any suggestions for my demise?

I promise to try to make a splash when I die,

to help increase the value of your knottart—

I'll jump off the Weldon Kees Memorial Bridge, or something . . .

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please note

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*
If anyone reading this has followed my posts on respectively my poetry blog and my art blog,

they may have noticed a decrease in the former and an increase in the latter.

I currently devote almost no time to poetry, and the meager creative energies I still have, sapped as they are with age, are spent on my sputtering artwork . . .

As I've pointed out many times on this blog and perhaps elsewhere, it has become more and more clear to me that my poetry is and has for the most part always been a failure—

I wish it were otherwise. I wish my poems were in the anthologies, but they aren't. Go look at the walls of Contemporary American Poetry anthologies—there have been hundreds of them published during the 40 or so years of my active career as a poet, and while I was fortunate to appear in a few anthols in the late 1960s/early 1970s, as time has passed my time has passed—you won't find my work in hardly any of the thousand relevant anthologies.

Maybe "thousand" is hyberbole. But hundreds isn't. It would be interesting to see a complete bibliography of anthologies published in the past half-century which include poetry by contemporaneous USA poets.

In any case, I don't think I will write any more poems. The law of diminishing returns, old age, the loss of any valid hope, the failures that pile up and crush the soul— I can't go on trying to write poetry which no one wants, which no one (with the exception of a few scattered delusionals) respects.

And as for my "artworks", their success rate is bound to be even less than that of my verse. But since I'm not trying to sell them, because I give them away free, their acceptance/rejection will hopefully never become the inhibiting and hurtful issue it was for me in poetry.

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open

*
Thanks to Kyle Minor for hosting a "Bill Knott week" last week on HMTL Giant blog—

and thanks to the contributors who took the time to write something for it—

I wish they had concentrated more on the poetry itself and less on the ways I have packaged and presented it to the public over the years,

but I'm grateful for any notice of my self-publications,

and hopeful that the attention drawn to those books will encourage a few more readers to give them a look.

*
And while I'm considering myself, let me boast a bit about my work:

Whatever their merit may ultimately be reckoned at, the 400-plus pages of my COLLECTED SONNETS 1970-2010 show an sustained engagement with and serious commitment to this form which is (I think) unique among contemporary USA poets.

I think I am (correct me if I'm wrong) the only living USA poet to have published a separate volume of their own political verse: SELECTED POLITICAL POEMS 1965-2010.

My collection of short poems—ALL MY THOUGHTS ARE THE SAME: COLLECTED SHORT POEMS 1960-2010—: I ask you, has any living USA poet published a similar volume? The most recent one before mine which I'm aware of is The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons (1990)—but other than that?

Has any poet other than myself put out a selection of their seasonal poems? A SALT OF SEASONS: WINTER SPRING SUMMER FALL POEMS. Which like all my books of poetry can be downloaded free via a link atop the sidebar of this and my other two blogs—

My POEMS FOR DEATH—have any of my contemporaries published a selection of their poems about death? Not to my knowledge. Again, my book is unique.

And: my SELECTED SYLLABIC VERSE— where are the similar volumes by other living USA poets? How many of them have published a selection of their syllabic verse?

How many poets have put together a selection like my POEMS FROM CHILDHOOD?

What about my (ACTING) POEMS: "Poems about acting—about performers of whatever sort—movies, TV, theater, et al. Poems in which an act of public (or private) performance (real or imagined) is central."

And my SURREALIST VERSE—?

And my book of HOMAGES—?


?

*
I think my pride of book publications (see the complete list via the link atop sidebar)

is unique and unparalleled in contemporary USA poetry.

No other poet is putting out volumes comparable to mine.

Whatever their quality, whatever their provenance, whatever the defects of their packaging and presentation, whatever their shortcomings,

they are distinctive.

AND they are downloadable free through every modem in the world,

available at no cost to any reader who wants to have them:

help yourself.

With my thanks and best wishes.

