Monday, November 29, 2010

Smoke

A man walks his dog but the dog holds the leash between bottom and upper rows of teeth that know chew toys and biscuits as distinct from the rest of the world contained on these few blocks to the park.
The man lights a cigarette  and drops the match in front of the swings at the playground where he sits on a bench, waiting for his dog to find a favored spot to remember in later days when it might be a kingdom for a friendly scent when there is only barking from behind the fences the two of them pass gong to and from the store or some such place near home.


It is winter the sun is caught in the bare branches of trees that have surrendered their leaves to the season, the light of the sun is cold on the breath, man walks dog in jerky steps, the dog raises his head and growls, drops the leash from his teeth, a car passes by and a dog in the back seat has head sticking out of the window, yelping against the wind the envelopes his face in a perfect wrap of jet streams pinning his ears to the back of his head,

The man's dog runs after the car, barking and baying along the street lined with snowdrifts and grey, runneld slush, gone into the cold, leash less in the cold gasping for the man's hand and the leash he swings like lariat catching cattle the size of boxcars.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Duncan Shepherd found distinctions

It is not altogether settled, among those who care about such things, whether the retirement of Duncan Shepherd from his post as the film critic of the San Diego Reader after 38 years of service is a cause for celebration or lamentation. The detractors of Shepherd, who are legion, contend, with wearying predictability, that he was a misanthrope who never found a movie to his liking, that he dispensed his black dots with reckless abandon, and that, most daringly, he harbored a deep-seated animus against the very art of cinema. I confess that I was drawn to his writings precisely because he was not easily amused by the offerings of Hollywood–at last, someone who dared to castigate the mediocrity that pervaded the screen–and I find the accusation that he loathed movies altogether to be a symptom of a reader who either skimmed his reviews superficially or failed to grasp his arguments. One of the delights of reading Shepherd was to discover his occasional praise for a movie that would otherwise escape notice despite its modest charm and crafty execution; he had a discerning eye for those filmmakers who could respect the genre they were working in and make it fresh without resorting to grotesque gimmicks. This is what good critics do, make distinctions, find exceptions.

It is hardly astonishing that the movie critics have been unsparing in their dissection of the movie version of Bewitched, given the dismal track record of television shows adapted into cinematic features. The presence of Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley McLaine, and Michael Caine has not mollified the skeptics. It surprises me only marginally more than Shepherd found some merit in it. It is not a matter of someone making fatuous pronouncements for provocation. Shepherd is more fastidious than that; he sticks to specifics and illustrations, and compares the current movie with a host of other recent works by the same participants. It amounts to arguing that the movie is good because it is less bad than its predecessors; it is an inelegant way of making a case for a movie and a nightmare for studio publicists looking for a flattering blurb. But it gives the reader an intriguing glimpse into how one critic thinks popular entertainment should be conceived and executed.

Shepherd is, in my estimation at least, a masterful if idiosyncratic prose stylist, a peerless historian of film art, and a refreshing breeze of honest opinion when he renders judgment on a feature. He has an aesthetic he will not compromise, and the endless tide of grueling gimmickry has not worn him down. I am less exacting in what it takes to entertain me at the movies, and I am usually more charitable than Shepherd tends to be. That may only mean that my standards are more relaxed and that Shepherd’s love of the movie art is such that he deplores seeing the medium squandered on plots that would not satisfy the requirements for a dime novel. Yet I read him all the same, given that he is the sort of critical contrarian who makes a case instead of pontificating about what aesthetic absolutes are being violated. He is not a critic who bemoans the death of the movies; it is one movie at a time, wryly observed, and judgments rendered in witty and incisive fashion. He is the sort of man you dread to see on the opposite side of a debate since it would mean that you would need to shore up your argument to a sounder foundation.

Three decades into his job, and his reviews are as brutal if elegantly phrased as ever. He does catch you surprised, though, and finds sensibly lovely things to say about films other critics have attacked like packs of hungry dogs. He gave Prince’s star-writer-director vehicle Under The Cherry Moon three stars out of his five-star rating system, appreciating the film’s look and measured style and the director’s ability to create a fantastic sense of place without making a mess of the art he’s trying to create. Likewise, he awarded five stars to Walter Hill’s seriously under-estimated Streets of Fire. Among other comments, he cited that virtually every other critic missed or chose not to discuss, that the ostensible rock and roll fable was actually a Western with its narrative conventions set in the mid 20th century America. Shepherd’s discussion of the Hill film is more nuanced than I’ve given here, but let it suffice that he was right about both films.

Friday, November 26, 2010

The Fate of the Novel: Franzen Frets So We Don't Have To



 Jonathan Franzen is a major novelist who seems fated to be remembered for being a weenie as much as being an important writer. In his June appreciation of Christina Stead's 1940 novel, The Man Who Loved Women", the stress-tested author feels at ease to share with us his suspicion that ths thing we love, The Novel, is an affection of vanity, not practical need.

" ...haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about."


I found myself rather stunned by Franzen's smugness in having it both ways; at times he wants to defend the literary novel from the barbarians who would turn the form into a fast food for the shrinking reading taste for reading, and now he hints that he thinks the Novel in general is a dated, creaking contraption. The eclipse of the novel, the death of the novel, the erasure of the novel are things that have been argued before, and lo, here we are, still reading novels and talking about them, arguing about them, still trying to minimize their importance. Tom Wolfe argued with typical bombast in his anthology of New Journalism that fiction had become irrelevant because reality had outstripped the novelist's imagination, and that the narrative techniques of he novel were better used for non-fiction.

The fiction writer's concept of the world had become a sorry trove of self-reflective theory and it was up to the journalists and the historians to properly tell the tale of our time. Wolfe, of course, desires to be the Dickens or the Balzac of our time, and considers the nineteenth century ideal of precisely capturing the surface the surface of things to be enough for those tasking themselves with working the long quills; to know a man, merely observe what things surround him.


