April is the cruelest month

It'd be interesting to have Bernstein meet up with Steve Kowit [www-rohan.sdsu.edu] and see if they can hash out their differences. As Bernstein rails against the fact that National Poetry Month emphasizes a more accessible , "mainstream" style in order to secure an audience , all while sacrificing the brave work of more experimental, edgier, gutsier poets (like himself), Kowit argues in his essay that the difficult, the avant gard and the abstract poem had taken over the poetry main stage and choked out more accessible poets as a result. Each side seems to view it's aesthetic as an endangered species at the hand of their evil twin. Bernstein himself is a Language poet, a method that attacks the idea that traditional ways of writing about experience and ideas in poetic fashion accomplish anything like truth; in fact, Bernstein and friends would insist that traditional Western poetics are oppressive and express nothing but the hegemony of soul-crushing capitalism.


Language poetry, and similar radical styles before and since, are by nature limited to a small audience, less because the means of distribution kill potentially high sales of the works of Zukofsky, Charles Olson or Ron Silliman, but more that the originality of the new styles are constructed precisely to challenge, baffle, and mock the expectations of the general reader. Marginal poetries demand intellectual rigor, the argument goes, and those who stay the course and master the critical vocabularies will get "IT".
That might be the case, but the general audience instinctual dislikes being held in contempt by small bands of snobs, whether New Formalist conservatives or left-leaning Languagers, and the collective sensibility of the interested audience will seek things that don't precede on the premise that they're morons who need to be instructed by their betters.Poetry has been an elitist practice for decades, and the efforts to bring a larger audience into the fold and investigate the diversity of verse styles is a good think, regardless of the misgivings of the abtruse few. I doubt books will vanish, nor that experimental and radical writing will cease; more likely, such forms will most likely gain readers because of efforts to get buyers to invest in Dorrianne Laux or Frank O'Hara instead of Mitch Albom or Dwayne Dyer.I have to say that I've enjoyed a good number of language poets and their poems, having taken classes from more than one of them, and done readings with them in the past. Take away the political shell of their theory and you have yet one among the many avant gard movements that have contributed to the richness and variety of American verse.Their agenda and goals were limited , though, and the problem is that the good work was done early on; particular works of Bob Perelman are perfectly comprehensible once you discern the satiric shrift he gives the rhetoric of political and academic speech, Rae Armantrout's best work has a compressed self awareness that compares somewhat favorably with some of Dickens and Millay, and Ron Silliman's work extends the cubist angles that Gertrude Stein gave her more invigorated writings.The difference, one might say, is that they gave their devices a different name, though I think the techniques are largely the same, and the purpose of their writings is to force language to do things other than render the world into pretty pictures and have valorize the predictable responses of narrative personalities within the conventional framework.We see, of course, that the work was finished early, and what was legitimate experimentation , a desire to develop new ways of looking at the world through the sieve of language , became naught but another style, incoherent for its own sake.By the time I came across and met these poets in college during the late Seventies and early Eighties, their moment had already passed, and since then have ceased to be a leading force in the culture. The controversy over the language poets in the areas where these contentions matter abated some years ago, as we've seen the vital resurgence of meaning as the principle purpose of the poem. Houlihan's 2000 essay is many years behind the times, and it makes you think that this was an old, unpublished batch of resentment she had lying around until this opportunity to publish it online.I'm sure she's a fine writer and a nice person in real life, but one wonders as well what kind of trauma the language poets put her through to make her attempt to revivify a controversy that's no longer relevant to the state of the art.

