blazevox redux

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this is worth reading (all of archambeau's posts are worth reading):


http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/blazevox-vs-nea-or-ezra-pounds-shilling.html


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the nea should be funding blazevox and other poetry presses, not banning their authors


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if blazevox got a dime everytime the media called some poptunester a "poet" they could publish a hundred titles a year


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i would certainly pay blazevox to publish my poetry, if they thought it was good enough, which of course they never would



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read this poem

which should be published on the front page of every USA newspaper magazine and website—

Poem of the Week: Joel Dias-Porter

Photo by: Taylor Mali

TRAYVON

is a story of steam,
rising like
a swarm of hornets,
singeing sight from eyes.
a parable of lava
moldering down a mountain
igniting all green to ash,
the song of a hit recorded,
number 1 with a bullet.

Is not a story
about "fucking coons"
that "always get away."

This is not a poem
about Emmet Till,
Amadou Diallo,
or James Byrd Jr.

It is not the tale of
a "suspicious" hoodie
in the wrong neighborhood
or a trigger finger with
a "squeaky clean record."
Is not a fable of a corpse
with a bullet hole
that was tested for drugs
or a hand freshly coated
with the back flash of phosphorus
that was not.
This is a story
that checks out,
so the only charges
will be on a credit card
for funeral services.

I did not write this poem
in anger,
I did not write this poem
in "Self-Defense."
I did not write this poem.
Because my pen is empty from
having already written & written this poem.

These words can be heard
only because
while facedown
on the concrete
of the righthand lane
at 10:37 AM
on April 15th, 1987
at 19067 Greenbelt Road
my name was not Gregory Habib,
my sternum
could stand the weight
of the knee between
my shoulder blades,
and the monomaniacal eye
at the back of my head
was a .38 revolver
with a 15 lb. trigger pull
and not the 8 lb pull
of a Glock 9mm.
Because it was all just

a misunderstanding
and have a nice day, Sir.

It is not true that
my eyes are red
as a bag of Skittles
as I write this,
and if my page is dotted
with drops, it is only
Arizona iced tea that is spilled.

This poem pertains to no crime,
contains no trees
with branches strong enough
to bear the weight of a black boy,
contains no rope (of any length),
contains not even a single slipknot.

But it does loop,
like a wandering moose,
a homeward goose,
or a four hundred year old
ruse.

-Joel Dias-Porter

Used by permission.

Joel Dias-Porter (aka DJ Renegade) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, and is a former professional DJ. From 1994-1999 he competed in the National Poetry Slam, and was the 1998 and 1999 Haiku Slam Champion. His poems have been published in Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Red Brick Review, Asheville Review, Beltway Quarterly and the anthologies Gathering Ground, Love Poetry Out Loud, Meow: Spoken Word from the Black Cat, Short Fuse, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, 360 Degrees of Black Poetry, Slam (The Book), Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapallooza, Poetry Nation, Beyond the Frontier, Spoken Word Revolution, Catch a Fire, and The Black Rooster Social Inn. In 1995, he received the Furious Flower "Emerging Poet Award." Performances include the Today Show, the documentary SlamNation, on BET, and in the feature film Slam. A Cave Canem fellow and the father of a young son, He has a CD of jazz and poetry entitled 'LibationSong'.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

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I read this poem there, and thought it was great, and I left a comment saying so but they deleted my comment because praise from me is an insult I guess.  Or something.  Anyway, their deletion is more evidence confirming my post below: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/03/praise-from-me.html


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p.s. on BAP and DL

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p.s.


All kidding aside, David Lehman is to be commended for his valiant efforts to keep the Best American Poetry anthology alive for so long.  I've written some bad jokes about him and BAP over the years, I've "roasted" him in print too many times, but I must confess my admiration for his superlative service to poetry and for his unique accomplishments. 


I should apologize for all those carping comments.  Consider them as nothing but spite and envy.  My poems were never good enough for BAP, and that made me bitter, and I expressed my resentments with vitriol and sarcasm.


