No more poems about poetry

I've posted this elsewhere a year ago and would have been happy to let the archive swallow it whole until retrieved, but the subject is an arguement that cannot be settled, and it seems that I'm not yet done thinking about it. The immodest musings on meta-poetics are posted here where new readers might find something to either cheer for or sneer at. I am assuming , of course, that there are those who are interested in my half wit opinions and can stand my careening sentence structures. -tb
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April, hardly cruel with its longer days and constant sunshine, does not seem so cruel in Southern California these days. T.S.Eliot, author of the fateful phrase that would be oft-cited sans context or coherent application, would doubtlessly agree with that assessment had he come through months of rain, gloom, mudslides and general grayness. The burgeoning of spring, the blossom of flowers, a quadrillion butterflies taking to the air, with all this you couldn't help smile and think life in April was worth waiting for, that this is a month worth savoring every sunny nanosecond of daylight for.

Grim facts do emerge in the month in spite the manic-cheer leading of the previous paragraph, the sorry and necessary fact that Federal Income Taxes are due by April 15, though one can absorb this philosophically however much it hurts to pay out what's due; death and taxes and all that. It is such an inevitability that it's pointless, you'd think, to have anxiety attacks over the fact. It is part of the texture of the day, a constant recurring weave in the tapestry of life. And all that.

A worse occurrence , a worse sin of existence, is National Poetry Month, where we will have the usual suspects , those few poets whose names are known by the mainstream reading public, engage in all sorts of self-congratulation and puffery , all in a grandiloquent attempt to sell poets and their work to a larger crowd of book buyers. Besides the fact that it doesn't work--those who don't buy poetry books, or care not to read poems at all are not likely to start the enterprise merely because Robert Pinsky or Billy Collins provide soothing assurance that poems are good for the digestion--what irritates me is the oncoming onslaught of poems about poetry. Readers are invited to observe poets attempt to make love to themselves in any number of verses where poetry is the subject.

Poetry against poetry is an amusing theme the first time you do it, but the contrarian stance can't mitigate the general obnoxiousness that it remains poetry about poetry all the same. Beyond the fact that it's usually a self-congratulatory clustering of poets praising themselves on being the "antennae of the race "(Pound's dreadful hubris-choked flourish), it illustrates a grating, even willful failure of imagination. "Failure" is perhaps too dramatic a word. "Laziness" would be a better fit.

Poets, regardless of their politics, religious beliefs, spiritual nuance or circumstance of gender, race, or even intelligence, have an over all need to deal with the world around them, to grasp experience as something raw and full , and then compose a poem about it all when there is something on the mind worth recording and revealing to a curious audience; it ought not carry the reminder that the author is a poet having the experience and who wrote the poem the reader currently holds, presumably reading.

It detracts from the job at hand, it dilutes, and it practically demands that the reader be grateful for the privilege to be in the presence of a soul more sensitive and attuned to life's nuance than him or herself. The promise of self-reflective art, brought to us in the Sixties by Godard and the sleeping sickness called Structuralism, was that once we understand the mechanisms and devices that form our ideas of meaning beyond the conventional, we will then be free to address social relations in words that would empower the reader to change society—to make a better world, to coin an odd idea.

Not much of that has happened in four plus decades, but the habit remained in poetry beyond the flesh-eating foisted on the art by those who misunderstood , I think, what L=A=N=G=U=A =G= E Poets were up to and centered their career making verse their subject matter. The Language Poets, one should remember, considered language as their starting point , with the work of Rae Armentrout, Barret Watten, Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and others , in various ways and strategies, interrogating, contesting and disassembling entrenched assumptions and conventional wisdoms about tongue we define and hang our perceptions on. Theirs was a project to witness contradiction, paradox and ambiguity, to take up the modernist task of fashioning a rhetoric that vibrates and gives way to the unpredictability of events and experience and perception. Not to everyone's taste or thinking , but Language poets, I'd say, are interested in maintaining poetic dictions as a resource the writer and reader can take themselves beyond the increasingly inane pronouncements of the publisher's preferred vocal style.

What's happened in the wake of these writers is a fungus that's seeped into the marrow of the Body Poetic and given a generation of poets a way to write without having to make some greater sense of their experience. Less disguised, this means that many poets are seduced but the surface sex and sizzle of an antifoundationalist theory and are with pages of alleged verse that hasn't a single communicable notion in them. There is in all this maze traipsing a lack of ideas; nothing seems to be said about being in the world in details or nuance that makes the prospect convincing . Craft and style are essential to honing emotional content into something greater than mere confession or less appealing forms of monomania--I'm not wholly enthralled with the idea of poetry being a substitute for therapy or group-groping apologetics--but the continual emphasis on poets and poetry as subject matter represents a flight from the standard practice of poetry as an extraordinary way to fathom that unexplainable condition of being human. Carpenters who talk about hammers and nails only don't get houses built. Poets writing poems about poetry aren't being poets at all, but is rather being dime store Hamlets practicing meditative poses in the perfume counter mirror, so much erudition impaled with the spike of their own cleverness, afraid to wander through the door and perhaps have an experience.

Marianne Moore's "Poetry" is widely anthologized and often cited, and it shouldn't be a mystery as to why this poem among the hundreds she wrote is the one that an otherwise indifferent audience remembers: IT'S A POEM ABOUT POETRY!! She rather handily summarizes an array of cliches, stereotypes and received misgivings about poetry a literalistic readership might have ,feigns empathy with the complaints, and then introduces one crafty oh-by-the-way after another until the opposite is better presented than the resolution under discussion.

POETRY
Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Moore is a shrewd rhetorician as well as gracefully subtle poet.Clever, witty, sharp and acidic when she needs me, Moore is clever at playing the Devil's Advocate in nominally negative guise, saying she dislikes it but mounting one exception to the rule after another until we have an overwhelming tide of reasons about why we as citizens can't exist without it's application.

It works as polemic, indeed, crafted as she alone knows how, and it adds yet another well-phrased set of stanzas that want to turn poets into more than mortal artists, but into a priesthood, a race of scribes attuned to secret meanings of invisible movements within human existence. It sort of stops being a poet after the first jagged stanza, not unlike all those pledge breaks on PBS that tirelessly affirm that network's quality programming while showing little of it during their pleas for viewer money. It's not that I would argue too dramatically against the notion that poets and artists in general are those who've the sensitivity and the skills to turn perception at an instinctual level into a material form through which what was formally unaddressable can now find a shared vocabulary in the world-- egalitarian though I am, there are geniuses in the world , and those who are smarter and more adept than others in various occupations and callings--but I do argue against the self-flattery that poems like Moore's promotes and propagates.

Novelists, playwrights , and journalists have had their mediums rightly demystified over time so that the title itself--novelist, playwright, ET AL--does not by association inoculate a writer against proper judgement; criticism, as such, deals with these scribes as craftsman , and the larger issue, literary wars and preferences aside, is how well an author writes, with how well they are doing their job.

The mystique remains,somewhat, for the poet and it is one that a good number of poets, good, bad and resoundingly mediocre, seem to want perpetuate. Moore, I think, had whimsy in mind when she wrote her piece, but the impulse to have poetry as the subject matter of new work keeps the medium unapproachable for many for no real advantage other than what appears to be vanity and status. There's a tendency to keep the edges of poetry blurry, smudged, indistinct as to the terms one is given to talk about poets and their work. One in this area doesn't want to give the whole game away.

