as always, the French say these things with more flare

poetry archive

Un blog utilisant Le Blogue du Québec

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« Bill Knott’s reader re metrics blog

on the predominantly. on the predominantly. Mr. Knott practices a tatty not at home phraseology.-Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books, May 7, 1970[Bill Knott's poems are] typically fatuous. on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. He produces not the prototaxis of idiocy. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

. Rumor has it that Knott’s garb of giving his parturition and maximum dates together originated when he realized he could no longer clone the detestation of a metrics reading he was scheduled to be reduced.-Charles Molesworth, Poetry (Chicago) Magazine, May 1972[Bill] Knott’s het up b prepare tends today to excite solvent sacking. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [He's] been artificial to self-publish some of his late books. on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [B]ad-not to imply offensively grotesque-poetry. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

appalling on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. maddening on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. wildly uneven on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. unfinished, or obsessively constant on the predominantly. on the predominantly. grotesqueries on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. [His] phraseology is like solid, intimate maquillage on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. his poems give birth to a class of crawly accrual that’s less decorative than also leary or layered on the predominantly. on the predominantly. emotionally distancing on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. uncomfortable. Knott on the predominantly. on the predominantly. is a willful on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. irritating on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

contrarian.-Meghan O’Rourke, Poetry (Chicago) Magazine, Feb 2005[Bill Knott's books are] filled with spitefulness. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. Knott seems to antipathy himself on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

and he seems to antipathy his readers.-Kirk Robinson, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine, dated?)[Bill Knott's work] consists not clearly of asinine poems, that about vomit-provoking things. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [His metrics is] crude on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

and brainless.-Michael Heffernan, Midwest Quarterly, Summer 1973Knott is making capitol on epic methodology, attempting belatedly to a postcard the canon of the Language poets miserly reviving the cant of Ezra Pound. on the predominantly. [His poetry] so successfully defies communicating anything that singular wonders what [his publisher] had in fancy. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. Knott, it may be recalled, killed himself in the primeval 1960s.-R.

. S. Gwynn, The Year in Poetry, DLB Yearbook 1989Consider Bill Knott, a lyricist who writes lots of sheer straightforward poems that are nothing but gasconade pretending at being the share of singular crying in the wilderness.-Josh Hanson, Livejournal, 28/06/07: http://josh-hanson.livejournal.com/26249. htmlEccentric, uneven on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

. lyricist Bill Knott is not [fit] to carry off prizes on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [His het up b prepare is] controversial on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

rebellious, additional on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.-Robert Pinsky, Washington Post.com, April 17, 2005[Bill Knott's metrics is] queerly unfinished on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. sheer outlandish.

. on the predominantly. bodily to the highlight germane of ingloriousness. on the predominantly.

. on the predominantly. his idiosyncrasy has grown formulaic, his inconspicuous poems more inconspicuous, his brief observations so brief they scoot miserly without leaving much of a dent in the reader. on the predominantly.

. There is a petulance at het up b prepare [in his poetry]. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

[H]is set has grown covet in the tooth. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

. In in highlight germane of fact, [at least singular of his poems is] unethical.-Marc Pietrzykowski, Contemporary Poetry Review (http://www.cprw.com/Pietrzykowski/beats.htm)Bill Knott’s [poetry is the equal of] scrimshaw. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. [He's] either self-consciously worrisome or it is reasonable that a fake too slangily up-to-date.-Stephen Burt, New York Times Book Review, November 21, 2004Bill Knott['s] hoary, hypothetical ramblings are in the main of what’s off the beam with metrics today. on the predominantly.

Ignore the intimate bastard.-Collin Kelley (from They Shoot Poets Don’t They blog, August 08, 2006)Bill Knott bores me to tears.-Curtis Faville, http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/05/moore-formalism-post-avant-part-three.html[Bill Knott is] inadequate on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.-Alicia Ostriker, Partisan Review (date? 1972?)Bill Knott’s poems are on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

rhetorical blunder on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

and counterfeit.-Ron Loewinsohn, TriQuarterly, Spring 1970Bill Knott on the predominantly. on the predominantly. is so lousy singular can not lament in rejoinder.-Peter Stitt, Georgia Review, Winter 1983Bill Knott [is] the area prince of lousy judgment. on the predominantly. on the predominantly.

