Notes on the Rapture, sort of

The world is supposed to come to a foretold end, or at least many of us who've been selected in secret on high are due to abruptly depart for Heaven's Gate Station, but my guess that most of us will still be here on the 21st,  our for casted day of divine interdiction, May 21st. Those who won't be here are the ones who leave via the standard methods, death by natural causes, horrible accident or suicide, or skull crushing boredom. I do have, though, a poem about the Rapture I wrote about five years ago, an extended musing on what it might be like in neighborhoods to have  people just vanish, leaving their material things, including their clothes, in a lifeless puddle behind them. 

I posted the poem soon afterward at supremely inbred poetry board referred to as The Gazebo, where a group of seemingly smirking sycophants followed the lead of the crotchety , fumble phrasing alpha dog and criticized me for writing a poem of such blind faith in Christian mythology; the fools hadn't a nickel's worth of irony amongst them and thought my poem was an profession of faith. 

I  quickly let them know what I thought of their summary skills and used words intended to give offense; I  used  the fact that I'd been banned by these nitwits as a something to brag about.  Should I mention that I am thin skinned above all else? On the subject, I used to work in downtown San Diego at a bookstore in Horton Plaza, and as I walked from the bus stop toward the mall I would pass a retail space that was being used by a store front church; in the window someone had placed their artwork of The Rapture in action,crude, blocky depictions of an urban landscape of those who had been summoned, post haste, by God. 

They were seen leaving their clothes on the streets and sidewalks and ascending toward Heaven in gleaming, garish swirls of bright colors,  genitals and female breasts obscured by convenient swirls of tri-colored mist. What was disturbing wasn't so much the idea of  an impending Final Judgement, but that the painting  , in it's minute detail, featured a bus driver being elevated from the vehicle he was driving; while he was being taken to join his Creator, the suddenly driverless bus was shown running a red light and crashing into oncoming traffic. If Heaven were a night club, the doorman would be performing summary executions on those who didn't look cool enough to get through the door.

Here's the poem:

RAPTURE

The mailman drops his parcels and
falls to his knees in the middle of the street


as a light comes through the clouds and
makes the commotions of the city radiate

gold tones like the frozen poses
of ancient photographs

found under the stairs of every parent’s house
that aging children have to close.

You see the mailman on his knees and wonder
why he’s praying, hardly aware of the increase in light

or the music that blares all the big band music of
trumpets and saxophones that disguise the grind of

passing cars, it’s such a shame that religious fanatics
are hired to deliver the mail, you think, so much depends


on what comes through the System, envelopes full of
what’s owed and what’s not covered by any plan

that can be written down; you run the water in the sink,
you wonder where did the clouds go?

There is no rain anywhere,
says the radio announcer,
and the light is tremendous all over the globe,

there is not a dark corner
in any corner or nook on the earth,

And then the radio gives out to static, and the TV
releases itself to snow, the music in the street is very loud

and swinging hard to the left and the right and then right down the
middle as all the notes scurry brilliantly through the hedges

and up the driveways, into the homes with each reed instrument
improvising disembodied melodies that form their own sheet music,


That is a very loud set of speakers in that passing car, you think.
and the radio announcer cuts through the music and says something you

hear as that millions of people all over the world have just vanished in
plain site under bright light and big bang music, gone in a wisp and puff of smoke,


You look at your watch and note that it’s time for lunch,
the clouds have fallen over the city again, the sky darkens,

the shapes of the neighborhood take on their deep hues again, saddened
with history, dense in dumb witness to what never ends,

You stop, look out the window; you turn off the water you ran,
in the middle of the street, by itself, flat on the cement,

The mailman’s bag and his clothes,
topped by his hat, kissed by a cool breeze.

notes on more dead horses

The generation of  New Journalist  who emerged during the 60s and 70s were indeed post modern in their coverage of events-- whether the writers themselves were modernists in sensibility is irrelevant to work they did. Post modernism is defined, in the usual quarters, as the eclectic jumbling of categories and styles, the blurring of distinctions of generic distinctions, and transgressive of boundaries that were formerly considered sacrosanct, immutable, unyielding.  Now that post modernism is as old hat and near useless as anything other than an historical place holder for a series of shallow ideas, we find that the what was called the pomo gesture in the work of the hungry journalists, that of treating their subjects and their contexts as though they were part of an explicitly literary, i.e., fictional framework, is important chiefly because it availed the writers a means to write a compelling prose. Less important than compelling readers to few the world differently—Ezra Pound’s assignment for all the Modernists—the importance of the books the style produced lies in their adherence to some rather conventional ideas of what constituted a higher quality of writing.

The work evident in Armies of the Night, The White Album, In Cold Blood, The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and other sublime and less-sublime examples of the approach fulfill what's come to be the givens, and even clichés of post-modern writing. It's not unreasonable to think that writers normally considered Modernists would take what's thought to be a post modern strategy in order to achieve perspective that normally form would make more difficult. Carrying about the matters involved in a story hardly disqualifies a work, or a writer, from being post modernists. The cool, ironic stance that is supposed to problematize and “make strange” the conditions of narrative formation seems more as a pose critics who have a curious aversion for writing that is meant to illicit a galvanizing reader response: it sounds more like a good rap than good reasoning.

I do not have a problem of with the conflation of the emotional with the rational, since that is the point of writing and making an argument in the first place. One may use whatever the current wisdom insists are formal means, or one may engage the current species of avant-garde slash and burn in order to make their case, but the point is coming to an end that somehow makes a point, or has created an enlarged and vivid sense of the studied particulars.

In any event, New Journalists never as a group never referred to themselves as "post modernists", and the style, now faded somewhat, has been absorbed by the culture as an accepted style for very mainstream consumption. The news story-literary-narrative scarcely raises an eyebrow today. But the judgment of history has these writers, nominal modernists perhaps, performing the post modern gesture, interrogating the margins of genre definitions, and making impossible to regard news reporting quite the same again. The conflation of reason and reason is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to append it with. 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 modernisms' arrogance that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, 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 principle thrust of their work, which was away from the straight jacket 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 Post Modernism , in effect, is a restating of the modernist project. 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 discourse.  Barthes notes that  the effort to achieve fixed meaning is doomed, as experience is not an 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, complex, interwoven within perceptions that argue amongst themselves within in the writer and onto 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 with hold 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 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. That post modernism's over all mission is to notify us of the limitations of our tropes, our schemes, and our rhetoricized absolutes seems redundant to what literature already does.