Enough. Enough. If a poet has something besides themselves and their gift to share with us, please, let's read it, let's hear it, let's compare notes about life in this world. What poetry has lost in large portion is the capacity to evoke a sense of invisible structures behind the details of everyday life that , given the occasional hunch or flash of inspiration, could be sensed however momentarily and provide the reader with some extra energy to live fully another few hours on this plain in the attempt to make the world yield more beauty and fairness, and in it's place has come, in equally large portion, a self-consciousness that brings attention back to the poet as-arbiter-of-meaning, a broker of slippery signs who is so conceited (knowingly or not) about their nominal privilege and power that they can well dispense stanza after stanza of mirror-gazing narcissism without risking their standing over the minuscule dominion they lord their constructed value over.

Whiteness ll

Stuff White People Like is a blog dedicated to mocking the ways of white folks, the class that is cursed with white skin and too much education and money, and as I've remarked elsewhere, white European Americans are the only ethnic assortment someone can make fun of with impunity; it's now beyond whatever value it as irony or poetic justice and now exists as a bad habit for taking cheap shots. Now we have a piece in the NY Times about the site's principle author talking about another white person's groupsyncratic curse, poetry readings.A laugh and a good wicked snort can be had making fun of the habits of poets, but limiting the odd ways to white folks alone amounts to taking the easy way out no less than some of the poems that appear on Slate. Everyone is in a hurry to get to an easy punchline, not in the interest of having an audience see their own foilbes but rather so the motor mouthing wise guying can jet through another batch of sarcasms so lame that one wouldn't even dare utter them at 1am on a Comedy Store Amatuer Night. Is someone brave enough to investigate the wierdness that besets ethnic groups in particular once they become infected by the poetry flu? Not really, it seems, and white people remain the easy target one may mock with out the slightest fear of being called to the carpet for the stereotyping disrespect. It's a sorry, lame ass practice

Stuff White People Like is a blog dedicated to mocking the ways of white folks, the class that is cursed with white skin and too much education and money, and I've remarked elsewhere, white European Americans are the only ethnic assortment someone can make fun of with impunity; it's now beyond whatever value it as irony or poetic justice and now exists as a bad habit for taking cheap shots. Now we have a piece in the NY Times about the site's p

A laugh and a good wicked snort can be had making fun of the habits of poets, but limiting the odd ways to white folks alone amounts to taking the easy way out no less than some of the poems that appear on Slate. Everyone is in a hurry to get to an easy punchline, not in the interest of having an audience see their own foilbes but rather so the motor mouthing wise guying can jet through another batch of sarcasms so lame that one wouldn't even dare utter them at 1am on a Comedy Store Amatuer Night.

Is someone brave enough to investigate the wierdness that besets ethnic groups in particular once they become infected by the poetry flu? Not really, it seems, and white people remain the easy target one may mock with out the slightest fear of being called to the carpet for the stereotyping disrespect. It's a sorry, lame ass practice

Dullness of Intentions

This week's poem has been compared to Wallace Stevens and his regimented wonderings of what it must be like to permeate the membrane separating our existence of mere representation and enter into the realm of Platonic ideas, where the real things actually exist. Heady stuff for a poem to plough its way through, but there is at least an elegance in Stevens' ruminations on these fixed landscapes, things-in-themselves-unsullied or spoiled by human vanities.

I had concluded some years ago that Stevens had stopped his search for intrinsic and immutable meaning in the nature of things and concluded that his imagination and his gift for scrupulous composition would be put to better use re-framing the texture and position of things among those palm lined shores abutting the fabulous terraces and columned cabanas, thus investing his language with a further power to evoke the mystery of things that seem, to him, to collude amongst themselves to keep us guessing to what end our days serves. For most of us this results in periodic bouts of being dumbfounded , a chronic state of WTF; the pratfalls we have at the point when we assume we've discovered our path results in arguments with the results. Stevens fairly much admits that he'd be baffled if he thought he could define anything in this world of appearances, and realized he would be guessing. Fortunate for us the guesses were inspirations in themselves and that he had the genius to transform his speculative method into poems that would inspire the intrigued reader to ask better questions.

Ferry, though, hasn't the elegance or eloquence Stevens, and his poem The Intention of Things is a rudderless mess. One might have fun chasing pronouns and such things as they try to follow these elliptical couplets, but this reminds not so much as a poem of phenomenological speculation linked with the secret purpose of objects than it resembles a stoned rap a group of dopers would wander into once the smoke took hold and the world around them became an unreal cartoon they'd been dropped into. The worse part of it is that it reads further as if one of the zonked participants actually remembered the disparate topics of the ganja fueled rap and wrote it all down, trying attempting to make it a serious inquiry into the sequestered nature of things and events. It is humorless, it is over done, it is sophomore metaphysics, it is dull and very pretentious ; the narrator seems to think he's Hamlet , standing apart and on high, ruminating on human folly , the inevitability of death dispite all in-genius plots. But that's a speech that's already been delivered, an unsurpassable achievement. David Ferry's dry verse here seems more a typing exercise committed while he paraphrased a seeming half dozen ideas already infinitely paraphrased .

I

A new kind of Barbaric Yawp:David Lehman

David Lehman’s poem “November 18”, from his collection Evening News, was the subject of a dispute among some fellow poetry readers, half of whom liked the poet’s disjointed connections, and others who thought the poem was dated because of a seeming lack of unity and the use of the names of dead American musicians The conversation became rather steamy. All the same, the poem is hardly dated. Leham writes as though he's a radio recieving transmissions from across the decades, playing the music and the voices on bandwidths that bleed together. This is channeling indeed; what makes the poem enjoyable is Lehman's playful into a single communication, a voice ramped up to talk about several pleasures at the same time. The intrigue is not just makes into the excited stanza, but also those things that are left out, the segues and tranistions that are this speaker's connecting tissue. That tissue, I suspect, would make a poem as intriguing as this ode to hastily discoursed artistry.

Because it mentions people, places and things that are equated with the '50's? An arbitrary habit of thinking, I think. Lehman essentially creates a medley of voices, different streams of language that melt into one another, and with he balances the texture of associations the references bring; this is very much in the modernist mode, especially as practiced by The New York School, who, through the work of O'Hara and Ron Padgett, made a city poetry from an every day language of the noise of the city, it's billboards, magazine stands, grand hotels, loud radios and sports extravaganzas.

November 18
By David Lehman

It's Johnny Mercer's birthday
from Natchez to Mobile
in the cool cool cool of the evening
very cool with Barbara Lee
singing Marian McPartland playing
the greatest revenge songs of all time
hooray and hallelujah
you had it comin' to ya
and a bottle of Rodenbach
Alexander red ale from Belgium
with cherries and "Tangerine" in
the background in Double Indemnity
he had a feel for the lingo, "Jeepers Creepers"
as Bing Crosby sang it on my birthday
in 1956 I just played it three straight times
and an all-American sense of humor what does
Jonah say in the belly of the whale he says man
we better accentuate the positive that's it
happy birthday and thanks for the cheer
I hope you didn't mind my bending your ear

Lehman lays claim to to a particularly American sound here, starting with Whitman's barbaric yawp, coming up through William Carlos Williams, and finding itself resting next to other high art forms that found much to use, exploit and find glory in from popular culture. It had been mentioned that Langston Hughes did this sort of thing” infinitely better”, but that’s an assertion meant to distract. Hughes never did anything remotely like what Lehman succeeds in doing here, I'm afraid. He sought a blues cadence, a gospel resonance, and a voice based on an idealized African American idiom, but what his brilliance is a separate set of accomplishments. They are simpatico on a number of points, but to weigh over the other on the merits of a fictitious objective standard is spurious.The terrains are different -- Hughes rural and black, Lehman white and urban -- and the motivations behind the experiments vary dramatically. Lehman is an inspired heir to the mood and tact of the New York poets, and what he is able to do he does cogently, with humor and a genuine love of making language behave in ways that are poetic for the sheer ingenuity that cogent barbarism can bring.