"The Hole" , a poem by Tom Sleigh

Few kinds of writing are worked on as hard as a bad poem; sometimes I suspect poets are aware that they've committed to an unworkable conceit and labor over it from pride, misplaced as it goes. Gonna make this son of a bitch work, goddamnit, no matter how hard it squirms and wriggles to get away. The reek of dried flop sweat never quite leaves the result. Tom Sleigh, otherwise a good poet, has one of them with "The Hole", published last year in Slate.From the first stanza where the wind is laughably compared to a dog trying to make a bed against the foul weather--rather hard to anthropomorphise the wind as a pooch let alone reconstruct our associations enough to imagine weather conditions seeking shelter against itself--to the self-conscious literary references to poets and their writings, I found Sleigh's poem dead on arrival. I object: wind is not like a dog , unless one lives in a cartoon,and the logic of having a weather condition digging for protection against itself reads like an insular joke about post-modern
self-reflectivity or , better yet, existential self-examination inspired by a light reading of Walter Kaufman. It takes too much explaining, it distracts
from the notion that Sleigh lacks a point to get to, or even an idea to develop through the stanzas. It is, in plain fact, bad writing, the depressed equivilent of the crowd who compose optimistic poesy and decorate their notebooks with hearts and roses.It's poetry written to fulfill a task: BE DEPRESSING,BE HAPPY!! This command-theme poetry caters to its respective audiences the way sundry and contrived pop music does; it allows the reader a fake sense of the poetic and reflective without any real work being done. Inspiration, the drive to side step obvious tropes and catch phrases and usual riffs, makes no appearence in this make-work effort.

One may, if they're inclined, sift through the images and dissociated images to get meanings and inferences to larger, buried controversies, but this poem is freighted with rather typical angst and dread. Sleigh's symbolism is the kind of thing one wrestled with in the fifties and sixties with Lowell, Plath and Sexton, disguised and not so disguised confession and perpetuated despair that sometimes resulted in striking, brilliant verse. The brilliant verse, remember,was the result of the poets trying their best to come up with a poetry of a sort that hadn't been composed before. Not all of it was good, some of it was especially self indulgent and grueling to the eye and ear, but there was genius somewhere in those lines, some of which emerged in particular poems. Sans the occasional spark, much of the work of Lowell, et al, seem less poetry and more the mutterings of
dementia.

Sleigh's slide- show confession gets stuck , frames askew. It's a grab bag of corroded symbolism that he drags around in a burlap bag, trying to sell off for gas fare. It's just not very good.There are many "new" poetries making the rounds, as there always has been. I prefer poems that work structurally, whatever the style or technique. The poems shouldn't have language that is strained, labored, or needlessly opaque, vague or abstruse, there should be a fresh idea or perception at the heart of the writing.From the first stanza where the wind is laughably compared to a dog trying to make a bed against the foul weather--rather hard to anthropomorphize the wind as a pooch let alone reconstruct our associations enough to imagine weather conditions seeking shelter against itself--
to the self-conscious literary references to poets and their writings, I found Sleigh's poem dead on arrival. I object: wind is not like a dog , unless one lives in a cartoon,and the logic of having a weather condition digging for protection against itself reads like an insular joke about post-modern self-reflectivity or , better yet, existential self-examination inspired by a light reading of Walter Kaufman. It takes too much explaining, it distracts from the notion that Sleigh lacks a point to get to, or even an idea to develop through the stanzas. It is, in plain fact, bad writing, the depressed equivalent of the crowd who compose optimistic poesy and decorate their notebooks with hearts and roses.

There are many "new" poetries making the rounds, as there always has been. I prefer poems that work structurally, whatever the style or technique. The poems shouldn't have language that is strained, labored, or needlessly opaque, vague or abstruse, there should be a fresh idea or perception at the heart of the writing. Frank O'Hara, Dorrianne Laux, Kim Addonizzio, John Ashbery, Richard Tillinghast, Paul Dresman, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Paul Blackburn, among several slews of others who do the artful balancing act of writing in a manner that is both friendly to the ear, simulating spoken rhythms, with a heightened rhetoric that makes the expression memorable, worth a second and third read. The goal is to seem natural, and the writer's stance might be to consider what it is he or she might want to read if they were to spend some time with stanzas. What they share is not style or ideology but rather an ability to make me, the reader, stop a second and consider their thoughts.

