knottbelievable

new class at St Marks Poetry Project:

Poetry Lab: What Can a Poem Be?— TODD COLBY

Saturday, October 6, 2012
2:00 pm	to	4:00 pm

Saturdays 2-4PM: 10 sessions begin October 6th
What can a poem be? We’ll attempt to answer this question while creating new modes and forms of poetry just outside the dominant culture. In this class we’ll create a safe place to take chances, to openly speculate and participate in the ongoing dialogue that ensues. There will be weekly experiments and assignments and a lot of in-class writing. We’ll tumble together through collaborations and mutual innovations. We’ll explore poetry through play, joy, openness, immediacy, profound ideologies, music, and art. We’ll take risks that allow us to reinvent ourselves as poets every time we sit down to write. We’ll create poems that don’t resemble or sound like poems; all the while being totally committed to the idea of broadening the borders of the possibilities of poetry. We’ll leap off a platform constructed by Henri Michaux, Reggie Watts, Djuna Barnes, Bill Knott, Fernando Pessoa, Hannah Weiner, E.M. Cioran, Ben Marcus, Gertrude Stein, Andy Kaufman, Sei Shonagon, Joe Brainard, Walter Benjamin, Diane Williams, and more. Todd Colby is the author of four books of poetry published by Soft Skull Press.

...

!  Hunh?  

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more of the same (a repost with a thought or two added)

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Many anthologie­s published by Penguin in England are issued simultaneo­usly here— but the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse wasn't— why? why are there no anthologie­s of Social­ist or Commun­ist poetry published in this country? Every year USA publishers somehow find the money to issue endless anthologie­s of "spiritual­" poetry, but there is not (to my knowledge) ever an anthol of atheist verse— why? Who puts up the money for all these religious anthols? Who funds this vicious christer crapaganda?


The CIA promoted the New York School of artists in the 1950s and reportedly helped finance The Paris Review and Encounter and who knows how many other literary magazines. . . and if there is one characteristic shared by all secret intelligen­ce agencies since WWII, isn't it the imperative to expand, to increase both their budget and their number of personnel (the size of which are always classified), to grow, to gain ever greater power and prestige, and to continue to impose their ideological agendas and to spread their influence and domination into every aspect of society . . .


So why would the CIA (or the NSA or how many other acronymic bureaus of faceless conspirators) not continue funding cultural entities from the 1950s right up to the present?  I mean: Why would they stop? Have they ever stopped intervening in any other domain?  Have they ever stopped for one second their constant efforts to manipulate and control every sociopolitical / economic arena around the globe? Does anybody believe they don't expend billions to coerce every aspect of the media? And if the media, why not the arts? —Really: why wouldn't they?  What's stopping them?  Having once created an extensive program and set in motion departmental protocols to interfere in the realm of the arts, and having established significant inroads there, why on earth would they cease and desist?  Given the historical trajectories of most such clandestine bureaucracies, does that seem likely?

And, given the CIA's choice in the 1950s to promote and fund the New York School of Painters, wouldn't you expect it to continue supporting similar offshoots of the Avant-Garde?  Remember that the Agency's chief James Angleton was a disciple of Ezra Pound (and probably ran the Op that saved Pound from being prosecuted for war crimes).  Therefore, assuming the CIA had continued its involvement in the Arts (and I repeat: why wouldn't it?), wouldn't it also continue its investment in the Avant-garde?  Imagine which poets it would have favored (Pound . . . Avant-garde . . . any names come to mind?)



USA poets know that writing innocuous 'spiritual­' or 'psycholog­ical' or 'existenti­al' or 'elliptical' or 'aleatory' or 'memoiristic' or 'postmod' or 'flarf' or 'newthingist' or massmedia-dictated 'pop' verse and other inoffensive brands of poetry will be beneficial to their careers.  Out of fear of persecution or censorship, most USAPO suppress any wayward urge to write political poetry or 'protest' verse.


They know where their bread is buttered, who pays their bills, and indeed how the State sponsors and supports them with its agencies—


of which the CIA is not the least beneficial:


because not only is Langley rumored to have founded and funded litmags like the Paris Review, it also and perhaps more importantly takes on the onerous task of going into foreign countries and eliminatin­g the potential competitor­s of USA poets . . . For example: How many young Chilean poets were murdered or suicided or impoverish­ed or exiled by the CIA-instal­led Pinochet regime? Think of the chagrin and embarrassm­ent USA poets suffered some decades ago when they compared their work to the great Chilean poets like Neruda and Parra, how solipsisti­cally small and provincial and futile their poems seemed in contrast to those Latin American masters. . . but now, in the succeeding years, hasn't that situation improved thanks to the CIA?


