Sharpen That Pencil

You wonder about all this leisure time many of Robert Pinsky’s poets seem to have in their daily lives. Based on the profusion of poems we are offered that hover around the subject of poetry or consider the turmoil and troubles of someone who’s assigned themselves the odious job of being the conscious of the race, you would think many of them don’t have jobs they have to go to, work they have to do for a paycheck. These are not homeless bohemians scraping by on recycling money. Someone pays them a salary for some kind of work that's performed, tasks rarely mentioned or hinted at. Do they teach the writing of poetry? Why wouldn't be surprised if that were the case? What would be interesting , I think, would be a series of poems where there no one was captured in the act of being poetic, contemplating ambiguity, choking on big thoughts, constructing small, straining epiphanies.

A poet’s task is to regard such things, sure enough, but we have a tendency, a trend, a permanent crease across the fabric of our poetry community that can’t stop regarding itself as something isolated from the rest of the community. Many poets are willing to keep themselves separate from the hoi polloi and rusticated rubes who are mere lowly readers.

"When I Think About the Time the Man Asked Me To Stop Fidgeting With My Pencil"

By Christopher Cunningham doesn’t concern itself with poetry and the poet’s sorry burden directly, but it contains the clichés one would toss into a diorama one would build to illustrate the context you’d expect to find a writer in, a café, a pencil in a fidgeting hand, the speaker, by association, worrying the lines of a poem or lost in strophes he might yet write to fictionalize his experience.

And fictionalize he does, in the form of someone who is presented in a manner that typecasts him as an interruption, a bother. Oy!, the agony of being a poet subjected to folks not interested in who or what he is; the bounder even attacks the means , the symbol of the craft , the essential tool of every scribe hunched over a tattered notebook ;

Will you stop that.

Will you put your pencil

down, and stop touching it, stop moving

it, moving and shaking and twisting

it. Will you stop. Stop.

Our poet ponders, frets, imagines the day this intruder goes through with his disorder, and bothers with a thought about his welfare, perhaps, but mostly feels threatened, his territory infringed upon. Sympathy goes out the window, the muscles tense, the jaw line clenches, and then the resolve comes to him, at last, to stick up for his right to twist and spin a pencil in a public place:

But on that day, stubborn

with surprise, undismayed by the jaw

of his fervor, I said, No.

He stared, fastened by wonder

and agitation, his fingers moving, nervous digits

tying and untying themselves, fretting

at some insoluble knot,

but I said, No. I said, Don't Look.

Just don't look, I said.

Papa Hemingway couldn’t have toughed out the situation any grander or terser, Bukowski couldn’t have been more –go- fuck- yourself .

None could have been more smug. Like the rest of the lazy scribblers who write these inane confessions and , Cunningham’s narrator wallows in his own reaction and attempts to make us co-sign his knee jerk thinking; instead of closely observing the man or empathizing with the poetic techniques one assumes he has at the ready, positing an insight or an opinion made visceral with an observed detail, Cunningham rather imagines the man elsewhere in the day, being strange, quirky, alien, a threat bring fear and bewilderment to small children. Strawman arguments are familiar among pundits and back porch pontificators, but a poet is supposed to use a language that gets to a truth that is overlooked or undreamed of. "When I Think About the Time the Man Asked Me To Stop Fidgeting With My Pencil" is another pathetic example of the kind of poetry that is little more than a writer scratching his privates in a public place.  I'm positive that this poem is meant as self -recrimination, but that isn't enough to get it off the hook , or to make it a good poem. It reinforces the self-absorption--this would fit very well into the many volumes of poems where the authors are caught in narcissistic feedback loops where their awareness of their obsession of their own responses and reactions to situations only sustains the activity. It is not art because the subject does not achieve an independence from the creator's intents or motivations--there is not the sense that appears in the best writing when the subject and it's (his) the world it resides in assumes a character distinct from the artist. This poem is about the narrator's comfort zone being invaded, and ends with the slightest suggestion that the narrator feels bad about his response. That is generous of him, but we're still stuck in this man's emotional backyard, listening to him recite his tales of woe about how awful he feels for not mowing the lawn or taking out the trash.

