Who is afraid of poetry?

April again, National Poetry Month again,and we ask ourselves, in an attempt to make conversation among the the clan, whether poetry intimidates the average American reader. The general response ,from anecdotal evidence,is that Americans haven't the collective wit or attention span to read anything that's over detailed, elusive and allusive in the way a point is made, or which doesn't offer an easy cure for an media-influenced dread of nuance.  I don't think Americans are afraid of poetry; rather it's a matter of not many Americans, comparatively, think of poetry as a resource since we, as a culture, are not an introspective culture, but instead one that continuously looks forward to a future to be created. Poetry, so far as the general reader is concerned, is a matter of one being alone with their thoughts and structuring their experience in a narrative form, a narrative that not only chronicles events along a time line, but also the nuance of experience, the fleeting sensation of something changing in their psyche.

This requires making the language do extraordinary things to accommodate an uncommon interpretation of experience, and Americans, a people reared on the ideology of what can be done in the face of adversity, have no expansive desire to do something so impractical. Language is a thing meant to help us solve material problems, to achieve material goals, and poetry, a strange extension of linguistic twists and shadings, does nothing to put food on the table, put money in the bank, to further the quest to cure an endless variety of incurable diseases.

Poetry is immaterial to purpose, function, policy; the absence of larger audiences for poetry isn't about fear from a perception that it's a mode of expression that is the least useful among several the lot of us might select on a given day. There are those of us who would argue that poetry's lack of identifiable utility is exactly what attracts us to the form--I happen to think that , like Wilde, that all art is quite useless in practical application (save for the fact that I believe humans crave beauty in form and in expression) and adhere to Harold Bloom's running definition of what literature , in general, avails the reader : to paraphrase, literature (poetry) helps us think about ourselves. Americans , I think it's safe to say in the broadest sense, have no real desire to reside individually and psychically work their way to an "aha" experience with poetry as a conduit. We do think about ourselves, but more in terms of accumulation rather than an inner equilibrium. The measure of a man is his wallet, not the subtlety of his thoughts, and this a form of fearlessness that borders on insanity.

A half minute of doubt

There are the times when, after bemoaning yet again a noted poet's latest poem-about-poetry and the attending self-admiration (or self-justification) , I am tempted to do my inventory and investigate the possibility that I've turned into a bored drudge for whom all the exciting things in the language have already haven't; I dread spending the rest of what I hope of are many years of life tossing soggy bombs at the poems that come from a younger generation of bards. I suppose it's a matter , partially,of the perennial search for a usable past--is there anything in the standards and tastes one  formed thirty years ago still workable in years where tastes and formulas have been modified to relevantly account for the alterations in the psychic landscape?   I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic.

The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.

I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would prefer poets engage the ambivalence and incongruities in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of it’s own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflexing tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.

Stevens, Oppen, and Bronk

I’ve been reading Michael Davidson’s superb anthology of George Oppen’s verse, Collected Poems, forcing me to the keyboard to ponder some connection with Wallace Stevens . with whom he shares an obsession with how the human personality tries to speak to those things that will never let themselves be revealed.The massive solitude in Oppen's work, wholly devoid of Romantic despair, seems an intrinsic part of his recognition that the Earth itself can never be known.Oppen is connected to Wallace Stevens, I think, in that there is awareness that language has the habit of taking on the personality and delusions of the speaker and thus disguises nature, "reality" under layers of wordy assumptions that miss the mark of the mystery of experience. Stevens, though, exults in his search and wonder, and views the finalizing that eludes him as occasion for joy, wonder, a reason to intensify one's attention on the very nature of being in the world; Stevens thinks it enough for the witness to be staggered by the realization that existence is absent of final, metaphysically fixed perimeters, and that one should relish the more profound miracles in the details of their own senses.

Oppen comes to know his loneliness, and there is in his work some longing for old myths that gave comfort to a restless mind. Oppen, though, denies the lure of nostalgia and presses forward on some path that has an end only beyond his own death, that language will be restored to it's ability to correctly assess the world and ourselves in it, and avail us with some ideas of assembling a world that operates on good acts and deeds and not a high rhetoric that amounts to sighing, whimpering and casual bad faith, in Oppen's estimation.

I'd be interested to hear your ideas regarding Oppen's path that leads beyond his own death, as that seems alien to his poetry, at least as far as it refers to poetry.A bad habit of mine is to use dramatic language when I'm the full boil of writing, so forgive me for possible vagueness and overstatement.I am thinking , of course, of Oppen's leftist politics and his association with what's come to be called the Objectivist movement, spearheaded by Louis Bukowski, and whose members, as such, included Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, with older American modernists such as W.C. Williams and Pound having close affiliations with this loosely defined group of writers.

In the broadest sense, Objectivist writers, following Zukofsky's lead, developed styles that evolved from Imagism, but sought to come up with a kind of unblinkered epic poetry that wasn't hampered the symbolic obscurantism. The idea was to write, according the poet's personality, a verse that presents concrete things and realities not for the purpose of making them mere props for some metaphorical system whose results wind up with dead tropes and forgone conclusions that reaffirm only bad faith, but rather gloried in those things and their uniqueness.

Zukofsky, along with Charles Olson, sought to expand the aesthetic into the social areas, the geographical, into areas the names of which define us in relation to nature and the world humans build within it. Where a modernist like Pound (as opposed to Stevens) sought to legitimize the poet as an insurmountable authority on the exactness of nature and meaning and hence establishing him or her as an arbiter of Power, Oppen's wanted to use his poetics to make the discerning habit of mind, the ability to use language in unsentimental ways, to the general population. This would have been his ultimate gift of love, and there is a tone in his writing that I get, sometimes, that he is aware that such revolutions are started in one's lifetime but often not finished. I've no doubt that he wished that what started as a preferred compositional practice would grow into a self-renewing alignment of the population's right-sized perception of itself within Nature. Some of that loneliness might as a result abate. Zukofsky, Oppen and the work of the Objectivist Poets, as such, are a huge influence on the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, whose ranks include that charged inversions,reversals and redirected practice  of Ron Silliman, Rae Armentrout, Bob Perelman, and Michael Davidson himself. It's a stretch to refer to these poets as a school or movement at all, which is why I preface the remark with the tired qualifier "In the broadest sense...."