Hughes was quite a different case. the poem can't make up it's mind as to whether it wants to be urban jazz or rural blues. The poem is about, among other things, the thriving, buzzing, and churning diversity of noise and music and tempos that one finds spread out across the American landscape, and what happens is a nice medley of musical emulations. If you've driven across country with the radio on all the way, you'll have an idea what the poem manages, the layering of music, voices, references all on top of one another, some fading to the background, others picking up as you near the transmitters, everyone in competition to be heard on the limited band width. You pick up this curious, adventurous, experimental verve in his brilliant music. Lehman is in much the same grain grain, an artist filling up the space of the American Vastness.

Belgian ale? Why not Belgian Ale? We have choices in this Big Country, and the use of this sort of potable enhances that ours is a place comprised of ideas from many other places. It's a nice, fleeting detail that emphasizes the idea of constant surprise. Is it fun? Big fun. It may be to people familiar with Johnny Mercer and his lyrics. That's millions of people, so I don't think you can accuse Lehman of obscurantist tendencies. One needn't know classical Greek to read "The Waste Land". It's the language and the tone that carries you through to the feeling that's being created. A poem ought not mean but be. Now it's a tired old baby-boomer of a poem . This is a poem where the speaker is happy to be alive, is happy for the life he's had, and demonstrates an eagerness for what is yet to come. Lehman concisely, entertainingly and skillfully has written a poem that tells us to enjoy this noisy existence while we may, because the time we have is finite.

Natchez to Mobile certainly gives us a rich slice, but few would say that it's a particularly urban slice,the poem is about creating a feeling of the vastness of America , and also the sorts of loud and hopped up sounds that are made up to fill up what is largely space between the coastlies; part of the way you create that feeling is with place names, time honored and effective. One has the feeling of pointing at a map, seeing an odd sounding name that has native-sounding exotica, and telling your traveling companion "let's go there." It's texture, and it adds this pieces city/country/city layout. This is a poem with names that travel well through the decades; they travel far better than Pound's name dropping of long deceased Chinese poets lyricism in any guise that effectively makes a reader forgo reason and engage emotional, more "felt" associations from what the language highlights cannot be said to be antiquated; it is always timeless. This poem is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who cares to read it with open ears.

Mercer is the starting point, but the poem moves on, along the roads, through the towns, the meals, the intriguing place names. Lehman addresses Mercer's lyrical, vagabond spirit. In doing so, the poem, like travel itself, moves from where it starts, and becomes about something much larger, and harder to define. Final definition is impossible, more than likely, but what we have is the realization of one of my favorite clichés, it's about the journey, not the destination.

Swimming from two shorelines

I was asked what a poet was talking about when I showed a friend a copy of John Ashbery's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and I was, of course, stuck for a fast answer. "Everything in the room" I said," and nothing in particular". An unsatisfactory response, she said. "I know" I replied,concluding "that's why he's fun to read." She made a sound and arched her eyebrows, annoyed , maybe, by the implication that poetry should have an entertainment value

The question ought to be not if the Emperor is naked but rather if the observer is blind. My take is that if one thinks there is nothing to John Ashbery's poems, they are bringing nothing to their readings.There is,I'm convinced, such as a thing as Author's Intent , an element literary critics have been trying to beat to death for four decades or so, but even so the reader is obliged to fill in the blanks and to stop complaining the poems are , alternately, too direct or too complicated. Willingness is the key; something of oneself needs to be invested in reading the poems in order to find pursuable verse.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained.He was more the walker than Ashbery, I suppose, or at least he wrote more about the going to and coming from of his strolls. unlike Ashbery, O'Hara loved being an obvious tourist in his own environment, and didn't want for a minute for his poetry to leave the streets, cafes and galleries where he treaded. Ashbery is more the stroller who gets lost in his associations triggered by what he beheld. Ever more the aesthete than his fellow New York Poets, he was interested in things a little more metaphysical, that being that the reality that exists in the inter-relations being the act of perception and the thoughts that are linked to it, which branch off from the perception and link again with another set of ideas, themselves connected to material things observed and remembered.

O'Hara was immediate, like the city he loved, while Ashbery allowed his senses the authority to enlarge his perception, to explore the simultaneity of sight and introspection. In a strange way, Ashbery is the more sensual of the two, willing to examine that even the sacrifice of immediate coherence. I'm not a fan of difficulty for the sake of being difficult, but I do think it unreasonable to expect poets to be always unambiguous or easily grasped. Not every dense piece of writing is worthy by default, of course, and the burden falls on the individual talent. Ashbery's writing, for me, has sufficient allure, resonance and tangible bits of the recognizable world he sees to make the effort to maneuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work.

Poetry, to distinguish itself from the precise mapping capacity of prose, ought to be written in a manner so ambiguity and multiplicity of possible readings thrive. .Otherwise, what would the point be? What matters for me as a tempered reader is not how well a writer coheres with a party line but rather how well they accomplish the goals of a craft that , by rights, should engage with a way of thinking of a confounding existence in a language that seeks to purify itself, continually,of easy attained tropes taken from a gallery of responses and generate instead some new ideas. Even the most conservative of poets in form and content do this very thing if they happen to be interesting writers at all; Poetry tradition is not a parsimonious use of language, but rather a deliberate expansion of what words pieced can do, what meanings they can evoke, and what sensations they can create.

Prose is the form that is, by default, is required to have the discourse it carries be clear and has precise as possible. Poetry and poets are interesting because they are not addressing their experiences or their ideas as linear matters subject to the usual linguistic cause and effect; poetry is interesting because it's a form that gives the inclined writer to interrogate their perceptions in unexpected ways. The poetic styles and approaches and aesthetics one may use vary widely in relative degrees of clarity, difficulty, and tone, but the unifying element is that poetry isn't prose, and serves a purpose other than the mere message delivering that is, at heart, the basic function of competent prose composition. I paraphrase the pragmatist’s credo: the validity of an idea is in how it works. It’s more interesting and fruitful, I think, to debate why individual poems work and why others just stay on the page, unlovable and flat, instead of holding the literary equivalent of Stalin Trials as to how well or badly a poet adheres to an approved party line. Quietude vs. Incomprehensible Quandaries? I reserve the right to swim from both shorelines.

Two concert DVDs from NetFlix

Miles Davis: Around Midnight (1967)

Filmed near the end of 1967 for the most part in Stockholm, Sweden, we have here a choice document that dispenses with the Davis mystique and allows us to hear the music , free and clear. Miles Davis didn't say much, as a rule, to his audiences, but with a band this good playing jazz this brilliant, it was wise for the band leader to allow the improvisation get the message across. Davis' trumpet work is all that is legend, crisp, curt, cool, muted, full of spatially lyric melodic forms and bursts of striking tones and angular phrasing. You anticipate the trumpeter's every solo, wondering what he'll think of next. Wayne Shorter on saxophone is Davis' perfect foil, an original voice who could provide you a sense of fully conceived and executed composition with each of his solos. The rhythm section of Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums is wonderful as well, especially Williams, who provided a malleable pulse that linked the instrumentalist’s dialogue.


