more on new thingism (cont. from previous post)

*
I don't have the exact quote, but somewhere Alfred Hitchcock said something to the effect that

critics who complained about the trivial or tawdry low-brow content of his films were like a museum-goer wondering whether Cezanne's apples were sweet or sour.

They miss the point, he insisted. It's not content that's important, it's style.

Any old apple or wheelbarrow or pistol poking out of a pocket will do for a subject.

Content is irrelevant, or should be, according to this theory:

the viewer or reader must focus first and foremost on the artist's stylistic choices and methods.

Indeed, the audience is commanded to believe that

WHAT the artist says or shows is secondary to HOW he or she does it.

As John Ciardi summarises the theory in his 1958 book 'How Does a Poem Mean,'

"Anything significantly looked at is significant."

In fact, in this dispensation, in this scale of esthetics, the more insignificant the ostensible subject is, the better.

Objectivist poetry (and much of Imagist) is based on this tenet.

Reznikoff: 'About an excavation a flock of bright red lanterns has settled.' (This example comes from the canonical Norton Modern Anthol.)

What makes this a poem? (And not merely a poem: no, it's now a Work of Literature, due to its enshrinement in the Norton)—

Maybe the linebreaks, for a start. I've deliberately left them out, in honor of all the 'prose poems' being written currently—

And then of course the metaphor: the lanterns are no longer lanterns per se, they're seen as a "flock" of "settl[ing]" birds.

Does this metaphorical overlay make it poetry? (I assume the comparison is deliberately clicheish—I mean, birds?)

The subject/object being depicted is ordinary, everyday, banal, something you've seen many times, especially in urban areas:

a hole, a trench has been dug, an "excavation", presumably for the usual purposes: to lay or repair waterpipes, electrical grids, etc. Installing cables. And then when the workers quit for the day, they leave lanterns, flashing lights, signs and sawhorses around the open pit, as warnings to protect pedestrians/motorists from straying into it—

About an excavation
a flock of bright red lanterns
has settled.

"Anything significantly looked at is significant," lectures John Ciardi, who insists that "How" a poem means is more important that "What" it means—

but is it? I wonder. I think this may be an idea (an ideal, really) whose time has passed.

This belief—that the content of a poem is irrelevant,

that poets are free to seize upon any trivial object, any thingy-thing-thing in the environment around them,

and then, through the power of their craft and the manipulations of their genius,

can transform that common thing, that wheelbarrow or street-flasher or this:

"Between walls (the back wings of the hospital) where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle."

What makes this poetry? I've left out the linebreaks.

If you saw this described in a scene in a novel—
you know, something like: "During lunchbreak Dr. Wayben stepped out for a cigarette in the area back of the surgical and ER wings and noticed down among the cinder gravel back there where grass never grew, some pieces of a broken green bottle; he wondered for a moment if it was a medicine or a wine bottle: either one, its shards gleamed up eagerly and desperately as his dying patient Julia Roach's eyes, smashed apart down there in the bleak shadows cast by the clinic blocks that towered behind him as he stood puffing. . . ." etc. etc.—

If you read it in a novel—and such intentionalized observations and characterizational metaphors abound in most fiction—it would just be another paragraph in the narrative . . .

But isolate that sight, that glimpse of glass in the dark gravel, chop that observation up into abrupt lines and stanzas, and presto it's poetry?

In this "Objectivist" mode the worse your subject matter is, the more trivial tawdry and ordinary it is, the better it is—

*
It's the arrogance of this theory which I find most offensive.

The Objectivist poet is in effect saying to their audience:

"Yes yes, I know you want poems about Important Significant Events Subjects,

but if I were to give in and give you such poems, you would focus your interest more upon those ISES

and less upon me!—

Distracted by that salient content, you might ignore and or insuffiently appreciate me, my artistry—

Look: here, I take this old wheelbarrow, this common roadside lantern, these unnoticed pieces of broken glass in the gravel,

or any trivial everyday phenomenon, any household object,

and lo, behold, even these mere nothing-things, these disposable sights and signs,

even the humblest is elevated by my craft my skill my genius

into the realm of art!

I take this mud and godlike transform it into gold.

And moreover, worse fate of all, if I gave you the poems you want, you might worship them instead of me."

—The Objectivist/NewThingypoo poet takes their credo from number one on the big 10 list: thou shalt have no other gods before me.


///

nonseq

*
There should be an app that lets you take a "prose poem" and instantly lineate it,

break it up into lines,

(syllabic or generic blank verse lines, for example),

so that it could then be read to ascertain whether there is indeed any poetry in it—

otherwise, how can you tell?

*

grr

*
EPITAPH FOR A DOG

Thieves I attacked; for lovers I kept still;
And so performed my lord's, and lady's, will.