These poets come at time when the American modernists were getting older and their ideas had been assimilated by a younger generation. The poets share some similar attitudes regarding poetic language and the quest for unassailable truth, but calling them a coherent movement is a stretch, as you say; literary critics, needing to classify styles and writers, pounced on "Objectivism" as a the term to use, and in fact wrote the manifesto, in the form of their varied systematized remarks, that Zukofsky et al never got around to composing. The poets were off into the American wilderness, distinct in style, attack, voice. Oppen's attraction to the general attitude with the Objectivists, to compose a phonologically responsible poetry, is understandable, but his personality and his style are his own, after the association. It might also be said that Oppen's poetry is the best of this generation of writers

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, unlike what's been called Objectivistism, was an actual poetry movement, replete with manifestos, several anthologies, and an intimidating backlog of criticism and commentary by the poets themselves addressing what are conspicuously shared ideas and aims, stated succinctly as this: the theme of Language poetry is language.It was an inevitable development, I'd guess, coming out of the Sixties new left affiliations, and riding in along the tide of structuralist -inspired art where making a consume aware of the art's own mechanisms and intentions, was a common card to play; along with the writings of Ron Sukenic, Barthelme, and the films of Godard and Snow, Language Poets seemed to think that exposing the mechanics of syntax and grammar would make readers aware of how they're being manipulated.

Not a bad idea, perhaps, but it's something that expressed whatever was interesting it had rather quickly. Lately, it seems more a strong addition to a poet's resume so they can acquire an academic position. Not surprisingly, there are younger student poets who've been seduced into this style, and one prays they move from the semi-Marxist psycholinguistic braying of that peculiar school and find their own voice, through which they can trust the authority of their senses.

William Bronk is a good companion poet to read along with Wallace Stevens, as both concerned themselves with our ideas of a world unspoilt by skewed perception. Both were poets you could imagine walking among their gardens and cities of perfect forms, the ideal types and not the inferior , material imitations, chancing some thoughts beyond the gravity of the actual planet.

Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World

William Bronk

Whether what we sense of this world

is the what of this world only, or the what

of which of several possible worlds

--which what?--something of what we sense

may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.

For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance

of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words

that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,

not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;

conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound

and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:

is something caught there, contained there,

something real, something which we can sense?

Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw

the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,

palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in

from say, the sea, a purity of space.

Helen Vendler asserts in her review of  the recent  "Selected Poems" that Stevens disguised his true hurts and sorrows with symbolism, merging his high, English inspired cadences with a Yankee's habit of plain speak. His was a seamlessly expressed struggle between the ideal relationships among things, or the ideas of things finding harmony among their distinct qualities, and the tense world he must return to. He was a vice president of an insurance company, after all, an institution designed to protect and amend the quirky happenstance between gravity and clumsy people.

Bronk, in contrast, seems to be in one world who is constantly thinking of the other, and here suggests that it is our ability to coin words or vary our linguistic references to known, quantified qualities that recreates our world constantly, in terms of a musical score, with beats, rhythm, a narrative line that flows or gets jagged according to the tone each moment might take. And it is that skill,developed through various layers of frustrated experience and states of monotonous torpor, that we can again think of what we see as too familiar and what we see as alien and strange as intrinsically exciting, full of intrigue, it's own vital elements we can learn about and learn from. We come to think of the world in other words and not by the clinical terms they're assigned by dictionaries. This availed Bronk to see that light in the street he trudged every day, palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in from say, the sea, a purity of space. Our language needs to remain vital and up to the task of re-inscribing conventional experiences, lest we miss the whole point of having senses to begin with.

Poetry and the mirror

Seems that Slate proper is catching on to something I've been complaining about on these threads for the last ten years or so, poetry about poetry. It is, however, not a situation isolated to The New Yorker, as it is a habit of mind that filters through the versifying consciousness regardless of politics, preference, or where the poet thinks they are in the relative standards of quality. Save for the few instances where the habit results in a brilliant gem of cadenced self-reflection, it is the worst sort of naval gazing, to employ a cliché. To employ a fresher simile, it's the drone of a specialist of who cannot talk about anything else. Poets are supposed to have mastered their craft and then enter the world. Too many of the writers that find sanctuary in the journals have reversed the process. I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing- down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic. The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.

I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would prefer poets engage the ambivalence and incongruities in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of its own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflectivity tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.

Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most beautifully oblique poet America has produced, can be said to have written poems about poems, but I think that misses the point. Our latter day mainstream reflexivists are enamored of the their own broad readings and wind up standing outside of poetry thinking they have a better idea to what a poem should be. The concern isn’t the poem, but the abstraction, an inversion that has the erudition outsmarting the inspiration. Stevens was smart enough to familiarize himself with the philosophical propositions regarding the problems associated with the world we see and the world as-is; his genius was that he created a metaphorical systems that could deal with poetics-as-subject and still give us something beautiful and wholly musical. I am beginning to suspect that the problem might not be that poets are writing too many poems about poetry--the tradition for the bard to reflect on his craft and his relevance is very long established in world literary history--but that of the tendency of editors to select or solicit these sorts of works. If one looks further into the works of the New Yorker poets cited in the story, one would notice that they respectively manage to engage life outside their craft ; the body of work is not always as suffocatingly one-idea as it may seem here. Editors, I am tending to think, need to be more open ended as to the subject matter they consider suitable for the magazines or journals they write for.

on Dorianne Laux's poetry

I met Dorianne Laux twenty years go when she was a protege of San Diego area poet Steve Kowit. She gave a reading at the bookstore I worked at, and what I heard was one of the most accomplished young poets I've had the luck to listen to or read. Her language is straightforward without being plain, her imagery is made of everyday things that are made to glow or grow dark with the turns of human joy , sadness, or darker moods, her phrasing is artful , and she is among the very few one is likely to come across whose work is notable for its heart and its skewed readings of small things, intimate things.

Break

by Dorianne Laux

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

Balance of sentiment and rhetoric make her endlessly readable and quietly inspiring as she takes a small thing and makes it into something quite radiant. Laux's mastery of the believable tongue enables to make unexpected yet credible twists in conventional subject and to make emotions that have been talked to death by my estimation resonate with a true ring of recognition. This cunning rescues this poem, “Break” from sentimentality, and that gives us a clue to what makes this and her best work stand apart; she is in touch with her emotion, but she has the skill to get to the heart of them . This poem of she and her mate playing with the child is touching because it brings you into the moment and lets you be a witness instead of the reader lecturing the reader; Laux speaks with an intimate "we", meaning not just her husband but also any one of us who have set aside our agendas to raise children, enduring their tantrums, feeling heartened by their laughter, consoling them in sadness.

GRAVEYARD AT HURD'S GULCH

His grave is strewn with litter again,
crumpled napkins, a plastic spoon, white
styrofoam cup tipped on its side, bright
half-moon of lipstick on the rim.
I want to scold her for the mess she's left,
the flattened grass and squashed grapes,
but I've seen her walking toward the trees,
her hollow body receding, her shadow
following behind. I'm the intruder,
come not to mourn a specific body
but to rest under a tree, my finger tracing
the rows of glowing marble,
the cloud-covered hips of the hills.
I always take the same spot,
next to the sunken stone that says MOTHER,
the carved dates with the little dash between them,
a brief, deep cut, like a metaphor for life.
Does she whisper, I wonder, to the one
she loves, or simply eat and sleep, content
for an hour above the bed of his bones?
I think she brings him oranges and secrets,
her day's torn and intricate lace.
I have no one on this hill to dine with.
I'm blessed. Everyone I love is still alive.
I know there is no God, no afterlife,
but there is this peace, the granite angel
with the moss-covered wings whose face
I have grown to love, her sad smile
like that sadness we feel after sex,
those few delirious hours when we needed nothing
but breath and flesh, after we've flown back
into ourselves, our imperfect heavy bodies,
just before that terrible hunger returns.