Lew Welch said that you don’t write unless you can’t do anything else; writers are powerless to write in ways other than the urge dictates, regardless of what crit

notes on a dead horse or two

More than ever, I believe The Fountainhead, to be a dangerous book. This may worry a point already mulled over here, but one cannot just pass-off this book's implicit assertion that mass destruction is justified in the name of "higher values" whose substance supposedly overrides the need to respect and protect human life. It is only irrational romanticism and literary convenience that Rand softens Roark's destruction with an empty structure.  Roark is the hero of all those ruggedly individualist libertarians whose opinions sound as oddly uniform as Comuntist Party USA position paper, but shed of the that odious veil, he's pretty much the prototype of the perplexed goons and gangsters whose lives are committed to making the world notice them by the most miserable means available. 

I've little problem with "enlightened self interest", a general concept where one pursues their own agenda with it in mind that their goal is not just to fulfil their own wants and needs but also benefit others in doing so. One "does well by doing good" when they realize that their rights are coherent and effectively applicable in larger social and cultural contexts. 

Rand lops off the "enlightened" part and effectively tries to make an intellectual defense for adults, males for the most part, to act like three years olds and essentially demand that the world bow to their self-defined genius and all the pulverizing engineering it takes for said genius to be foisted on the community. It's a childish view, the mewling of King Baby, and it is, frankly, solipsistic to a degree that approaches a species of mental illness. 
______________________
The existence of God can neither be proven nor proven in absolute terms, and is that belief in either proposition requires an act of faith, faith being a firm belief in something for which there is no proof . The acts of faith, in William James' estimation in his writing in Varieties of Religious Experience, is the relevant quality to watch; if the belief and the dictates the faith espouse result in helping its membership adjust, adapt and find purpose in a world that subjects them to all sorts of catastrophies and seeming cruelties, then that is reason enough . The existence or non-existence of God comes out of the equation: we look at the results of the faith, and see how it's contributed to the General Good; the description and standard can apply to believer and atheist alike.
_______________________

Noted pop musicians in twelve step meetings often seem bursting at the seams to tell other members what it is they do and what their latest projects are. It's a testimony to most of them that they contain the impulse to brag and speak in a general way. Bill Wilson had the same dilemma, in terms of keeping his vanity in check, and wrote about in in both the book Alcoholics Anonymous and The Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. It was a fitting thing for me to read that the man who warned against being the AA big shot had to live up to his own advice.

Eric Clapton's celebrity doubtlessly shields him from any blow back concerning his well publicized battles with booze and the needle , mostly because the public is quick to forgive those who've gone astray but who have gone to well-publicized lengths to clean up their side of the street. We see the same thing happening with Robert Downey, a repeat screw up and jailbird who a few years ago just made it a point to work as much as he could, prove himself reliable, bondable, professional. It paid off, as he more or less owned last summer's box office. In their cases, celebrity might work as a sufficient substitute for the lack of anonymity, but it comes down, again, to whether the famed addict or alkie has willingness to change their lives. Talent figures into it as well; fans just want Clapton to play blues guitar and prefer to see Downey peform well in good roles, and are willing to suspend their misgivings over their bad habits provided the entertainers do just that, entertain.

---

MC5

"Kick Out the Jams" was a regional hit when released in 1968, mostly in Michigan and Ohio, where the band did most of their touring. The single charted on the local top 40 lists distributed in the Detroit area by WKNR and WXYZ (the "brothers and sisters" version). It classifies as a hit , though a small one at the time.They were considered for years to be one-hit wonders after they broke up. While the rest of the world kept its eye on Iggy and praised the Stooges (rightly so) for their genius and influence, fellow Detroiters MC5 were pretty much ignored by virtually everyone , excepting a few hearty encyclopedists, who even then didn't give the band their due. The 5 were not a hip band to admit to liking. Revisionism is a wonderful thing sometimes, and in the last 9 years or so the MC5 have been rehabilitated by some thoughtful writing.  The release of their three albums pretty much solidifies their reputation as creators of punkoid sound thats' been influential years beyond their time. Now everyone seems hip to the MC5, and is willing to admit their importance.This was not always the case, though, as it wasn't that long ago when their name and music seemed consigned to the the filthiest portion of the dumpster.

Hemingway at his best./

Ernest Hemingway is, in fact, grossly under-appreciated for his best work, specifically "In Our Time", "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not". So much gets accomplished in such a stingy choice of words! His was a different world than the one we live in now, and his accounts of the world, is, at its highest, sublime. At his worst, he wrote sentimental gruel whose bathos so thick you could use it for mortar. A string of posthumous novels hasn't helped the reputation, and have served to obscure the real accomplishment.  There is the issue that Hemingway’s obsession with masculine stoicism and the adherence to a personal, difficult to communicate code of honor as a means to transcend the stumbles, betrayals and petty grievances of a rudderless world is a set up for a  bad end.A man who holds himself to a standard he knows he cannot live up in the least is essentially giving himself permission to seek a twelve gauge solution.