—Martin Opitz (1597-1639)

translation by Raymond Oliver, in his book "To Be Plain: Translations from Greek, Latin, French, and German", 1981—

*
my flings at it:

GOOD DOG BAD DOG

I keep the thieves at bay
With growls and grunts and grrs—
But I look the other way
For gigolos and lovers:
Thus doubly I obey
Both my Lord's and Lady's orders.

...

huh:

I barked off thieves afraid
of my lunges jumps and gyres,
while lovers came or stayed—
see how straitly I obeyed
both my Lord's and Lady's desires.

('gyres' doesn't work . . . maybe 'flyers' (as leaps), or fleeing thieves—

My barks kept thieves afraid
and turned them into flyers

and sent them helter-skyers

and fled/sped them fast-off flyers

and set their heels to fires

outliers / liars / briars

(my barks were sharp as briars)

My snarls kept thieves afraid,
my barks bit them like briars

/

My barks kept thieves afraid
and set their heels to fires, / heels at fires

/
My barks made burglars turn afraid
and spanked their cars to backfires,
while panting lovers parked and played—
a special traffic-ward-dog, I obeyed
both my Master and Mistress's desires.

/
My barks made burglars terrified
and spanked their cars to backfires,
while lovers parked and slinked inside—
doubly-good guarddog, I satisfied
both my Master and Mistress's desires.

/
Thieves and burglars ran terrified,
my yips and yaps were vicious—
but lovers I let slip inside:
thus janus-face I satisfied
my Master's and Mistress's wishes.

///

narratific

*
I've complained here about the ineptitude of some contemporary narrative verse by USAPO—

see my posts on poems by Wojahn and Plumly, for example—

or my recent response to a "prose poem" by Robert Halfhass—

but there are good/great narrative poems being written by today's poets—

Stephen Dobyns (to name one) has written dozens of them. Dobyns must be the most underrated poet around—

his poetry should have received major prizes long ago. But of course Dobyns

is envied by other poets because of his distinguished record as a novelist—

and so those other poets who "judge" the National Book Award and the Pulitzer etc.,

well, fuck, they're not going to give a poetry honor to any poet who's slash a successful novelist,

are they—

when's the last time that happened? was it Robert Penn Warren,—has it happened since then,

has any poet/novelist gotten one of the plum po-prizes, since him?

(I can't recall any; maybe I should go and factcheck the lists of winners since Warren, before I make this accusation)—

Anyway, it seems as if the main requirement for a poetry judge is an alliterative one: jealousy.

(See this previous year's shunning of Seidel's Collected by the panels who picked; hell, they're not going to give it to a millionaire, are they;

except Richard Howard, he's a wealthy gentleman, and they gave his poetry a Pulitzer,

but then Howard for most of his life was the chief dispenser of po-pork in the land:

wasn't he the capo tuttifuck, the kingpink who doled out the the graft,

the nero-nabob who awarded the sweetheart contracts,

the biggycrat who ladled out the cash for all the usual boondoggeral projects,

from his chieftain's-chair up there at PoBiz Inc.)—

Hey, Laura Kasischke,— you're a wonderful poet, your poems are great stuff, but you're writing all those novels in addition to your verse,

and look at the track-record: Dobyns, and Marge Piercy, two names that come to mind of poet-novelists,

neither of whose poetry has gotten the credit and accolade due it.

*
But I've strayed from my original intent with this post, which was to point to a good narrative poem, this one:

http://www.versedaily.org/2010/recess.shtml

—Whose virtues are obvious, I should think.

Compare it with a narrative poem I think is bad, or incompetent:

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14848

—The good one is superior to the bad one not just in its technical skill and style,

but in its clarity: you can tell what's going on in the poem, what's happening:—

and that seems to me the absolute essential basic ingredient of any narrative poem.

Because if I can't ascertain the

who/what/where/when

from a narrative poem I'm trying to read,

well, I get frustrated.

I see what the one I can't appeciate is trying to do, or think I see: to replicate the emotional confusion of the narrator/protagonist

via the misleads and meanders and maunderings of the writing—

the poet is leaving it up to me the reader to supply the missing factual context/frame, the empirical details

for the poem—

which doesn't want to show: it wants to, what, evoke? Sorry, but after repeated readings I can barely adumbrate what this poet/poem are saying or doing—literally.

They leave me wanting. The failure may be mine, of course, not theirs.

*
I don't write much narrative poetry, never have. I lack the necessary skills for a sustained depiction of events and characters,

for presenting a scene and the acts that occur therein—

my few attempts have never been satisfactory.

But I do enjoy reading narrative poems when they're done well.

I have (I hope) no prejudice against them simply because I can't write them,

but it's true I seem to have less patience when reading them than I do with lyric verse.