To dare to think that a novelist could render a character's interior life negotiating the flow and flux of the external world (to say nothing of the task of making an entire cast of main characters just as complex) amounts to a terrible heresy against the storyteller's art. Or at least Tom Wolfe's version of what a story teller is; but we remember, Wolfe is a journalist, finally, not a story teller, he is beholden to the 4 W's, who, what , where, when. Pesky novelists, though, strayed beyond the bemoaning and constraining tide of naysayers and they continue with their stories, dealing with people and their complexities, and readers continue to read them. The only task of the novelist, I would say, is to put the reader in the respective shoes of a set of characters in a world they , the reader, might not otherwise experience; the notion is to live a little fuller without having to buy a plane ticket, to experience the world for a period in a way that has nothing to do with what one's instinctive resistance to change instructs us to do. Novels matter. Fiction matters. Arguing that they don't is a species of tedious grand standing. It's a rumpled horn section bleating the same old chord changes on a song that's old and sticks to the table top like a grime-primed coaster.Jonathan, Tom, take the lampshades off your heads.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

You had me

You had me at "no so fast"
when my mouth ran like a faucet
that filled up the sink, 
you had me between centuries
I asked when the moon would be full, 
you  had me in stitches
and unconscious for days  ,
 you had me in hospital clothes
with a blood and iron on my breath, 
you had me with my marker,
the document I signed
with needle and thread,
 you had me going for a minute,
you had me guessing along,
you had me the way a fat man has an appetite,
you had me for lunch,
you had me rewrite the love letters I wrote you,
you had me going for a moment,
you had my heart 
and I never got it back.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

THE RUMBLE OF THE GRUMBLE

Robert Pinsky offers up Sir Walter Raleigh's poem "The Lie" in this week's Slate poem selection and offers up a cogent argument for the ability of the poet , when provoked and inclined, to puncture pretension, artifice and reinforced falsehood with more precision and pointedness than a mere counter assertion could.  In another era, perhaps, in a bygone day, when writers opposed to one another's notions of what constitutes justice and moral righteousness had to wait for however long it took for letters, pamphlets, books, the like, to be written, processed, and delivered.

The period gave the conflicting bards time to hone their craft and compose the rhymes , with all their indicting hooks and barbs, so that they had a sharpness that would cause the deepest wound. The gift of this was a spirited exchange, a correspondence of heated verbal dexterity that could be enjoyed and examined years beyond the relevance of the original topic; this is the literature we parse in college, these are the examples we are supposed to appreciate to learn our rhetorical craft.

he art of the inspired exchange of views, seems lost on the Internet , as one is hard pressed to read an otherwise interesting article and not find a comment stream that is less discussion or debate than it is a boiling stew of vulgarity. It goes beyond the pointed use of F Bombs for added emphasis or  colloquial texture, as that word and it's barnyard cousins often times are the conversation, verbatim.  One might consider their own adventures into the comment streams of many a web forum and consider  what happened to all those fine cadences it seems everyone said they loved so much in graduate school; these were the syntaxes that were supposed to give our oppositions to bad faith the clear, cutting sweep of Truth.

 There are a few exceptions, truth be told, not every web zine readership is composed of aggravated boobs typing their congealed rage with clubbed fingertips; Slate and Salon , among others, seem to inspire  generally thoughtful responses. Still, the loud , baggy monsters are out there, cursing their own eyes for seeing the light. Small wonder, it seems, that a good number of better online forum contributors have , seemingly, gone elsewhere. There are better things to do than continually lean into that sucker punch you know is waiting for you.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

I WAS A TEENAGE POETRY POSER

I was in high school during the late sixties and early seventies, suffering from all the belated-arrival blues that was the usual blend for teens who wished they were older than they were, thus more experienced and hip. The daily aggravation started with a look in the mirror and sighing loudly, too loudly, that my facial hair wasn't coming in thick enough. I was particularly pissed that I'd missed out on the Beat era, and that I was too young to truly be involved in the college folk revival.

Still, I took my Dylan very seriously, although I considered him at the time to be an also-ran--the last great age of hipness was the fifties--and I went about my way, my rather self centered and self righteous way, to become a campus poet, seer, gadfly, intellectual, man of mystery. I had long hair, wire frame glasses, I wore as much black as I could, which was absurd since I was living in Southern California, a terrain where I still hang a shingle and get my mail.

Black clothing makes sense, I guess, if you're in colder, damper, more overcast climates, ala NYC, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, but in So Cal there was and remains a surfeit of sun, which made attempt to be a gloomy, dark, frost-bitten avatar of hip a ridiculous enterprise. It's only beginning to occur to me how absurd my middle class yearnings for street credibility really were. I'd lived up to that point as a self-conscious, shy, hard-of hearing and overweight nerd who was often the brunt of abuse from others because I was thought of as dull and dumb do to my hearing loss--I didn't always catch on to what others were talking about and tried, often times, to bluff my way through a conversation. My responses to what others had said or had asked me , or what I put forward in attempts to become part of a conversation already in progress, were as often as not guesses at the topic, based on what the words I thought the phonemes resembled . It was a poetry of its own sort, and I felt absolutely exhilarated when what I had offered at risk wound up being dead on, and it was even more electric when my mad stab at relevance somehow managed to jump the rails of the subject and introduce a related tangent that others hadn’t considered and thought was a brilliant leap on my part. Too often, though, my remarks caused a quiet in the room that had the dead solemnity of a tombstone; I was the Coltrane of Confusion, the Mozart of Misspeak, and the Picasso of Puzzlement. It went something like this:

"I just got a new bike..."
That's great. What kind is it?"
"One o'clock..."
Norm Crosby, a comedian who was a regular player on the Ed Sullivan Show, came up with that joke, but it got the experience of a hard of hearing fellow trying to make his way through the world without letting on that he had a loss. Crosby got the absurdity of it precisely right and I still use the quip as a reference point some forty years later Even so, I wrote poems, did special readings in 7-11 parking lots, and performed some original verse at an ersatz antiwar rally where in an especially precious ad lib I announced that Bob Dylan was "...the father of us all". One might have wondered how I discovered half the paternity of the counter culture. My nonsense utterances gathered many rueful looks; I was among those weenies that went to dances to listen to the band. During my senior year I'd made something of a name for myself as a faux bohemian, dark and mysterious as previously described, taken to mispronouncing names of famous men and writing reams of awful poetry of which there is not a single line in existence; I tossed the poems into the trash one night, all three folders and four notebooks. It was liberating, if that word ever had any meaning. It was as if someone had taken a big boot from my throat. I was now free to be a pompous git on my terms alone. Not perfect, but progress, no?

Saturday, November 13, 2010

When Reviewers Attack.

Josh Board, film reviewer for Sandiego.com, does an amazing job of regurgitating 38 years of proletarian complaints against the retiring Reader film critic Duncan Shepherd. The thrust of Josh's argument seems to be that DS is a bad critic because he didn't like the movies he thought were the cat's pajamas.


He concludes that DS hates movies. We must note that Josh does not deal with the substance of Duncan Shepherd's critiques; he reminds me of the sort of guy who would listen to a reasonable criticism of a movie he thought brilliant and would respond with the old fallback "Oh, yeah, that's just YOUR opinion." 