We witness that in the string of post humus novels where the famous style turned into self parody, but at his best, his absolute, crystallized greatest, it’s precisely because that he had issues with his masculinity that he tried to work out in his fiction, is a large part of what makes him great. The point of literary study is empathy as well as analytical comprehension. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not.  Stylistically, I prefer the spare evocation of Hemingway's agony over the auto didactic fumbling of D.H.Lawrence, another writer of mixed blessings. Where Lawrence wanted to be a philosopher more than a storyteller, a lecturer rather than a sympathetic ear to his characters, Hemingway had an intimacy in his work, the sense of being within the innermost circle of a community  who, among themselves, needed the fewest phrases to convey the most complex of emotions. The dialogue between Jake and Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises  in clear yet oblique reference to the war  injury that left the protagonist impotent is a a brilliant exercise in getting across what was then unspeakable in way that couldn't be mistaken. We could say the same thing for the love scene in To Have and Have Not, a tired, grinding, ritual grudge fuck performed from habit rather than desire; this is not to say that I prefer the grim and gruesome expressed in sparing terms, but that I admire the particular finesse  Hemingway had in creating scenes that resonate loudly with as few effects as possible. It was a limited roster of techniques, of course, but what he did with it was beyond the instincts of most other writers seeking to become a voice for something greater than themselves.Let us say that at this point I am more likely to pick up Hemingway's books for another go round, since he fulfills the most important requirement; he is a good read  after all the issues are , for the moment, set aside.
Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine. But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria. The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile.

Hemingway at this best

Ernest Hemingway is, in fact, grossly under-appreciated for his best work, specifically "In Our Time", "The Sun Also Rises", "To Have and Have Not". So much gets accomplished in such a stingy choice of words! His was a different world than the one we live in now, and his accounts of the world, is, at its highest, sublime. At his worst, he wrote sentimental gruel whose bathos so thick you could use it for mortar. A string of posthumous novels hasn't helped the reputation, and have served to obscure the real accomplishment.  There is the issue that Hemingway’s obsession with masculine stoicism and the adherence to a personal, difficult to communicate code of honor as a means to transcend the stumbles, betrayals and petty grievances of a rudderless world is a set up for a  bad end.A man who holds himself to a standard he knows he cannot live up in the least is essentially giving himself permission to seek a twelve gauge solution.

We witness that in the string of post humus novels where the famous style turned into self parody, but at his best, his absolute, crystallized greatest, it’s precisely because that he had issues with his masculinity that he tried to work out in his fiction, is a large part of what makes him great. The point of literary study is empathy as well as analytical comprehension. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not.  Stylistically, I prefer the spare evocation of Hemingway's agony over the auto didactic fumbling of D.H.Lawrence, another writer of mixed blessings. Let us say that at this point I am more likely to pick up Hemingway's books for another go round, since he fulfills the most important requirement; he is a good read  after all the issues are , for the moment, set aside.

Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine. But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria. The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile.

BB STYLE BLUES FOR d HARMONICA.AVI

Keeping it dumb in black and white

"...democracies are fundamentally anti-artistic. "

A door without a frame is not unlike a question without a desire to know.

That's what I heard , just walking by the patio , a man and women geeked out on wine and Sherman cigarettes discussing whether free elections are hindrance or a boon to the artist. They seemed to think that the contenders for power appealed to the primordial fear of a hypothetical Mass Man in order to foment their unspoken desire to consolidate their resources; only the black and white world need apply. But , in truth, it is  ;ess that democracies are anti-artistic than they are resistant to the notion that aesthetic concerns and artistic expression are reserved for a cultivated elite.

Democracy rejects this sublimated priesthood on principle, and opens the arena, the galleries so that more who wish to do so may engage in the intuitive/artistic process and keep the activity alive in ways that are new and precisely relevant to the time--this is the only way that the past has any use at all, as it informs the present day activity, and allows itself to be molded to new sets of experiences. Art is about opening up perspectives, not closing them down, and that is the democratic spirit at its best. 

Otherwise, the past is a rigored religion, and history is an excuse for brutal, death wish nostalgia.

Tucked out

The times have changed to the degree that women who wear revealing clothing are no longer offended when you make note of what they're revealing. Everything is permitted , it sometimes seems, and the surfeit of goods and the lack of time for concomitant indulgence renders all those options invisible. Our choices become more than a distraction, they become a hindrance, and how you judge whether a day was a success or not was how well you resisted, no, ignored the allure of what used to drive you crazy with yearning.

MUSIC FOR CASH REGISTERS

I could sing all night
if the lights never changed
and if the radio played this song
again and again,
it’s a riff that rubs me
the right way in traffic
it’s a chorus making downtown
a party of long ribbons
and faired tap shoes,
the motor purrs and growls
with each keyboard grunt
and grunting guitar,
this car just rocks
when there’s no one I have to
return it to.

This is the curse of
owning things
that merely own you in exchange,

Cars, toasters, hand guns and
and magazines hug your
face with a deep kiss of need,

What I receive is nameless
and elusive, some music, some smoke,
dry ice vapors and a wallet that
floats away,
that’s how light it’s gotten,

Money is air, invisible but potent,

I owe money I’ve never seen
to people I’ve never met,

Like you, shuffling your debit cards
and saying prayers that don’t seem
to soar as high as interest rates
or blood pressure,
you should be dancing
for all the coin we owe,

This moment , right now,
on the street that vibrates
with orders on how to drive
when to cross and what to smoke
the thirty yards from the public entrance,
the world can stop and we perk our ears to
listen to an imagined needle scratching
the surface of percussive vinyl,

The bass line and the grunts of soul singers
are all the advice we need; they called decades ago
when we started to toss our cash out from
Wall Street Windows,

They advised

Do the jerk, baby,
Do the jerk now!M

A sonnet I wrote

I thought this effort   was a decent attempt at the loose-fitting sonnet form, as practiced by Ted Berrigan and featured in Gerald Stern’s engagingly gangly book American Sonnets. The distinction between these efforts and the Elizabethan sonnets one parses in college courses is that the “loose-fitting” form (my phrase) is an attempt to bring the particularly American instinct to confess and promote one’s idealized personality in free verse, ala Whitman and Charles Olson , with the limits a more formal structure. The results satisfy nearly no one but those who appreciate perversions of form, with the hope something new emerges. Sometimes something does. I was hoping for comments on this slight effort:

Sonnet 16  

A sign of the cross and a sign on the door or just sign

yourself out if it’s a weekend pass you’re dealing with, 

sign yourself up for a moment in the sun when youhave your tax refund check in hand, give us some cash for 

the diversions that approach the distraction level

of morons who get their exercise reading the labels 

on records as they go ‘round and ‘round on the

phonograph, signs of life in a living room, your parents 

house and sofa, I am hiding behind a chair before the light

switch is flipped and a panic like business plans that come 

undone where you signed a dotted line that ends up

being a perforations around your wrists, like you see

on butcher’s charts, you know, under the sign that reads

NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT, DON’T ASK.