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>>>>>

joke

from page 8 of the New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007,

Julian Barnes recounts:

A British Euro-joke tells of a meeting of officials from various countries who listen to a British proposal, nodding sagely at its numerous benefits; the French delegate stays silent until the end, then taps his pencil and remarks, "I can see that it will work in practice. But will it work in theory?"

Substitute "SOQ poetry" for "British proposal," and "SON poet" for "French delegate" and the joke still works, I think.

But while the School-of-Quietude poet does value Practice, and the School-of-Noisiness poet valorizes Theory, this is (like the British/French characterization) overall a generalization, and can't apply to every individual case—

For example, thinking of jokes, humor: surely the SOQ Bidart and the SON Palmer are clones in their droneful solemnity, their drastic seriousness, their complete omission of the comic muse?

(Palmer of course inserts a double space inbetween his lines so his poems can kill twice as many trees as the normal poem (Lebensraum, Lebensraum, his cramped lines cry); and Bidart: sometimes he too spreads his lines sparsely and straggledy-taggledy down the page to blitzkrieg the margins of poetry's Maginot line . . . )

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xxxx

reposts from 06 blog:

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the furies

"The plagiarism Furies, idle for a time as the more clandestine and irreproachable forms of literary borrowing and imitation continue from day to day, have been unloosed again. . . . This time, the context is the British literary world, and the accused is one of its leading lights, so the indictment has taken on a moderate, even decorous tone. Ian McEwan has been called to account for using some brief wording in his best-selling novel "Atonement" that some feel was drawn too directly from, rather than merely inspired by, a memoir by the romance novelist Lucilla Andrews."

The above quote comes from the NYTimes of Dec 3rd, 2006; [a few days later] the Times reported that "heavyweights like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and . . . Thomas Pynchon [have] arisen in defense of Mr. McEwen. Most of the writers said that [they had] done the same thing themselves."

It's interesting when these "Furies" erupt in the world of prose, as they occasionally do: because it never or almost never happens in poetry. There are certain poets who assimilate and appropriate biographies, and then present that culled material, sometimes with little or no alteration, as poems. Yet no one ever confronts these poets, no one ever asks Frank Bidart where the plagiarism ends and the poetry begins.

Prose is important, prose writers are important, and so what they do is covered and reported on by the major media. But poetry? Nobody cares. The New Yorker, which is what, supposedly the mag every literate USAer reads, pays infinitely more attention to pop music than to poetry. Almost every music event in NYC appears in their listings, and almost none of the poetry events. . .

Think of the money spent by governments/societies to support music, as opposed to poetry. They support music because music supports them; it facilitates their tyrannies. In the case of the USA, the Pentagon's budget as opposed to human services; the NEA's stipends for music compared to what it piddles out to poets.

Scientists who tolerate their enemy, religion, have a death-wish; poets who don't attack the hegemony of music, who don't protest against its disproportionate and unwarranted dominance of the cultural sphere, are similarly defeatist. The assets available for the arts are limited, and music gobbles up more resources than it deserves. Poets who support this, and who make excuses for the sovereignty of music over poetry, are suicidal traitors. Just as scientists like Richard Dawkins and others have begun to actively oppose and combat the evil of religion, so poets must work against the dictatorship of music, and must use every means to denounce and denigrate it.
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The New Yorker manages to review prose books every week; why can't they review at least one poetry book per week? If poets weren't such lickspittles and wimps they would boycott and refuse to submit their work to The New Yorker until it paid regular attention to poetry. And boycott every other semi-literary journal, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Bookforum, the TLS, the LRB etcetera, until they start giving regular attention to verse. Hell, the New York Review of Books reviews more music than it does poetry, and more books about music than books about poetry. Why do poets put up with such neglect and disregard? Why don't they fight back?