True as that cliche maybe, it does not diminish the four decades of Duncan Shepherd's film appraisals, since the unspoken addendum to that tired saw is that NOT ALL OPINIONS ARE CREATED EQUAL. Josh as well cannot seem to get his head around the fact that you can regularly read someone you usually disagree with on a particular subject. I don't know why this is hard him to fathom, but it does get back to the "Not all opinions are created equal" remark from two sentences ago--Duncan's wit, knowledge, and elegance as a writer made his opinions worth keeping up with.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Edvard Munch swallows himself

One looks at a reprint of Munch's most famous painting The Scream and then regards the subtler, more somber depressions of this painter's angst soaked paintings, such Girls On the Jetty, and wonder why he was such a glum Gus. The reason is more practical and less mysterious than some of our more mystical critics would insist.He was good at it. With all the impressionist swellings, swirling clouds, jaggedly mad crows, blurred lines and obscured faces moving about his canvases under the darkest, deepest shades and tones he could manage, what Munch saw in the world wasn't nice formations in pleasing shapes and arrangements, but rather as a thin film of appearance under which each and everyone of his dark moods and skewed perception pulsed, ached and persistently throbbed. Munch and his allies did a rather nice job of freeing the artist from having to make pretty pictures for dentist offices. Not that it was a bad mood alone that motivated his brush strokes.

The desire to depict reality in a different way, to find a truth that hadn't yet been brought forward, is a permanent impulse among artists who are the least bit figurative, and Munch's penchant for gloom and depressed spaces were a perfect inspiration, it that's the word, to take the image of the world apart, tweak the essential elements, and reassemble it, askew, fuzzy, angular. Munch's genius was also his pathology, and the crazed energy in his head which drove him to relentless distraction was additionally his ugly gift to the world. It still commands our attention generations later.


Writers tend to over state the depressive elements in Munch's paintings and speak of them as if every stroke he applied to a canvas produced works like the scream. Hardly the case, of course, and the slide show shows that he could manage pastorals, country scenes, bits and pieces of everyday life. What is obvious, though, is that his preoccupation with death, with mortality, finds it way into the scenes with his choice of deep hues, grave undertones, with no distinct lines but rather rushing, brush-textured dimensions that made his surfaces seem to tremble underneath the placid tableau. The particular painting, Girls on the Jetty, has them looking over the bridge, faces averted, staring over and into a flat lake or pond whose reflection is dark even on what seems to be a sunny day and finally gives itself over to blackness. However vital our daily lives are, however serene our present circumstances, death is always with us, informing our choices even the denial of death. Munch was a depressed man, no doubt, but aside from the constricted fury of The Scream, he had subtler ways of transmitting his unease with existence.
The depressive elements in Munch's paintings and speak of them as if every stroke he applied to a canvas produced works like The Scream. Hardly the case, of course, and the slide show shows that he could manage pastorals, country scenes, bits and pieces of everyday life. What is obvious, though, is that his preoccupation with death, with mortality, finds it way into the scenes with his choice of deep hues, grave undertones, with no distinct lines but rather rushing, brush-textured dimensions that made his surfaces seem to tremble underneath the placid tableau. The particular painting, Girls on the Jetty, has them looking over the bridge, faces averted, staring over and into a flat lake or pond whose reflection is dark even on what seems to be a sunny day and finally gives itself over to blackness. However vital our daily lives are, however serene our present circumstances, death is always with us, informing our choices even the denial of death. Munch was a depressed man, no doubt, but aside from the constricted fury of The Scream, he had subtler ways of transmitting his unease with existence.


Thursday, November 11, 2010

"Mother and Child" - By Rosanna Warren - Slate Magazine

"Mother and Child" - By Rosanna Warren - Slate Magazine

None among us relishes the idea of spending inordinate amounts of time with someone who seems to have no vocation other than to wait for their own personal End of Days, but there is shared in our endless ranks the issue of family, loyalty, a grudging paying back of the attention that was given to us unconditionally, if grudgingly, by our parents. In adulthood , our tasks multiply , among them the giving of care and attention to aging patriarchs and matriarchs, together separately. We grit our teeth, we mix our thoughts with high, chiming music, we go to lunch, we make the bed, we distract ourselves with airport novels and movies about imperiled women that rotate like plates on one of the plethora of cable channels; coping with the deadened time, the terse conversation becomes itself an art, an artifice radiating in the mind alone, unseen, a psychic mask that allows us at least a composed visage , if not assuaged nerves.

A basket of scones swaddled in blue-checked cloth, 

slanting floorboards, brass bedsteads, lace curtains to soften 
the narrow, 19th-century view of neighboring shingles— 
we had paid for quaint. The sea, three streets away, 
like a giant quilt an invalid had shoved down: 
low tide. We turned from the heave-ho dunes 
back to the boutiques, their improbable lingerie, 
leather halters, handcuffs, whips, and paper roses. 
Cafes proffered espresso and Portuguese soup. 




Affected, yes, but this prop-glutted language is likewise effective, the speaking voice creating the sense of stress that is obscured by perfect manners and well rounded phrases. The particulars are separated , ordered, relegated to a well honed description that makes the roiling issues under the activity's perfect skin appear only temporarily lulled into a fitful sleep. Not put to rest , not in the least.

 








Rosanna Warren , it appears , prefers a fussy, antiquated prose as she narrates her afternoon with a mother who seems too tightly wrapped in a generation of frustrated designs: the peculiar emphasis of the fussily described detail, the pristine diction of the adjectives and crafted application of verbs in the service of capturing a recent event seems to me an affectation--the style seems like an elliptical gathering of phrases from a Henry James novel , The American or Wings of Dove when a character's movements are no longer "closely observed" by the untrustworthy narrator but become obsessively detailed, a clue to an author's stalling action until a plot turn presents itself.-- but it is the artifice, perhaps, Warren wants to draw us to. It's a voice coming through the either as if from a hundred years earlier, underscoring the distance the daughter has created as a means of disowning whatever emotional damage might be radiating between her and her mother; this is an attempt to treat the circumstances like they were scenes from a novel, quaint, picaresque to a degree, a situation that one can get to with tenacity, like the last page of a book. And yet, and yet...for all the defenses and denials festooned in a mellifluous 'though dubious music, there are cracks in the defenses.