K and K

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times reviews books like the smartest kid for a junior college bi-weekly student newspaper, which is to say that her insights, her scorn, her depth of field would be amazing for an eighteen year old in any decade. What is amazing for an eighteen year old, though, seldom amazes anyone when the same level of aptitude and attitude are displayed in mature adults; you think  experience along the way to one's thirties and beyond would have seasoned the fact-obsessed certitude with a personality and a weariness of making statements that are applied like nails to a coffin.  This, of course, sets up those who continue to read her to have expectations that she will someday come into her own and develop the qualities one desires in a critic--real passion, a lively, unstrained prose style reflective of a personality that wants to talk to you, and, if it's not asking too much, insights, conclusions and judgments that break away from the clichés and tropes that often, too often pass for commentary. This blossoming is not forthcoming for Kakutani, who remains an underachiever  in the assessment of of other people's work. Her views are so frail in presentation,so inch-deep in investigation that she does not seem that could withstand a conversation with someone wo politely disagreed with. Kakutani seems like she would sulk, cast her eyes down, puzzled about why she is being attacked. She does not sound as if she cares about the books she's tasked with giving an opinion on, and there is mechanical movement to her columns, a method she's seemingly developed in order to dispatch her obligations as soon as possible.She gives you the feeling that she looks forward to getting away from the computer and easing into bunny slippers , cocoa and a dvd she is finally getting around to watching. Pauline Kael cared about the movies she wrote about, and though she faltered toward career's end with messy pronouncements and idol worship, at her best she convinced you that movies were important and had you talking about the issues she's raised.Hers was a passion that would bring you to a tavern after a movie where you would argue with her until the late night about the merits or demerits of a particular director's work. Kael was the sort you thought would continue the argument you just hung up with the first person to come to her door--the mailman,the landlord, homicide detectives--or with whoever chanced to give call at home; her engine was always goined, revving itself for another contest of who had the quickest wit.  Kakutani  just makes you wonder again and again how any reviewer could make reading books or writing reviews about them seem like such a joyless way to spend one's time.

2 poems by Bei Dao

Bei Dao is an especially fine and brilliant poet , and I thought it would be a relief to read some work from a contemporary Chinese poet who better brings together a modern diction with the tradition of image clarity found in traditional Chinese verse. Pound's translations are so loose in their relation to the original tongue and intent that many who know of such matters consider them to be not translations at all but wholly original poems instead. 


This perspective makes the poems a bit more approachable, and presents us with the idea that Pound's misreading of Chinese aesthetic led him, all the same, to develop his notions of a twentieth century poetry where the image prevails over sentiment and empty rhetoric. Bei Dao, of course, has the sure-footedness I don't think Pound ever achieved in this area. While Pound was busy mimicking an old old style (or what he took to be what an older style would sound like) ,Bei Dao neatly builds surely, delicately, all things in balance, indeed, not an idea but in the thing.

Branch roads appear and disappearin the hands of trees.Where did the fawns go?Only cemeteries could assuagethis desolation, like tiny cities.

The thinking comes after the poem, for the reading to resonate with. Our fine poet here performs his art beautifully, the presentation of the perception. 

Translated by Eliot Weinberger

June

Wind at the ear says June
June a blacklist I slipped
in time

note this way to say goodbye
the sighs within these words

note these annotations:
unending plastic flowers
on the dead left bank
the cement square extending
from writing to

now
I run from writing
as dawn is hammered out
a flag covers the sea

and loudspeakers loyal to the sea's
deep bass say June

______________________________­_____

Teacher's Manual

A school still in session
irritable restless but exercising restraint
I sleep beside it
my breath just reaching the next
lesson in the textbook: how to fly

when the arrogance of strangers
sends down March snow
a tree takes root in the sky
a pen to paper breaks the siege
the river declines the bridge invites

the moon takes the bait
turning the familiar corner
of the stairs, pollen and viruses
damage my lungs damage
an alarm clock

to be let out of school is a revolution
kids jump over the railings of light
and turn to the underground
other parents and I
watch the stars rise.