Poetry,especially free verse, should just about never have itself as subject matter, nor should the poet refer to him or herself as a poet in the work. The self-referentiality is a dead give away that the poet is stuck for a transition and will instead digress among a plenitude of ready made discourses about poetry before getting on with the show, often times with ham-handed transitions from the poetry rap to the larger theme. The poet who refers to themselves as "poet" in a poem is often times bragging without a accomplishment to justify their pride; it's a conceit that maintains that the "poet" is the antenna of the race and is capable of greater perception than the poor, clueless reader.This marks an insecurity on the poet's part that they're not really sure of what they want to say, and it comes off as busy work rather than actual poetry writing. As such, it distracts, detracts , diminishes and otherwise gets in the way of what a poem ought to be doing, sans self-justification. A poem should be proactive with life, not the writer's library.

Emily Dickinson ponders immortality

Emily Dickinson, the mistress of compressed reflection, advances her belief in the probable darkness that follows death when she writes on the subject of the immortality of poetry. As with much of her work through her harbored life, there was a preoccupation with the concept that sheer nothingness awaited each of us. There was no "passing over", there was no seat next to God despite sermons and summons to behave righteously, there was no ethereal vantage point to see what writings were still read, which had been scrapped, which we rediscovered. Death was not a "state" one lapsed into as if it might be something one might come out of again; it was entirely non-being, bereft of potential. The fate of a poet's work, in popular regard and currency, were to be unknown once the lights went out. She doubtless refers to her own work with these lines:

#883 

The Poets light but Lamps— 

Themselves—go out— 

The Wicks they stimulate— 

If vital Light 

Inhere as do the Suns— 

Each age a Lens 

Disseminating their 

Circumference—

She seems to assert that the poem survives if it is vital and with that the meaning of the poem changes with each generation that it passes through. Author intentionality is relevant only when the poet is still alive and is around to make further arguments, write more poems to expand or contract their original thesis. Afterward, what the author intended to say, what they originally meant, becomes merely historical, and the poem assumes a life independent of its author's particulars. The poem, because it is vital, is adapted and absorbed by each succeeding "lens" "circumference" it passes through; vital poems and vital literature in general are a means for which the intellectual and cultural givens of age can confirm or critique the legitimacy of their habits of mind.

The text of the poem, or the author's thinking and intentions, cease being the end-all and be-all of interpretation since the work's passage through generations of readers and discourse presents a contemporary audience with something layered and laden with meanings and associations that are not easily dispensed with. The dialogues of a vital work have become as much a part of the poem as the actual words on the poet's tablet, freshly writ. This makes Dickinson quite contemporary in her thinking since it reveals an awareness that there is no metaphysical certainty that will lock her work's definitive and final meaning into place, for all time. Rather, she was aware that, seemingly, that so long as a poem continues to be read, it continues to be changed, revised, altered. She would have been an interesting person to discuss reader-reception theory with. I don't mean to say that what trying to grok what Dickinson is driving is impossible or useless; I think I overstated that part of my rant. Rather, I think it's impossible to read the poem in situ, by itself, sans outside references, which is how New Critics would have us take up the text. Generations of discussion and interpretation have become inextricable from a vital poem and, though one may well re-establish a poet's original set of concerns and the gestalt from which their poetics originated, that is not a place modern readers can profitably dwell for long. Our readings must engage decades of previous readings that have become inseparable from the vital work. The goal is comprehension, in terms of making a poem mean something to readers beyond the poet's imagining, and that means creating new contexts and criteria for relevance. That is something I positive Dickinson, always one aware of the nearness of death, had on her mind. Or something akin to it. I don't think Dickinson anticipated immortality, but it seems likely that she wondered how her poems would be interpreted beyond her life. She seems to have been of the mind that the poems, 'though fixed, as such, in the same scale of words, wouldn't be quite the same poems she'd written. Absent her voice to correct an erring view, she was aware that the poems would come to mean different things to commencing generations.