They are dying, side by side, at different rates, at different speeds, and this is the subtext of their day of tea, meals and mornings of small talk and walks among the towns people, they are where they are , locked in gestures and cadences that mirror one another across the decades, busy with small tasks and habitual tics, waiting, under it all, to leave this plane, one,and then the other.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

So Long, Duncan Shepherd

San Diego Reader So Long


Duncan Shepherd is leaving his spot as The San Diego Reader's film critic after thirty years of imposing the hardest standard on new movies; I've read him continuously since the mid 70's , when I wrote occasional concert and record reviews for the reader, his prose , more than his knowledge, being the attraction.

 I was on a rather long journey to get something of the critic's tone and elegance--Shepherd and the late Steve Esmedina, another Reader critic, were my local stylistic models.Duncan's departure is a loss for film criticism ; there was something sublime about The Reader, one of the largest alternative weeklies in the country, having the single most "un-blurbable" film critic . 

His style and his nuanced, formalist arguments of movies, favorable or otherwise, were so that it was literally impossible to extract a single quote from them for a newspaper ad. That suited him fine, and it suited his readers.I left these words in the comment stream following his last column:

I am sorry to see you leave the pages of the Reader, web or otherwise. You've been one of the few  refusing to be swayed to the chorus of fluctuating fashion. Although I have to say that I disagreed with your judgments more than half the time, I respected and looked forward to your knowledge, your wit and the elegance of your prose. It was a good bet that if I wanted to defend a film you found wanting, I would have to "up my game". You have my gratitude that you kept up the good fight as long as you had; I hope someday soon I might again be able to read you again, on  terms that suit you, about what you find engaging.


 Good luck , Duncan.

Monday, November 8, 2010

More on Jane Hirshfield

"Two Poems" - By Jane Hirshfield - Slate Magazine

Hirshfield's "Alzheimer's " poem was actually the first of two poems published in slate, the second one being the bittersweet coda to the the former work's spare unraveling of expectations to aging and infirmity.
The poem, called "The Kind Man", picks up where the other poem ends, where the beautiful thing that was supposed to be forever--the memory of a great man, the beauty of the poem--slips into anonymity and becomes mere material for a younger generation to make use of. The survivor realizes that they don't want their lives becoming museums of those they can longer talk to , kiss, argue and have meals with. Small things become less mementos of glad times than they are stubbor pebbles in the shoe as one tries to move on.

The Kind Man
I
sold my grandfather's watch,
its rosy gold and stippled pattern to be melted.
Movement unreparable.Lid missing.
Chain—there must have been one—missing.
Its numbers painted with
a single, expert bristle.
I touched the winding stem
before I passed it
over the counter.
The kind man took it,
what I'd brought him as if to the Stasi.
He weighed the honey of time.


This is what we settle for, taking a deep breath and walking over the briarpatched fear of letting go of things imbued with inordinate associations of love and loss, frustration and small wonders, and passing on the things that have family value, accepting the encroaching sense of betrayal, seeing, finally, the watch as only a thing with a minor market value as far as anyone else is concerned. Painful, yes, but this something must be done to make one's life, one's home their own. Any of us who've had to close a parent's house, or say a few words at a good friend's memorial knows the ritual. This is where the life we've given us achieves full autonomy: we are more fully ourselves, more alone than we've been before.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

A poem by Jane Hirshfield

An interesting couple of poems appears in Slate by Jane Hirshfield, dealing with the inevitable experience of death, the long shadow that falls over all of us. The first, "Alzheimer's", is a harsh lyric, a superbly connected bit of detail that makes a connection with a troubling fact of life; it is a terrific example of how to concisely travel the distance from the abstract to the specific without sacrificing emotional power. That poem can here.

The question goes "what's eating you?", and , as we get older, shakier, less full of ourselves because there are fewer people who care what we think, or what we've done, a proper answer would seem to be that it is other people who've picked up on your accomplishments and done something more with them. Their inventions and bits of genius are not possible without the base you laid out. So one is a rug, bright, colorful, an intricate weave of detail, experience, improvisations and inspiration, that is chewed on from the margins; the center remains ,the design is visible, but it is tattered and gnawed upon, unable to collect itself to a former glory. The glory never returns.

A thing of beauty is a thing forever, as it goes in the Keatsian sense, but in this instance, the rug standing in as metaphor for a man's presumably long life, the idea of "forever" hinges on the title of Hirshfield's poem,"Alzheimer's". The beautiful man will be so long as there are people to remember him and exchange stories about him, marvel at old photographs, trade details on conversatins they've had with him.

"Forever", Hirshfield implies, is merely another way to refer to describe what the historical record is for the likes of us who do not move mountains , win wars, or save nations from destroying themselves; it merely describes a reprieve against the amnesia that over takes all of us after a loved one dies. The survivors themselves die, and their children have nothing of the friendships to their memory, only the archive of deeds and repeated wisdoms, now uttered as common place phrases in the commonly held idiom. There is a bitterness here, a realization that one has had their turn in the sun and that soon enough the misery of fading away will be done; what remains after the funeral, the books, the furniture, the inventions, the best of what one has done and said, will be distributed among a variety of networks, and what is deemed useful will be judged by an anonymous population that perhaps has no knowledge of who we might have been . Not the example of Keatsian joy. Hirshfield's succinctly debunks the idea that we live on in the memory of others. The lights dim and go out on everything, to the extent that all that actually remains is the detritus of our individual lives, recognized as incidental paraphenalia, to be judged and used by the young in ways of decoration, not honor.

It was suggested by someone that this poem contains an embedded irony in Hirshfield's remembering this dying man in this poem, immortalizing him, in effect. Or so it seems.Preserved in a poem, perhaps, but not really, as most poems that are written and published get a minuscule readership, and that most are not remembered after a short duration. Trust me, as bookseller I have had to clean out houses of a lifetime's reading, piling stacks of old poetry books written by poets with names known only to retired librarians and specialists in arcana. A beautiful poem is not a thing forever, in most respects--someone like Yeats is rare, rare, rare. Poems, their subjects, and their authors fade with time; they become forgotten. What remains is an anonyous residue.

