Friday, February 13, 2009

"Easy to read and melodious prose is one of the least natural things in the world.


In the course of a mad email exchange with a friend in Pittsburgh about writers and their strategies to creating a prose style that effectively conveyed their stories in all their obvious and more oblique consequences, I was struck by my friend's incidental declaration that "Easy to read and melodious prose is one of the least natural things in the world. " But who wants to read anything that has absolute fidelity to natural speech, whatever "natural" speech happens to be? The ear wants something better formed, and memory wants something that is, well, memorable. What is natural, if anything can be, is a human desire for things that are elegant,balanced, pleasurable to behold, a joy to the senses. What makes these pleasures varies radically in subjective examination, and that is what makes talking about the differences a peculiar pleasure in itself.


"Easy to read and melodious prose" has been the ideal since the creation of the professional writer: it's not far a field to say that humans generally prefer clarity over confusion, and to develop methods, developed through experimentation, to achieve those goals. Because we are a species that's smart enough to demonstrably learn new habits through different kinds of training or learning--whether mechanical or in the acquisition of cultural topsoil-- my thinking is that that a clear style is really a natural expression of human habit, determined however that habit might be. Culture itself, the abstract idea condensed histories gathered along a relentlessly twined strands, is indeed artifice on the face of it, but the formation of culture and it's aesthetic distinctions is hardly unnatural to anything one might think is alien to some wordy definition of man's "natural" state.

It's all natural, in other words: most everything we do, whatever our convolutions as a species carry us to on whatever tide of rhetoric, ideology and religious infamy, is the result behavior that is , of course, animal, species related, but also quite human, quite "natural" .We are not outside of nature, but rather our expressions are quite natural within it's all encompassing sphere, and the development of a musical style in order to express some sense of an individual experience of one's environment, the poetry of the moment, falls handily into the categories of "natural" acts.

More useful, perhaps, might be to consider the word "natural" with regards as to how a writer can create a plausible, believable voice within and without their narrative technique: DeLillo and Hemingway, stylized as they are, created powerful voices that compel response. The styles are connected to ideologies that themselves define a poetic/philosophical superstructures that lay final claim to the progress of history, and it is here where discussion as to the use of the voice becomes "natural" in it’s sound and tone, in it's tropes as it outlines a world view.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Compressed Dog walking with Christian Wiman


Sometimes you can concentrate on something so closely that the thing or the idea becomes abstract, blurred or jagged at the edges, a layering of form and sound that makes for a crowded, frame busting tableau. "It Takes Particular Clicks" by the adroit and terse Christian Wiman makes me thing of a walk through a familiar set of scenes that are closely observed but briefly referenced, suggesting something of the narrative stream technique Virginia Woolfe employed in her novels Mrs.Dollaway or To The Lighthouse (among others),There is something odd and detached here that makes me thing of someone floating through an experience, as with Woolfe's prose at it's most sensory rich, Wiman's poem skips and jumps, highlights and moves on to other details. Woolfe, though, awarded her readers with a flood of associations, the world of hard substance negotiating terms with a mind attempting to frame and contextualize the minute particles of the everyday;It is an impressionistic undertaking here, and the way things seem to be as one passes them can be influenced by any one of many moods one experiences in a short order. Fine, I think, but what's splendid of your review is your attention to Christian Wiman's creation of sound; this poem has a soundtrack of clicks, scrapes that underscore a psychological restlessness that narrator/dog walker finds himself in. This is a noisy poem about a brief visit to a noisy world, and you've done a nice job assembling your examples. Good criticism here.
.Wiman's poem is more a fast , hard rain in spring. The briefness livens the nerve endings.

Flip-flops, leash-clinks,
spit on the concrete
like a light slap:
our dawn goon
ambles past, flexing
his pit bull. And soft,
and soon, a low burn
lights the flight path
from O'Hare,
slowly the sky
a roaring flue
to heaven
slowly shut.




This is a poetic situation captured in compressed essence, not enlarged, glorified, vulgarized, made philosophical, but presented instead with a flash-card alacrity Sounds against a sidewalk soon rise above as would a responding lift to note air traffic and the sky that is several tones of cloud-coded atmosphere.
At first reading they seem a jumble of incomplete thoughts, but you've gotten the sense that this is a poem of a mind in full stride through a familiar terrain. Perhaps a bit like the scenery that rushes by a passenger window, the recognition of details nesscarily conflate and color each other in succession, but there is a coherence here; noises, distractions, from planes to speed bumps and the seem to make the walk a peril for our narrator, who seems constantly to be catching with himself ; the onslaught of images and their contextual framing seems constant work. The dog he's walking, though, is unperturbed and is determined by instinct to locate what it's senses have locked on. The shape and meaning of the world changes with each step, but a dog remains a dog and will do what dogs do during walks on neighborhood streets, and in so doing brings a focus to the onslaught, provides the reason to stop, reassemble one's rattled senses and make a statement about the experience: Good girl.