It's not just Chile, of course.  Imagine how many other South American poets have been killed or quashed and quelled by CIA black-ops.  Not to mention Africa, Asia et al.


Think of it: all those foreign poets who right this minute might be writing better poetry than our native versifiers­: thankfully that ongoing threat is being countered daily by the CIA.


USA poets know (though they rarely if ever acknowledge it) how much the CIA and other government agencies help promote the health and prosperity of AmeriPoBiz Inc!


They know that the majority of their publications, most of the magazines and books their exciting breakthrough verse appears in, are largely funded by the CIA or, if not directly by the CIA, then through the distributive channels of other indirect pipeline organizations via the standard "cut-out" methods,

funding which then is managed and administered by the executives of AmeriPoBiz Inc—


which USA poets are for the most part devoted or subservient employees of.


And most USAPO are grateful to be subsidized and supported thus.


And to show their gratitude they write all these poems about how their mom and dad were only human but they love them anyway, or how mystically moved they are by the apparition­s of tangency as it transpires in the treetops or their laptops.


Everybody knows that USAPO who write apolitical verse are rewarded for it, they win the top prizes and grants, their books are foisted into libraries everywhere and their careers are glide-path­ed. Louise Gluck and Charles Wright are two egregious examples of what I mean, but really most of this country's "leading poets" are similarly components in the con.  The construct.


Bought-off, co-opted by endowment patronage from the state's cultural authoritie­s, USA poets know it doesn't pay to write political poems, and ergo most of them don't—


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two very good poems—

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—two poems by a poet I haven't read before, to me they seem very well-written, impressively imaginative, worthy of rereading:


http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Paula-Bohince-Two-Poems/


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of course poets whose work I praise are embarrassed and hate being lauded by me—they wish I had kept my keyboard shut—no poet wants a blurb from me—a good word from me can only harm their career, not help it . . .

in fact, if I were conniving enough, if I had the guile-style to do it, I would write posts praising the poets I loathe—Charles Wright, for example—knowing that my approbation would taint and undermine their reputations—

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Rutger Kopland dead at age 77

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I see that Rutger Kopland died this past week:

http://romenu.skynetblogs.be/archive/2012/07/15/in-memoriam-rutger-kopland.html

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Here is a reprint of my earlier "appreciation" of a sonnet by the Dutch poet:

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appreciation: Rutger Kopland's "Breughel's Winter"
...

I admire James Brockway's translations of Rutger Kopland's poems . . .
This Dutch poet is (was? I hope he's still alive, born in 1934) much
honored in his native country. Brockway before his own death did
2 or 3 books of selections in English.

Here's my favorite:

Breughel's Winter

Winter by Breughel, the hill with hunters
and dogs, at their feet the valley with the village.
Almost home, but their dead-tired attitudes, their steps
in the snow—a return, but almost as

slow as arrest. At their feet the depths
grow and grow, become wider and further,
until the landscape vanishes into a landscape
that must be there, is there, but only

as a longing is there.

Ahead of them a jet-black bird dives down. Is it mockery
of this labored attempt to return to the life
down there: the children skating on the pond,
the farms with women waiting and the cattle?

An arrow underway, and it laughs at its target.

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A sonnet. With a truncate-jolt volte after an octave in which repetitions of words and phrases (at their feet, at their feet, grow and grow, landscape, landscape, there, there) act to lengthen or delay our progress, to pause us as the hunters have been halted for the static moment of Breughel's depiction,

caught upon his crest.

The jet-black bird, the crow, the raven, harbinger of mortality, or symbol of its post-predatory ease.—

It doesn't have to trudge down that slope with feet aching from the endless trek, lugging the heavy slay on sag shoulders, it can dive down zoom, as fast as the skating kids.

Does this swoop mock their laborious attempts to return to the down-there life of children farms women cattle?

These adult males stand there suspended, the wild at their backs and the domestic before them;

their duties as savage hunterkillers and their duties as tending-to fathers farmers husbands and stockbreeders hang in the balance,

poised at this schizophrenic midpoint. Here, there (four "theres" in the poem), it's split—

The bird is an arrow of course, but so is the artist's brush, the feather at its front instead of at the tail; the hairthin threadstrands of the brushpoint are feathery in their effect.