What the old man says about not being the picture of "Keatsian joy" offers a clue to Hirshfield's probable realization that even a metaphorical immortalization in a poem is subject to the recollection of the collection memory. Somethings last longer through the decades better than others, but it is a fact that most poems and their poets are not remembered past their century. Those of us that write poems long to be Shakespeare , Pope or Donne for the sake of longevity, but most of realize, at a gut level, that notoriety in poetry, in content and authorship, is the least reliable way to get famous, or stay famous. I don't think Hirshfied is telling us something so sentimental as to declare that somehow one is remembered in a work of art; this poem has a harder core, but not a cold one. She merely acknowledges, I believe, the limits of memory, of reputation for most of us now walking the earth. Most of us will land in the history books, most of us will not have poems written about us, all of us need to appreciate the joy that does come our way and to not become angry when sorrow occurs , as it must.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Still more notes

The conflation of reason and emotion is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to append it with. Tension, anger, conflict, a war between impulses that are global in scope but local in context. The goal isn't a resolution of conflict, as that would be mere preaching and the extension of convenient dogmas; what's more interesting and likely closer to the cold shiver of recognition is in how things end. Being neither philosophy, nor science of any stripe, fiction is perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes, their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think needs to be accomplished. The attack on modernism's arrogance that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly overstated, it seems, vastly over regarded: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that new perceptions and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had. Individually, each writer had a different idea of heaven that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so far as the principal thrust of their work, which was away from the straightjacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because it came before.

I agree with Fred Jamieson on the point that Postmodernism, in effect, is a restating of the modernist project., although I suspect the critic was as much interested in preserving his own relevance as a critic as he was in establishing new distinctions to a topic that has, if nothing else, perfected the practice of topic drift. His implication is that postmodernism is critical of the culture it ironically reflects; this stance would keep Jamieson, a dutifully abstruse  Cultural Marxist variant, in things to writing about. Or write toward, as the good critic's style is to introduce things he intends to address and then to defer, endlessly it seems, until some clarity is brought, by him, to the terms and context of his impending discussion. He is, it may be said, the image of the lecturer who assumes the podium without his notes organized, assuming he has noted in the first place. Jamieson, in fact, is something of an ironic example of postmodernism less as a stylish choice or determined practice than as result of trying to wear too many hats; it is more important to act as though you have a point than to actually have one to begin with. Jamieson has his insights and critical genius, of course, but too often it takes a good while for him to warm up to his actual set of talking points. Writing is an argument so far that the central impulse to write at all is to make a series of statements about oneself and one's experiences in the world and reach a satisfying conclusion, some "meaning" at the end of the chat.Roland Barthes noted that the effort to achieve fixed meaning is doomed, as experience is not a static event, but a fluid movement through time that a writer's perception of changes moment to moment, text to text. The argument is thus not one-sided, but multi-vocal and relentlessly complex, although that complexity is the layering of endless snippets of conversation, debates and discourses that challenge, contradict  or ignore the tropes of the chatter that coincide with them, simple ideas, cliches and tropes that are given an unintended complication and ironic juxtaposition by simply having all  the talk occur at   once, like a room full of radios blaring loudly, tuned to different stations with an infinite amount of clarity. These are interwoven within perceptions that argue amongst themselves on their pages, in the extension of characters, plot, instances, local, active bits of imagining where the goal, is finally to attempt to resolve contradiction, arrive at something absolute in a universe that seems to permanently withhold its Absolute Meanings during this lifetime, and to achieve, somehow, some peace, some satisfaction. But no: the argument persists, the imagination soars, the old certainties cannot contain either the unset of new perceptions nor can sooth a writer's innate restlessness. In literature, the conflation continues, reason and emotion color each other, the eyes shut, hoping for vision, a clear path, but the writing continues, the sorting through of experience continues, the unease continues, the world changes radically and not at all.  The postmodernism's overall mission is to notify us of the limitations of our tropes, our schemes, and our rhetoricized absolutes seems redundant to what literature already does.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Last stop for a used hankie

At face value, the poem "About My Mother" By Adam Zagajewski appealed to me; I like the idea of the rushing stream of words, breathless and minimally punctuated in their rush to the last crystallizing image; when it's done well, when the subject catches a little considered incident of experience and riffs on it briskly, quickly, ending, finally, on a surprising note in the run, that nuance you didn't know existed between the words you'd use to objectively outline your emotion, the effect is exhilarating. 

When it works, that is. The secret is creating the feeling that the writer, were just as surprised by the ending as you hope the reader will be. When it doesn't work, the effect is a desperate assembling of random clauses, unconsidered, a piling on of things that happen to be in the room of memory one is rummaging through for something to write about. "About My Mother" reads as just that sort of poem, something composed to have written something, a short form limning of a problematic relationship with one's mother. The narrator recalls things said, meals made, silent gestures in response to his presence in the same room, presented in a tone that does not mean quite mute an otherwise undercurrent of anger and regret; you know where this is going, you know the destination this poem has in mind for you-- 

when she
compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,
and I said, cruelly, but you know he
had talent, and how she forgave everything
and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston
to her funeral and couldn't say anything
and still can't. 

This is meant to take our breath away, to elicit a surprised gasp, to make us feel someone had just walked over the spot we will eventually be buried, but it comes as no surprise. It's unreasonable to think of this poem as calculated; the last image was conceived first, and everything else was composed afterward, the delivery system for the punch line. The details that come before are a conspicuous set up for this melodramatic ending; the reader who has done the due diligence and read and studied the confessional tendencies of Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath might find this template familiar, like a route to work they take five days a week on public transportation. The poet's mute regret at the funeral is merely the last stop through a scenario that scarcely deserves remarking upon.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Salon, take your own pulse

Salon's Mary Beth Williams wonders in a  recent article   if actor Charlie Sheen can be saved from his drug addicted ways. It's a content provider's dream, a topic needing little research, or original analysis. One need only arrange established facts in an accurate timeline and then join the chorus of hand wringers who've been virtually drooling over the actor's repetitive misadventures. Besides the ongoing tales of infamy, it's a depressing sign of what passes for cultural commentary.Where is Dwight MacDonald when we need him, a loud scorn who can beat back the rising tide of  baroque trivia clogging the talk of the town.

 Sheen will likely die a sad and predictable death that awaits nearly all practicing alcoholics and drug addicts (unless he has the fabled "moment of clarity" and achieves the means to keep the epiphany bright, shining and alive), and what I wonder , after all these years, is why this marginally talented actor's relapses are still considered news.True enough Sheen has squandered the considerable resources he has to sober up and clean up, but it's telling that much our entertainment medias squanders it's opportunities to highlight and promote the best of what our artists, authors, poets, film makers, actors and instead maintain death watches over those celebrities who cannot get their lives and careers back on track.

The rise of 24 hour news cycles and instant Internet updating, of course, turns the daily mishaps of Sheen, Lohan and others into something of a low overhead gift for a growing class of journalists, the gift being that of the serial relapser who will dependably screw up again , and again, and provide a meaty grist for the mill. This is the kind of ongoing situation that fills many column inches, fills hours of airtime, and generates unending Internet blather and videos; little investigating, research, or analysis is needed at all.These are the stories that write themselves, and the pity of it all is that this makes the media not reporters of events nor historians, of a sort, who bring coherence to an onslaught of new information, but rather game show hosts officiating over a vulgar, ritualized form of public suicide.