This poem as well brings to bear an entire life into one stanza, physical details of plastic spoons, wrappers, Styrofoam cups crisply described in its obsolescence (“Styrofoam cup tipped on its side, bright /half-moon of lipstick on the rim.”) nonchalantly desecrating a site dedicated to the eternal memory of one’s mother; the irony is that the trash indicates in it’s a small way that life goes on and the bits and pieces of what we wrap our conveniences find a grave in the earth to. Laux contemplates that we proceed in death as well, in physical decomposition, and she offers up a lyric of death without transcendence, without migration to higher realms and yet entertains that death isn’t the end of it all, the period at the end of a long story. But she turns again to her life as it is, knowing this is goodbye and a final look at what remains of the woman who bore her and raised her; life, the narrator’s life, resides elsewhere. That is where Laux sharpest instinct as a poet lie, the ability to look back upon the significance of people , places, and things that have gone away through death, marriage or migration, and then returning to the life that she is within, affirmed and joyous to have a life that's worth living. She serves the situation with a fine, delicate balancing of the prosaic, the simple phrasing, and the higher allure of lyric speech, and allows neither to overwhelm the other. Her poems, often time presented to us in the guise of prose, has an intimacy rare among a generation of poets who maintain distance from their most volatile emotion; her poems have the power of revelation, of someone sorting through old photographs or a rediscovered journal who , while recounting their day, gets a high pitch in their voice as they realize something even they hadn't realized. Laux never forgets herself as a writer with a goal, fret not, there is a point she comes to, the pay off one expects to make the listing of a poet's personal world resonate in ways it otherwise wouldn't.

She is suspicious of rhetorical resolutions to real problems and relationships that inhabit her poems, and offers instead an intimate tone, the voice of someone who begins to tell you a story after some arduous activity who then lays her bare.Not a confession, not a dumping of toxic emotion, but a revelation, possibly at the very instance when the clarity comes to her; all the bits and pieces of past events with family, husbands, friends who have passed on, are now a whole. Her poetry quite is often something wonderful, intimate, moving. I found this poem fitting for the month, since both my parents died, at different times , in August. The month has been a bit touchy for the family since that time, but we collectively give a shrug and move on with nary a pause to linger over the lives of the couple that born the four of us. One grieves, commemorates, and then moves on, right? Not so fast; sometimes in the middle of watching a television program or waiting for the bus , something falls inside me. It's the sensation you'd imagine having inside an elevator whose cable was suddenly disconnected. The bad news hits you again, and yet again, if you let it. Laux's poem on the matter , to coin phrase, speaks to me, and punches me in the gut.

How It Will Happen, When

Dorianne Laux

There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch,

the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying,

half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry

anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear

and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door,

and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be

different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows

shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax

on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird

spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how,

for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before

gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it:

flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word

you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is

and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language.

Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's

when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not

coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.

This speaker is talking about spending an period of her life trying to talk herself into accepting the loss of her dearly departed, and goes on from there to talk about a life that seems detached , dream like; there is an unreal calm in this world as she struggles to push on. She is emotionally numb, so far as I can tell, until it hits hurt, triggered by what some small matter, acutely detailed to her, when the artifice comes apart and the fact of her friend's absence hits hard, almost like being struck. Laux isn't contradicting herself, but instead talking about the transition from merely mouthing the conventional platitudes of acceptance of a loss and the eventual , inevitable realization that her friend's absence is permanent.Artifice includes ritual, which would be the sort of compulsive house cleaning one occupies their time with while trying to pretend that they are moving on with their life after the death of a loved one; the activity and the manic obsession with the details of these tasks are , for me, a conspicuous clue that there is something the person would rather not deal with.There's an intuitive leap here, and I think the power of the poem is the quick but not illogical insertion of the final remark, that instance when you realize a loved one isn't returning; what Laux does here is shown that a feeling like this is like a sudden attack, coming from seeming nowhere, leaving you in a what I could only describe as a state of shock. This is not a formal argument she is making; this has that eliding quality few poets capture well, the revelation expressed as if we're witnessing the thought coming to the narrator as she speaks. The “clean house” Laux mentions, with everything neatly arranged and placed in their place, every trace of the person gone or tucked in some burnished-over corner:

the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows

shining, sun coming in easily now, skimming across
the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. (...)

This is an apt metaphor for the attempt to deal with a loss by discarding personal reminders of the departed; the house is "clean", as in emotionally neutral, the goal being that his would be a reclaimed and re-imagined space where comes not to grow but to not feel, not a feel a thing. The absence of pain is mistaken as solace, and the narrator tries to sustain a numbness in her household. But comes undone, inevitably; the years the person had resided in those rooms, the small , shared rituals and pet phrases on familiar furniture have absorbed something of his spirit, it seems, and a memory triggered, a flash comes upon the narrator. Those who are gone remain in the details, regardless of who hard we scrub the floors or repair the roof:

You’ll be reading, and for a moment you’ll see a word

you don’t recognize, a simple words like cup or gate or wisp

and you’ll ponder like a child discovering language.

Cup, you’ll say over and over until it begins to make sense,

and that’s when you’ll say it, for the first time, out loud: He’s dead.

Although the were burned and the household has been scoured and cleared of reminders that he once lived there, the space cannot be converted as if nothing had happened before. It's circular; what we toss outcomes back to us .

He’s not coming back, and it will be the first time you believe it.

This is beautifully done, a set-up for someone telling you that they've accepted life on life's terms , with the strong suggestion that they have exhausted their allotment of emotion, only to be struck once again that they've lost something valuable that cannot be replaced. The narrator is at the precipice, the classic existential situation: aware, finally, of the facts of her life as felt experience, it remains her choice to remain in stasis and so become bitter and reclusive, or to finally, truthfully let go of what she's held onto and take new risks.

Brow Beat : Can New Yorker Poets Write About Anything Besides Poetry?

?

Slate's Browbeat section does a telling survey of the New Yorker's habit of publishing poems that are about poetry, about reading, about writing, in one fashion or another. I read with particular interest, as poems about poetry has been one of my specialized gripes for years. At this point , a blogger focusing on covering the rants on poetry blogs might write a screed against rants-against-poems-about-poetry, citing a series of links to my repetitive missives as especially grouchy examples. I've tempered my protests lately, though, as it the the tendency for poets to reflect upon their own form and their relevance to the world they live in is firmly established in world literary history; although it bugs me still, I have to admit that I am subject to slipping under the conceits of earlier Modernist manifestos that appointed their authors as those who would erase history and recreate the way we see the world. I would hope most of us have learned some bitter lessons about ignoring history, even at this level. You can attempt to persuade folks, yes, but you really can't force them to like something they're not inclined by personality to enjoy, and you can't force the correctness of your opinion on them. Anyway, my grievances are a matter of record on this blog, and I invite you to enjoy the article and the ensuing discussion stream.