There is a pull of many things on one's attention, and the effort to recognize, categorize, acknowledge the information from a familiar neighborhood walk goes efficiently, the things themselves in curt terms, associations hinted at, suggested, the walker moving along, persistent in their path.

Here's a curse
for a car door
stuck for the umpteenth
time, here a rake
for next door's nut
to claw and claw
at nothing. My nature
is to make
of the speedbump
scraping the speeder's
undercarriage,
and the om
of traffic, and somewhere
the helicopter
hovering over
snarls—a kind
of clockwork
from which all things
seek release,
but it takes
particular clicks
to pique my poodle's
interest, naming
with her nose's
particular quiver
the unseeable
unsayable
squirrel. Good girl.

This string of scenarios unfold quickly, in steady stride, and there is an attending narrative for each thing and a cogent linking between the very different items of speed bumps or the odd thing his dog uncovered during the time on the leash, very little of it explicable , but all of it coherent; this has the eliding sway of a narrative with small notes, cryptic asides. Not as cinematic as John Ashbery's associations have been, but that, I think, is the strength of the poem; Wiman minimizes rhetorical intricacy, concocts a shorthand which suggests unsaid pleasures or private disgusts, and creates in doing a collage of signifiers, the smallish incidents and contents made extraordinary in their banality. This is something akin to the old Modernist's decree that language be treated not as the audible sighs of a wise God speaking directly to us, but instead as a hard, malleable thing; Wiman's style has the mashed together beauty of junk sculpture, the condition of things that were formerly utilitarian and explicable in design and purpose but now, mashed together, cogs, gears, fenders, trash compactors and steak knives pressurized into a furious, creviced cube, approach an organic unity.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham


Recently put down The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and found it rich and entrancing. The particular Woolfe-like riffs he does with his language is lovely, and under perfect control, and it is a suitable way to link the lives of the three women, whose psychic lives of acceptance and denial illustrate a scatter of concentration, a loss of the self when all other memory, personal history leads one only to the exact moment one is in, a cell of complacency, a dead end. The intertwined narratives, connected through time and each related in some marginal way with the issue of Virginia Woolfe and her novel Mrs. Dollaway, is lovely, being about lose, desire, the great inability to frame an ideal and then live in it in a universe that is busy, intrusive, insensitive to inner life. Cunningham commands the Woolfe style : the stream of conscious that is amid thought in the ebb and flow of existence: we have , again and again, real images, concrete in detail and form, become, through character musing and more musing, become abstract, fluid, merged with the fleeting psychology of each passing.Cunningham is quite good at describing a sadness that cannot be named, a spreading melancholy that invades and over takes both dreams and waking lives, and he demonstrates the act of creation as being in some way some way to seek a cure for the souls' illness--at one point or another, the women, compare themselves to the facts of the Mrs. Dollaway story, that it, somehow , is a narrative frame work through which a story, with a perfected technique in rendering its poetic effects, is taken for an achievable ideal , a diorama that instructs the reader how to respond to others, to the world.

Even the character of Woolfe, the author of the story that links the women through the novel, struggles with her unhappiness, and seems, desperately, to try and order her work habits to bring the work some illuminating , enlarging quality that will demonstrate consciousness at ease in its world, fatalistic in to a fatal degree. Cunningham understands the lack, and deals with the sense that things are lost, people die, memories live as long as there are people there to have them, unless one is fortunate enough to have been a novelist, or a poet who, through some publishing fluke, produces works that survives one whose contents, language, style colors the personality of another decades off.

Even so, Cunningham suggests that literature's' promise is not to bring happiness or resolution, but only reminders that the flesh grows old, the mind faint, and regret is a luxury in which no one should invest. The Hours works because author Cunningham doesn't try in any obvious way to assert a connection between the women, other than a tenuous connection with Woolfe and her novel, Mrs. Dollaway.

It's the skillful use of the stream-of-conscious the connects the stories, really, the women and their time periods, the way in which the on set of depression and slowly inhibiting despair is explored in the ways that these women think about the world they live in.

Family, duty, loyalty to others, all the things that the characters have to be loyal to and whose cause the central figures argue for, are seen to come into a continuing conflict with personalities whose centers are eroding, slipping into darkness. Like Woolfe, Cunningham continually deploys the facts and the images of the external world, a sign that the conscious mind is struggling to stay engaged with the world, but we see these images become abstractions, mere definitions, blurry and meaningless as the corridors get darker, colder. Applying this to Woolfe herself, as a character, was a smart and unexpected touch, perhaps critiquing the notion, the myth that one may write their way out of a chronically dour state. In any case, this trio of tales is delicately rendered, and the author's touch here is sure, if not invisible.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Why are Republicans So Mean?