Interesting, and as often happens on the forums, the first response to the poem brought something else in the poem to think about other than how well it works as an amateurs attempt at  more structured verse. A poster with the moniker Th Paine asked How many people will understand what you mean when you refer to record labels spinning around on a phonograph?

Good question. Who would have thought that LP's would be something that reveals your generation? I remember years ago talking to a young man , twenty years younger than I at least, about various matters. When it came time to say goodbye, I said "I'll see you on the flip side". He looked puzzled as we shook hands as asked me what I meant by "flip side". In an instant I realized that he was too young to remember long playing albums, vinyl, and briefly explained that before Cd's records had two sides, side A and side B, and that the phrase meant the other side of the record. It was no big deal , of course, but it was informative that I was now old enough that some of the cultural references I'd been using for decades were now potentially incomprehensible to younger adults.

FALLING ON DEAF EARS

 I  like loud and distorted guitar, old school, in the form of jamming power trios, those guitar-bass-drums shootouts where the downbeats started at debated counts and the length of improvised middle section was undetermined and unpredictable. Improvisation, riffing, vamping, monochromatic chord mongering, the center portions of this species of spontaneous noise took it's stylistic cue from several generations of black American blues geniuses and took their clear, elegantly expressed formulations of anger, pain , dread and joy and tweaked the pentatonic elements to a narrowed strain of white male rage, performed at volume levels beyond endurance levels , with the nimble, simple, eloquent rhythms and solo configurations of guitar , harmonica, banjo being replaced with a waves of distorted notes bent to their furthermost pitch of emotional credibility.

It was perfect for the smoky ballrooms I went to in the late '60s, where the likes of Cream, Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore and Mountain belched, groaned and assaulted a beleaguered audience of addled brains with their instrumental abuse; on some nights the commotion and clamor reminded you more of a demolition derby instead of a unique engagement with a fleeting muse. The impact was more important than configuration. There was joy when, in Detroit where I lived, I came upon the MC5 and the Stooges. The 5 were every car Detroit had manufactured being tossed off the top of the Penobscot, the tallest building in town; they had a speed and power only the fury of an accumulating gravity could provide, and half the fun of watching these guys batter, abuse and flail their instruments while the wiggled and wrenched themselves in hip-thrusting deliriums was the expectation of their metaphorical car crashing, smashing into the hard, metal strewn concrete below. The Stooges were, on the other hand, the guitar that was tossed off with a violent fling at a bad rehearsal and left on, still plugged into the amp, humming and crackling the whole night; Ron Ashton's guitar work was perfect, imperfect, with a wood-chipper rhythm, a perfect three and two-chord background for Iggy Pop, who's psycho-sexual explorations into the outer areas of teenage impatience would make you think of a zombies severed arm. It still twitches across the blood, the hand is still making grasping motions for your neck, you realize that even death cannot stop this force that requires your attention.

Reading Bei Dao

Bei Dao is an especially fine 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 specialists 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 disappear
in the hands of trees.
Where did the fawns go?
Only cemeteries could assuage
this 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.Here are other poems he's written,scaled back to a sparkling essence of 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

Sketches drawn with a broken hand

Striking images alluding to opaque , disquieting personal episodes used to be the thing I insisted a poem be, a constantly streaming series of broken bits rendered in sufficiently harsh terms that seemed to want to perpetuate a pain. I am lucky to have had a series of professors and poets who suggested, even required me to read far beyond my reading preferences; I would have small poetry collection had I not broadened my horizon. It is unreasonable to demand that poets write with the same depressed acuity as Sylvia Plath, and I think equally irrational for poets to attempt the mimic her singularly downcast genius.

Leslie McGrath's poem , "The Mouth of the Mind", nonetheless treads the excessively forged confessional path in order to offer up a scenario that recalls Mark Strand's "The Dreadful Has Already Happened". Strand, whom I don't care a great deal for as a poet, does however have a lyric ability where a musical of how to start a phrase, what to make of it in mid turn, and where to finish up, and his poem is a masterpiece in how to convey wordless woes and worries without sacrificing flow. McGrath , odd to say, is no Mark Strand (at his best); her emphasis , blunt and less willing to provide a reader with a verbal ease to segue between the clashing elements of her nightmare, seems to reduce the ratio of what can be understood on an intuited level and make her awful recollections into garish totems , a bric a brac of crummy self image. Strand's poems features the poet leaving the baroque verbal garnishments in the spice cabinet for a change and crafting instead a scenario of  fluid strangeness, creating the most effective surreal effect;  a narrative line that seems that it ought to resolve itself but which only deepens ever so slightly in its contradictions the more one re-reads to see if they've missed something vital. It's meaning is undecidable, but the presentation is compelling.

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh   

when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them   

out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.   

It was about that time I gave up.

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips

are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered   

around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search   

I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.

This is something of a silent film, significant family members and friends involved in a ritual that is required for reasons that are with held. Every small thing finds negation, each gesture of warmth and security is undermined by sullen looks and currents of anxiety; what we're made aware of, though, is that through the  temperamental extremes there lies those short moments of peace, serenity, the lack of the nagging noise that converts the banality of the world into storm warnings and shots over the bow. The sadder bit of it all is this calm that requires the most effort to arrive at.

Bear in mind that I enjoy a surrealistic, non-sequitor style; even with that, though, a certain playfulness is expected, a particular joy in presenting the world and memory of it in alternative versions of What Happened is required, if only to prevent the odd bits of phrase making from becoming a humorless shelf of unfocused melancholy. Her imagery is heavy handed and lacks a memorable phrase or unusual. The segues from baby bunny rabbits, alive or dead, dinner tables, stray bullets on a counter salads full of wasted money are not especially convincing that this was anything worth writing a poem about; it seems more an unrefined extract from a dream journal that is intended for a therapist or an astrologer than it is for a readership who are interested in how the language might again escape the truism that everything worth saying or expressing in verse has already been said. McGrath's crabby, snippy, self satisfied anguish does not express the inexpressible in terms of the forgettable. It is, though, a confirmation that writing a good poem is not something just anyone can do. 