***

*
Poets should be issued pistols and authorized to execute on sight those malignants

known as "buskers"—

street musicians with their caterwaul guitars and awful lyrics (all plagiarized from poets, of course)—

obscene disturbers of the peace.

*
In a just world, all songwriters, writers of song lyrics —let me change that term to tunesmiths, since they don't really write anything, do they, no, they steal and corrupt the words of poets—

In a just world posses of poets would treat criminals like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan et al

the way rustlers were met in the old west: string them up from the nearest tree.

*
Benjamin Peret, or so I've read, would insult and hurl curses at priests when he passed them on the street—

not only should poets (and atheists in general) publicly vituperate the clergy,

we should extend that courtesy to any busker polluting the air of our towns—

we can't shoot them, unfortunately, but we can scream the truth at them as we walk by,

we can shout out the verdict of their iniquity: Thief! Vandal! etc.

*
As I've pointed out in many earlier posts on this blog,

poetry is (or should be) in a state of warfare with the other arts, all of whom oppress and exploit us—

but sadly all too many poets are quislings, class traitors disloyal to their comrades, constantly consorting with and supporting

our enemies. Which, I've noted several times, is not surprising given the lowly status of poets—

there are always slaves who will accomplice themselves to aid the master's oppression of their own suffering cohort—

*

47 million

*
for an egregious example of what I'm talking about in the previous post,

see page 13 of the Sunday Opinion section in today's NYTimes,

the Metropolitan Opera currently spending 16 million on a new production of Wagner's Ring,

while last year the Los Angeles Opera wasted 31 million on a similar fling—

Where are the poets protesting this misallocation of arts funding?

Where are the poets picketing these presentations,

lying down inside the opera houses refusing to move and forcing the police to drag them up the aisles with nightsticks and tasers,

where are the poets refusing to accept this injustice—

poetry is the least funded art, every poet knows: but

when are the poets going to rise up and battle against this inequity?

47 million: 470 poets could have been given a hundred thousand dollars apiece

to support their work,—

470 poets should have been granted this money,

but poets will never get the share of arts funding they rightfully deserve unless

they stand up and fight for it!

*
a fable:

The State (society, the institutional powers that be, etc) has budgeted 20 beans for the Arts—

of course 20 beans are too little, the State should allocate more beans, everybody knows, everybody bleats and tirades

that 20 beans are not enough funding for the Arts, etc., etc.,

the State should give them more, the State should blah blah blah—

the Artists endlessly complain they're being shortchanged in the State's dispersal of resources—

and they're right, of course: but so what?

The Artists can bang their heads against the State's palace doors all they like,

but 20 beans is it.

And eventually inevitably those 20 beans are distributed to the Arts:

Music gets 8 beans,

Film gets 4,

Painting/Visual gets 3,

Theater gets 3,

Prose gets 2,

Poetry gets—wait, aren't there any left? Did you count them right?


**

a familiar fable

*
If you were the member of a tribe that was constantly attacked by other tribes,

if for centuries those clans had continually robbed your crops and stole the fruit of your labors,

wouldn't you consider those groups your enemies?

And what if your tribe and those same hostile tribes were under the rule of a larger entity,

a body politic, a realm, that favored those rival tribes, that in the distribution of its wealth and benefits

had always unfairly granted those enemy tribes more resources than it gave to you—

If you were a member of this outcast caste, this slave class,

might you not resent and even rise up in rebellion against the system that despised and exploited you—

You probably would,

unless of course you were a Poet,

in which case you'd be kneeling down and kissing the ass of those enemy tribes

of Music, Painting, Film, etc.,

and prostrating yourself at the feet of your most rapacious enemy, the Prosewriter tribe,

and your whole tribe, every Poet would be groveling alongside you—

Nor would you and your fellow helots mass your forces in united protest against the State that supported and awarded its endowments

to those foe tribes of Musicmakers, Painters, Filmistes, Prosewriters, et al,

those adversary tribes who have eternally plundered and plagiarized your achievements, the produce of your hands,

who have commandeered, hijacked the goods your serfdom has created—

those rival tribes, whose punishment for the evil piracy of your work

has been what?

Not punishment, but prize: to garner the major share of any and whatever Arts funding

the greater society meagerly dispenses in its budgetary decisions.

*

But of course if you were a member of this tribe, it wouldn't be heredity; fate would not have cursed your birth into this family of Untouchables:

no, you would have joined it yourself, free will, you chose to enter this pariah pack

and suffer its abject, its humiliating impoverishments,

to sacrifice your life in masochistic menial fealty

and obsequious servitude, in endless subjection

to those superior vicious tribes who fang the food from your mouth, who loot your livelihood and ransack your soul,—

and oh yes, you'll crawl and humbly bless the god that rewards those enemies.

