Brautigan's catfish

Even the stingiest of our poets seem to work in earnest to make their minor-key efforts seem like treatises about the objects they 've chosen to make their subject. A banal, everyday image to open, a bit of conversation, an incidental gesture, a memory that is generated, some arcane reference to a philosophical truism, freshly lifted from a directory of over used quotes, to make the whole thing resonate with the semblance of larger import, and then a return to the image from which the enterprise started, hopefully altered for the way the poet has talked his idea into submission.

Even in the concise poems of Billy Collins one can sense an autodidact chomping at the bit to unload the sophisticated reading they've done to invest in such slim prophecies. One senses what was left unsaid, and that makes for an unsatisfying work, compromised between desires. And John Koethe strikes you as a junior league
Pound, the last guest to leave the party . But not the late Richard Brautigan--too much of a whimsical clown half the time, given to quick sketches and half-bright paragraphs, Brautigan could still pull perceptual beauty from situations where there was nothing going on. At his most sublime , he was the laureate of what hadn't been thought through. His intention appeared to be to stop writing before intellection kicked in and larded up what was already a choice, uncluttered perception of what he saw, what he felt, what he thought in the instance of perception.

Your Catfish Friend
by Richard Brautigan


If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge of
my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

Richard Brautigan--he is happy to remain slight, a poet who can deliver the payload he has without seeming, at his best, to be serving another poet's muse. Zen, I suppose, is the first thing I think of, a what-if scenario that rather joyfully plays with a Muddy Waters catfish metaphor and transforms a blistered, haggard blues trope into a suddenly wonderfully state of being awestruck. One goes along with this and is impressed with the way the narrator can suppose he were a catfish, imagine the thoughts of the woman he is addressing, and land the final perception in some notion that is unrelated to the teller's implied desire and lust but is linked, entirely appropiate, all of a piece"


"I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."


This pond, as imagined, is the perfect place for these people and their musings--a superb bit of half a notion given a full and complete voice. An awesome thing, this poem.

John Koethe cures reading

In another life I might have the time and inclination to stand up to Koethe's daunting allusions, but after attempting, more than once, to overcome the skim, the glance and the cursory read and engage the poems, I became listless and depressed; it was like one of those odd moments of bleak -yet- hackneyed  literature of the most unremarkable sort  where the hero, me, is alone in some government office waiting my turn to speak to an official about something and discovering that I couldn't understand a word that was being said. Worse yet, though, was the fact that didn't care what anyone was talking about. A book of poems that creates torpor and apathy, the urge to crawl back into bed with pretend flu symptoms, does not encourage a recommendation. I might as well extend the analogy and suggest these poems are without music--inert and supine is their rhythm and position. Maybe I'm just stupid. Or maybe that poems really are that dull and dulling. I suggest that Koethe could not outpace the tendency to ponder and get to the poetry portion of his resume.

A new poem

The talk shows

The talk shows
Lost their spark, hark!
I hear something
Being said
As a lark,
Oh rats, it's
Someone speaking to
Us through the wall,
This won't do at all,
Some one desires a
A voice in the
Air when the airwaves
Short out,
Men and women are mumbling
After their cars stall and they walk
Stumbling into spiked, arched coronas
Of headlights burn in the avenues
On scuffed and dusty designer shoes
Until the batteries die and
Engineers with hard hats
And tool belts climb towers
And dig
For hours
To shed illuminate
The issues of aches and pains
stuck like stains
On the mind of a brooding city,
But let’s be calm
And not get frantic, give into panic,
Have our words get curt and manic,
Let’s cheer together than cry alone
Where all can hear us
Curse the dark
Rather than cheer the
Flashlight’s batteries,
What else is there
To do on
Saturdays
Except wait in line for all entertainment and
Bad service at
Each over rated bistro and café,
It’s about
Getting paid
And paying the rent
On the expectation of
Getting lucky in the
Dark places
Where all those fifty dollar laces
Flow in the night
Which makes it easy
to find you
and yours
when the sirens
and revolving red light
come upon you
in a corner
of an blind alley
with a letter to
someone named
Sally
Who is still waiting,
You hear the cops say,
For her husband
To come home from
The war
And meet here
Underneath
A dark and rusting
Statue
In a park somewhere near
This intersection,
Oh yes,

What in the world happens to
The color of desire
In the instance when there’s
A failure in the wire
And transformers?