Against Rhyme 2

Artemesia, a contributor to Slate's on line Poetry Forum, responded to my post arguing against the contemporary application of metered verse with the observation
"Isn't it interesting that so much instantly forgettable poetry is written by poets who disparage any form of rhyme!" I am vain enough to assume she meant me in her offering, to which I was also vain enough to respond to. Likely her response will mention that she didn't name me at all, add a couple of more indirect digs, after which we can expect that conversation to become stony silence or snarky round robin. All the same, here's my response, and the last I'll bother this blog with on this subject.

Much of my poetry is forgettable , yes, but much of it is good, I think, as I've been at this craft, free-verse style, for a very long time. The quality of my output, I believe , is on a par with any other good yet minor (league) poet with an ear for music who continues to hone their skills, is mostly in relative anonymity; grand slams, hits, near misses, strike outs, belabored performances, all of them in mostly equal abundance. My poetry, if I happen to be your unnamed example, isn't the point of comparison, though, and is largely irrelevant to what I was addressing. I would challenge anyone to produce something I've written, here or elsewhere, where I insisted my writing in general as an example anyone should follow; my claims for my style are modest. Let us just say that I like the way I write prose and that my style in poetry has evolved over some 40 plus years and that I believe there's been some improvement in quality. The point in the original was, and remains, that rhyming in the current time is archaic technique that is at odds with the zeitgeist and expressed the idea that it too often sounds strained, false and little more than a demonstration of one's facility with a technique that calls attention to itself rather too much.

Eliot, of course, could compose rhymes (as opposed to "construct") that were fluid and musical and never far from the sound of the spoken voice. For all his erudition , he could write an abstract, fragmented verse in a clear and plain vernacular, and was able, as well, to extend his phrase of the voice , not of the metronome, a guiding aesthetic during his period. Masterful as his rhyme schemes were, however, Eliot is generally regarded as someone who could mix his techniques, balancing free verse and the metered form.

This was part of his genius, and that sort of genius , in the twentieth century as regards an exclusive rhyming technique, is rare, rare, rare. None of this, though, is to insist that there is no place for rhyming--the skilled hand can employ it when it makes musical sense, when it is effective service to a perception and does not announce itself , as so many latter day New Formalist poets do when they write their elaborations. The great poems in English of the 20Th century are not rhymed; the poets of the last hundred years or so have sought less to mimic the argued perfections of ancient standards and sought rather to seek individual accommodation with a general conception of the human voice as it speaks. The heavens and the earth are less the things to be pondered through rhetorical skeins that imply an extra-human dimension than the are things we see and speak of in terms of our own experience, the subjective passing through the general conception of everyday life.

Against Rhyme

Just because something rhymes and has regimented meter doesn't, by default, make it a poem. We would generally think agree that a poem is , in some sense , a heightened speech that seeks to get at perception, sensation, and psychological states that are problematic for standard prose writing, and that , broadly speaking, the writing that qualifies for those qualities, vague as they are, ought not to be sentimental, conventional, sing-songy, prone to cliche, platitude , scoldings, lectures, or inanely obvious moralizing.

Rhyming, a condition that about dominated all poetic technique until relatively recently in written history, has about been exploited to the degree that it is nearly exhausted . A contemporary audience, desiring a more intriguing vocabulary to discuss and describe the experience of the individual in a culture that is accelerated and quantified and subdivided among a host of meaningless disciplines, wants that discussion to be in a parlance, a rhythm, a cadence and verve that is recognizably of the modern time that typifies the way we address our experiences, and yet has the embedded genius to last decades beyond it's writing.

The art continues as it always has, it changes as the language has, it's pitches and dictions have taken on the twists of the spoken language and forges a unique set of voices that keep the language fresh, relevant, alive. It might well have to do with the fact that the feeling of experience can no longer be contained and convincingly resolved with the now-formula ironies a precise formula compels you to reach; two world wars and the use of nuclear weapons has pretty much undercut the chiming resonance formalistic poems present us; they sound false and eager to smooth away the tragic, the gritty, the sad, the plainly inexplicable conditions of everyday life with a grandiose , over determined orchestration of sounds that are meant, I suppose, to convince you that beauty is most important overall and that petty miseries and small joys are of no consequence. It seems nothing less than a mirror of the conceit of organized Christianity that God has a purpose for this world and that we must accept his will, as small laces in a complex weave. It's about surrender, actually, but it would be the case, rather, that enough history has culminated so recently regarding the disasters of absolutist philosophies that the taste, collectively, has preferred the colloquial to the grand, the open ended to the determined resolution, being-in-the-moment rather than controlling the agenda.Syllabic convolutions, pretty as they sound, are just that, pretty sounds, not the voice of Higher Authority.

The language changes; that's how it stays viable as way of making ourselves understood. Poetry changes; that's the way we keep ourselves interested in testing the limits of our imaginations. Poetry is an active thing, done in real time, in the present period. It is not an art consigned to being little more than duplications of what was done before, endlessly before, forms leeched of all vitality and allure.

second notes for the new decade

I tend to think that the best relationship between practice and theory , as regards the arts (and poetry in particular) is when one blends with the other in a seamless fashion. It's a process that begins with the work itself, a reading and rereading of the poem, let us say, and then , after some routine reflection, referencing any number of critical schemes I think might work in bringing what's contained in the stanzas out from under the subterfuge. Seamless is the word I'd like to use, and it applies here although the handy term has diminished impact with overuse;all the same, theories of criticism , for me,are a way of extending the poem into general discourse.

Poetry works in many ways, but so does criticism, and a pragmatics of interpretation is the most useful way for me to make a poet's work something other than another useless art object whose maker adhered to someone else's rules. My gripe is a constant one, that each succeeding school of thought on what poets should be doing are too often reductionist and dismissive of what has been done prior. This isn't criticism, it's polemics, contrary to my notion that what really matters in close readings is the attempt to determine whether and why poems work successfully as a way of quantifying experience and perception in a resonating style.

Dry and Brittle Poem: stale toast?

Intertextuality , the notion that text, whether poem, novel, third grade reader or medical textbook, can refer only to other text gets an awkward expression with Linda Gregerson's poem "At The Window" ,a poem published in Slate in December of 2006. selection. The reader, it seems, finds themselves locked inside the gloomy room of perception, wishing there were a window. And some air. It fits the would-be verse, a writerly and clustered screed on religion, death, the purpose of events and the objects within those experience. It's more a theory of a poem, really. Dry. Brittle.

