Robert Wilson, in his testimony before a Congressional Committee in 1969] . . . a Senator wanted to know the rationale behind a $250 Million government expenditure for a new collider:
Did it have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?
Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Senator: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Senator: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
*
Three things strike me about his last answer there, which I've quoted verbatim as the New Yorker prints it:
First, the way Wilson takes the Senator's use of the word "respect" and shifts its meaning . . .
Second, [given this nation's] celebrations and glorifications of War, the irony of his saying that painters sculptors poets are among "all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about."
Third, his use of modifiers here: "good painters, good sculptors, great poets."
*
Why GOOD painters, GOOD sculptors, but not GOOD poets?
I don't think the distinction Robert Wilson offers here is wrong. Intentionally or not, whether he knows it or not, he is being rather scientifically or at least historically correct in his assessment of relative value:
good painters and good sculptors are respected and venerated, but not good poets . . . only great poets (like Ashbery) make our country "worth defending." Elizabeth Bishop is worth a Hiroshima, so to speak.
*
The works of good painters and sculptors can increase in value posthumously: if you've ever seen the Antiques Roadshow, you know that even artists who were "regional" or ignored during their lifetimes can generate higher market prices eventually.
The work of art, the object produced by a deceased artist can still function as merchandise . . . and therefore can survive.
But the work of a good poet?
Prior to the current Norton Modern, the edition before this latest one was edited posthumously by two dead Irish guys, therein you can read James Stephens: he's no longer in the Now Norton,
which does "rescue" theoretically, for the moment, a few obscurantes, specialcases to replace Stephens et al . . . :
or for a dollar from usedbook venues you can obtain Oscar Williams' anthologies of "Modern Poetry": they're filled with good poets whom no-one reads anymore, whose efforts will never be resurrected by the Antique Po-Show . . .
The harsh truth is that Wilson (and Bloom) is right: only GREAT poets count. The good ones are worthless.
///
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
prize winner
*
For the eeriest poetry post of the day, see this:
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2011/02/poetry_review_the_illiterate_b.html
Maybe Biespiel isn't being disingenuous about Meredith, maybe he really admires him—well!
Meredith was the PoBiz equivalent of a figure you often see in politics:
a mediocre rich guy who buys his way into favor, onto boards and committees,
and through decades of backroom deals and bribes and kickbacks and collecting IOUs
finally weasels his way up the ladder, a "pol" who gets his pay-off in the form of
a cabinet post or an ambassadorship or the governor's mansion,
i.e. the PolBiz equivalent of the Pulitzer, NBA, etc.
Meredith: just another Ivyleague richguy poet like all the other IV-richguy poets whose oh so prestigious work is deepsixed six months after they die. (Howard Moss et al.)
*
Hey, all you Pulitzer Prize poets, you National Book Award-winning poets, you Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, all you Yale Younger poets, aren't you proud to share those honors with him, with William Meredith? —Because he copped every one of them: he won the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award, and he was a Chancellor of AAP, and he was a Yale Younger poet!
///
For the eeriest poetry post of the day, see this:
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2011/02/poetry_review_the_illiterate_b.html
Maybe Biespiel isn't being disingenuous about Meredith, maybe he really admires him—well!
Meredith was the PoBiz equivalent of a figure you often see in politics:
a mediocre rich guy who buys his way into favor, onto boards and committees,
and through decades of backroom deals and bribes and kickbacks and collecting IOUs
finally weasels his way up the ladder, a "pol" who gets his pay-off in the form of
a cabinet post or an ambassadorship or the governor's mansion,
i.e. the PolBiz equivalent of the Pulitzer, NBA, etc.
Meredith: just another Ivyleague richguy poet like all the other IV-richguy poets whose oh so prestigious work is deepsixed six months after they die. (Howard Moss et al.)
*
Hey, all you Pulitzer Prize poets, you National Book Award-winning poets, you Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, all you Yale Younger poets, aren't you proud to share those honors with him, with William Meredith? —Because he copped every one of them: he won the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award, and he was a Chancellor of AAP, and he was a Yale Younger poet!
///
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