RED DRESS

The dress I bought you was a bad guess at what you wanted for a birthday or Holiday
when I take an unjustified sleep. I thought white polka dots against Communist red
would make you think of white flags and equality, that you’d stop asking me who I voted for or what I wanted for dinner if our lives were meatless from now on, that you’d let it go at that…:That” turned out to be a hanger in the front hall closet where you put the dress for future reference every time we came home. I remember you looking at it after a month, holding at arm’s length, you were shaking your head just slightly, a downward glance at white polka dots against a fire engine red material that made the air grow heavy with aromas that hadn’t been invented. Lately I’ve dreamed about climbing telephone poles. There are so many lines voices crossing one another across static and bad words, words and their inflection a sparking, electronic snarl. I knew one of those voices was asking me who I wanted for mayor, what I wanted for dinner, that’s all they wanted to know and more than I knew how to answer.

A sharp stick in the eye

Ezra Pound is some one who has given me eyestrain and head aches in college, something I can't forgive him for. He didn't give me anything that was remotely connected to the idiomatic language he idealized, the truly modern voice that was to be of its own time, a period sans history. It's a totalitarian impulse to try to live outside history, or to lay claim to it's reducible meaning, both matters Pound thought he adequately limned, but the problem was that his verse is leaden, dressed up in frankly prissy notions of what The Ancients had been up to aesthetically. The effect was perhaps a million dollars of rhetoric lavished on ten cents of inspiration. I didn't like him, I'm afraid.

Unlike Frank O'Hara, dead too young, but with such a large and full body of brilliant--yes, brilliant--lyric poetry left in his wake. O'Hara, influenced by some ideas of modernists, got what Pound tried to do exactly right: he mixed the  vernaculars of High and Low culture in the same stanzas with an ease that seemed seamless, he juggled references of Art, TV, movies, jazz , theater along with the zanily euphemized gossip of his love life, and was able to render complex responses to irresolvable pains of the heart--and heartbreak is always a close kin to his rapture--in lines that were swimming in irony, melancholy, crazy humor. This is poet as eroticized intelligence.

A reader should care if a poet's work adds up to the sum of their theories because it's a difference between talking a good game and playing one. Pound seemed to me to have the instincts of a good talent scout. I'm grateful for his remarks to his fellows, but I wish reading his work wasn't a path I had to go through in order to find the better poets.

If Pound's poems work for reasons other than how he wanted them work, fine that can be explicated interestingly enough with entirely new criteria extraneous to the author's aesthetic/political agenda, but it begs the question, really. It confirms my belief that Pound was talking through his hat most of the time. In this case, based admittedly on my learned dislike of his poetry, I think he gussied up his theories in order to usurp the critical commentary he knew would follow his work: no matter what, all critics had to deal with Pound's flummoxing prose before they could render an assessment, a trick he garnered from Poe, and one deployed by Mailer, a somewhat more successful artist/philosopher/critic (though failed poet).

Eliot had better luck combining the two virtues: The Sacred Wood and some of his other critical assessments have merit as purely critical exercises, self-contained arguments that don't require Eliot's work to illustrate the point. Eliot's poems, as well, stand up well enough with out his criticism to contextualize them for a reader who might other wise resist their surface allure. The language in both genres is clear and vivid to their respective purposes. It can be said of Eliot, though, that he was attempting to run interference with the critical reception of his own poetry by supplying a good amount of writing dedicated to form, or seeming to form, a substantial theory of his. A neat trick, this, since the popular critics and attending academics cannot begin their post mortems on  Eliot's verse without first engaging what he had to say about the practice and purpose of poetry; in some sense he swayed opinion to regard his work favorably. The point, though, is that one is required to deal with Eliot first on his own terms; his ideas color your findings regardless of the position you take.