OLD CDs

THE PIOUS BIRD
OF GOOD OMEN--
Fleetwood Mac

With Peter Green on vocals and guitar and Jeremy Spencer, slide guitar and vocals. Green is the attraction here, with a voice that sounds as if it's bubbling from the bottom of a river of black water, and a guitar style that remains a model of economy and emotion, an uncommon virtue in an era given over to conspicuous displays of chops. Particularly beautiful is his version of Little Willie John's "Need Your Love So Bad", a gorgeous blues pleading for love, unadorned. Green's singing is transforming.

Whatever Turns You On-- West Bruce and Laing

This is another cassette that's going to hit my trashcan soon. This is a grandiose, cluttered, sloppy, utterly phony release from good musicians who can't scratch up a good song between the three of them. Leslie West has his ringingly sweet guitar tone, Jack Bruce's bass work and keyboarding are busy as bees jacked on pollen, and Corky Laing, bless him, is one hell of a good rock drummer. An exception is the song "Token", which manages to be both arty and rocking all at once--power chords against a mystery time signature, nicely tensioned harmonies and verses from West and Bruce, a rousing riff out at the end. Power trios needn't be brain dead, as this track shows, but "Token" is also an aberration, for the genre and this band. It comes back to songwriting, as it always does; chops, vision, attitude, looks get you only so much credibility if the tunes are , say, underachieved.

This Land-- Bill Frisell

Frisell's twangy eclecticism works better here than on a good deal of his unfocused solo work; having Don Byron on reeds helps tremendously, suggesting that mystry session when Duane Eddy might have sessioned with Aaron Copeland in a Klezmer band.

Live In New York-- Jaco Pastorious

Some say Pastorious was the greatest bassist who ever drank themselves to death, and who am I to argue?What's obvious here is that he was especially thrilling when his band was gelling to the degree that the middle of long improvisations had a tight weaving that sounded like spontaneous composition, and too busy on the downside when matters were rote, overlong, lacking a center. This disc is gut busting in large part, though the ever-speedy Mike Stern riffs busily , armed with phase-shifters, phlangers and additional effects, not letting one measure to go unfilled with a dozen or so rote notes. Steve Slagle does some sweet and swift work on saxophone. Pastorious is a god, of course.

Wow--Moby Grape

Their first album, Moby Grape, is on generally considered one of the best albums done by a Sixties American band, and with good reason, but I've got a soft spot for their sophomore effort, the much-maligned Wow. It certainly deserved some of the critical slammings it received when it was released in 1968, as the band and producer had a batch of solid songs they wanted to gussy up, festoon and otherwise psychedisize in the trend of over-produced pop wrought by Pet Sounds and Sgt.Pepper. Large parts are made literally unlistenable--at the time of release, the band killed the "nostalgia" fad of the period that not only had one song written and performed in the 20's style, but which also required the poor stoner to get up and change the album speed from 33 and 1/3 to 78 rpm. The results were not amusing. Some songs come out unscathed, though, as with "Motorcycle Irene", "Murder in My Heart for the "Judge","Can't Be So Bad". At heart, a good bad fucked by drugs, ego, and mental illness, but what they had, briefly, was terrific talent. Jerry Miller was one of the best blues guitarist of the period, bittersweet and fluid in ways Mike Bloomfield never quite realized, Bob Mosely was a natural blues belter, and Skip Spence was an American Syd Barrett, fried before his time. Needless to say, I'm burning a disc of the best tracks and jettisoning the artsy remainders which are unlistenable and hopelessly junked up with effects.

The Idiot--Iggy Pop

Confirmed. I didn't like this set of Bowie-produced mood music when it came out in the Seventies, and I like it less even now. Iggy isn't especially interesting when he's given to reflection, confession, or other poetic indulgences. Avenue A is a more recent example of the side of him that sends you running. Iggy talking about his feelings may be an occasional compulsion he gives into, but it's not something he's turned into art. Our boy is a reactor, an angry cuss, a fast wit, an in-the-moment realist, and he rocks.