Jimi Hendrix: Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight

We who grew up with Jimi and were saddened by his early death need to face facts and admit that he was an underdeveloped as a guitarist. In concert, anyway. While there is an oh-wow factor to consider in the man’s playing , the context is historical only, and an out of tune guitarist who sounds bored with the songs , the riffs and the stage antics he’s paid to perform does not travel well into the 21st century. For all the genius he demonstrated in the studio, he was a messy, out of tune, mistake-prone improvisor live, and this DVD shows him at his most exhausted. This is not experimentations in dissonance, as some would suggest, it's just inferior guitar work. Sorry, Jimi, but I do wish you had lived and gotten your act together, but at least you left us with "Electric Ladyland". I wish we had another ten years worth of music that amazing.

Wayne Shorter's Ensemble Straight Jacket

Alegria -Wayne Shorter

Fronting a superb brass and woodwind ensemble, saxophonist Wayne Shorter goes to expand his considerable palette with this 2003 set of compositions intended, I suppose, to highlight his talent as a master of texture, tone color and someone who can lead a large ensemble through theme and variation. This is not Ellington, this is not Julius Hemphill, this is not even Gunther Schuller. What is, though, is monotony on a virtuoso level. Technically there is much to admire, but there is little to enjoy since the project is obsessed with making Alegria match other large-group efforts at the sacrifice of the punch and flurry a richly showcased set of improvisations would provide. Oh, if they had reached a little less and jammed a little more. Davis didn't forget to swing amid the expanded contexts of Kind of Blue, and neither Mingus nor Monk forgot the blues wail or the gospel shout in the textures and subtler angles of their respective concert works. There are moments here, of course where Shorter's tenor and soprano saxophone sorties emerge from the arty murk and redundant changes of the ensemble to lighten up the proceedings, but even here it feels rootless, divorced from the melodies they should be making statements upon; one senses Shorter trying to make something happen. Nothing does as a result.

Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate

I'd be pleased if a poet preferring small matters to big themes became our Poet Laureate. But in the value of Kay Ryan, I find her work malnourished, under muscled, simply lifeless, and still as a rusty coin in a cushion crack. She is part of the School of Quietude, a dismissive term coined by Ron Silliman to describe the poets of the larger marketplace who concentrate on approaches to poetry that will not attempt to tackle more than one idea at a time. I have less animus toward poets who desire to do one thing well before moving on to the next matter at hand and have taken more than a bit of joy reading Billy Collins, Robert Haas.  Collins, though, is someone whom you "get" in short order, amused, shall we say, but his stylish effects but with no compelling reason to revisit the poem. Dickinson, certainly not a Quietuder (although she has been mentioned in conjunction with Ryan's name), shows all of us that compact does not mean straightforward; whole philosophies and shades of far-reaching intellection exist between those dashes. We read her because she's not easy to reach; with each re-reading, the reader tends to bring more to their experience of her work. Collins gets paraphrased, like a joke one half-recalls. The impression he leaves is soon smoothed into a general nothingness like the white noise that makes up radio static.

The compressed diction, the ruthlessly scoured syntax, and sparse, clean rhythms (or rhythmless, at times) is breathtaking when it works in the world of single-subject poets, analogous to rare moments when a perception, an odd and unplanned arrangement of things, surprises you when your eyes come to rest on them. It's the sight of surprise, the aha!, and the short formers, the Quietuders, likely excavate against excess rhetoric and come upon the one thing they are writing about. It's not an easy thing to do well. But more often, it is a mere shtick, a form of slick aptitude for evading the harder edges a poet would be expected to walk on. One idea, maybe too, a good turn of phrase, a quick exit. Ryan, though, isn't even this interesting.

My problem with Ryan is that too typically, she seems to be getting started on an idea, about to unravel some mystery of a material thing and connect it with an ongoing argument each poet has against Platonic idealism. Still, she leaves, darts away, and is elsewhere after her aggravations are generated.

Bad Day

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

From Say Uncle, 2000

One admires skeletal purity and an aesthetic that won't be overstated or festooned with gamy rhetoric. Still, there are some things Ryan might have taken from the more formal approaches she turned her back on, central among them the need to finish a thought. As with the above, the ganging up of internal rhymes makes this poem cute as a button but not practical as a poem. It would serve, I suppose, as a setup for a more extended set of complications with the size of the clothes one is supposed to wear. Still, the theme is rather banal: one grows out of their clothes as they age and gain weight, and complications don't seem to interest Ryan anyway. Incompleteness can indeed be appealing in a poet who provides a strong sense of the absent details they address elliptically--strong points for Dickinson and the fascinating Rae Armentrout--but Ryan's is not that kind of poet. Her poems make you lean in so you can hear this soft voice suss through contradictions and the follies of fanciful thinking, but it ends in a mumble.

One should consider the work of a lesser-known but though brilliantly clear-eyed poet named Kate Watson, a writer I know and was featured within a 1996 anthology Small Rain: Eight Poets from San Diego (D.G.Wills Books). Her tone is modulated, her sentences balance tactile adjectives and purring verbs with an uncanny equilibrium, and her quiet moments transcend the perceived banalities of the School of Quietude and actually enter into perceptions that are sweetly unique, clear, aesthetically riveting. Something is arrived at. The rare thing about my friend Kate is that her version of considering the thing-in-and-of-itself is without the faux profundity so many other poets would evoke despite their best efforts to rein in their egos; poets by nature have a hard time stepping from being the Arnoldian seer/priest. Kate Watson's is a poetry that is in large part free of those posturing suppositions.

Smudge

Pussycat,

pink eared, squints

in the sunshine,

sniffing flowers.

Button-eyed, she

purrs and

furlicks my legs

in the kitchen.

Four years ago, four

kittens born

in a drawer, smelled

of a barnyard.

Mature, she sleeps

in a circle,

the slope of her head suggests--young doe.

Trinity

She meets I

in the body

which is one

with my mother

I can see

where sits by the blue fire

flame-quick knitting

Is she sighing

shall I sing

she is I

am a long way away

when the wind blows

white wall coal black

light grey hair

my mother winks

from the middle of the flame

and I rise up

and leave her

alone

In the fire a reflection

coming home?

(C) 2008 Kate Watson

This is just a way of saying that the Library of Congress could have made a better choice. Saying that they could have done worse than Ryan doesn't say much for the office nor for what good graces are to be found in her conceit-laden lines.

A windy defense of the "Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara"

Selected Poems
Frank O'Hara
Edited by Mark Ford (Alfred A. Knopf).

Famously dour poetry critic William Logan smooths a few of the wrinkles from his creased visage and assess editor Mark Ford's new Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara with a surprisingly even hand. That is, he found some nice things to say about a poet you wouldn't have thought he'd consider to have any saving graces .The upshot is that he has a peeve against massive "Collected Poems" from dead writers where the good work is buried among limitless juvenilia and failed experiments. The poems of O'Hara, he writes, needed a good weeding.

"O’Hara’s wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest. At times the banalities pile up and overwhelm the poems — but then they were the poems. Rarely has an American poet so influential (two generations of urban poets have come out of O’Hara’s shopping bag) written so many poems dull to anyone except his genial fanatics — his very notion of the aesthetic courted failure as a method.... When O’Hara was lucky, he was very lucky, because his method could not help but fail most of the time."

One does have to admire this congenial sourpuss's ability with a phrase.I happen to love my massive , Donald Allen edited Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara , and think that Logan is being obtuse for the sake of not diminishing his reputation for taking iconic writers to task, but all the same, enjoy the review. What is significant and wonderfully successful about O'Hara's poem is , as Ron Silliman upon, he was the first American poet since William Carlos Williams to shy from, lampoon or ignore altogether the dominant conventions of formal, high style then current in American poetry and to instead settle on a unique idea of the patois of American cities. There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language.