A poem

Part of me thinks the best part of this poem is the portion I didn't write, the epigraph by John Ashbery from an essay of his about avant-gard art.  We seem to have  collective wish to have the art of our understanding flirt, skirt and play footsie with grave and fatal matters, to ponder the eternal beyond, to take the reader/viewer/listener on a vicarious trip to the edge of whatever rim of existence and extinction our imaginations can conjure and set within us some sense of the urgent need for us to live fully, purposefully, creatively. We want our art to be dangerous, in other words, and force to understand what life is after we garner a strong, vibrant sense of what it is not. Ashbery, though, takes a another stance and dares the Wildean notion that Art has no use other than entertainment; presented wth with nothing but abstruse guesswork and blank slates in response to the Big Question, we busy ourselves with our designs and find ourselves by what we now recognize as religion, philosophy, busy systems of supposition to distract from the groaning emptiness threatening to appear should the props collapse in mid sentence. Not to have fun is to face the crushing truth that all  is likely without purpose or any sort of intelligent predestination, but we can't consider that a sure bet.

____________________________________________

Another Side of Long Distance Calls

"...religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing. We would all believe in God if we knew he He existed, but would this be much fun?..."
-- John Ashbery

Somewhere along the line
something was said
that made
an awful lot of sense.
an utterance so
stable in verb and stance
that my head jerked up
as if on a string
moved about
by a cruel master.
The guy who said
was smiles
for miles his white
teeth could blind.

William had his glass at the tip
of his lip
as though a toast
were to emerge from
his studied gestures,
he repeated
his wisdom,

"Jesus lives in a house on
the moon
and he can't go outside
because there is no air..."

The table spun just then,
three fast fandangos,
and in the swirl
three thousand or so years of
thinking came undone like
badly sewn stitches across
the seams of thin, historical clothing,
every fig leaf has fallen
from our shoulders and
waistline,

Philosophy and faith
are seen finally
for what they are
through the bottom of
the bar glass,

a little man in a corner
holding a wet paint brush.

I used to have the idea that being vague and indistinct in your writing was the best way to achieve poetic effect and labored, or rather scribbled a good ten years with that thinking as my working principle. Clarity be damned, it was all about striking images and bizarre juxtapositions of styles, images, concepts that were the important factors in making writing achieve what was truly inexpressible in everyday language. The conceit, as you may guess, was the confidence that I had transcended the ordinary arrangements our lingua franca imposed on us and that I had , by romantic right and personal inclination, was provoking a conversation about earthly affairs in terms only God could create; the more complex approach to the common place was too much for mere linear progression--heaping leaps of faith aplenty were required of the reader, who would, ideally, "complete" the poem with the missing details of their own lives. It was the poet's version of Method Acting, raw and unpolished responses to intricate and emotional situations .

Contriving Issues

Michael Ryan admires Emily Dickens, it appears, but there’s nothing in his poem“My Young Mother” that comes near the compressed internalization the Amherst mistress created with her jump-cut, cat-footed leaps between ideas. Dickens, for sure, was a writer one stayed with, labored over, argued with in terms of the uncompromising nature of the style, and then and only then grasped her cadences and the burrowing revelations they contained; one was rewarded as well with a stinging wit that was properly lacerating once it was released from it’s coded sheath.

There are, to say the least, considerable rewards for the close inspection of her unusual diction and convoluted construction. Ryan fares much less trying to write with a suggestion of her style—it’s the subject for emulation that is the least likely to produce interesting results—and where Dickens had the skill to keep one guessing, unsure, strung along as to what her point would be or what it was that might be revealed (the peculiar joy of Dickens is the teasing, the delayed gratification), Ryan’s poem confesses his meanings and intents readily. There is no suspense in the game here, nothing that casts a different light on memories that are clear but clouded somehow with intervening events. There is, instead, a mannered and stiff rendering of a childhood memory I can’t help but think unfolds from Ryan with too much detail,

What she couldn't give me

she gave me those long nights

she sat up with me feverish

and sweating in my sleep

when I had no idea whatsoever

what she had to do to suffer

the pain her body dealt her

to assuage the pain in mine.

The writing is too fussed-over, the particulars too polished, the narrative constructed in such a way that one knows that there is a punch line coming by the usual literary routes. Ryan continues an argument he seems to have been having with his mother over the years and finds himself in the grasp of a swooning revelation that a handy device has landed at his feet to aid him in bringing a coherent (if game footed) line to his leftover recollection. He senses his mother resents her requirement to remain with her sick child but remains so through an instilled sense of obligation and duty, instincts she likewise resents.

That was a noble privacy—

her mothering as a practice of patience—

how deeply it must have stretched her

to watch me all night with her nerves

crying for rest while my fever

spiked under the washcloths 

she passed between my forehead

and her dishpan filled with ice.

Ryan attempts a feint her with the last stanza, doing as Dickens does by at first seeming to address a subject in a way that suggests a praising tone, and then, against expectation, turn to the other extreme, although in Dickens case, the “other extreme” wasn’t extreme in the writing, but rather swiftly, deftly, ingeniously offered. The effect was of someone changing their mind about someone or something, but credibly so, with some evidence visible from the argument the speaker had advanced in their initial praise of the subject. Ryan’s attempt to address a darker side of what he’s set up in the previous stanza, the conspicuously moldy conceit of the Sainted Mother, is ham-handed at best, and bizarre.

That was a noble privacy,but even then there was so muchunsayable between us, and why this was now looks soludicrous in its old costume of shamethat I wish not that she had justsaid it but that I hadn't beenso furious she couldn't.