The target—the work of art—can rarely or perhaps never be reached by this arrow's flight.

The artist's paintbrush is always underway.

Underway, halfway between the willed desire of the artist to stalk down his/her feral-furred nature, to haul it baked into the cozy parlance of the anthology—

It hunts its target to feed our needs, but what are these hungers; and where do they achieve rest, cave-wall or salon?

Does it laugh to demean, to dehumanize its victims for the abattoir: worldhistory's pogrom patrons and patriarchs stationed, armed with grins, at their torture posts and burning stakes—

Does it laugh at what it aims to pierce, it laughs at its prey, risus sardonicus laughs at us.

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as good as or better than

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just left a couple comments praising this poem at "e-universe":


http://www.everseradio.com/fancy-jehanne-dubrow/#comment-422379


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Please go take a read at it if you can.   The poet's name is Jehanne Dubrow.  She writes this kind of poem about as well as or better than any contemporary who comes to my mind, including some Pulitzer Prize winners.


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from bad bad to worse

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I have become the epitome of everything wrong in writing—

For example,

when the moralist Craig Morgan Teicher wants to insult a young poet, he uses his pulpit at Publishers Weekly to tar him or her with me—

2 examples: the first from his review of Chelsea Minnis's book "Bad Bad":

"Petulant, clever, sometimes funny, sometimes irritatingly flippant, Minnis's poems will inspire questions as to whether this work qualifies as poetry at all, though some readers — fans of, say, Bill Knott, at his silliest — may find much to like."

The second, again from a review in PW:

"[Karl] Parker is one of the oddest poets you're likely to meet. . .  No poet has had this kind of simultaneous reverence for and disregard of the poetic tradition since Bill Knott." 

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—and here from another censurer, this tweet:

26 May Daniel Casey ‏@winslowbobbins
 

Bill Knott is Tao Lin in 30 yrs

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Daniel Casey must really despise Tao Lin to say something this vicious.  To forecast such a horrible fate for this or any young writer seems kind of hardhearted and punitively pessimistic wouldn't you say.

Think of the sad miserable future Casey is predicting for this young writer Tao Lin: 30 years from now he will be detested, scorned and ridiculed by everyone in the literary establishment, his books will be rejected by every publisher, his work will never appear in anthologies, he will be blacklisted, declared persona non grata, etc., etc.  He will be unemployable.  He will never be invited to give readings or participate in conferences at the AWP or the PSA or Poets House or any other locus of lit-world power.  No magazine will publish his work.  His name will be a curse-word used to condemn other writers.  In short, his life will be the same as mine has been for as long as I can remember. 
 
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It seems the worst insult you can apply to a young writer is to associate them with me.

Imagine how hurt and humiliated Minnis and Parker and Lin and others must feel to read such a cruel invidious comparison.

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And then of course there's this:

"Bill Knott, the crown prince of bad judgment."

—Ron Silliman, Silliman's Blog, June 26, 2007

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Yes: if you want to slashtag the wrongness and badness of any writer, just invoke my name.  You can't damn them worse than that.

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ad/verse

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A poem by Glenn Shaheen, from the Spring 2012 issue of Ploughshares:
 

ISRAEL

Steam lifting from the highways, ascending
to the heavens beneath the misery of commute,
fires below the pavement. I have become

a better driver by the standards of Houston.
I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt.
No, ok, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All

this blinding steel and glass, we’ve made
the world a brighter place. They tell me Israel
is a great problem. I don’t care. They tell me

it is our final hope. The world is a maze of
definitions and borders, problems, signs painted
in an array of colors scientifically chosen to

arrest the vision. Israel is a place that rolls
from the tongue. There are no enemies unless
you make it so, unless you inch menacingly

over the paint. The album is criticized for its
lack of structure, for the singer’s refusal to
repeat herself. Hold me, hold me, the heater

is broken, cars are being pulled over outside.
Adults are in the park, groping casually over
glasses of wine they’re not supposed to have.

It’s all true, I am weak. Give me a nation
to hate, to love, to touch and trust the borders of.
Come here, entreat me - inside of you, on you,

what difference does it make. Nobody to call
and nobody who would come out. Come forth,
fond wrench, and do something different to me.


/


I hope to write some thoughts about this poem in an upcoming post . . . thanks to Mr. Shaheen for allowing me to reprint it here.


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