He is so well-known for his civic leadership in the poetry community, his role as the public persona aegis of BAP's success, and for being the face of USA poetry as it were, that his own distinguished and marvelous verse is perhaps sometimes lost in the shadow of that spotlight fame, and doesn't get the recognition and acclaim it deserves.  


He should put out a big Selected Poems, and it should win the Pulitzer on the strength of its own merits alone.   


And parenthetically I must say that everyone I ever met who knew David Lehman personally, everyone I have ever heard speak of him, all of them were unanimous in praise of his generosity and kindness and warm affable demeanor.  He seems to be not just a great poet/writer/editor, but a real gentleman as well.


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problem solved

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Craig Morgan Teicher's report on the problem of publishing poetry for ebooks:




 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/46615-diverging-digital-roads-poetry-and-e-books.html


 My response to Teicher's piece (PW won't accept my google account to allow me to comment directly there) 

is:

what problem?  

Most verse written in the AngloAmerican tradition should fit quite easily on such escreens, especially the ones that can be turned sideways, no?

And if there is a problem with some contemporary texts,

the answer to that problem for those authors, is simple: 

Stop with those prosey long lines—

write poetry instead: you know, decasyllabics, blank verse, etc . . . 

any line longer than the hendecasyllabic is already in danger of being contaminated by prose,

or indeed may be a form of prose.
 

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reprint from old blog—

-->

bizarre

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Here's how Geof Huth, at "dbqp: visualizing poetics" starts his review of a Kenneth Koch book:

VISUAL POETRY AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Thursday, June 24, 2004

The Impossible Comics of Kenneth Koch

I’m not that familiar with Kenneth Koch’s poetry. I often see him as the spiritual father of Bill Knott, though Koch’s lines are generally more rambling and freer than those of Knott’s.

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Comment:

This is really bizarre, not to mention stupid.  (But whaddya expect from a "PoViz" goof-off like Huth.)— 

 I dislike Koch's work and feel sure that if he had read any of mine he would have disliked it.  

Koch admirers would gag at the above statement.   

If Koch is seen by anyone as my "spiritual father," I demand a paternity test. 

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afterthought 03/18/12:

I should apologize for using that word "goof-off"—

I mean, apologize for being redundant—because, after all, when you employ the term 'PoViz' you don't have to add "goof-off," it's already implied—

what is a PoVizzer?  It's sort of like a "rock poet"—

you know the definition of a Rock Poet: as a poet, they're a great rocknroller; as a rocker, they're a great poet.  In other words, they suck in both.  

A VisPo or PoVizzer could be similarly defined: as visual artists, they're great poets; as poets, they're great visual artists.  In other words . . .


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reprint from old blog circa 08

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i do read SON (School of Noisiness) blogs,

and have been bemused recently by their inane Spicer mania——

the lines they quote from him seem to me to be banal or at best mediocre,

and i shake my head over what the Piss-Avants can see in him—

then i read the review of his Collected by Bill Corbett which says quote:

"It is almost impossible to quote Spicer in any useful way. He wrote lots of stand-alone poems, but the serial poem was his preferred form, separate but linked."

. . . i've been hearing horseshit like this from the Avanti-Ranties all my life—

—i remember Diane Wakoski informing me in 1970 that my failure to appreciate Robert Kelly's poetry would be remedied if i would only read ALL of it——all 300 pages of it . . . (it was 300 pages in 1970, what's it up to by now, 3 thousand? —Jerome Rothenberg's blog ran a rave recently anent Kelly that informed us his 50 published books were only a fraction of his entire output)—

yeah: so if i read ALL of Spicer's poetry (and ALL of the Post-Aholes that Silliman PRs for), then i'll see the merit in it——

every Spicer poem i've seen online is junk, or middling at most——

a quote from Jack Spicer:

"…The trick naturally is what 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..."