And we? We cease being interested citizens seeking knowledge about how our society works politically, culturally or how it succeeds or fails in it's quest to make ours a more decent place to live.We're reduced to being little more than ersatz sports fans reading insanely irrelevant articles like whether Charlie Sheen is beyond redemption in prestige publications that used to know the difference between what's important, interesting and crucial and what's mere noise, distraction, trivia.

Charlie Sheen is powerless over drugs and alcohol and his life, outside of work, is unmanageable. The phone calls for new jobs, though, will stop coming, sure enough, and this pitiful man's saga will rapidly change from merely sad to being tragically fatal. Our media, though, which is to say the technologized projection of our national conversation, is seemingly powerless over the existence of celebrity fuck ups.
And the inability of any brave editor or owner to change the terms of that conversation suggests a malignant unmanageability; unable to fix what's wrong in our lives, we've been turned into routine bigots exchanging our bad faith over the metaphorical backyard fences and cracker barrels.



Nobody wins.

Monday, October 25, 2010

The DiagnosisThe Diagnosis by Alan Lightman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars




Out of the DeLillo playbook, a business commuter gradually loses the use of his limbs, and his confronted with medical experts who disguise their inability to treat him and render a diagnosis by having him submit to yet more tests. A novel full of comic moments and sleights of hand-- the father's relationship with his son is sad stuff, two-hankie time-- but there is strong feeling of what the world would be like if all the things that we plug into stopped giving us the illusion of information and clarity and instead added to our anxiety, increased oh-so-slowly another ten or twenty degrees. Lightman isn't the most graceful writer, but this novel works rather well. One will note the shared concern with DeLillo, who wrote a kind blurb for this novel: nominally intelligent citizens who realize  too late their trust in the priesthoods of specialists and jargon masters have not only not aided them in their real or imagined crisis, but in fact made their lives worse.


Feast Of Love 

-- Charles Baxter 

The author-writing-himself-into-the-novel gambit is strained at this time, but Baxter makes it new again but receding, almost immediately, to the background as the chapters give themselves over to the characters' voices that confide their habits and whims of love, the very stuff of their breathing. A surpise, a pleasant surprise, this. 



Sunday, October 24, 2010

Influences bring us through the future


I've entertained the notion that at some point my writing skills would improve to the extent that I would no longer feel beholden to the many writing heroes who inspired me to pick up a pen and learn how to type. This around my late thirties to mid forties, when  my resume was long with many stints in unrelated trade, a fact that signaled that what I'd live through constituted the fabled "paying one's dues"; I hadn't made a fortune, but I had my own voice, my particular flair , my signature verbal devices, at last.  Thinking that, my prose became bloated and needlessly baroque, and my poetry ceased in large measure to be about expressing the inexpressible in unforgettable terms--John Ciardi's definition--and became, instead,  a pale, if prolix, carbon of John Ashbery.  While I was rethinking my position about whether a former influence still had relevance to my chosen craft, I came across this in a discussion forum about writer's and writing:
Guys like Pynchon and Barthelme are analogous to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones; we owe them a debt, but their art is no longer a relevant response to what is actually happening now.
I  had been going back to my acknowledged masters --Hemingway, Cheever,  Mailer in an effort to learn again what it was they had learned while on their trek toward their famously distinct styles.Some one you owe a debt to is always relevant to your current situation. This is the reason that we acknowledge what we owe.

Thomas Pynchon is certainly relevant to the current situation, and I agreetake Timothy Mallon's comments aboutMason & Dixon: a original take on the historical novel that skews the mouldy texts of mythology and history in a fresh, "made new" manner. Pynchon, along with Don Delillo with his tour-de -force Underworld, are both at the center of American writing, ironic, one supposes, since we are in a time when the current fashion is to insists on the resolute lack of center, or a knowable, defining presence under the surface of things, under the disguises of material.

While it seems to me that Wallace is something of clever if lazy archaeologist writing funny , and long descriptions of snapshots of a reality he barely even tries to understand, Pynchon and DeLillo are relevant to a that search for coherence, the unifying set of references, that might connect the world that's been made with the universe it's been constructed in. Both authors are relevant because , truthfully, the honor the notion of the Search, the Quest for defining, that is literature at it's most compelling, the books that bring generations back to the shelves looking for the titles.

The late work has only gotten stronger, broader, and more concise with the kind of rigor, style and humor, ultimately, it takes to write a literature that brings a digitized culture into the next hundred years.                   




The things of the world we grow up quickly vanish, the language we learned to express the needs of the self in relation to another is supplanted by another species of cant, unrecognizable as to what psychic wire it's supposed to resonate with.

Both writers are intrigued with systems, hierarchies of meanings, colliding matrix's of name-giving authority that makes the explicated terrain, the perfect sphere of a democratic society, a tag-team wrestling match.

Both authors wonder what went wrong, and seek the language, the metaphors, that can describe the loss, and perhaps give us pause to make sense again of the eviscerated cosmology.

That both writers have stressed a quest, of sorts, at the heart of their post modern fictions nails their relevance in place. The search ultimately collapses, as it usually does in credible fictional stretches, but the relevance is that the language of the writers, of their characters in situ gives us ways to think about ourselves: it furnishes us with an imaginative vocabulary that is revitalized beyond the easy-street defeatism that lurks behind the present vogue for unearned irony. Wallace is a good writer when he cares to be, and he may yet find greatness through a long succession of books. But he still riding the coat tails of his betters.
 

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Bob Guccione

The passing parade of celebrities passing away makes one sigh, to feel vaguely sad, to feel a tinge of nostalgia when the sensual life was the undercurrent in all our affairs. And then we put down the obituaries, read the entertainment page or write a letter to the editor; we forget who it is has left this thin shell of existence and involve ourselves in all of its immensely complex, nuanced, impractical doings. Yes, I feel saddened, but come one, life goes on, things change no matter what I think of how wretched existence became after I entered my forties. Fuck celebrity worship. And fuck Bob Guccione , the recently deceased publisher of Penthouse, dead as cracked leather at age 79. He was a cartoon of a man, a posturing boor with money. I understand an autopsy has revealed that the man was blind in both eyes and that the palms of his hands were extremely hairy. What I feel sorry for in his case are the years I lost thinking idiotically that women specifically and the world, in general, owed me unlimited riches and pleasure by the bushel. His magazine was concentrated assholism.Well, no, I just made that up, the bit about him being blind, with extremely hairy palms. But it is an apt summation of his contribution to consumer culture, ratcheting up the untouchable, rescinded sexuality offered by Hugh Hefner's Playboy and laying the ground, so to speak, for reducing a generation of young men to masturbating mass of materialistic wanna be's who couldn't come up with a creative idea but who could dream up an endless rape fantasies against women as a kind of revenge against unnamed powers that forced them to live anonymous, mediocre lives. Guccione's product was an escape to some perverse idea of the Good Life where the reader is Man Who Is Owed. What came from that was a sustained vulgarity many of us abide; many of us contributed to Guccione's bank accounts, one magazine purchase at a time.