This is a dreary reconfiguration of Augustine's
stalled obsession over the
state of his body's
peculiar refusal to adhere to God's all inclusive
bitcheness, and the use of a substantial quote (to be polite) from the sainted
theologian against a
memoir of personal loss, the death of a parent, is
a
stretch and a strain.

It's pretentious and dishonest, I think.The intoning of the successive suppositions, each intended to make us pause and consider the limitless minutiae in which God's animating force resides, becomes, as both reading and writing, a grind.What works well for a rapturing Confession does not make for a poem of the sort Gregorson attempted here; giving the section eccentric line breaks, to suggest rhythm to which the conditional phrases might hint at swaths of thick , slow liturgical musical will not give the borrowed writing a lift. Gregorson should have better paraphrased what she borrowed and have it better mirror the deferred narrator's sad recollection of his (or her) mother passing away at an early age.

There was an opportunity for a revelation, when words written in complete abandon in an effort to sense a deity's essence and purpose for the world slam up against real feelings from actual experience, with the glory of the literature is found wanting. Perhaps the transition from the uncited Augustine usage to the parallel scene where the dying mother announces "I do not know why I am here" less jarring. This is film school stuff, a quick cutting between past and current scenarios, and while the method is sometimes effective in the right writer's hands, it is ineffective here.

The stitches from joining these uneven parts together show. You realize that the author has a time of it reconciling losss in clear language; the generous use of of cumbersome syntax with the high-falutin' references and rhetoric sounds unnatural . What we have are strange sounds rather than feeling at all. Gregerson attempts is a pastiche between an t established text and and a recent memory, with an unsuccessful result. It would effective if , perhaps, if there were a suggestion of unexpected continuity between the past and present, and that there is a reason why we use similar narrative schemes through the periods to account for our interior experience. There can be something provocative in such a blur, with poetic resonance being a result.

We get instead a theory of a poem, an outline. The flaw here seems to be that Gregerson chose erudition for it's own sake rather than use her reading as an enhancement to her senses, creating distance between her and the subject she sought to explore; the poem is self-reflexive in an uninteresting way, waxing on about literature's limits. It's a tired trope, really, and it's time that more poets realize that most of us realize that literature is, of course, imperfect in getting to the distilled reality of experience. Perfection is not and should never be the intent in writing about something , just as literature ought to avoid itself as subject. It is the attempt to get to the heart of things that interests us.That is the essential goal of poetry, the expression of the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable (to borrow from critic John Ciardi).

More on "Dead Mother"

I talked to someone earlier today about the Henri Cole poem "Dead Mother", and it was remarked that the poem read more like a rehearsal of a response rather than a gathering of the conflicting emotions a parent's death unleashes on you. It was remarked that that his may be the reason for the seeming foliage Cole circles his subject with.I agree that Cole is attempting to inoculate this poem against criticism by making the language abstruse, as opposed to abstract.

Abstruse , for me, means clutter, vagueness, a grandly arranged set of unconventionally phrased ideas that have the sound of a hollow tin can once their noise is made. Abstract language, in contrast, leads back to a referents, and everything can be discerned in an intricate network of relationships; the associations, obvious and less obvious, emerge from a careful reading of how unexpected things become analogies for unstated irresolution , or as metaphors for a larger theme the specific topic is only a symbol of.

Even in the tight reins of a sonnet, I suspect Cole sometimes lets his imagination get the better of him and leaves a personal association, a private pun , linger quizzically in a line on the pretext that a scholarly critic might catch it, inspect it, run a gamut of philological tests on the wording, and uncover a deep vein of insight and erudition that would make some latter day jaws hit the floor. It's laziness, I think. The poem seems not an account of viewing a dead mother and experiencing a traumatic reaction than it is the work of someone trying to perfect their reaction; this seems about grief as gristle for the literary art , and that I think is this poem's downfall. It's over-thought, and not thought through.

Pound or Frost?

I'm not a fan of either poet, but of Pound intrigues especially me . His fabled difficulty seems more willful than inspired , more determined than originating from a flash of an idea that would spark a firestorm in how poetry is read. His theories, his proclamations as to the duty of the writer to lead the race to a higher standard of perception, were the writings that galvanized and polarized a generation or so of writers who followed or argued with his lead; his poems, though, were stuck in an abstruse inertia. This is distinct from abstract, a quality where there is an actual idea being deployed and which, in turn, can be parsed by a reader with due diligence. There is no argument with how important Pound is to the reformation of literature and advancing the Modernist aesthetic, but some one who was so obsessed, in theory, with reconfiguring language arts so that a new generation of readers can have fresh perceptions of reality and discover means with which to change it, Pound seemed seduced by the legend he was making for himself and delved headlong into his admixture of projects without a sense of how his materials and sources would come to make a generalized sense of themselves.

It seems obvious to me that he reveled in the difficulty of his work. His innovations as poet, for me, are worth studying in line with his critical pieces, but beyond their importance in establishing a time line, the language , the style, the attitude has not traveled well through the decades. He seemed like the brilliant critic and tireless promoter of new talent who put himself in competition with his fellows, IE Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, et al. Pound believed art was the process through which a substitute priesthood of painters and poets can perceive the world, and it was the artist who could correctly provide the inspiration and spiritual means to change the way reality was constructed and lived in. He was attracted to strong leaders with pronounced visions of a Better Future, was attracted to the notion of violently blowing up the artifacts of the past in order to forge a new order from the ground up, and it was apparent to everyone that he aligned himself with such leaders. He desired to be considered among the scarce select who would show the way to the new dawn, whether they wanted to or not. Pound was fascinated by chaos, turbulence, severe intrusions of alien forms usurping dictions and definitions of older ideological husks and having them be transformed to some strange array of notions that are a vision of a Future not all of us will be able to live in. Frost , although over- estimated, is an acceptable minor poet and a canny careerist, neither of which are offensive to anyone who understands the need to make a living. He was content to be a passive witness to the state of things built by hand running down, subsuming a cynicism in a lyric version of sparely detailed plain-talk that could, at times,produce a stunning insight into the feeling of how the body aches as it ages.