We find now that he resents his mother because she was putting her child before her own needs and desires and that she did so without protest, but that the child Michael was sensitive enough, aware enough at the time that she was disguising her true feelings, was, in a sense, being false with him and now he has the lingering simmer of resentment that she couldn’t speak to him , mother to child. There are those folks in various twelve-step programs who “get stuck at the fourth step”, the writing of a fearless and searching moral inventory of themselves where one’s foul deeds, resentments, traumas and what have you are written out with brutal honesty, the goal being that one may face their demons (to risk a cliché) and work through those matters that impede their progress.

The goal is progress, to move on and make a life for oneself that’s worth living, not to assign blame to those who are beset you with life-hobbling “issues”. But there are those many who continue to dig for bones in the backyard and continue to contrive new odious scenarios from scant fragments; it basically turns these people’s lives into conspiracy theories where forces have aligned to make one’s life a punishment. Ryan sounds like he’s stuck on some matters that he would have been better ridding himself of once and for all; the point of an inventory is for an enterprise to rid itself of goods that cannot be sold if it is to remain a going concern. Exaggeration oftentimes benefits a poem that is often the point of engaging in this peculiar form, but Ryan doesn't make me want to suspend my disbelief or to dissociate my sensibilities precisely because the thinly constructed and blatantly contrived nature of the punchline, which was the supposedly stultifying effects of his mother's care for him. The poem is whining, really, the sort of who can't help but feel ennobled by their self-diagnosed dysfunction. It's an easy way to give your life a narrative arc, an original source, from which a limitless flow of causes and effects can be writ, most pat and phony. “My Young Mother” seems to be an example of someone inventing evidence that he’d been done a foul deed; the result is an awkward and ludicrously reasoned poem. Some things can only be written off when all is done, and as someone who manages bookstores, ridding oneself finally of what cannot be made good use is a relief. The tone of Ryan's poem is weepy and woe-is-me, and my experience in the programs I alluded to in my initial post has presented me with those for whom their issues, whether alcoholism, drug addiction, codependency or child abuse, is a form of identity politics. There is a power in the brand, as it gives one a world view and provides a license for one to rummage through their past and invent further originating sources of their dismaying existence. It might well be that Ryan intended anaha! in all this, that something is revealed, but what I take to be an unsettled issue keeps him on the fence in the form of the equivocating language he selects. It remains in dysfunction; if the matter here was settled, Ryan would have the instinct to offer up a portrait of a "fully-formed man" that would have resulted from his struggles. But he doesn't, and the poem ends only with the feeling that this is a man who can become weepy because he chooses to be so.

Our punk, our genius

Bob Dylan, strictly speaking, is pop. He was pop by the definitions of pop music holding sway in the mid to late Sixties when the word became associated with experimentation, the avant-guard. "Pop" and "Rock" were interchangeable terms. Peter Townsend was the one who coined the term "power pop", in an interview I read in the old Hit Parader music journal,  and used the phrase to describe the Who. It was a term he used to define the Beach Boys, a band he admired quite a bit Definitions of terms change, of course, and with the re-emergence of conspicuously commercial tunes in a post-punk era came a new pop music that was heavy on irony and purely obsessed with its hook value. 

The Beach Boys were an extension of the harmony prone Four Freshmen, a vocal style overlaid upon a Chuck Berry chord progression with lyrics addressing concerns not of the 40s or 50s, surfing and souped cars. The who borrowed the Beach Boys'  vocalese and used it in conjunction with a musical style premised on power chords and snarling teen hooliganism. Dylan, though, was the one who broke from the pack, taking his inspiration from the nominally "pure"  genres contained in the folk music revival.  The good man, though, had something larger to  do rather than adhere to principles; fame was his goal, and fortune;  he walked backward into genius,  into the backwoods with this nasal, grunting vocals and lyrics that blended  an idealized  proletariat idiom with  great heaping doses of  Verlaine and Eliot: he brought literary Modernism to the jukebox. He also understood the dynamics of being a teen ideal. If he couldn't be sexy/dangerous like  Elvis, he could at least be vague, mysterious, "poetic".

The "dignity" and" integrity" that Dylan refused to be marginalized by--ie, made quaint and neutered as a revolutionary force of any definition--were those notions codified by the lefty Folk Revival he eventually abandoned. Their idea of those qualities had little to do with Polonius's greatest platitude--"...to thine own self-be true..." --and everything to do with conformity to a vaguely held consensus.  I would only insist that the means of Dylan following his muse amounts to deftly selected instances of opportunism. Had Dylan been less inspired in his mashing together of his unlike influences, we likely would have regarded him as a pretentious fool trying to beserk himself into genius. Dylan, though, was a genius, and his careerism is mitigated in the music and lyrics that resulted from it. The work is everything. It took rock and roll by surprise. Someone like Dylan from the Sixties wouldn't be considered pop at all. He had singles that found chart positions, he earned gold albums, he toured internationally, gave interviews and signed autographs. He was a pop star, a pop artist, a contradiction that refused to be marginalized by unprofitable consolations such as dignity or integrity. He was going to be famous and get rich; he was a pop star and a punk. Our punk, our genius.

Grumble

 Jill McDonough's poem,  "December 12, 1884: George Cooke", from a series of sonnets she's been writing drawn from actual events in American history,  appeared in Slate's poetry section a few years ago. It did me a great and gracious favor, that of being so recognizably inane that it spared me the purchase of the book.

This reads as if it were a combination of dry facts from a history book blended with a student's marginalia. Scissors, paste and yellow highlighter are all over this assemblage, which indeed seems more assembled than composed. There is a punchline McDonough wants to land on, an example of Fate's anonymous wit, but there is not enough here to make us, meaning me, the reader, care enough to interpret the poem so that it becomes whole and coherent. It would be easy enough to dwell on issues such as how a sensationalist media twists historical fact into personality driven events and fictionalizes the record with romantic constructions in the interest of selling papers, but that would be too much weight to lay upon such a slight and underfed piece of writing. Such speculation would be more than the critic's invention than the author's intent.The mistake was to approach this set of information as a poem, as this is a clear case where an unambiguous prose format would have achieved what resonance McDonough wanted to have us experience; prose seems better suited for such terseness.