Not unlike the live-wire architectural cubism in Stuart Davis paintings, with their jazz inflected angles , bright,bursting colors and idiomatic use of advertising iconography (but avoiding the entombing tendencies that doomed Pop Art), O'Hara's writes the poetry equivalent of a man supremely stimulated by what the boundless blocks and tall buildings of New York could bring him; his was the rhythm of someone wanting to talk to you about a dozen items at once, and there in is his genius; with so many things to relate, to remark upon, to marvel at and express the accelerated rush of emotional response, the poet allows matters to drift, topics to drop, creating an impressive verse that is at once of it's time and yet timeless in the sense that a reader to this day recognizes the exhilaration and sadness of O'Hara's valedictorian missives, both compact and expanded, generalized and specific to friends, lovers, situations.

There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language. As others would learn from him, O'Hara was the master of not getting to the point. The point , if any, was that he was alive in a life that was simply too incredible for words to contain.

GOP parody a flat tire

Daniel Nasaw writes the deadline:USA news blog for the Guardian , and ran an item regarding an ad produced by the Republican National Committee intended as a parody of Obama's recent speech in Berlin. The point, one would guess, is what would an Obama election ad look like if he were running in Germany rather than in the United States. We are meant to shiver with the slight yet obvious Nazi implications and indulge our Europhobia yet again. The fear card is a hand these guys cannot stop playing. The ad here.

A weak parody that lands far afield any target the would-be propagandists might have had in mind. One wonders how the fact that Obama is liked by Germans should bedistrubing to American voters. The opposite is more likely.Disgust with the war policies and subsequent disasters of the Bush Administration would cause a good many voters to be heartened with the prospect that there's a major Presidential candidate Europeans actually like,respect and are eager to cooperate with. Those of us in the States are sick of going it alone and being the bane of Civilization's existence; we're more than aware that the cowboy antics of our current group of election-hijacking thugs have made matters domestic and international a miserable mess. What's clear is that the RNC is desperate to undermine the success of the Obama trip; McCain and his surrogates dared him to go to Irag and Afghanistan with the expectation that Barack Obama's alleged naivete and inexperience would cause to make mistakes, commit gaffs and otherwise look unprepared and ill suited for the job he's running for. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, and the Republican Noise Machine is reduced to seeming like a nitpicking, complaining, embarrassed and whiny bunch of playground bullies who are trying to recover from a humiliating and deserved public spanking.

This would be a suitable footnote for a dictionary of famous phrases, specifically "hoist by one's petard", IE,

"To be caught in one’s own trap: “The swindler cheated himself out of most of his money, and his victims were satisfied to see him hoist by his own petard.” A “petard” was an explosive device used in medieval warfare. To be hoisted, or lifted, by a petard literally means to be blown up"

---(from Bartleby.com).

In a less literary vein, this is the equivalent of an inept robber getting shot with his own gun. That's gotta hurt.

poem: This page & a pair of pants

No romance for dental ovine modular cordless
Coltrane sheets for loud wall paper, habitue
lounge jazz frisky changes bandstand waltz time
allegro tropic corridor rhyme scheme , harmony boned up
like homework under iteration sans antidote to anecdotal
grave-cleaning, take the pennies off a dead man's eyes,
Yes to negative figuration as Madonna herself
gypsy queen of the Kick Stand Church of Low Heeled
gas line, stretch pants show the gender and the money
she and he carry as they travel between drainage ditches,
in my mind there are always factories gone behind forests
quiet as the commas gracing this page & a pair of pants
zipped up, sans legs, arms, a useful torso.
No time in half acre barn dance
means quarter notes and bandstand antics
grappling with third moon erasing
cruel ripples trails never clear
in diacritical manager's special,
the choice leaves on the absent pages
crack with what's made of history
but there are no bannisters to slide
down in Oakland
where you house exists
on a lake cured of flat fish and mud sharks,
after tonight everything is in the present tense,
But what you said even then,
as the strawmen fell out of their jeans
and shirts and their hats floated across
the stained planks of the gymnasium floor,
that our lives are less
now that bull whip politics
has an attitude
about spiral notebooks that
come undone and get stuck
to the notebook it lays atop,
all the notes are written at an angle,

What was said about masters and slaves
crawls over the slippery finger tips
of land lease, yeah, he said
I pull the trigger until it goes “click”.

Deconstructing the Deconstructed

Architecture is an art form, but of course, the crucial distinction between this art and other mediums is what the consumer, the perceived, and the witness to the artwork can do when confronted with unsatisfying works. One can walk out of a movie they dislike, they can walk past ugly paintings without relinquishing many linear feet of space, no one can not buy books by authors or poets they find not worth the time. As in Richard Serra's obese steel curtains, even massive sculptures can be removed from the public space they bother. But architecture? Great and ugly buildings are both more or less forever once they are constructed; in either case, one hasn't the option to ignore them. A structure can either be the greatest gift to a community or the vilest curse on its horizon. Thom Mayne's new U.S.Federal Building in San Francisco is a case in point; Architecture critic and historian Witold Rybczynski offers an even-handed critique in his current Slate column/slide show, and I do wish I had his sage-like repose. My recent view of it provoked something less generous. It would've been interesting if someone who actually had to work in the proposed building five days a week were involved in this building's planning. Assuming that each of Mayne's notions and details would be explained to a potential group of structure inhabitants, the architect might have received the sort of practical, technical, aesthetic feedback that would have prevented the Federal Building from being another whiz-kid vanity project constructed with public money.

But alas, there are the lingering traces of Howard Roark's fictional fingerprints all over the self-image of many a star architect. Even with the requirements that the project meet budget deadlines, structural codes, and conservation requirements, the structure will provide all the same penancethe petty concerns of practicality and beauty for whimsical design innovation that, although reputation making, age badly, look tawdry and contrived over time, and are more imposition than benefit to the community they are built-in. I've walked alongside this aberration, and the experience is, say, less gratifying than walking past a boarded-up storefront. I had the sensation of being crowded off the sidewalk, or worse, of feeling compelled to try and outrun an avalanche. From street level, it's a densely packed leviathan that promises a hard road ahead, a bleak and desolate future for the civic population that dares to remain in cities. From afar, it resembles nothing so much as a collection of remote control devices that had been taken apart, bashed with a hammer, and reassembled with two bottles of Super Glue.

One reads continually in interviews and scholarly critiques that the capital "A" architect desires and is compelled by little muses to challenge the citizen and force them into various dialogues, inquiries, inquests, and critical examinations of their relationships with shapes and forms. The purpose of that, I suppose, is to coerce the mere resident and worker to confess that any expectation of graceful and efficient buildings in crowded centers is an indulgence. The hidden agenda isn't just glorifying the builder who sees himself as a social engineer but diminishing the stature of the citizen from whom all power flows; symbolically, the building informs us rather plainly that the electorate's consent is damned. Albert Speer would nod and give a knowing chuckle if he observed the grandstanding disarray constructed on the San Francisco site. I couldn't help but think that Thom Mayne's realized this too and was somewhat giddy thinking that he was getting paid by the same public his new building would vex.