Port of Call-- Cecil Taylor

Repackaged sessions from 1960-1961 released in the States on an economy label called Past Perfect, this is a bit more comprehensible and, say, conservative than what Taylor and his bands are known for. An abstract heat still burns away, though, and there are great moments here; the ten minute piano deconstruction of "This Nearly Was Mine" keeps you guessing and anticipating where Taylor and his trio would take the Rodgers and Hammerstein chestnut, and "Things Ain't What They Used to Be"is rethought a dozen different ways by Archie Shep and Steve Lacy.

Flowers of Evil--Mountain

I play this once a year, and this morning was the time to do it; the studio sides have a repetitive pomposity you can get behind after a couple of stiff drinks, but the combination of Felix Papalardi's whiny voice singing his wife's bullshit lyrics can ruin any buzz you have going for you. It's the live material that kicks it, with lots of fat, snarling Leslie West guitar work getting twisted around a punchy set of slow, grinding, distorted hard rock. Yes, arrangements do count, even in rock and roll."Roll Over Beethoven" and "Dreams of Milk and Honey" are on my best live rock tracks ever. I might be the only one who likes this, but fuck it, it makes me happy.

Live at Bradley's --Kevin Eubanks

If you can forget the fact that guitarist Eubanks is Jay Leno's band leader and default second-banana, you gather that he's a classy jazz player; rhythmic, melodic, swift on the solos, but with emphasis on phrasing, pauses between passages. This is a pleasant respite from the copious amounts of the ever-busy Mike Stern I've listened to lately. Stern seems unable to leave a quiet moment alone and fills it with frantic riffing, not so much as technique gone berserk, a jazz version of wank guitar, but rather an accelerated directionlessness. An agile Jerry Garcia would be a better comparison. Eubanks, meantime, swings powerfully, with a light touch, a spry tone. James Williams (P) and Robert Hurst (b) do lithe work here. Good stuff for a drummerless trio.

Stepping Stone: Live at the Village Vanguard--Woody Shaw

Oh man, can this guy play the trumpet. I first came across Shaw on a couple of early Chick Corea sessions (or at least credited to him, part of the Laserlight budget series), and was floored by the range, ferocity and sense of development his playing had. Shaw was easily best of show. The wonders of Google led me to a series of albums he recorded as a leader, and this is the one I picked to start with. The only thing wrong with it is that Shaw died in 1989, obviously with a lot of great music in him still to play. Wild, blowing session, and next, I am going to reacquaint myself with Eric Dolphy's Iron Man, with a 19-year-old show matching the leader.

Earth Walk--Jack DeJohnette and Special Edition

A 1991 session on ECM, it's engaging if conceptually diffuse collection; DeJohnette as a composer/arranger can be irritating at times with his habit of inserting style changes with hardly a thought of a natural sounding segue. The charts tend to drift into the kind of "space chords" vamping where there's nothing to suggest a melodic underpinning, a lack of an idea, leaving worthy soloists like reedmen Greg Osby and Gary Thompson to play more frantically than otherwise would be called for. It gets the customary ECM Afro/Euro groove going about a third of the way through, which leads us to much rhythm interplay, spiraling, head-whacking flights from Osby and Thompson and, to be sure, DeJohnette's sure stick work

A poem

I've been a bombastic blowhard of late, and have gotten myself into insoluable squabbles on other people's blogs. It occured to me that I've been writing the way Al Pacino acts:loudly and without variation in tone. Needless to say, there are those who think I'm a jerk who doesn't know what he's talking about. They're half right. I am a jerk , though I have my better moments. I often wondered what would happen if a poet I'd given a negative notice too met in actual circumstances; this poem is me answering my own question. A post on Stephen Burt's blog got me thinking along this line, and here is where I offer my face for a little chin music. If I've made you mad, imagine those are your knuckles meeting the stubble.


The Poetry
Critic Is Moved, Parts One and Two1.