Settling down with a voice like my own

It's strange to go through old bits of writing and see again what you once thought was simultaneously cutting edge and timeless. This isn't the sort of thing I pursued in my writing life, and have vacillated between degrees of difficulty that at least read well, but I can't quite dismiss my time attempting to write within the self-critical confines of Language poetry as being a waste of time; it was , in fact, terrifically instructive, not least of which was to direct me toward my strengths and away from my weaknesses. I also have a real fondness for some of this enjambed lines and marvel at the language's capacity to snap back into usable form after being tortured and twisted by willfully abusive wunderkind.

But overall, I couldn't see writing a poetry that only a brief coterie of associates and a thin scaffold of masters might appreciate. I read this and recognize that the non-sequitors have there origins in actual conversations in which tempers flared and love affairs commenced, and that the puns are jokes I used to share about texts, authors, gossip, local landmarks, pop culture references, all mixed together in many attempts to dislodge the master/slave relationship we thought existed between writer and reader. The words to describe the appearance of things that compose an imitated world are the subject of the Language poets; the variant commodity fetishism that links a unified idea of poetry to a consumer reality is reduced to non-sequitor, babble, a distracted murmur of people standing in line.

The problem, though, is that that audience for whom the pieces were intended has dispersed, moved on, or died as tends to happen in the unexamined life, and the poems and texts I produced emulating Language poets are homeless, so to speak, sans an audience to confound and taunt. People just stared at me at the readings where I dared trot this creaking experiments and attempt to perform them; imagine a room full of confused dogs staring at you, heads tilted the side, waiting for the biscuit of wit you don't in fact posses.

The problem of my early forays in public forums was my impatient vanity , that of a young man in a hurry who didn't want to learn lessons, emulate those he admired nor apprenticed in some way to a mentor, but desired instead to bump shoulders with the Grown Ups. The verse I managed was odd, choppy, strangely conjoined, and little of it with that element of being "made strange" that inspires a parsing, an inquiry as to origins and strategies. Strange looks and nods were my response, and the harder I tried to be brilliant, the stonier the silence became. It was a sheer cliff of non-response. It would be a few years when I finally happened upon a style , for better or ill, that was my own. Just as a great harmonica player like Sonny Boy Williams wasn't afraid to be simple in his riffs, I in turn had to get beyond my fear of being understood. The densities , layering and sweet pastiche of voices and dictions were the stuff of other, better poets; I was at home, at last , with the sound my own voice made.

Unlike Cage, extended silence bothers me tremendously, and over the years I've opted for a style and strategy that at least invites the reader to interact with. It's not inaccurate to say that I found my subject thirty years ago, but only fifteen or so years ago did I find the consistent, flexible voice to give it life.

A poem I like

We Never Know
by Yusef Komunyakaa

He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.

What works in this poem is the dual aspect of feeling that you're the one witnessing something powerful and brutal, and at the same time having your senses dissociated; a soldier who'd just caught several rounds in a fire fight is said to "danced with tall grass" , and then collapses to the ground, dead. Violence is associated with an unexpected bit of grace, the tearing of the bullets through his body making him seem to dance. But there is more; in the jungle , where dead matter quickly decomposes and is returned to the earth from which it originated, the dead soldier is surrounded by "a blue halo of flies (that) had already claimed him". In the jungle foliage their is transcendence symbolized by the lowliest of earth's eternal pests, and the narrator, who'd witnessed the death, takes a photograph from the dead man's hand and insists obliquely

There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.