Writer Paul Levinson blogs at Open Salon about why members of the GOP are so mean spirited, an issue that sent me off on a rant, a toot, an unfair diatribe. Think what you will, but Democrats have been demonized since both terms of the Clinton Administration , thanks to the right-leaning echo chamber of talk radio and the seemingly endless liberal-bashing books coming out from Regnary Press; one may cite their own examples. Fair or not, here's my two cents on Paul's topic; by tomorrow I suspect I'll be something like sane again and will approach my work, my bills and my taxes with a level concentration. Level, but not flat line.

There's a latent worship of power , stamina and absurdly skewed masculinity , and the party of Lincoln, so called, more often than not likes to think of themselves as rugged sorts for whom any helping hand from a state agency is sure weakness, moral slack and despicable. Though a good many of them will scorch the earth in their creationist ways and continue to demonize Evolution, the irony rests in the facts that there’s a strong, rancid tendency toward Social Darwinism in their thinking. It’s not that one should do the Christian thing and be kind to one another, cloth and feed the poor, and in general err on the side of decency, but rather that the strong need to subjugate the poor and powerless and in turn carve up the earth’s resources . Anyone who hasn’t power or money or status is , by default, a wretch who cannot survive the rigors of living in the real world; they and society would be better off if they died off, disappeared , vanished into the thin, fetid air that surrounds their corporate towers. I can’t say that all Republicans are bastards—I have anecdotal evidence that a few of them have principles not linked to serving the already rich and powerful—but I’m never shocked when ever the Republicans come into power and proceed to slash funding for helpful federal programs with ease and without a pause in their stride. It’s a determinist imperative, perhaps, a hard wiring of specific genes that cannot be untwined; Republicans cannot help but be hard-throbbing assholes.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Poems and prayer

There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've been sober for twenty years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

The key distinction between poems and prayers are that poems are almost invariably written from within experience, and as a form, is under no obligation to detail and highlight it's rhetoric toward any obligatory pitch or prejudice. The poet, distinct from the praying person, has the freedom to invoke God or invoke him not at all; the poet might even insist that the wonders he or she comes to write about are phenomena in and of itself, independent of anything divine.

Poetry allows for the religious, the agnostic, the atheist and the indifferent with regards to God. The single requirement is that the poem meet the needs of literature, however the poet lands on the issue of the divine; what constitutes literary value, of course, is subject to a discussion that is nearly as abstruse and premised on unprovable suppositions as theology, Literary criticism might be said to be it's own sort of religious dogma.

Prayers, in contrast, start outside human, terrestrial experience and beseech a higher power to intervene in human affairs. While poetry , in general, glories in all things human and is obsessed with the mystery of perception (finding that miraculous enough ), prayer assumes human experience is flawed, in error, and needs a strong hand to right itself to a greater purpose. Prayer in essence is an admission of powerlessness or one's situation and one's instincts to cope with the difficulties presented; the varieties of spiritual inspiration vary and are nuanced to particular personalities and finer or lesser nuanced readings of guiding sacred texts, but prayers share a default position that human existence sans God is incomplete and in need to surrender itself to the Will of a variously described God.

It is possible to write a poem that addresses god that is not an entreaty, finding His presence in the world as we already have it, not as we think it was."Question" by May Swenson does this.

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?


It's a fine poem, and Swenson is speaking from within experience, finding something wondrous in the world as it is. Her poem is about finding God in the details of this existence, and does not beseech a higher power for guidelines about how to live a more righteous life according to scripture. Prayer assumes that human life, in essence, is merely an audition for a seat in Heaven. Swenson assumes we already have our seat and seeks God's inspiration in making the place where we live purposeful and fuller. I don't think God ordains prayers,since they commence with the human subject starting a conversation with his maker in the search for guidance, inspiration, hope. Prayers (and poetry writing) are voluntary, as humans always have the choice not to pray at all and to neither seek nor have an interest in spiritual matters. God does not micro manage what human beings do.

Getting a grip


I'm the first to admit that I was an opportunist jerk more often than I care to remember when I was in college, a bright boy with a morsel of talent who had large pretensions ; I came to realize these things, though, and I've managed to fit into the skin that God gave me. That is, I sobered up July 16, 1987, the day after my 35th birthday. The gave me the gift of time, twenty one years to change my mind about the mission I came to think I had and to try a different game altogether. It's been ragged , rough and full of mistakes, you bet, but there's been good orderly direction all the same; better writing to, although there are those who'd argue contrarily.