I talk too much
when the room gets loud,
there's a shroud about my face
when I have something to say,

a siren is going off
just above my neck,

everything I think
about these words
someone else wrote
gets ugly as rabbit warrens
after they release the hounds,

my words sound
like I'm baying at the moon
because the heart that gets broken
didn't crack convincingly,
didn't fall to the rutted floor
loudly enough,
and soon, I say, yeah, so what,
we all get hurt, we all have a name
cannot stop singing
in the center of the night
as we drive from bedroom
to 7-11 for a can of coffee
and a newspaper we will not read,

make me feel something
that blasts me to through the wall
and over the lake, make my body clear
a line of fir trees where a road needs to be,

give some lift to your depression,
place some down in your graceful stride,
smile at me only when there's smoking gun
at your feet,

damn it all,
write something that moves me.

2.



He drops his pen, rises
from the table and walks
over to where I sat,
filling the room with
every slur I could sustain,
he cocked his arm back,
he threw a punch,
the last thing I saw
was where he wrote "Fuck Off?"
on his knuckles
before his fist caught my chin
and I went flying backwards,
hitting my head against the wall.

Charles Bernstein on National Poetry Month

April is nearly upon us, and it's time for us to prepare for the minor onslaught of platitudes major publishers will offer their readership as they give lip service to National Poetry Month. Expect a short flurry of big ads, poets advertised who don't usually appear in publisher promotions, and then little if anything at all once the month and the would-be mania for poets and their work abates. Doesn't it seem ironic to anyone that April was picked to be the commemorating period because of Eliot's famous line, which is that the month is "cruel"? This is either amnesia or some ad person pasting together bric a brac to add more sizzle to their pizazz. Charles Bernstein doesn't like National Poetry Month either, and waxes on the point here. It's worth a read.It's a buzz kill the entrenched poets, the few who have measures of fame, position and (yes) money garnered from activities other the popular sale of their books
would rather not grapple with. Bernstein essentially makes the point that by placing "poetry"
(as defined by marketing research in attempts to make it palatable to a reading public that could care less about poets and their poems) of a campaign to spread the word have, in effect, marginalized even more. Bernstein, a smart cookie if a didactic poet, prefers a form without sanctioned codification and conditions that can challenge , fester, disturb,
disrupt; this Disneyland approach to promoting poetry encourages writing with middling ambition, producing middling results. At that point it ceases to be poetry.

300

Fans of slick macho adventures (very) loosely based on historical events with a pronounced emphasis on hacking, stabbing and slashing are having a feast with director Zack Snyder of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300. The squabble here is the Battle of Thermopylae, circa 480 BC, where Spartan King Leonidas and a hardened band of his best soldiers head off an invasion of the overwhelming Persian armies. The excess masculinity and historical inaccuracy didn't bother me, precisely because the film is adapted from a graphic novel. Director Snyder, I think, has found the right pitch for the movie version and has, in effect, created something better than Frank Miller's original fantasy.  The results are acutely mindless, with characterization and momentum at a persistent fever pitch and dour tone found in the comics, with the potential allegories to current day debates over Bush and the Iraqi War blurred at best. The point is less to bring awareness to the audience that Imperialism Is Bad than that unchained and uncompromising masculinity is good. Suitably, the intellectual content of 300 comes off as a cartooning of Robert Bly's masculinist screed Iron John. But rather than shudder with the confused mash-up of Spartan history and homoerotic militarism, the movie moves forward with its absurdities, bombast, and swagger with impressive agility. To exploit a cliche further, the battle scenes, though hardly believable, are amazingly balletic in their swerves, dodges and severing connections of weapon to limb and neck; Synder has mastered the rhythm of intersecting slow motion and regular speeds and the constant perspective-changing the latest camera technologies avail him. This does rather well to exploit the perfect forms of the Spartan soldiers, nearly naked save loin clothes, helmets, spears, and spears, hard, sinewy athleticism poised (and posed) to jab, stick, slice. It's doubtless Yukio Mishima would have liked this movie for the amount of time the camera spends scanning the length of one sculpted body after another. 300, however, did not bore. Snyder seems something of craftsman when doling out the excess and the unneeded here; he knows when to stop and move on. He deserves credit for keeping the narrative brisk.