There is no back story here, no filling in what is happening between the gasps of this breathless accounting; is the fallen soldier friend or foe, what is the photograph of , with whom or what has the narrator fallen in love with. It's the rush of contradicting reactions of someone caught bluntly of a turmoil that rages around him. My preference is to think that the narrator had fallen in love, in an epiphany, with life itself, and had a revelation that each life is important. We do know, though, that this someone who has a tendency to look for to the lyric turnaround in the ugliest and most brutal subjects he chooses to describe. He turns the over to face the sky, to heaven, so that

so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.

I like this poem because it denies the reader the d information that would make this narrative whole, immediately comprehensible, and I like as well that parse and scrutinizw as we might, it remains a cryptic, potent response to violent death. Like the senseless act it describes, it's task is to make you feel the loss , the diminishing of the race for a death , and for the sudden feeling that one appreciates the aches and pains and infernal discomforts they have the privilege to still suffer.

A poem and a position by Kenneth Patchen

Patchen was a poet with a thick diction and lead-footed cadence, and his poem "The Artist's Duty" is likewise a wide load and wide of its mark.It's a supreme example of what I've talked about constantly since I've started posting on the internet, the self-important poem-about-poetry. My point, in brief, is that the creation of art that contains it's own form as it's subject matter is evidence of a bored technician who , perhaps suffering from an inferiority complex in a world that they see as being really constructed by workers whose hands are layered in dead skin and scars, have to trumpet their own occupation. The notes are off key and played to o hard, the result being noise, not revelation. The aim , of course, is to convince the many that poetry such as that written by the secretly insecure poet is something no one can surive this life without. Patchen writes with a big, blunted pencil as he
advances his manifesto:

So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame
To extend all boundaries
To fog them in right over the plate
To kill only what is ridiculous
To establish problem
To ignore solutions
To listen to no one
To omit nothing
To contradict everything
To generate the free brain
To bear no cross
To take part in no crucifixion
To tinkle a warning when mankind strays
To explode upon all parties
To wound deeper than the soldier
To heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all

To verify the irrational
To exaggerate all things
To inhibit everyone
To lubricate each proportion
To experience only experience

To set a flame in the high air
To exclaim at the commonplace alone
To cause the unseen eyes to open

To admire only the abrsurd
To be concerned with every profession save his own
To raise a fortuitous stink on the boulevards of truth and beauty
To desire an electrifiable intercourse with a female alligator
To lift the flesh above the suffering
To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit

To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss

To HAPPEN

It is the artist’s duty to be alive
To drag people into glittering occupations

To blush perpetually in gaping innocence
To drift happily through the ruined race-intelligence
To burrow beneath the subconscious
To defend the unreal at the cost of his reason
To obey each outrageous inpulse
To commit his company to all enchantments

.


Not graceful by any means--Patchen is an exclaimer, a walker in clown shoes--and his grandiosity of the important and great things he thinks a poet should do is a conceit he appropriated from Pound, one that he does not make any more interesting. Artists making art about their art are spinning their wheels most of the time, seemingly trying to convince themselves that they're geniuses when no inspiration is forthcoming. This is one of those kinds of poems; intriguing for historians, perfect for aspiring and delicate ubermensch, but useless for the poetry reader, or even the poet who has it in mind that a poet should be using poetry to see the world outside and not navel-gaze on it's own imaginary perfection.

Horace and Virgil and Wordsworth were able to turn poems about poetry into literary art because they were that rarest thing , writers of true genius.That's why they are are still read, and likely why the works have been preserved over time; quality does make a difference. I'd wager that they were able to write about anything they wanted to and be able to make it interesting for reasons beyond the ridiculous self-importance that goes on in Patchen's humorless puffery. Patchen is not a genius, and cannot really make his pedanticism rise to the level of being compelling.

Someone who seeks good writing, originality, fresh perception, unencumbered by an author's ham-handed attempts to disguise a lack of grace or power with what becomes a low-grade ideology. The reader is one who seeks a poet ,a writer who can get their ideas across without rhetoric usurping the subject.For the most part, at least this is what I have always assumed to be the case, most readers of poetry are practitioners of the craft. Even so, most poets read as readers, first and foremost, and they (we) in general react badly to writers swaggering around the page wasting their(our) time with hosannas about poetry's higher and grander purpose. There's an impatience with poets who don't sound as though they leave their house to take a meal with friends.