The Dark Knight

I was wondering if DC Comics would ever deliver a counter punch to the glut of comic book movies arch rival Marvel Comics has so far managed to bring to the screen, and now, on the eve attending the San Diego Comic Con, I have my answer, The Dark Knight, directed by Chris Nolan. It's earned over a $158 million dollars on it' first weekend, blowing away the previous champ, Spiderman 3 , and may well become the biggest earner of the year. What did I think? Well...I rather liked the movie over all, but my basic complaint is the one that plagues nearly all Hollywood films these days; The Dark Knight is simply too long. One has to admit that there is little slack time here and that all the materials coming at you are part of an intricate and dense weave, but the attempt to compensate for length by having a brisk pace results , if not torpor, then monotony. Would if director Nolan had paused and let Batman, the Joker and the lot perform their drama agains the glorious architecture and neighborhoods that are Chicago; racing through them makes one feel cheated visually, giving you the effect of trying to see a city while driving through the city after dark on the freeway leading out of town. The additional padding comes with the character of crusading DA Harvey Dent, who's commitment to clean up Gotham City has Batman more or less grooming him to assume the mantel of being the town's symbol of law and order. The tension between he and Bruce Wayne/Batman for the affection of the same woman would've been compelling enough, but having Dent morphed into Two Face and become an an aggrieved avenging angel, replete with gimmicky suit, is bloat.Aaron Eckhart’s performance as the pre-disillusioned Dent is so effective to the narrative drive that I wouldn't have had the character disfigured and made over into an insane villain in the same movie, saving the Two Face saga for another movie. The final was flat, pat, predictable. Plot management seems to be a challenge for director Chris Nolan, and one wishes there had been someone around advising him to condense when he should have, to slow down when he could have.

Birthdays

Time was in the seventies and eighties when I had an exceedingly high opinion of my opinions about poetry, literature, movies, and music, and it followed that during the period I would share my opinions with you as to the aesthetic merits and sins of what cultural agents were trying to sell us. Rather, it was more like I was telling you how the world work or why it didn't work; I wasn't a philosopher, a politician, or priest. None of that. I was something better, a critic. My reviews were in the Reader, The Door, The UCSD Guardian, Kicks, The Triton Times, The Paper, tabloid pages were my means to have a say on lyrics, fumbled organ solos, botched metaphors, I was in love with my own voice as it said sour things about a whole lot of people places and things.

Not that I've come any more modest with time, but I've calmed down some since taking the pledge; being a drunk for twenty years with the arrogance I held onto is looping mindset that kept me drunk. Not to wander into a drunkalog here, but let us say that my phone stopped ringing, my prose was incoherent, my poetry naught but an angry page of typos. Getting older and sobering up, I'll say, are the best decisions I could have made under my reeking circumstances. It's a miracle that I was able to make the decision at all.



Well, here we are again, another pair of special occasions come and gone, and still, the novelty of turning 56 on my birthday and the celebrating a 21st sober anniversary hasn't worn off. When I was younger, in my thirties, this arrangement of back-to-back touchstone dates were my primary bragging rights, something I would share, no, declare to each stranger, work mate, attempted girl friend and luckless traveler. It became a standardized rap, a memorized monologue about miracles, phoenixes arising from stirred ashes, cruelties, indignations and various cheats against daily ethical limits, and the sure deliverance a horrible biography needed.

Sure enough, I was impressed with the results I'd experienced as a result of laying aside the bottle, but I was word drunk all the same, and often times a bore. With every success in work, love, career, with each disaster or middle state of the same, sobriety was my boilerplate, spirituality was the punch line, and the signature phrase was my length of sobriety was the number of years I was beyond my life expectancy. The miracle sounded canned, in other words, and I could hear myself going through my paces as if I were the person I was talking at (as opposed to speaking with).

Even I couldn't deny the staleness of the best phrases, how slack the cadences and rhythms had become. It was something I couldn't spice up, juice up, liven up no matter my efforts; the only thing left to make it interesting to dwell on such matters aloud would be to make things up, that is, to lie, but that was contrary to the point of staying sober in a fellowship constituted on a spiritual cure for my hopeless situation as someone who couldn't stop drinking by his own power. So I a sat in the back of the rooms where folks like me gather night by night, listening hard, making it a point to ask how other people were doing, letting them finish their answers ; the hardest part of this project to take a genuine interest in others was refraining from offering up my own version of the anecdote they might have shared, and to avoid giving intense forms of unsolicited advice on what they ought to be doing with their problems. Surely, it was a humbling experience realizing that those around me weren't problems to be solved or ills to be cured, but rather people with live no less difficult and no less blessed than my own. At 56 and 21 respectively, I think I might be getting the hang of that simple notion.

USED BOOKS: The Poems of Norman Mailer

Modest Gifts:Poems and Drawings
Norman Mailer (Random House Trade)

Some of us think Norman Mailer ought to win the Nobel Prize for literature because of the sure and quarrelsome genius of his books and the ideas they contained; like him or consider him an aberration in the culture, a number of the styles he took, particularly the novel, the essay and journalism, gave you a personality that was hard to ignore.

 Many who thought him a lout , a grind, an egomaniac had to admit, after reading him to counter his many assertions about many things, that Mailer was, after, a Great Writer. Joyce Carol Oates, an astute critic of Mailer, offered that Mailer's ideas were dangerous because he wrote so well.This, though, isn't one of those books," Modest Gifts" being, at best, a gussied up reissue of a lone book of verse he produced in the early Sixties,"Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)". Now, as then, the pieces are slight, skeletal, un-propelled by anything resembling a notion that the reader cares about. For a writer who's composed some of the richest prose and lyric flights this side of Faulkner and DeLillo, these efforts are so minimal that even a verbal skinflint like Hemingway would call these gifts not modest ,but cheap. The poems were written in the early sixties when the author had several professional , legal and marital crisis hanging over him, a situation that had given him writer's block and which, as a professional writer, placed an additional burden on him.

Brief, truncated in content, artless in the lack of interest of achieving the sort of ambiguity that is poetry's to apply to the senses, the poems are more like pained gasps of someone airing their gripes, bitches, and congested rage in a sequence of angular phrases. These are the kinds of things you might hear in an operating room when the patient's ether and pain killers wear off. The splintered style, rough and absent color, rhythm or graceful metaphor, is what Mailer wanted to present the public, though, and thought it in his best interest to write about his troubles in a language that lacked the elegant buttressing his essays and journalism could achieve. Of interest to scholars, perhaps, who can examine these puny bits in context with the larger body of work--many of his life long obsessions are to be found here--the reader desiring Mailer's talent for metaphor, adjective and metaphysical fancy had best look elsewhere for some of the brilliance some of us claim for him; this volume is an embarrassment in the late author's career. Mailer explains interestingly that these were put together at a bad time in his life when he could not compose--stabbing your wife will tend to dampen your willingness to wax--and that he found something therapeutic in their existence, but there never has been a compelling reason for these things to be put between covers and sold. Unlike some, I think that a great writer's less great work, the unformed work, the jottings, the juvenilia,the notebooks, the scraps and crumbs, need to remain in the drawer, and not committed to the judgment of history. This poetry is so minimal that it can't even raise a stink.

USED BOOKS: Novels by Richard Powers and Mark Costello

1. The Time of Our Singing
a novel by Richard Powers
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers is an amazing novel, an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. He grasps inexlicable contradictions--there are scenes when one believes that prim and closested bigots are about to have their hearts changed forever as they listen to the heaven sent, transcendent voice of the young man, only to resort to their unshakeable racism once the music has finished--and offers up the idea that what prevents justice and good will from prevailing more often is because of the collective and individual fear that no one wants to admit their world view is limited, wrong, and harmful to life on the planet. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there.