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revealed truths versus involved terms

*
from The Aeneid, Book 6, lines (approx) 100-106:

Robert Fitzgerald's trans:

............. These were the sentences
In which the Sibyl of Cumae from her shrine
Sang out her riddles, echoing in the cave,
Dark sayings muffling truths, the way Apollo
Pulled her up raging, or else whipped her on,
Digging the spurs beneath her breast. . . .

John Dryden's version:

Thus, from the dark recess, the Sibyl spoke,
And the resisting air the thunder broke;
The cave rebellow'd, and the temple shook.
Th'ambiguous god, who rul'd her lab'ring breast,
In these mysterious words his mind express'd;
Some truths reveal'd, in terms involv'd the rest.

*

Apollo presumedly expresses his mind as he wishes,
being a god. When he wants to speak truths, he does,
and when he wants to speak what,—mysteries? dark sayings?
ambiguities?—when he wants to speak the latter, he
does that too: presumably he knows the difference between
"truths" and "terms" and when he speaks he is consciously
choosing to use one or the either, given his olympian
powers. . .

Ein Gott vermaggs. Wie aber, sag mir, soll
ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier? (Rilke)

A god can do it. But how, tell me, shall
a man follow him through the stringent lyre?

/
Involved in terms, wrung in the contorted serpent
ingenuities of his own terms, how can the poet speak
truths when truths and terms seem so irreconcilable,
and how would he even know when and where and with
what power his lab'ring breast was ruled, if his terms
could express truths, assuming he even wanted them to. . . .

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the craft

*
It's funny how seldom those who ostensibly undertake to write about my poetry, actually do it—

instead they often fixate on absurd secondary matters like the "presentation" of my books, or data re publication formats and irrelevancies like that—really, what's the point of swotting around such trivial minutiae. I appreciate all honest straightforward appraisals of my work, but if commentators focus on side issues other than the merit (or lack of merit) of the poems themselves, I'm insulted.

I can't force anyone to take my poetry seriously, and if they want to indulge in gossip superfluous crap I can't stop them—

But in case anyone is interested in my verse itself, and would like to see a critique which directly and thoughtfully addresses some of it,

I recommend the new book by Stephen Dobyns, Next Word, Better Word / The craft of writing poetry—

in which he offers close detailed readings of three of my sonnets.

(But even if I was never mentioned at all in the Dobyns book, I would still recommend it—it is a first-rate handbook/guide to poetic craft, and everyone involved in writing (and reading) poetry would benefit from it.)

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reprint

*
reprint from my old blog: 08/25/08



Ashbery's Visit to Pahlevi, 1972 (after James Wright's "Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1958")

The American poet must kiss ass
The forces of darkness.
He has flown here first-class
And come down in the oil fields
Of Iran.

Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi stands in a shining circle of CIA.
His wallet opens in welcome.
He promises all USA cars
Can gas up forever now
And live like Beatniks "on the road."

His police fill the prisons
With dissidents. Ashbery follows
His fellow celebrants to the banquet
Of the Avantgarde Arts Fest
Where Her Royal Empress Queen Farah
Gilds to their honor.

Smiles glitter in Shiraz.
Ashbery has touched hands with John Cage, embracing
For the Cultural Attache's report.

Clean new tankers from America
Glide along gantries now.
Their prows shine in the docklights
And their hulls swallow all
Of Iran.

*

As everybody knows, and some knew at the time, Pavlevi's reign was a CIA op from the start——

they ran the coup which put him into power,

they trained the gestapo forces he wielded to keep his people in terror and suppression——

and I assume they advised him that putting some of his swindled billions into an annual "Avantgarde" Arts festival would pay off as a publicity stunt

to help counteract international outrage and protest against his police state regime——

I assume the Avantgarde artists invited and paid handsome sums to attend this yearly farce-stival

were vetted and chosen by the CIA's Cultural Committee——

carefully selected for their a-political esthetics——

*
See this for more about the 1972 gathering: http://thefaleslibrary.blogspot.com/2011/04/downtown-arts-in-pre-revolution-iran.html

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