The change of attitude has improved my writing. Kerouac, though, never had the chance to get over his over sized idea of himself as a jazz-keened godhead, he instead became bitter when the vibe went numb and the scene became crowded with people he didn't approve of--Kerouac was essentially conservative, after all. As such, he drank himself to death , bitter and disappointed. Writer Barry Alfonso and I have talked about this repeatedly since our days in college, and what he insisted on is that art shouldn't, by default, be in service to some one's death wish. Leaving a good looking corpse is a myth, he said, dead people just look dead and those who died because of drugs or alcohol just bring on sadness over the waste of not so much talent as the life that contained it. Dying young is not cool, he said, and I've remembered that.

These days I respect writers who have resilient through the years and who constantly challenge themselves with new styles and approaches--both the late John Updike and Norman Mailer are examples of these artists. Bright, brief flames for most part seem to get blown out just when they seem to be getting started with the good stuff. How many decades have we rationalized Kerouac's feckless lack of form, or pondered what Hendrix lived and learned to keep his guitar in tune?

It's a species of hero worship that obscures the newer talent: it's the idea that everything that was good in this culture has already happened , and that more recent additions to our arts are imitation, variation, and elaboration of past genius. It's an odd thing, this latter day Spenglerism, this worship of the dead, that it comforts us in times of an uncertain future. I always thought the future was ours to

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

How does your garden overgrown?


Anyone will tell you, if asked, that what they want from this life are merely simple things, not much at all, nothing too large or complicated. Emma Jones in her poem "Paradise" would have us realize that simple things are less simple than the label would indicate. There is enchantment in building our particular nest, but there is work before there are glory, many surprises, and obligations to tend to after the daydreaming is done with:
What you wanted was simple:
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
A fine stream of language, this poem reads as if author Emma Jones were half asleep late in the evening typing rapidly, barely keeping pace with the colliding, chiming, alliterating language that flowed through her fingers and onto to the monitor. I'm assuming, of course, that this was composed on her computer, but even if I'm wrong it has that feeling of a ripe and rapid language that is intoxicated with the scents and scenery of a tableau being observed and then re-imagined. "Paradise" is a bit like the lash garden, foliage, and greenery Jones undertakes to evoke, the words and phrases demonstrating all sorts of conflations intent and verbal assault that there's the feeling of an everyday scene becoming virtual, enhanced, as if in high definition. Unreal as it may be, it fits a poem where the commonplace thing comes under intense scrutiny and unlocks the associative tendency. Perhaps Jones was half asleep, writing halfway between dream time and the solidity of the chair she was sitting on. It is lovely all the same;

Darling, all day I've watched the garden make its waydown the road. It stops at the houseswhere the lights are on and the hose reel is tidyand climbs to the windows to look insidelike a child with its eyes of flared rhododendronsand sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombsso buttered and brave the sweet peas gallopand the undergrowths fizz through the fencesand pause at some to shake into asters and weep.


If nothing else, the makes me think of the book Cultivating Delight by essayist/poet Diane Ackerman, a lyric series of essays she wrote observing her garden grow , seemingly decline and then grow yet again in the course of year; Ackerman is an especially eloquent stylist with a broad knowledge of natural sciences who persuades you (or at least me) that the seasonal cycle is wondrous, fantastic beyond the scientific data one can cite, memorize.


Jones delights as she describes the garden growing lushly, thickly, out of control finally, finding it's way beyond human borders, insinuating itself into man-made things, onto houses, around windows, growing in and around the man-made things that intrude on the fertile soil. Her rhymes and slant rhymes are wondrous and give evidence of the musically tuned ear; the near enjambments and alliterations scan easily from the page, and effectively create a sense of sensory seduction--this comes off as an invasion of ambivalence, in that one doesn't know whether to fight for their boundaries or to give in altogether. It is closely observed, sweetly detailed, the way this growth, this spread simply and ably transgresses the invisible lines that define legalistically determined notions of property and in effect change the way one comes to regard the soil where they make a home.


A knowing scenario, the setting up of the small accumulations of things one wanted in a homestead, the fantastical growth of the garden that softens the hard-edged result of consumer-driven housing results and rewards the homeowner who has tended their plot, who has grown roots in turn, and the final summation, a bit of banter where a banal observation is an acknowledgment of a rare bit of sublimity in progress:


The garden is a mythical beast and a pilgrim.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.

Barbeque eater,yankee doodle,
if the garden should leavewhere would we ageand park our poodle?
"This is paradise," you said,a young expansive American saint.And widened your arms to take it in,that suburb, spread, with seas in it.

One needn't surrender to the chaos of overgrown plants nor develop an obsession with cutting back a foliage that threatens one's doormat; balance is the message, the tending of things, the trimming, the hoeing, the time on one's knees with a spade, gloves and a box of tulip bulbs and apple seeds; a balance is maintained and the pay off, if that's the word, are those moments when what one has, a home, a garden, a preferred street to live on, family and friends to share it with, become of a piece; for the moment, for a precious few moments, things are absolutely perfect