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The disparity between the funding for music and the funding for poetry is insane. Poetry is the most important art. Ergo, poetry should receive more funding than any other art. More attention should be paid to poetry than any other art. For every printpage and webpage devoted to music, a dozen should be allotted to poetry. For every dollar that goes to music, poetry should collect a hundred, a thousand!

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In reality, of course, poetry is the most abject, the lowest of the arts. The most ignored, the least recognized and honored, the least rewarded. Count the millionaire novelists around the globe, the millionaire painters and scriptwriters, the multimillionaires of music . . . the wealth that accumulates around all the arts but poetry. And ask yourself, poet, what you have in common with them. They hate you, you know it: they despise you. They have nothing but contempt for you. All the other arts look down with disgust at poetry. When will you turn that contempt back at them? When will you scorn them, and deny them the commendation they refuse you. (Oh yes, they all offer lipservice specious praise to poetry, smirking behind their hands at the hypocrisy of the gesture that costs them nothing.) Even poets (you know this too) hate poetry, and disdain poets. How can we not hate ourselves and hate each other; we're poets, we're slaves: Genet said it best, in The Maids: "When slaves love each other, it's not love they feel." Poetry is the slave of the arts, and poets are slaves to the prosewriter and the painter, and even more to the molochs of music. What kind of slave reveres and worships its oppressors? The masochist kind portrayed by Genet: the poet kind.

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But what's the real plagiarism story here, the one that won't be covered by the Times or any other organ of the Masters? Plagiarism: theft. In the realm of the arts, who are the ones most stolen from? who are the ones robbed everyday of the prestige and recognition and respect they deserve? Whose true-earned recompense is snatched away by fictionwriters and painters and musicmullahs? And more than that, more criminal than that, whose ideas and concepts are historically and always and still today are the most plagiarized? Daily, hourly, poet-slaves produce goods which are expropriated and exploited by the other arts. That's the ongoing plagiarism scandal hushed-up and suppressed by every media. No famous novelist or filmmaker or rockstar or painter is going to do an Op-ed about that inequity, or band together (like those "heavyweights" mentioned in the Times article quoted above) to write letters of protest against that iniquity. These are the crooks who steal the work of poets, and they aren't going to confess or atone or make reparations. They're going to keep on plagiarizing poets every chance they get, yesterday today and tomorrow. (Have prosewriters ever been capable of original thought; haven't they always stolen all their ideas from poets.)

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But hey, don't let me stop you, poets. Go on, go ahead and kiss-ass praise the millionaire Pynchon, the millionaire Jasper Johns, praise all the success-practitioners of the Master arts, the crumbs from their tables may fill you yet. It's your duty as slaves to curry favor with those above you, to flatter and obsequiate your betters. And praise most those writers who began as poets but abandoned poetry, who betrayed poetry for the chance to move up the foodchain of the arts, after all if you could hum a tune you too might get rich like Leonard Cohen and fuck moviestars; you'd do it if you could, wouldn't you. Of course you would. Because, let's face it, who would want to be a poet when they could be a novelist or a songwriter or a screenwriter or a rockstar or a Cindy Sherman or a what's his name, that Brit artist who cuts sharks in half,—who would want to remain a poet, the lowest puke on the cultural totempole? Only a fool, a masochist, a scumbag, who can't weasel their way into any of the real arts, who has to sink to the bottom of the bard-barrel, the pegasus-dregs. Poetry, the most ignored, the least compensated of the arts. . . but you already know this; why am I wasting my time telling you what you already know.

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December 07, 2006

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December 17, 2006

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The world of Art mirrors the world of Society. Just as the latter is based on hierarchy, on
a class system, so is the former.

And in the world of Art, poetry is the lowest class.

In the world of Art, poets are the proles, the slaves.

Just as slaves in the world of Society are bullied and beaten, treated as subhuman, so in the world of Art poets are similarly abused.

All the wealth/value produced by Society's slaves is stolen from them by those in the higher classes. The latter grow rich on the former's misery.

Every idea or good generated by poet-labor is also stolen, plagiarized by the higher classes of Music, Painting, Film and Prose. They prosper on the poet's back. All their wealth comes from stealing and using what the poet-slave produces.