Poetry and lying

Some time I posted a poem I wrote concerning a blurry childhood memory of my Mom sobbing over a stove, the conceit being that I'd first give hints that this was going to be a melancholic memoir and then reveal, through a clever alignment of detail, that her tears were not from a spat with Dad. It was revealed by the last stanza that she' chopped raw onions for what the meal . Someone asked in a response how the memory was so clear, and I explained that the story was not wholly true; I manufactured the narrative thread I couldn't recall, and produce an entity that had a punchline, not a grievous irony. The response was fairly psychotic; I was called a liar and worse with my method revealed, and the inconsolable assailant couldn't get it through his (or her) head that not every poem is factual, therapeutic, journalistic. My response was defensive, of course, and typical of the accused bard.It's called imaginative literature, after all.Not a good reading habit for someone who says they love poetry. No, my friend, I didn't lie to the readers, I just told them a story.Poetry is imaginative writing, my brother, and there are those who err in reading this as an attempt at autobiography. The offended party didn't seem to accept any of this and cranked the vitriole higher, at which time I stopped talking to her (or him),You wonder what they missed in grade school when reading and writing was taught ; poets are liars by habit of mind when it comes to their craft; they make stuff up when they feel the need. Critic John Hollander has a useful essay on the matter,The shadow of a lie: poetry, lying, and the truth of fictions. That should give us something to consider.This is a slippery slope, and what it underlines it your unwillingness to admit that poetry is the practice of writing in imaginative, figurative, fictional language. Writers employ metaphors, similes, and varied tropes at times to get to what one can call the "larger" truths,"greater", which is to say that writers, poets especially, try to get at matters a straight forward prose style can't get at. The hidden moral of the story, if you will.Part of this is creating scenarios that are not necessarily factual (autobiographical) or plausible in the conventional sense. Coleridge has a useful principle he calls the suspension of disbelief, which roughly means that a reader needs to leave their suppositions and stipulations at the door as they enter into reading a poem; you need to stop arguing that a poem is obliged to fulfill your personal requirements and instead read it as is, inspect what the writer does. Bandying about words like "lies" blocks us, meaning myself, from the sunshine of the spirit.An impatient man can't possibly get all that poets and their work have to offer. Exactly what they have to offer is debatable, but that's part of the pleasure of reading poetry,or writing it. It's better ,I think, to leave people wondering for themselves than to try to tell them the facts , Joe Friday style.

Thomas Lux, the Poet Laureate of Unintended Results

There are those poets whose mastery is so inspiring that one feels a need to cease writing verse themselves lest the master comes across a slovenly stanza one has written and commence to laugh deeply, richly at the grammatical incompetence. Paranoia, I know, but that's the feeling I get sometimes after reading the poems of Thomas Lux. The ease with which he's able to merge plain speaking with unaffected turns of phrase, dark irony with darker humor, hard realism with lyric sweeps which make me pause in my own work and consider the next line I'll write harder than I normally would. Great poets inspire that. Lux is one of my favorite poets--I can't think of anyone else who crafts a free verse poem with better care and intriguing twists of perception that he does., He is exactly the poet people should read when they want more from comprehensible poems than Billy Collins' unceasing tours of his neighborhood. Lux is the Laureate of Unintended Results. He will show you how matters invade expectation and undermine a grand view of how one's life is working through the weeks.

CUCUMBER FIELDS CROSSED BY HIGH-TENSION WIRES.

The high-tension spires spike the sky

beneath which boys bend

to pick from prickly vines

the deep-sopped fruit, the rind's green

a green sunk

in green. They part the plants' leaves,

reach into the nest,

and pull out mother, father, fat Uncle Phil.

The smaller yellow-geren children stay,

for now the fruit goes

in baskets by the side of the row,

every thirty feet or so. By these bushels

the boys get paid, in cash,

at day's end, this summer

of the last days of the empire

that will become known as

the past, adios, then,

the ragged-edged beautiful blink.

An agrarian scene, we assume at first, made dense and surreal with Lux's painterly descriptions, but there is something subtler, deadlier underneath. This poem for me addresses invading armies, albeit disguised in fruity metaphor. Overwhelming forces invade homes, destroy homelands, cart off citizens and vital resources, and then are gone when use is exhausted, in a blink that Lux fuses with Yeat's "terrible beauty". This poem has more to do with the metaphorical devices nations and electorates will use to distance themselves from the real damage their country inflicts for some greater, glorious good. Suffering is discounted, and the blood on one's fingertips is said to taste like honey. This is a provocative poem from Lux. He is so skilled in his language that it gets scary. Of all the poets with a realist bent, Lux I think is the one who is truly subversive of his own and, by extension, his reader's assumptions of the world. It is a neat and meaningful leap for him to go from a narrative that mimics, shall we say parodies Hemingway's hunting persona that reveals , at the end, a bizarre twist in Papa's Romanticism masculinity, equating the resemblance of the monkey's small hands with those of children, and fantasizing in the last instance that monkeys "can be taught to smile."You smile, indeed, you chuckle, you get the joke and wonder how on earth he came up with this unexpected yet fruitful turn, and then there is the additional, delayed realization that what Lux has offered up is a brief and cutting critique of hunter mystique. Rousseau himself would shiver at what comes up with. Lux is one of our best.

Refrigerator, 1957

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out

and on the shelves: not a lot,

and what there is (a boiled potato

in a bag, a chicken carcass

under foil) looking dispirited,

drained, mugged. This is not

a place to go in hope or hunger.

But, just to the right of the middle

of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,

heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,

shining red in their liquid, exotic,

aloof, slumming

in such company: a jar

of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters

full, fiery globes, like strippers

at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,

the only foreign word I knew. Not once

did I see these cherries employed: not

in a drink, nor on top

of a glob of ice cream,

or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.

The same jar there through an entire

childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,

pocked peas and, see above,

boiled potatoes. Maybe

they came over from the old country,

family heirlooms, or were status symbols

bought with a piece of the first paycheck

from a sweatshop,

which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,

handed down from my grandparents

to my parents

to be someday mine,

then my child's?

They were beautiful

and, if I never ate one,

it was because I knew it might be missed

or because I knew it would not be replaced

and because you do not eat

that which rips your heart with joy.

Like Don DeLillo in his novels, Lux gives the history of a consumer culture's love affair with the objects they purchase and attach their happiness to, only to fall out of love when a wire is too frayed, a motor stops running, or a newer, sleeker design replete with more gadgets hits the showroom floor; so much history, family is contained within this refrigerator, memories that grow faint as children grow, parents die, people move to places out of town. A poignant picture this is, a deserted refrigerator on the back porch for years, something you pass daily, perhaps, knowing there are history and stories attached to its existence as a working machine, all of it unknown and unrecoverable like singular drops of rain into a stream."So You Put the Dog to Sleep" is one my incidental favorite poems of the last ten years. In it Lux categorizes within a routine, if excruciating ritual of middle-class life, the skewed habits of mind, suggesting here the weirdness John Cheever could get at with his tragi-comic stories about New York suburbs. He additionally subtly indicates how we handle the minor tragedies in our lives.

SO YOU PUT THE DOG TO SLEEP

Thomas Lux

"I have no dog, but must be

Somewhere there's one belongs to me."

--John Kendrick Bangs

You love your dog and carve his steaks

(marbled, tgender, aged) in the shape of hearts.

You let him on your lap at will

and call him by a lover's name:Liebschen,

pooch-o-mine, lamby, honey tart,

and you fill your voice with tenderness, woo.