'm thinking of Ernest Hemingway, who's masterly avoidance of qualifiers still provides a powerful kick, particularly his short story collection In Our Time.The collection is a masterpiece of what wasn't said. The italicized sketches between the longer stories are what McDonough should pay attention to, as they show how only a few facts conveyed in a paucity of words can still pull at your heart the way she wanted with "George Cooke" .

Don't Name The Chickens, a poem by Charles Simic

DON'T NAME THE CHICKENS

Don't name the chickens, says poet Charles Simic, because doing so is to find yourself leaning  into  a perceptual left hook. . As the poem details, in  details inspired by the spare , weathered cadences of WC Williams, chickens in the barnyard are not really the kings of their domain as folk tales and cartoons would suggest, but merely a creature inhabiting a niche on which some things depend on; lording or majesty have nothing to do with it.  We have the terrain Simic sets up  beautifully, a small niche in the natural order  that is overlaid with expectations that suit the man or woman gazing from a window, from the porch, on their way to the barn to repair  a machine.

Don't Name the Chickens

Let them peck in the yard

As they please

Or walk over to stand

By the edge of the road.

The rooster strutting about

Will keep an eye on them,

Till it's time for them

To step under a tree

And wait for the heat

To pass and the children

To return to their toys

Left lying in the dust.

For, come Sunday,

One of the chickens may lose its head

And hang by its feet

From a peg in the barn.

This is beautifully done, I believe, a  cold and crackling laugh coming from the throat, and winding up echoing through the nose, a  combination of  bemusement and revulsion with  the vanities  citizens dress themselves in, the  idea that persists even on the most micro level, that the events of the day revolve around them.

Naming creatures implies ownership, that the animal given  a Christian assignation is now part of the family, like the dog or the cat, embedded in the good graces of human social structure until death , a natural death. But again, the power to name things and bestow upon them the complexities of far reaching relationships with kindred human significants are projections of  our collective ego, personalized, brought down from the global to the specific, the back yard, the barnyard.

GRAB BAG OF GAB

A New Yorker cartoon shows two dogs in a den, one on chair, in front of a computer monitor , talking to another dog seated on the floor. The dog in the chair tells his friend "No one knows you're a dog on the Internet."

Exactly, and I suppose that's the appeal of forums and blogs; one is at liberty to represent themselves as having some competence and insight on a subject. One might even convince readers, or some of them at least, that one has professional expertise;one might even have something interesting to say. I don't know if the words that following are interesting beyond coffeehouse chatter--I think the points are sound enough--but here they are. Judge them as you will, and call me a jerk if you think I'm a deluded dealer in obvious asides.-tb
______________________________​_____________


He was typing furiously to get a response to me before I shut off the computer, and sure enough, after refreshing the computer monitor, there was his nic name on a new post, attempting a counter argument in a protracted discussion (or competing rants, if you will) about the uses and role of art and poetry in this world. He wrote “ART used to create a response in LIFE. “

It's the other way around, replied, and continued; Art is a response TO life, a creative way for us to find new ways of experiencing what otherwise an incoherent flux of activity that only bullied us about with out any of us having the vaguest idea of how to better our lot. Life, as sheer process and force of nature, cannot be swayed by pure acts of will or bold imagination; art, besides leaving civilization with personal expressions of who we are and how we felt while we were alive, is also a engagement of our senses and skills that empower us to solve problems, to maintain a sense of humor, faith in something greater than our lone human selves, and provide with a means to live better lives. Art is a means for us to bring our imagination to bear on this planet, to create something for our selves that make this existence bearable, and at times joyous.

One discussion I had recently was interesting in that the person I was spoke with insisted that technique was over rated and that “…form is immaterial... so long as it creates the desired effect”. I scratched my chin and offered that one can usually have an effect of any sort only if the form is effective in getting across the intangible things you want your poems to address. One may effuse and rhapsodize all they want, but beyond a certain readership already inclined toward sentimental barbarity (the breathless pursuit of trite expression and banal conclusion, a defense mechanism, I believe, that shields the nervous from thinking bolder, or at least clearer about the larger implications of their actions in a world beyond themselves), the larger readership, small though it may be, will gain nothing, remember nothing from odd lines that exclaim obvious annoyances and joys. War is bad. Love hurts. Babies area cute. Mean people suck.

Millions of poems written by thousands of furious scribblers don’t get much further than these belated realizations, and it is understandable while yet millions more walk away from poems that are uniformly unmemorable, with hardly a quotable line or pithy adage to be drawn from them. This is all very sad because what comes forth in these untidy ossifications are notions that are revelatory and previously unrevealed to the writers themselves but which otherwise rest on the bottom of the fish tank like so much glass seashells.

Form matters because it means that one has learned their lessons about writing—poetry, though expressive of the soul’s yearnings and all, is writing, remember, subject to rules of clarity, precision, diction. One may do what one wants to do with language only after the lessons are learned, which is to say internalized. Form does matter, as in grammar, language skill, syntax, et al. A writer is more or less required to know the mechanics of writing and something about poetry before their efforts reach the level of art of any consideration. One cannot break the rules unless one knows the rules. The poet ought to desire the effect, but the insistence that a work have the "desired effect" is a slippery bit of business. Individual readers will bring their own experience to bear when they read and interpret the work; a bit of themselves will color how they recognize the particular ideas and instances the poet writes of. The poets' task, better said, is to write their material in a way that it elicits a response in the first place. For the most part, the dimensions of response are none of the writers' business.

Poetry... without effect... is meaningless babble.


Too broad a statement, covering as it does too many centuries of poetry, ideas about poetry, cultures in which poetry is written, et al. "Effect" is another slippery word; what one doesn't personally respond to may well be and probably is someone else’s' core moral truth. There is also the reasonable possibility that the reader finding something foul in a style of writing is unaware of the standards and requirements the style needs. What isn’t understood straight away is often condemned out of hand, without inspection, and it’s not unlike many to be willful in their refusing to learn something about writing aesthetics they didn’t know before. This fact doesn’t lessen the quality of the complainer’s preferred bards, periods and dictions; indeed, some of the poets might be embarrassed at the use of their name for cultural intolerance. Still others, like Eliot or Pound, would join a chorus of condemnation in short order, as long as the controversy involved further vilification of Jews.