The NetFlix Report: "Changing Lanes".

Getting around to some old movies , courtesy of the NetFlix miracle, and I decided to catch up on a Ben Affleck/Samuel L.Jackson film form more than a few years ago, Changing Lanes.  It thought it was a decent enough Hollywood "message" film, though it had the dopiest premise imaginable. It's not that I object to happy endings -- in this case, each of the characters played by Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck realize the exact nature of their wrongs and wind up doing the right thing by the world and themselves -- it's that I want the fictional solutions to seem fictionally plausible. The concentration of the events into one day snaps credulity, and while you're wondering whether this is an alternative universe where there are 76 hours to a day, the film drags way too much in key areas. 


Jackson and Affleck are both quite good here, but in the crush of the events that are eating our protagonists up, there is too much reflection, too much self examination, too much fortuitous circumstance for the characters to redeem themselves. Irony is fine, but Affleck's pragmatic do-gooding at the end is too much of stretch, theatrical without being dramatic. Like the film as a whole.  


It's a cinch that Affleck, who is having a comeback lately with a growing reputation as a director--the buzz is that he ought to hang acting altogether and stay behind the camera, calling the shots--has spent sometime pouring over this flawed drama and thinking what might have been better. He, and we, are benefiting from his mistakes. 

New poem

I started blogging about seven years ago as a means to get my unpublished poems on the web, and in the evolution , of sorts, my emphasis shifted to reviewing and commentary, a variation of my activity in the seventies and the eighties when I was a music critic and occasional film reviewer. It was the suppressed academic in me coming forth, a personality trait that wanted nothing to do with the mush and incoherence of poetry (at least so far as writing it myself) that instead yearned for some hard headed clarity. It's not that it hasn't been fun--reviewing is , in itself, an adventure , an exploration in those subjects in which you've been immersed to discover, at last, what your opinion happens to be.

Yes, I love to think, whether good ideas or bad. Writing poetry, though, subsided, I had little to say, my images and ideas repeated themselves, my older material read more like unedited transcripts of inane rants than expressions made in a craft (emphasis on craft). So I stopped, more or less, writing poetry for two years, and concentrated rather on the critical side of things: having an opinion on everything is the easiest job in the world, until you tire of the sound of your own voice. Frankly, my prose had turned into a bleat and bray, a species of barn yard sarcasm. But there is hope, I guess: I've started writing poems again, as a means to loosen up the mental machinery that aligns words with thought. Some of them are not so bad, so please bear with my vanity as I offer this up, a lyric on recollection,
the waiting for the "it" of expectation to come through the door, or to seep under it.



Simple grace would do the trick

Simple grace
would do the trick
if there was anything
simple about grace.
tricky as it is.

I've tried drinking soft drinks
perched like a robin
on a limb, but there is
as much spill as thrill
as the horizon teeters
and telephone poles
out number tree tops
of likely places to land.

Walking on glass and hot coals
likewise get me nowhere near the center of things
where all the tension is released from my muscles,
the headaches abate, and my appetite returns.

You asked me once
what made me happy
and I imagined
an empty glass and
calendars stacked in the attic
next to the noise makers and paper slippers.

Your eyes, I said, your eyes
make me happy, the blue and green pools
I fell into when I lifted my head from
books, magazines, cheap airport novels,
when I turned my face from
the television and saw you writing letters,
talking on the phone,
staring out the window
to what might over the hill,
the tree tops, imagining who makes their way home
and pays what's come due
'though the world seems
to dissolve like
sugar wafers dipped
in angry, boiling water.


Where was the grace we wanted,
walking between bullet streams
and falling bricks to the end of the day
where ever after
was a calendar without pages?

On the other side of the street,
a bike chained to a bus stop signed, waiting for its master
for as long as it takes.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Stuff and stuff

It does no one any good to pretend that Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" is a poem; it is, in fact, a badly aged piece of propaganda that these days radiates the grim nostalgia of an audience that has gone beyond mourning their lost youth and instead wonders who will mourn for them. I was one who took up the cause of rock and pops lyrics being "the new poetry" in the late sixties and early seventies, but I didn't know much about poetry at the time and had no real basis for any claims I made. Poems and lyrics are different crafts, the difference being that song lyrics are not usually interesting, arresting, or effective as language unless joined with the music they're meant to work in concert with. One can't recite "Desolation Row" or "Hey Sixteen" without recalling and missing the original Dylan and Steely Dan melodies. Generally speaking, perhaps too general, a real poem, though musical through various means to achieve euphonious, ringing and hooky results, read very well aloud, off the page, without the music to bolster the effect the worlds would have on the reader's/ listener's pleasure center. Realizing, of course, that poetry and songs are linked throughout history, let us fast-forward to the current situation and realize that poetry is stand alone, by itself, a medium of words, not musical notes. Poems as we regard them, though, do just fine, sans melody, provided the poet does the work of doing interesting things with the sounds of their word selection. That said, Mitchell has a genius of a strong variety, and her lyrics achieve a poetic shading that rises above the host of self-serious tunesmiths who consciously strive for a literary feel; where others sound for the most part as though they're trying in earnest, Mitchell shows no strain at all. There is ease of expression, unusual turns of phrase, remarkable associative leaps. The difference needn't be mysterious. Mitchell is simply a better lyricist than most of her contemporaries, and better than the artist who claims her as an influence.