He loves you too, that's his only job,

it's how he pays his room and board.

Behind his devotion, though, his dopey looks,

he might be a beast who wants your house,

your wife; who in fact loathes you, his lord.

His jaws snapping while you sleep means dreams

of eating your face: nose, lips, eyebrows, ears...

But soon your dog gets old, his legs

go bad, he's nearly blind, you puree his meat

and feed him with a spoon. It's hard to say

who hates whom more. He will not beg.

So you put the dog to sleep, Bad dog.

Cheever might be the best writer to compare Lux with, as the two of them have established the elegant yet clear-eyed tone of a narrator who can affectionately, intimately describe the conditions and contexts of the scenarios and yet remain seemingly detached , uncommitted, reserved if only to not break into laughter or tears as to the outcome. With "Dog" the situation begins with love, affection, an owner's dutiful care for his pet in exchange for the animal's unqualified love and loyalty. Later, as the dog grows older, his love and loyalty turns into dependence as he ages and becomes infirm, while the owner's affections sour into resentment. It constructs how thinking is geared to allow us to dodge guilt. As with farts, missing homework and soiled carpets, blame the dog for his own demise.

Slaves to do These Things: Amy King

Slaves to do These Things
poems by Amy King

Amy King's writing is at once brainy yet coursing with a perceptible sensuality, are among the best of the post-modernist, post-Language, post-confessional style where we have. She is a writer who has surmounted the collective, generationally situated surprise that our native tongue is, in essence, slippery when it comes to addressing our experience and who has gotten on with an interrogation of both the templates one has absorbed from birth and the ones accrued through living long enough to modify one's narrative.

There is no defeatism here, no smallish voice sighing over disappointments, no staccato -cadenced anger replaying old wounds. Amy King comes through these poems, not as a survivor nor someone inclined to obscure the bare facts of her life and the reading she brought with her, but rather a poet with a firm grip on the co-agitations of joy and subtler anguish.

The wonder is that there not a place one senses that they've come across someone who thinks it's time to address themselves in a disguised past tense; these are the wonderings, inspections, musings of someone too enthralled with the discussion underway to worry what the final word will be. What hasn't been said yet is nothing to worry about, but to anticipate as a hard-verbed, sexily ironic entree to what one doesn't already know.

King's verse is sharp, witty, moving in ways that are made powerful by the emotional nuance her line breaks contain; there is the sense that everything one knew is wrong, after all, and yet it stands as a reasonably reliable filter through which one may continue their negotiation with the metaphysically inclined whispers--the ghostly reminders objects, places, faces can awake and send a chill down your spine. There is an analytical rigor here, but not cerebralization of one's history. One witnesses the sort of appreciation of personal multi-valence; the meaning of King's life has changed due to the texts she's absorbed, and her experience, in turn, has changed the meanings of the books she has been given.

Choice and recommended.

a paragraph with general praise for David Lehman

I enjoy David Lehman's mosaics of place names, mad jazz and painterly effect; there is an fabulous improvisation in his lines that performs an activity I think is poetry's core province, which is testing language's ability to accommodate experience and offer up perception in a manner that merits a second, third or a hundredth look at the daily things that surround us.There is what sounds like genuine surprise and glee when his pieces are at their best set of finessed pitches ;the interruptions or clipped notions work as layers of many references Lehman decides to associate; it's a sloppy process, I suppose, but it's one I'm partial too, taking Frank O'Hara as my foil. There is not enough time in this life to bemoan and decry what cannot be undone. You're use of another writer's phrase merely passively agrees with him. Lehman's technique is more adventurous, more artful--he makes his borrowed references perform as he wants them to.

The joys of reading Ron Padgett

Ron Padgett is every bit the off hand and fresh-phrasing poet Billy Collins wants to be, and it's his particular genius to write in such a way that he hears what is truly and spontaneously poetic in actual speech and yet has the sense to contain the vernacular with real cadence and rhythm. Only a poet tuned into the weights and varying degrees of gravity a line of phrases and images can sound like if they're managed well can write these types of visual astute poems. His is a poetry of framing a perception at the moment it occurs, a sense of the banal giving rise to new formations of thought; the world is askew despite what appears to be sameness and order, and Padgett's method of ordering it all is askew as well. There is in him a capacity to be surprised without sounding like he's a taffy-headed cretin. There is wonder here, not wondering, which is to say he provides the reader with a clarity that incredibly manages to add to the mystery of the thing or emotion he's trying to contain.

Rialto
When my mother said Let’s go down to the Rialto
it never occurred to me that the name Rialto

was odd or from anywhere else or meant anything
other than Rialto the theatre in my hometown

like the Orpheum, whose name was only a phoneme
with no trace of the god of Poetry, though

later I would learn about him and about the bridge
and realize that gods and bridges can fly invisibly

across the ocean and change their shapes and land
in one’s hometown and go on living there

until it’s time to fly again and start all over
as a perfectly clean phoneme in the heads

of the innocent and the open
on their way to the Ritz.

Padgett has a contagious high spirit , and a large part of what attracts the reader to him is constant sense of surprise; right at the point when matters of thought, situation and action tend towards a fatal gravity, we come across one of his zany associations. The effect is of driving for a long period while listening to an ernest, or at least a belligerent discussion on talk radio when your passenger suddenly changes the changes; sometimes it’s sudden and hard, like the hard jab of fingertip to radio button, or screeching, chaotic and questing, like someone turning the knob up and down the AM dial. A mixture of different measures and accents of modulated speech covering news, weather and traffic conditions and a class struggle of music zips by you while the world the car barrels through promises only more commotion, kinetics, and, for Padgett, surprise and joy .

FixationIt's not that hard to climb up
on a cross and have nails driven
into your hands and feet.
Of course it would hurt, but
if your mind were strong enough
you wouldn't notice. You
would notice how much farther
you can see up here, how
there's even a breeze
that cools your leaking blood.
The hills with olive groves fold in
to other hills with roads and huts,
flocks of sheep on a distant rise

Padgett’s poems at their heart expose the commotion we set ourselves off on as we struggle with what we think existence is doing to us, leaving the effect of a supremely comic sense that’s been honed, whittled and made coolly efficient by pratfalls and even further extremes of snit-fueling agitation.


NOTHING IN THAT DRAWER

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.


There is in him a capacity to be surprised without sounding like he's a taffy-headed cretin. There is wonder here, not wondering, which is to say he provides the reader with a clarity that incredibly manages to add to the mystery of the thing or emotion he's trying to contain. Padgett is inside his engagement, not separated from it; what works in his poems is his capacity, like Frank O'Hara in his best, unguarded moments, to remained stunned at a flashing perception; a dozen or so combinations of thinking about what's unfolded in front of you rush by like so many film frames even as the phenomenon is still in the process of revealing itself. This is meant as a compliment, as sincere praise; Ron Padgett reminds of someone who is constantly gathering his wits.