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As slaves, poets internalize their inferior status. We grovel before the Masters of Music Painting Film and Prose. We become their lickspittles, their toadies, their dogs, obsequiously grateful for the least crumb falling from their fat tables.

We flatter kiss-ass praise these Masters for their greatness, forgetting that every good every gram of worth they possess, every virtue, was stolen from us.

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From time to time the slaves of Society have risen up against their evil Masters, have rebelled against their oppressors.

But the slaves of Art, the poets, have they ever revolted against their oppressive Masters?

Never.

We have never tried to rip off our chains. We have never protested against the Prosewriters the Filmmakers the Musicmucks the Painters,

the Masters who daily steal our resources, we have never tried to expose their criminal acts of theft and exploitation.

No, we never even dream of rising up in fury to confront and attack these overlords whose cabals conspire against our welfare, whose cultural institutions and media are designed and operated to keep us in penury and abject submission. Whose statutes of power stand ready to cripple and punish and murder us. As they have done so often.

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notes and nubs

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Anxiety can pluck feathers from an egg.

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Like most corny jokes, it has a few kernals of truth stuck in its toothy grin.

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If it was labeled, tagged with
one letter set upon each tooth,
what would your smile spell out—
whose mouth can find the word
to speak its name to mine.

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All I'm asking is that the Academy of American Poets requisition a supply of suicide capsules from its bosses at the C.I.A., and issue one to me. And to other elderly poets who likewise seek a quick demise. The AAP should be shamed and blamed that it does not offer this most humanitarian of services to the poetry community.

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The Father's business success: each floor he rises drives another elevator shaft into his children's heart.

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Like a needle sipping an eel.

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The doorkey that melts in the lock gets exhibited; Jasper Johns' brush sticking out of the paintcan: impotency on parade.

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There's another war every 20 years or so because there are new poets every 20 years or so, and war exists in order to kill poets.

The purpose of war is to kill poets.

But it's not the enemy's poets each country wants to kill, it's their own.

Thus in the Great War the British soldiers were murdering Oscar Wilde; the German soldiers were killing Rilke; the French, Rimbaud/Verlaine.

The USA troops in Iraq today all aim their weapons at Ashbery.

(Yes, Wilde was already dead then, and R/V too. Even posthumously they still had to be killed.)

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Bookstores and libraries put fictional prose in a separate section from nonfictional prose.—

Why shouldn't books of poetry be similarly segregated?

My poems, which are fictional, should not be on the same shelf with poets who write nonfictional (autobiographical, biographical) poetry.

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Chekov: the antithesis of poetry. The enemy of poetry. The writer poets turn to when they begin to hate themselves in their art.

I don't know if Konstantin in "The Sea Gull" is Chekov's only portrayal of a poet, but it's such a cruel epitome.

Mocked and humiliated throughout, his lover seduced and stolen away by a prose-writer, poor Konstantin by the end of the third act is finally reduced to a mere ploypuppet in a coup de theatre, an offstage prop murdered and remurdered to provide a Hollywood "shock ending" climax.

As if being cuckolded and killed off to effect a plot-twist weren't bad enough, Konstantin is forced to suffer during the course of the play an even more evil and demeaning fate,

as the sadistic Chekov turns him, the aspiring young poet, into a short-story writer!

You can always tell when poets are going through a period of self-hatred and doubt about their art: they write poems about Chekov.


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. . . going back to Pater: think how very different our (contemporary) relation to music is from his, compared to his experience of it. how often would he have heard music? I ask that literally:

how often and under what conditions would he in his daily life have physically heard music, ie real music as opposed to any tune humming in his head?

i would guess to answer that question by saying : not very often: on special occasions, concerts, recitals, probably church bells more than anything else, a street musician perhaps, though it's hard to imagine Pater walking on streets where such creatures thrived . . .

Now compare that to our current experiencing of music, how it ubiquitously presses in us relentlessly from every medium, my god you can't make a phonecall without being assailed by it,

every store you go into blasts your ears with it, every street is boomboxed and car-stereoed to death with its intrusive noise. . .

there is no escape from it. It greases the gears of consumer capitalism as much as the oil our government is currently killing everybody it can to gain control of. . ..