The Big If
a novel by Mark Costello

First, this author isn't to be confused with another fiction writer named Mark Costello, who is the author of two brilliant collections of short stories called The Murphy Stories and Middle Murphy.Those books, a series of related tales involving the title character, is a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a generation growing up in Illinois, and it is one of the most beautifully written sagas of dysfunction, alcoholism and despair I've ever come across. This Costello does things with the language that take up where prime period John Cheever or John Updike left off and offer up a virtuoso prose only a handful of lyric writers achieve; it is the brilliance and beauty of the writing that makes the unrelieved depressive atmosphere of the two books transcend their own grimness. The prose in these two books demonstrate the slopper pretender Rick Moody cannot help but seem. Buy these books and experience a devastating joy.

The otherMark Costello, a younger writer, has equal genius but a different approach to the world, and his novel Big If is quite good, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired, and the other is with the rich detailing of the other secret service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us". Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rational, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out on intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field.

Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details , his comic touches, A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me". She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks. The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things, the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters that conspire against our happiness. A fine book.

USED BOOKS:Satan, His Pyschotherapy and Cure by The Unfortunate Dr.Kassler, J.S.P.S

Satan, His Pyschotherapy and Cure by The Unfortunate Dr.Kassler, J.S.P.S
By Jeremy Leven (AuthorHouse)


No one has ever done a subtler or a more devastating send up of the psychiatric/psychology industry, nor have many been able to insinuate sly philosophical digressions into a frothing satiric text with such grace and pacing. This satan, faceless, locking himself inside a computer in a public gallery, has the charm to coax a snake out of new skin. The complications are wonderfully wild and orchestrated, and Kassler's travails as a single dad trying to rekindle a relationship with his children are heart breaking as they are potently hilarious.
I'm among those who've loaned out various copies of this book and have had to replace it with replace editions, not an easy task considering that the book is out of print. This novel needs to come back into print from a major publisher at a reasonable price, as the current edition from vanity press AuthorHouse is an arm and both legs at $27.95. The cost stops more people from discovering one of the best bits of black humor since the glory days of Naked Lunch; no one has better gotten the sheer hysterical intensity of the moment when one is facing impossible evil and finding something to laugh at dispite the oncoming despair and horror. Dispite the onslaught of misfortune that comes down upon the haplass doctor, the book also is about shouldering one's share of the common burden and dedicating themselve to the good work that must be done no matter the personal grief that distracts and irritates. Satan is indeed cured in this novel, and one needs to read it to get the kind of genius that's been missing in American satiric writing for too long, far too long. Author Leven has given us one of the best structured, best written American comic novels, and its a disservice to the reading public to keep it out of print

Robert Kelly on science

I have this poem "Science" by Robert Kelly posted over my desk at work, and what I like about is that it gets the feeling of someone talking to himself, under their breath, but speaking nearly full sentences, referring to an unspecified other to whom the comments are intended. The element of eaves dropping comes into play , the effect you get when you only hear one side of a phone conversation or what's being said in the next booth in a noisy Denny's; the poem has another dimension, a countervailing polemic that is conspicuous by being unstated, unheard. As readers , we demand that things we bother to glance over make sense, and so we speculate, interpret, fill in the gaps to have the portions presented make at least theoretical sense.


Science explains nothing
but holds all together as
many things as it can count
science is a basket

not a religion he said
a cat as big as a cat
the moon the size of the moon
science is the same as poetry
only it uses the wrong words.

The leaps, gaps and goofy intrusions of odd comparisons may distract and annoy some readers, but I happen to like the disjunctions; broken syntax, interruptions, the overlaying of point, counterpoint and further contradiction gives this poem the verbal ambiguity that would make you pause a little, consider the implication of an accidental connection.

You wonder how science comes to be compared to a basket, or why the subject the moon and its size have to do with anything the speaker and his unknown friend were talking about, but they do fit neatly into the introductory notion of whether the methodology can indeed explain the world to us, or does it merely record what researchers observe, without an idea of the crucial "why" behind the function these processes have. Hence, science is compared to a basket, something which contains loose ends gathered from hither and yon, connected only by the method in which they're gathered. Hence, science is compared to poetry, which describes the world and the experience in it with a language that is barely accurate enough. But whatever one comes to refer to science as, all that it attempts to dissect and explore and extract meaning purpose from remains a unknown, it remains a mystery.
Kelly, a bit of the mystic for whom poetry connects one to instinctual knowledge rather than the measured, indexed and delineated, tells us that science is just like poetry, but that it uses the wrong words. The words he wants give us bearings in the flux and sway of a life's accumulating events and yet retain the sensation, the anger, the joy of being alive to what is arriving, while science is all subject to materialist verification. In a rational world, I would side with the scientists and , but I'm not always rational. There are times when precision will kill the soul faster than the surest poison.

Playgrounds and Catechism

I was one of the those lucky enough to attend Catholic School for grade school, junior high and early high school, and it was, to be sure, an odd place to go through the awkward teenage blues; one's obsessions with comic books, monster movies and an bewildering and growing fascination with girls mixed in delicious confusion with the discipline and moral instruction given us by nuns as to the purpose of the Church and the mission being given to it's young members. It made for radical shifts in focus when the bell rang indicating the end of recess, when all the rude jokes, dirty talk, leering and horsing around stopped abruptly and some institutional rigor entered one's spine, and surreal attentiveness to what nuns and lait teachers were saying came over otherwise expressive faces. Charles Grosel gets it mostly right with his poem "In the Fourth Grade", a succinct an artful blur of external forces vying for a young man's attention. It lacks, however, the third act, the additional detail that would elevate this above oh-hum irony that keeps too many poems chained to the earth. This is a poem that should have soared high and grand.

One might be too severe in deriding the comparison between catechisms and Adventure cards, but both both have something to do with what role is too play in the world; one learns their parts, becomes aware of their weaknesses, and pursues their ends for a good that is , finally, greater than oneself. Catechism, it should be said, is simply the first layer of a Catholic Theology that is about as sophisticated and textured view of man's place in the universe which God created and how one may best use the abilities and skills they've been gifted with to make way through an pitiless existence for the purpose of bringing some of His grace and goodness to this life. It is a whole system , elaborate beyond the basics regular catechism outlines, and in that a central tenet is that Man has free will and must intuit and intellect his way through ambiguous circumstances to move toward teh good , the goal, shall we say, entails honing strategy skills and such no less than what pop culture past times offer.Adventure cards, as Grosel calls them, in fact mirror the Christian mythology that institutions like the Catholic Church have developed a substantial moral philosophy from.

I suppose what the poet is getting at is that the boy, attempting various cool hoodlum poses and such before the bell rings and the lines form, drops his mannerisms and learned street attitudes and takes on the proper behaviors and deference the nuns expect of him and the other fourth graders. Conversion, in this sense, is a pun, a weak one, in that one can relate this to how one converts currencies; the young man here converts his playground attitude to one that enables him to get along under the sister's watchful eye. It doesn't work, though, and something more is needed, another idea besides the easy resolution involving conversion experience is required. We have, as is, a well turned construction that delights with the indirect rhymes and disguised alliteration that lacks the third act; Billy Collins, or better, Thomas Lux would have been able to twist the readers off the neck. This is merely sweet and feeble by the end.



As far as it goes, the poem is a fine bit of observation to my mind, and Grosel treads lightly with the parallels he brings to our attention; some other poets would have talked the comparisons into submission, others would have pounded you over the head, while still others would have choked on the incoherence they were creating. Not so with this writer, who maintains his balance, does not lose his cadence, keeps his emphasis visual, and terse. The poem is fine for what it sets out to do, and the only failing , for me, comes with the ending, which was too easy, too obvious a matter to deploy, but which is not irredeemable with a smart revision.