>>>and that presents the dichotomy here: we SOQs continue to want to write the perfect poem, and the SONs have abandoned that quest to pursue their endless unconfined poeticking——

it's poem versus poetry,

that schism that split will not yield to any "third way", no matter what intriquing terminology you lard it with: Hybrid, anyone? . . .

 the real schismatic diff between SOQ and SON is that the former write poems and the latter write poetry——

    i'm hardly the first to point this out——

    as Corbett acknowledges about Spicer——

    but i think it applies to all or certainly most of the poets in the two groups——

    it is the arrogance of the Avantistes to expect that their work will be read in its entirety——indeed, they demand it as an essential of the esthetic encounter——as Wakoski was convinced in her belief that i must first read all of Kelly's verse before i could pass judgement on his value——and i am convinced that her belief is shared by all or most Avants——

it is this assumption——

    this totalizing attitude or expectation that distinguishes and differentiates the SON poets from us SOQs——

    this seems to me to be the essential difference in our two camps——

    it's poem vs. poetry——

    and i don't think there can be/will be any lasting practical synthesis or transcendance of these antithetical positions . . .

 /

    when i say above "and i am convinced that her belief is shared by all or most Avants"——

    i mean in general,——

the SON says in the imperative:

    "Here is my poetry, my Work:

    you must read it all to understand its significance."

    the SOQ says with a shrug:

    "Here are my poems: I hope some of them look interesting to you; and the ones that don't, unh—"

 /

    we SOQs are essentially lazy backyarders, quotidian empiricists of the possible,

    while the SONs are empire builders, theorists who seek to prevail over all entities—

    (as Ron puts it daily:

    My name is Sillimandias, King of blogs: look at my stats, ye SOQlings, and despair!)

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reprint from old blog circa 2006-7

look at this, which I cut and pasted from some website:

Meghan O’Rourke is one of the brightest new voices in contemporary poetry and American culture. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, earned her B.A. from Yale in 1997, and that summer began her literary career at the New Yorker, first as an editorial assistant, then in 2000 as an editor.  Since 2002 she has served as culture editor for Slate, and in 2005 was named co-poetry editor, with Charles Simic, of the Paris Review.

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From Yale to New Yorker to The Paris Review . . . is how it goes.   The tradition continues.  The road is paved: see the quotes from Bourdieu below.

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What is Meghan O'Rourke's secret?  Why her?  Why is she showered with these prestigious jobs,— why does she have a bigpress book that duly and automatically gets a rave in the NYTimes (prepaid for, as it were) when other poets her age who are a dozen times better than her (—okay, that wouldn't be that hard—) can't even find a publisher . . .  her "career" is a gilded glidepath, greased with opportunity.

What poet her generation wouldn't want the Kenyon Review to call them "one of the brightest new voices in contemporary poetry and American culture" . . .

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I repeat: why her?  There have to be at least two hundred poets her age who write better poems than her.  And her prose isn't any better: Slatejournalese, N'Yawkerpap.

How can such a mediocrity be so successful?  . . .

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These thoughts from Bourdieu might be relevant to the O'Rourke case-file:

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Pierre Bourdieu: "School [the institutional education system] actually reproduces the cultural division of society in many visible and invisible ways despite its apparent neutrality."

(Or: [Po-Biz] actually reproduces the cultural division of society in many visible and invisible ways despite its apparent neutrality.)

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London Review of Books, 20 April 2006: Bruce Robbins writes that

Bourdieu had "an extreme scepticism about the structures of formal democracy, which he believed functioned so as to disguise the hereditary transmission of privilege, allowing the success of some and the failure of the rest to appear as an innocent process of selection on merit."

From the same review (p. 18): 

"[For Bourdieu,] domains like art and science, which appear to be free from the political and economic constraints operating elsewhere, are in fact structured by an aggessive competition for 'symbolic capital' that is neither open nor equitable. In one way or another, things are arranged so that rewards end up in the hands of those who started at the top of the social hierarchy." 
  

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