Pound, again, to my maybe tin-ear, really sounded, in his verse, like he was trying to live up to the bright-ideas his theories contained: The Cantos sound desperate in his desire to be a genius.

David Ferry scratches his head

I remember reading David Ferry's poem The Intention of Things online and was somewhat bemused when other readers commented that the piece reminded them of Wallace Stevens'  wondering of what it must be l pass through the membrane separating our existence of mere representation and enter into the realm of Platonic Ideas, where the real things actually exist. Heady stuff for a poem to plow its way through, but there is at least an elegance in Stevens' ruminations on these fixed landscapes, things-in-themselves-unsullied or spoiled by human vanities.I had concluded some years ago that Stevens had stopped his search for intrinsic and immutable meaning in the nature of things and concluded that his imagination and his gift for scrupulous composition would be put to better use re-framing the texture and position of things among those palm-lined shores abutting the fabulous terraces and columned cabanas, thus investing his language with a further power to evoke the mystery of things that seem, to him, to collude amongst themselves to keep us guessing to what end our days serves. For most, this results in periodic bouts of being dumbfounded, a chronic state of WTF; the pratfalls we have at the point when we assume we've discovered our path results in arguments with the results. Stevens fairly much admits that he'd be baffled if he thought he could define anything in this world of appearances and realized he would be guessing. Fortunately,  the guesses were inspirations in themselves and that he had the genius to transform his speculative method into poems that would inspire the intrigued reader to ask better questions. Ferry, though, hasn't the elegance or eloquence Stevens, and his poem The Intention of Things is a rudderless mess. One might have fun chasing pronouns and such things as they try to follow these elliptical couplets, but this reminds not so much as a poem of phenomenological speculation linked with the secret purpose of objects than it resembles a stoned rap a group of dopers would wander into once the smoke took hold and the world around them became an unreal cartoon they'd been dropped into. The worse part of it is that it reads further as if one of the zonked participants actually remembered the disparate topics of the ganja fueled rap and wrote it all down, trying attempting to make it a serious inquiry into the sequestered nature of things and events. It is humorless, it is overdone, it is sophomore metaphysics, it is dull and very pretentious; the narrator seems to think he's Hamlet, standing apart and on high, ruminating on human folly, the inevitability of death despite all in-genius plots. But that's a speech that's already been delivered, an unsurpassed achievement. David Ferry's dry verse here seems more a typing exercise committed while he paraphrased a seeming half dozen ideas already infinitely paraphrased.

JIBBER JABBER OF THE GODS

Some years back I was in a coffee house thoroughly caffeinated into a babbling blend of erudition and nonsequitor overkill , arguing with someone , a young man dressed in black and brandishing a dogfaced copy of Ecce Homo that life had no meaning because it had no real structure, no arguable basis for being something other than an accident of molecules colliding at precisely the right point and time. Whew, I offered, that is the best Dime Store nihilism I've come across in a long time, and recommended that he put it on his blog, ;under a pilfered photograph of Richard Nixon. I went further and remarked that I had to disagree on the matter of life having no structure. Then the coffee really kicked in. 


Life, actually , does have structure, in the communities we create and the institutions we formulate to hold them together,and in the culture that is shared that provides a diverse citizenry with a sense that there is a purpose to where and the way we live, and that there are the means to improve, correct, or change the conditions of our lives. This is structure. While life has no narrative arc, per se, literature certainly does, and it is in the art of that narrative that the contingencies of life, all those things that one cannot predict (let alone prevent from happening) are contained in fictive form and which can be appreciated as drama, comedy, moral instruction, what have you. Literature is a means to make sense of life, to provide resolutions to brief joys and large traumas, and it is a way to prepare a reader for what ever strange turn one's life might come to.