That said, let us conclude that no one reading this the Ideal Reader, earnestly reading literature without preconceptions as to an art’s need to bolster unchanging certainties, and that we do the best we do to understand how something works on its own terms. It’s the cliché we hear from time to time, the search for similarities among ourselves rather than the concentration on obvious differences. We can reject the similarities if we like, but it helps to have a humane preference as to what one leans toward in the service of creating a life worth living rather than merely wallowing in the bitter juice of sour grapes

My adversary changes the subject, a dig at the universities and their secular relativism: At worst it is pseudo-intellectual drivel indented to impress Academic pundits. Take that!! Have at you!!!

You're writing about a particular KIND of academic poetry, I wrote back, and went off on another riff; this is suspect, and here condemn hundreds of poets and their work without a fair reading. It's hard work, I know, trying to keep abreast of what's available, what's being written, and a lot of it is bad, stale, calcified on the page, but a good amount of it is daring and fresh, contains verve, engages ideas and the real world at the same time, and otherwise performs what has always been the principle mission of the poet, to find new ways of experiencing the world, and inspiring new ways of living within it in a larger sense of community.

Poetry, at core, is about ideas and intellectual concepts as much as it is about feelings, and far less about sentiment. Without the kind of rigor these "intellectual" poets bring to bear on their work, there'd be nothing but a dull gallery of old and brittle styles for us to choose from, a juke box full of scratchy records, rhymes of old dead men that we ceaselessly imitate without a wit about why these old lyrics were written in the first place. I would say these old tunes were first written to bring some NEW IDEAS to our consciousness, some new perceptions to fire our sense of a larger and more interesting life. This is something we can’t afford to stop doing. At best it elevates the spirit or creates deep emotional response. Life, I believe, is something whose final, "fixed" meaning is unknowable, and is, really, something we bring "meaning" to by dint of our actions.What we have done, said, written will speak for us when we aren't able to rant, cajole, seduce and wave our arms as we attempt to persuade others that we're a benefit to the race. This, of course, makes life neither inherently good nor bad, though we do have it in our power to agree on acceptable, workable, flexible definitions of what constitutes the "good life" and what actions make for the ill. Life, though, is more than just "mankind". It is EVERYTHING, and we are just here visiting. The quality of the visit, though, is entirely within our grasps.

He didn’t answer and I was tired, and it was then I noticed the neighbor’s television was on, and loud. David Letterman was barking his quips about Regis Philbin, his voice muffled as it filtered through my radiator. It was time to shut things down and go to sleep.

Escape from New Criticism

Someone I know posed the question "what else is there?" in response to a past diatribe I posted here , "No More Poems About Poetry". I replied, in a hurry, I admit, that

not everything spoken of in poetry need be funneled through a filter that refers to poetry .Poetry is meant to produce an experience through a heightened language that should,all the same,be plausible as speech.The reader should be brought inside the poet's discourse and convinced the experience was real,honest.Dependence on self awareness of form for ironic effect is,I think,a form of cheating.true,there are brilliant poets and poems about poetry.my gripe resides with the abuse of the ploy,which is pervasive and dulling. 

The point of writing poetry and of reading poetry was to see to what extent language can be extended to include those perceptions and fleeting rushes of emotion and sensation that might otherwise elude our capacity to express; it is a way of knowing ourselves in a world of others. If poetry as subject matter needed to be an issue within a poem, a problematic quirk that needed to be contended with in the expression, I had always thought it should be in the struggle for a narrator to get beyond their own contingencies and possibly experience something that was not formed on them since before birth, Stopping the discussion with poetry as the subject with little effort to poke through the veil, or faith that this can even be done, is to allow oneself to remain chained to the cave wall.

No one and nothing escapes the history of the form which born them, but what's interesting in literature, poetry in particular, are the results from those daring to dream beyond their confines in what they write . Even if the matter concludes that no one gets out of here alive, so to speak, it remains that a consequence none the less that one , writer and reader, are made a little larger, are made a little braver for the experience of realizing lies beyond the mere sensation of what our skin receives. The reflexive thing, the pondering the very form one uses to create their tales, the structuralist take down of all narrative, poetry, play or novel, being the mere result of economic determinism, is something that charged a generation or two of poets toward some inspired work , but what it has turned into, I'm afraid, is something of a wallow; it lets the poet coast on the easy excuse that there really isn't anything outside the box after all and that we might as all stay home, watch porn or baseball and discuss the impossibility of sensing anything beyond the walls. 


Even if it were true that poetry is implicitly connected to all other poems and poets, something I wouldn't dispute beyond a certain point, I find it ridiculous for poets to carpet bomb their poems with untoward, unprompted and needless mentions of other poets, of the form poetry itself, or that the writer is a poet in the company of other poets; while we may treat the whole issue of poems about poetry as an issue that is hopelessly meta, there remains a need, I think, for the poet to artfully tamp down his intellectual preferences and give his attention to what is job number one, of coming out of the clouds and presenting us with a perception that is unclouded by the overnight bags of history.

The lay of the Zoomba

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 creaky 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.


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. Some would point out that Dylan did produce a book of poetry, "Tarantula", a surreal stretch of William Burroughs insomnia that suggested, yes, but had little in the way of poetic achievement, He was merely typing madly, as Capote said of Kerouac. Leonard Cohen, of course, is the logical example of someone who can both be a published poet, novelist and songwriter and achieve remarkable success in each of those forms. One does need to remind the earnest that Cohen the songwriter was not working as Cohen the poet who, in turn, was not operating under the mistaken diversion of writing a novel while thinking he was in a rehearsal for Sid Caesar  beatnik sketch, 

The lyrics to Leonard Cohen's 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.