RECORD PEOPLE
Written by Melanie Safka

Record people ain't like others
They give bullets to their lovers
They get T-shirts and they get buttons
They go from having to having nothing

Movie people make the moves
Record men live in the grooves
They're always flying to better weather
They go swimming in the middle of the winter

Ma, I'm on the move again
You see, I married me a record man
We gotta move to California
Oh Ma, I guess this is goodbye
You see record folks live very high
To shake the hills of California
Wanna shake the hills of California

I was shot down right in the middle of the fog
Shot down, poor thing
She was shot down, oh she was, poor thing mmm
Was shot down right in the middle of the thought
In the middle of. . .
Shot down, oh, I was shot down, shot down, shot down

Oh Ma, I'm on the road again
You see, I married me a music man
We gotta move to California
Oh Ma, I guess this is goodbye
You see record folks live very high
To shake the hills of California
I'm gonna shake the hills of California

Lawyers who become producers
They schuk and jive the golden goose
Movers and comers who write and publish
Chicken parts, rhubarb, hot ones and rubbish

Ma, I'm on the move again
You see, I married me a session man
We're gonna move to California
Oh Ma, I guess this is goodbye
You see record folks live very high
To shake the hills of California
I wanna shake the hills of California

Record people ain't like others
They give bullets to their lovers
They get T-shirts and they get buttons
They go from having to
Go from having to
Go from having toGo
 


Melanie is an underrated lyricist, I think, who has cursed her hits Top  "Candles In the Rain" and "Brand New Key"; having pop hits for some songwriters diminishes stature, some critics assume. How could anyone presume to write a song that many listeners wanted to hear more than once? Gauche and gross.  This lyric, though, does yield meaning when merely reads it on the page,  her rhymes are interesting. Her colloquial language fits the narrator's persona well; chatty, catty, just a tad sardonic, someone addressing the myths of Hollywood success through a thinly disguised refusal to suspend disbelief. What the lines cry for, though, is the absent melody. Unlike formal poetry, which would require the writer to make these lines come alive as page poems through a mastery of rhythmic and euphoric techniques that would make the piece a literary object, the lyrics get their push but the lift, lilt and folded nuances of a melody that , in turn, is anchored in place by chord structure. Though the lyrics here, in themselves, communicate the author's intent, the punch, the sweet spot, as it were, is missing. The melody is required for full effect.

_____________________________


Barry Afonso comments: Glad to see someone is showing Ms. Safka some respect, finally. But to your main point … I think the rigid distinction you draw between song lyrics and poetry is just a tad arbitrary. What do you make of someone like Edgar Allan Poe, for instance? By today’s standards, “The Bells” is practically a song lyric; in fact, it has been set to music as recently as the 1960s. Poems published in American popular magazines were often turned into commercially successful songs during the 19th Century. Best-selling poets like Edgar Guest and James Whitcomb Riley likewise wrote the sort of rhymed, sentimental-to-clever verse that is very close to old-fashioned songwriting. As far as I can tell, the modern distinction comes from the loss of rhyme in poetry and the increasing separation of “serious” verse from pop culture. These are developments that did not have to happen. Yes, it is true that pop song lyrics frequently rely upon melody to round out their ability to express themselves. But this is certainly not always true, no more than every mouthful of words spewed out at a poetry slam qualifies as“poetry” according to your definition. There IS a difference between a lyric and a poem, but the line between them can be ambiguous and porous. Art is like that sometimes.

TED: Art is art because it's an expressive mission in constant flux, which means that the definitions are of what a lyric or a poem happen to be are slippery suckers indeed. Fact is, though, is that Poe was a mediocre poet, an arch-romantic rhymester given to obsessive surface effects because, I believe, he realized the vacuity of his content. One never responds emotionally to Poe's cadences; rather we appreciate them for their scansion, which is a distinction as banal as his best rhyming work. For all the talk of poems and lyrics being arbitrary distinctions at best, one needs to admit that the aesthetic of poetry has changed dramatically since the days of yore; reciting rhymed verse is more likely to seem affected and goonishly cute than stirring; there is always the genius who will rhyme brilliantly and with emotional power, but said poets are rare things. The upshot is that rhymes sound stilted, mannered, over thought to the contemporary ear. Recited sans music, one is greeted with the feeling of a peg-legged man pacing a creeky wood floor. As awful as so much free poetry can be, the poets do not, by default, sound ridiculous reading their work. Theirs is a different kind of banality altogether, starting with the waste of their parent's money to send them to a writing program.

Barry: These changes you cite in poetry are not marks of progress, only shifts in fashion. Rhyming seems anachronistic and even goofy in the modern era, but hell, a toga looked pretty good on Caesar Augustus. The times favor the sort of artistic expression that suits them best; the new innovations are not necessarily better, only more appropriate. Eddie Poe (and Eddie Guest, for that matter) may be stilted and corny, but they are still poets. And the likes of Dylan and Mitchell (and Lady Gaga) may well be their inheritors. 

Ted: All the same, the criteria of what makes for credible poems has evolved along with the style in which poems have written; although one may take from the past and revolutionize it to some degree, it's a new set of idioms that make up the current sensibility. Dylan and others may also be the inheritors of what Poe, Crane and still others have done, but they do so in the practice in another art, related to but distinct from poetry, which is songwriting. Dylan is a songwriter, not a poet.

Absorbine Jr: Jack, I must dip my toe into the warm broth of this discussion to bring up the case of Leonard Cohen. Did he cease to be a poet when he began writing songs? Don't his song lyrics echo the same themes and techniques as his work for the printed page? I think these questions need to be faced frankly and squarely, lest we give birth to firing squads.

Man Tied to a Chair: The lyrics to the song "Sisters of Mercy", written as lyrics, remain lyrics. In that case, Mr.Cohen is a lyricist, a songwriter. As the author of the haunting poetry sequence "Flowers for Hitler", he is a poet. He is a poet and a songwriter, and we appreciate what he does in either in both fields by related, but finely distinct standards. Poetry, written for the page, in a tone closer to vernacular speech, has greater range and may make use of more literary devices and is, as a result, capable of greater depth of feeling, allusion, association. Given the skill of the page poet, the poems have a life, a musicality when they are read aloud. Song lyrics, no matter how "poetic" they sound (or indeed, how actually brilliant they may be), are confined to the contours of the melody they accompany. Cohen songs, Costello Songs, Dylan Songs, Mitchell songs, Hendrix songs sound stiff, silly and vaguely pretentious when read aloud, as speech, sans melody. Ours is not an age of great rhymed poetry.

Grelb: Do not forget, my red-combed comrade, that many song lyrics are written first, with melody applied afterward. The confines of the rhyming form are restrictive, but so are many other literary conventions. It may well be true that the lyrics by the songwriters you cite sound silly or pretentious when they are read aloud. This is not, I submit because they rhyme. Rhyming does not damn all of the verse of the pre-modernist era to the realm of non-poetry. The very fact that most critically-accepted poetry does not rhyme today probably means that rhyming will eventually return as a revolutionary gesture. For better or worse/You read it here first.