If Pater had to hearsuffer what what the average USAer is deluged with on a daily basis, I doubt he would reverence music quite as highly as in his pre-massmedia'ed cloistered Oxford. . .

Anyway, my tirades against music are hyperbole, and not meant to be taken entirely unsatirically.

But I can't be the only poet in the last hundred years who has chafed at Pater, and has resented the fact that poetry is not ranked first among the arts.

And yes, I'll say it again, the complacency and arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable.

Compare poets to musicmakers, and their respective self-doubts. Poets are constantly questioning the value and the validity of poetry; do composers and conductors ever do that?

It boils down to economics of course: music makes money and poetry doesn't. So poets have to keep justifying themselves in the face of a commercialized world——

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THE NOTES

given the fame
surrounding
the recent book
of unfinished or
abandoned writings
by Elizabeth Bishop
won't someone
plan another
consisting of her
(and the concept
might work as well
with Robert Lowell
or James Merrill)
penned instructions
to the maid
the menus she
handed the cook
the lists she left
for her secretary
and what about
her stockbrokers
the screeds they got
regarding assets
and every scrap she
(or Russell Edson
or Louise Gluck
or Richard Howard)
wrote should be in it
all the notes
to the chauffeur
the wine steward
the groundskeeper
the butler
the manicurist
the psychotherapist
the poolboy
the hairstylist
the dressmaker
the wigcomber
the authorized
biographer
the pillwrangler
the gardener
the cleaning staff
the masseuse
and what about
the servants
we don't know about
the flunkies
whose functions
remain hidden
whose arcane chores
are kept secret from
us the public
unimaginable
to us lowerclass
unbelievable
the sponge-wringer-outer
the sexologue
the doubled-over doters
the astro-prefixed kneelers
and of course
the lawyers on retainer
not to mention
the critics on retainer

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matthew dickman

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Some pobloggers are so hostile and condescending; their arrogant academic attitudinizing scares away many potential readers:

According to [insert the name of whatever experts you click to],

I can't for example simply enjoy reading Matthew Dickman's verse,

no, I have to prove its merit, I have to present a "critical argument" to justify my admiration, i have to try to persuade those opposed:

screw that—

I refuse to apologize or offer "critical discussion" to justify or authenticate my preferences and pleasures——

and if that means I'm not "serious," so be it.

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>some thoughts from my blog of three years ago (I was writing about Olds, but since Matthew Dickman is in the Olds mold, I think it's relevant):

I don't see anything wrong with writing about one's self, though it seems like there are always those who stand ready to condemn the poets who do it too passionately (re Olds).

Sadly this type of poem has now fallen into disfavor—not with the larger poetrybook-buying public, but with a growing segment of younger poets.

The first-person narrative, the realist-autobiopoem of Olds and Levine [add Matthew Dickman to this lineage], has been subverted and refuted and or ignored by many younger poets.

These new poets know they've grown up into a regime where poetry is ruled over by Theory, where the poem is a slave to Poetics.

In the ancient quarrel between poets and philosophers, the balance of power has shifted to the latter:

"[T]he philosophical critique of poetry is ascendant. In the provinces of literary criticism, Plato's heirs have apparently won out." (Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida / A Defence of Poetry).

These poets have internalized this cruel critique and sublimate it via the usual strategies of auto-punishment. Snatch the whip from Master and lash yourself.

In any case their seemingly-on-the-surface-disparate modes of servile irony have to a certain extent seized the floor. The Confessional poem has been pushed offstage.

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I'm glad to see the return of the Levine/Olds style poem as exemplified by Matthew Dickman,

and I applaud Tony Hoagland and Marie Howe for bringing him to the attention of readers like me who will appreciate and buy his book——

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If the success of Matthew Dickman indicates a trend back

to the modes of Confessional poetry,

what good news . . .

Hopefully his courage and genius will embolden others of his generation

to stop writing poetics and start writing poems.

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