Poetry in particular is and always will be where the depths of soul are plumed, where emotions are bared,and writers will reinvent language again and again to capture the tension between interior sensibility and the harder facts of material life.Poetry is introspection by default; what we're talking about is how well the individual writer creates work that gets that oscillating tension. Navel gazing on poetry itself, though, is a dead giveaway, more often than not, that the writer has little to say and yet must hear his voice. Unfortunately, we get more prate than poetry when this the case. It's a dubious proposition that Patchen wrote these lines intending to be humorous or ironic; he took himself so seriously that a good laugh would crack his mask. As grandaddy to the Beats, heir apparent to Pound, he most likely meant every word he wrote here. Poets are the new priesthood, the antennae of the race, the mystics and fools who have turned their insanity into a virtue and now a weapon to upstage, upset and overthrow the repressed lives that The System gives us. This was revolutionary thinking in the fifties and sixties, when there was only a suburban squareness to rebel against, in addition to an illegal and immoral war in Vietnam.
One can well imagine a generation of poets and readers being wowed by someone insisting that wild and nonsequotor behavior and utterances are in fact a benefit to humanity. It merely seems quaint now, sadly dated. Patchen's certainty here seems ,in retrospect, something you'd see the late Dick Shawn singing in a Mel Brooks parody of counter culture heroes.

Poetry Everywhere: THE EMBALMING CONTINUES

Poetry Everywhere is PBS website featuring what we'd call the Usual Suspects whenever a corporation or institution decides to pay tribute to what is generally treated as the bastard child of the arts. Their roster of talent, highlighted across the top of their web site, holds no surprises; there's no one to make you scratch your head and wonder. Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, ark Strand, it's all rather cozy. Videos of over exposed poets reading blandly, bloodlessly. The embalming of the muse continues. I wrote this on their sight when they invited folks to pose some questions the producer. No replies just yet. The remarks, presented below, are cleaned up and expanded from my original thesis, and that's alright--refusing to have one's tastes pickled in aspic should be something all of us should speak at length to. The fate of one's sanity depends on it:
_______________

I would say your selections are good for the particular style they represent, an intensely biographical narrative style that continually reveals a life's lesson that generally defeats the narrator's expectations. Monotony is the culminating effect, and poets highlighted here come to resemble the sort of constant whiners and complainers you avoid in everyday life. It would appear American Poetry is a slim side road and not a Great Highway, and that only a very few writers qualify for admission--interestingly enough, it seems a rigged game, with these writers being the same ones who get their books reviewed , win prestigious awards and have their poems anthologized in major collections. We know, in fact, that there is an intensely interesting diversity in American poetic life, and one is left to wonder whether you have the willingness to substantially expand your selection process.

At this point it would seem natural that poetry readers and poets themselves would be bored with recycling the same platitudes and tropes and rusty arguments concerning the post-Confessional defeatism Poetry Everywhere prefers and would prefer, demand even a spicier, more compelling buffet to graze upon. As is, too many of us in positions to actually bring more styles and arguments into the mode instead remain in the old neighborhood of deep sighs, gutless irony and the phonied up zen moments that make starting and ending a poem an easy thing, a formula that becomes disturbingly similar to the perfectly competant writer who can produce column copy by the hour and still manage not to offer a thought that makes you think through an ambiguity's nettlesome challenge to our collective thinking. Why have surprise, goes the assumption, why make things that are nice so unfamiliar, filled with strange perspectives and voices with accents and intonations that are different than our our own? Again, it's remaining stuck in one's location,not moving , not adding a book to the shelf; the upside is that one can always find their way home by the shapes of the old houses and storefronts, the same old landmarks. The downside is that you know how the poems are going to end, more or less, variations on the same scales, played real fast , medium tempo, or death dirge, but the same scales, the same half melody all the same.

The question, I suppose, is whether you intend to become bold and seek to really discover what poets are doing in this country, or if you will continue to highlight the over reviewed, the over praised, the over exposed?