I suppose what the poet is getting at is that the boy, attempting various cool hoodlum poses and such before the bell rings and the lines form, drops his mannerisms and learned street attitudes and takes on the proper behaviors and deference the nuns expect of him and the other fourth graders. Conversion, in this sense, is a pun, a weak one, in that one can relate this to how one converts currencies; the young man here converts his playground attitude to one that enables him to get along under the sister's watchful eye. It doesn't work, though, and something more is needed, another idea besides the easy resolution involving conversion experience is required. We have, as is, a well turned construction that delights with the indirect rhymes and disguised alliteration that lacks the third act; Billy Collins, or better, Thomas Lux would have been able to twist the readers off the neck. This is merely sweet and feeble by the end.

Whiteness

When in doubt, slap a new coat of paint on an old idea and hawk it as something brand spanking fresh, as in the case of the folks who started up the site Stuff White People Like .Well, yeah, I laughed at this, recognized the material things we as a light skinned privledged gather about us, and then wearied of the whole notion of this satire. It's a riff that's been played into submission, like hearing the umpteenth posthumous live version of Hendrix playing "Red House" or the final "must-see" episode of the current season of Law and Order; try(and lie) as you might, there's nothing especially surprising at this point in Hendrix's drugged guitar fumblings, and the unexpected twist or turn of the legal scenario of that L/O storyline, the one that would simply stun you even though this show has been on the air for 18 years, is simply a hyped -up run through of old plot lines, old outrages, with the twists arriving on time, on schedule.Making fun of white people has been a dependable staple of comedians for years, a safe haven for those times when you have a need to deride, insult or stereotype an entire population with the most reductionist jibes. 

The sweet part of the deal is that one can indulge this stale diversion with impunity, as no one will muster the nerve or umbrage to yell foul; Richard Pryor through Dave Chapelle can mock the doings of the lighter hued race sans a protest, and white comedians will do it to their own kind because the current tone is zero toleration for a discouraging word said about anyone, on any terms, for any reason. Except white people. It's lopsided, yo. Gore Vidal remarked in the Sixties that homosexuals were the last minority group that one could make fun of and get away with, but times, attitudes and the strength of group pride changed all that. There remains the need to mock someone. White people are it. It may well be our turn in the barrel to many people's thinking, but that sort sort defeats the purpose of judging people by character, not skin color. This is progress?

"Post-racial" is a preferable state for the world to fall into, but meanwhile racial and ethnic matters are as touch as they've ever been. Ethnic cleansings are a very recent memory, and the GOP's hard right flank isn't shy about unloading racist stereotypes in their opposition to Obama's policies. Still, there remains , codified in our ethics, our laws, and our basic sense of decency, the notion that invective aimed at blacks, hispanics, gays, women, Asians and others is "wrong" , and evidence of a disturbed mind. I wouldn't argue against that; racists have to be censured, the message that it's not okay to denigrate anyone for matters of race, gender, sexual preference is unacceptable. My point though, is, that making fun of those of paler skin and European heritage is okay. No one in an official capacity, or any level of cultural influence, will arise and advise the rest of us , indeed remind us, that reducing a population to the sum of their stereotypes is not the way a more just and tolerant culture is created.

An unfair take on Derek Walcott

I am not a fan of Derek Walcott, and here I get the usual DW routine of reading a poet who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to make what he sees, smells,hears, tastes interesting in themselves, blessed only with an excess of qualifiers that the poem becomes something like perfectly fine cup of coffee ruined with too many spoons of sugar. It's not that I haven't tried to get acquainted with the man's work; he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after all, and was at the time required reading for anyone thinking themselves up on poetry. The Nobel Committee isn't infallible, though, and matched Walcott prolix poetasting in 1992 with the selection of Dario Fo in 1997, a questionably lefty playwright I think never should have been allowed the small press. 

The difference, of course, is that Walcott has an audience, the same audience that sees poetry as a means to get to the Idea behind the Things we see , taste, and feel, the same audience Billy Collins more skillfully (and succinctly) caters to. And so Walcott hams up the language with digressions that offer more silt than sunshine. It might be a dual problem between reader and poet--his audience thinks he's going somewhere with the elephantine mythology he constructs, and so does the poet.

The problem, I guess, is that Walcott tries for elegance and transcendence and yet never convinces you that he's even looked out the window let alone taken a trip anywhere. There is so much rocking back and forth between obvious extremes of situation, so many adjectives and verbs seeking to convince you that details being offered are more exciting and significant because DW perceived and categorized them. It is both arch and prosaic, a monotony of routine list making.

THE SEASON OF PHANTASMAL PEACE 

by Derek Walcott,

born in St. Lucia in 1930

Then all the nations of birds lifted together

the huge net of the shadows of this earth

in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,

stitching and crossing it. They lifted up

the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,

the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,

the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill -- 

the net rising soundless at night, the birds' cries soundless, until

there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,

only this passage of phantasmal light

that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,

what the ospreys trailed behind them in the silvery ropes

that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear

battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,

bearing the net higher, covering this world

like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing 

the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes

of a child fluttering to sleep;

it was the light

that you will see at evening on the side of a hill

in yellow October, and no one hearing knew

what change had brought into the raven's cawing,

the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough

such an immense, soundless, and high concern

for the fields and cities where the birds belong,

except it was their seasonal passing, Love,

made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,

something brighter than pity for the wingless ones

below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,

and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices

above all change, betrayals of falling suns, 

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause

between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,

but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

This is the kind of self-consciously literary language that ruins the literary experience for millions of readers who otherwise wish to be transported through a brilliant use of language. The theater advice applies here, "don't let them see you act", meaning that the effort to evoke conditions and states of experience through artistic means should seem effortless; the technique should be invisible , unnoticed. The artful should conveyed without the conspicuous essence of art. Walcott's poems make think of a man who wants to let you know that he's a poet, that he is a wordsmith.The elegance for the sake of elegance always seems more the subject in Walcott's poems, or the point of the writing; the subject exists primarily as a means to display  his  virtuosity. The net effect, in my readings of him on an off for twenty years or so, is a stalling tactic--the undecidability isn't an Ashbery like conundrum after one of his intense and relatively compact scrutinies between his Stevens-like formations of perfect Ideal Types and the world independent of the senses. In Ashbery's and Stevens' cases, the point of the poems was to evocatively ponder the distance between perception and a material existence that will not conform to the demands of brilliant language. That creates tension,suspense, irony; there is intrigue and there is reader interest in what the poet makes of it, if anything.

Success, though, depends on how      well the language used to accommodate the subject and ideas being subjected to the kinds of extra-critical interrogation. For Walcott, it too often seems a case of indecision of what to settle on as a nest of notions on which to write and instead obscuring that blankness with sparkling qualifiers that , after a point, enhance not ideas or emotions but rather emptiness, a lack of anything interesting to say.  It's not for me to demand what this means because that's the least interesting thing to worry about in a discussion of a work, but I would expect a competent poem to at least be able to evoke sensations, associations and the like toward a satisfying ambiguity; a certain genius with the language is required, and Walcott, Nobel Prize or no, hasn't that genius. The banal poeticisms of "soundless voices", "betrayals of falling suns" "the pause between dusk and darkness" and the like are arty rather than artful, It amazes a certain readership,but to me this borders on kitsch.