*

po-poirot

*
“Anyway (poetry) is not the most important thing in life, is it? Frankly, I'd much rather lie in a hot bath sucking boiled sweets and reading Agatha Christie, which is just exactly what I intend to do as soon as I get home.” —Dylan Thomas

**

repost from a couple years ago——

*
One of Wallace Stevens's many masterpieces, "The Man on the Dump," may reveal something of what it is that great poets do, or can do.

They forage, scavenge on every debris/each drop of detritus and forge it charge it reborn—

Part of that garbage, that scum of scrap they use is us—

we lesser poets.

Great poets can take other poets' failures and transform them into successes.

A great poet like James Tate can take the failed verse of dub poets and transform them into his masterful poems.

This is hyperbole perhaps, but there might be some truth to it.

This capability may be one of the many that separate great poets like Tate from flub poets like me.

Because, I think, and this is the thought that woke me up in distraction this morning,

the sad meager truth is that I can use nothing from other poets' failures. I do not have that capability—

No: I can only take other poets' successes and turn them into my failures.

The successful poet is the Man on the Dump,

the failed poet is the one lounging around in the King's Treasury.

Like all lesser poets I am doomed to waste my life taking the successful works of great poets and transforming them into my failed poems.

In fact I the lesser poet may have no source material, no resource but them, their verse.

I have nothing else to work with but their accomplishments.

Whereas they, the great poets, have for their wield not only the heap achievement of their fellow greats, but

(and this is the crucial difference between them and us)

they can also utilize the wasteproduct trash efforts of all us failed poets.

(Could it be a formulaic fate's-cross exchange: we failed poets have nothing to work with but the triumph-tomes of successful poets, while they, the great ones, have nothing to work with but our ruined rhymes—? No, too neat.)

Everything's piled on their scarred and stained workbench.

But on our escritoires only the heavy volumes of the Majors are lined up

and held up precariously

by the trembling bookends of our arms, our forearms—

which leaves our hands, our hands flapping around quite useless.

*

x

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.

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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.

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(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."

**

two scenes from Ian Hamilton

*
If you were as bored as I was by that arrogant hack Michael Hofmann's pathetic efforts to lump himself with the Legend of Ian Hamilton via the Jan 2010 issue of Poetry (Chicago),

here are a couple Hamilton squibs by much finer sources:

first, from the TLS: Hugo Williams' column (p.16, April 17/09), recounting a story from one of Hamilton's USA pobiz-crawls wherein he encountered, quote:

a certain professor who had gone on about the work of Clayton Eshleman. "Just a tremendous poet", he said. Surprised by this, Ian asked for the title of a good poem by Eshleman. "Oh, I don't know", said the professor. "Taken as a whole, you see. Just a tremendous poet." Ian insisted on knowing the name of a single decent poem so he'd be able to understand what the professor was talking about. "Oh for God's sake", the man said. "What is this anthologist's approach to literature?"
...

and here, from Simon Gray's "The Smoking Diaries," page 29, where Gray, after confessing his lifelong dislike of Auden, ruefully acknowledges:

". . . anyway, I've got to face it, almost everybody I like and a lot of people I admire, like and admire Auden, I used to admit as much as I nagged away at Ian [Hamilton], nagged frenetically away, even claiming once I had evidence to prove Auden was autistic—what evidence? Ian asked,—well, I said, he liked to pick his nose and eat it in front of people, and then, well, the poems! I said triumphantly, take 'In Praise of Limestone' and off I went— 'Actually, Auden stinks,' he said, out of nowhere, during one of our very last conversations, 'but his forms, you see, the way he could play about with forms'—and that was it, for him, as a practising poet there was an astonishing skill to be admired and studied. If you weren't a poet and were after meaning, sense and feeling you [wouldn't look to Auden], but if you had a technical interest in rhyme schemes, etc., for their own sake, and for the sake of your own practice, then Auden was worth your while—and so we left it at that, for the rest of his [Hamilton's] life, or at least of my time with him."

...
Gray's book has other evocative pages re Hamilton . . . Gray knew/was friends with him from university days:
one of his most successful plays, The Common Pursuit (subtitled 'Scenes from the Literary Life'), features as its key character ('Stuart') a simulacrum of Hamilton.

*
Inexpensive copies of The Common Pursuit are available at Amazon—the used hardcover page has copies for under a dollar—if it's the same hardcover edition I have, it will have a four-page insert of photos from the first USA production (with an exuberantly-young Nathan Lane in 3 of the pics)—

it's a great play, a fun play to read, and should be particularly fascinating to anyone who's ever aspired toward 'the literary life' . . .

*