The modernist divide

Ben Friedlander thinks that Marianne Moore is the center of American poetry's modernist resurgence, not Eliot or the storied Ezra Pound. He has no problem ignoring the names text books , lecturers and earnest undergraduates insist as being embedded, in place, in order. He responds to what he likes, not brand names. Or so he seems to be saying; I think it a reasonable thing to do when one seeks what speaks beyond reputation and an theory that speaks louder than the work it's supposed to examine. This got Ron Silliman's attention, who argues for a need the relationships between the artists over the decades, one period to the next, one century to the next. The kinds of poems we prefer are not written in an historical vacuum. Both make their points.

The problem seems to be that modernism is a slippery thing to define so far as getting all the moving parts perfectly described and catalogued. It's a general style and approach, one could say, and that Friedlander's preference for Moore being at the center of this concentration of forces seems personal instead of subjective; he's chosen those that work for him and has banished those that intrigue him the least to the hinterland, a matter that doesn't bother me so long as we intend our declarations as subjective rather than historical.

Moore was a hit or miss proposition in my reading of her, lacking the set of masterpieces that fuse one to the gravity center of a period, and Eliot, though a conservative and unpleasant old coot even his younger days, did write a set of stanzas that still take my breath away; one can argue the point, of course, but Eliot's best work, in the Waste Land and Ash Wednesday, still pokes a sharp stick in the side of one's personal complacency.

Pound, I think, is indigestible, arrogant, and possessed of genius only with respect for being an idea man, a critic, a talent scout. As a poet he was more an overstuffed trashcan than a filter for the larger culture he was trying to effect. His work matters the less in our current time, but his life does provide us with an idea that we ought not trust the artist's political thinking solely because they're an artist. An imagination capable of taking the forms of the world apart and reconfiguring them in interesting ways may make for good art or not. We can always ignore bad art with no effect to the social good; bad politics are impossible to ignore.

The sourpuss returns

I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming up near second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous stream of encrypted banality. Not to grind this axe too long nor too loudly, what is most striking about the assembled grossness of over-reaching testaments it is no one seems to have had an interesting take on what muse-inspiring incident happened to them. Too often, too often indeed, the Epiphany moment seems to drive the earnest amateurs deep into the Archive of the Already Said Too Often, which dampens my enthusiasm for the notion that an introduction to good poets and their work will, by default, improve and hone the attributes of a readership who would likewise enjoy contemplating existence in unique combinations of metaphor and simile. Rather than broadening the perspective, as hoped, many become entrenched in bad ideas. It's like a cold one can't quite rid themselves of, I guess, doing so at last after rest and a vacation from taking one's seriousness too seriously, but the bad taste also acts like a virus, incubating for quite a while and effecting the senses in ways that seem to lay an irreversible tendency to grandiloquence, truism, bathos, rugged individualism. Some of this is inevitable during being human with the conceit of being sensitive creatures with something to say--God knows I am an insufferable jerk when it comes to the sanctity of my poetry, which is, let us say, looking increasingly hokey as I get older. If that were the case, the reader, and the listener, would have the sense that some fact, independent of the narrator's expectations, was acknowledged and that the speaker is ready to change their thinking. Yet another reason I gave up doing public readings as a matter of habit: my good poems are few, really, and repeating them bores me. The sort of tract many readers come across in airports and the shelves of bookstore self-help sections, though, resemble a poem less than they do knotted strings of re-fitted clichés that lacking the value of irony or circumstantial variation. These are more things one would say after an accompanying string of disasters and disappointments that work not to comprehend experience and, perhaps, gain a perspective on why things don't go according to plan, but rather to rationalize and reinforce one's attitude and manner of moving through the world. When all is said and done, Frank Sinatra said the same thing, but with more style and less pop-psyche cant: I did it my way… Not that Sinatra's croaking croon makes this a desirable way to go through life. We are who we, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in. One is powerless in controlling outcomes of events, but within the larger picture, we can change our actions, we can change the way we think. We do, more often than not, influence the results. We are who we, sure, but a large part of being human is our capacity to change our behavior based on experience. Existence is not something you experience passively, or an event that merely happens to you. It is something you participate in. One is powerless in controlling outcomes of events, but within the larger picture, which this poem attempts to present to us, we can change our actions, we can change the way we think. In doing so, we can, more often than not, influence the results one gets. Such poets come across as defeatists in a Hemingway ammo belt. Poetry is fun when it is good. This was not good. Those who write poems, I think, are obliged to write the poems they can, whatever their style, and that they ought not be surprised when they are criticized for using clichés and glittering generalities in place of real craft or inspiration. One's innermost thoughts, of themselves, are often not interesting as poetry. Whether the young poet admits it or not, they have a responsibility to express their inner lives in  fresh ways that it's exciting to readers in the outer world. Small thoughts are perfectly fine, and one need only inspect Emily Dickinson, or the Imagist poems of Pound or WC Williams for examples. Even the "less than earth shaking" poem has a bar to reach; it should nonetheless be exquisitely expressed. Those who participate in their lives are not passive, they are engaged with it. Even the shy, weak, infirm, modest and laconic among us take proactive roles in the directions we take, and take responsibility. Most of all, there is the capacity to remain teachable, to learn from experience and change behavior and mindset; this is what keeps people interesting and useful to their fellows. Those who refuse to change their ways, to use experience merely as rationale to reinforce ineffective methods to coping with existence, are jerks much of the time, or just irredeemably clueless. One stays away from these people, and their poems.

"Next Life" by Rae Armantrout

Next Life, Rae Armentrout (Wesylan).  

Rae Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes, and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively. A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian, among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundaries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluble fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an ongoing inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title, what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence; 

 

We wake up to an empty room addressing itself in scare quotes. "Happen" and "now" have been smuggled out to arrive safely in the past tense. We come home to a cat made entirely of fish. --"Reversible" 

A good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion. Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a calm voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience and crisply discovers, underlines, and speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the intricate, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed that expose an archive of deferred emotion. 

 1. "That's a nice red," you said, but now the world was different so that I agreed with a puzzled or sentimental certainty as if clairvoyance could be extended to the past. And why not? With a model sailing ship in the window of a little, neat house and with a statuette of an stable boy on the porch, holding a lamp up,  someone was making something clear-- perhaps that motion is a real character. 2. How should we feel about "the eraser"? "Rampages" wears one expression while "frantically" wears another: conjoined twins, miraculously separated on Judgement Day? Then "only nothingness" is a bit vague. But words are more precise than sight-- increasingly! 3. The old man shuffles very slowly, not between a crosswalk's white lines but down one of them. Like a figure in a dream, his relations to meaning is ominous.-- --

"Agreement" 

 These are voices of a consciousness that surveys several things at once; time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, problematic. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the things one considers late at night when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit? This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that minor and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare, ruminative volume by a singular writer.