Ellen Wehle and Mark Strand

Not every poem an interesting writer publishes is itself interesting;I've had the embarrassment of seeing my least favorite self-penned poem printed in small magazines
that would expose my damning pretensions to an audience that mattered ato someone trying to practice the craft. I thought Ellen Wehle's poem in this week's Slate"Second Coming" was too elliptical and sparse to worry a meaning from it, which is a shame since I think poet Wehle is normally an interesting poet.This seems less writing than say, jotting , an attempt to get flashing chains of association rapidly on paper. Not every chain is worth rattling, or presenting as a finished work.There is what seems like a conspicuous attempt to create a dread here, something similar to Mark Strand's poem "The Dreadful Has Already Happened" [www.poemhunter.com]. Strand, though, isn't merely arranging choppy sentences that are glutted with iconic references; instead he creates a narrative, non sequitur as it may be, and lands us on a terrain that is palpable in spite of it's unreality.
The symbolism and private allusions remain concealed, of course, but their capacity to disturb and convey the sinking feeling that something awful has happened , for me, strikes a primordial core. It works because Strand's elements is localized, with a skewed family history, punishments. The familiar is defamiliarized. Wehle hits a slip stream with "Second Coming" and powers through the junkyard of history with the equivalent of an industrial grade magnet. The assignment , perhaps,was to sweep over the battered metal remains of political and religious bastards of the past and then to make art, a poem, from what sticks to the black, flat disk. It is ,though, a tad worn in presentation, part Dada construction, part political agitprop, part language poem, not synthesizing the energies of the three competing anti-aesthetics into something recognizably new. Or interesting.It suffers the worst fate a poem can suffer, it has no vigor. Tap, and you get a flat thud in place of resonance. This is more finger exercise, a practicing of the scales in different keys, this is something you leave in the notebook. Ellen Wehle is a good poet, and I've written well of here in a past Slate offering, and I will chalk this one up to Robert Pinsky's curious habit of pick weak submissions by good writers.

On reading from a box of my old poems

There's value in leaving things out of poems, of allowing gaps in a narrative field as a way of allowing a reader to assemble a line of thought or interpretation composed of what the writer has furnished and the tactile facts of one's own experience and reading. The best results give us a bit of verbal mystery, a collection of skillfully arranged elements that, hopefully, results in a new poem with each person's reading. But this is an approach fraught with danger, and one wanting to write in this style would need to ask themselves essential questions, such as whether they're going to be able to do what it was Eliot, Ashbery or Rae Armantrout, creating a abstract writing that still draws in a reader and compels them to "finish" the work, or is one going to write a impenetrable mess, either skeletal or verbose, that absolutely defies having any coherence brought to it by even the subtlest reader? I fall into the latter camp more often than I care to admit, and spent too many years being willfully obscure, hermetically sealed and airless, so private in intent that even I was at a loss explain what I was trying to say. Prolixity and drift are my twin trademarks as a flawed poet, and I am the author of many boxes of unreadable sheets of typing paper that are where they belong, in boxes, many of them, waiting for the dumpster.

Grousing about work

No one likes to work, and everyone likes to complain about having to do so. A general statement, for sure, but accurate in a general sense. Some folks we bond with and empathize with their experience, while with others given to grousing and grumbles we encourage to shut up, for God's sake. What's clear is that some folks are better at listing their complaints than are others. It's about style, attitude, on whether there's something interesting to hear, or read.Philip Levine is a sure cure for anyone who can't push the proverbial boulder up the hill anymore, and his poem "What Work Is" is a magnificent detailing of the glory and grime of getting your hands calloused for a paycheck. Levine, a Detroiter, is keenly aware of the layerings of the working Middle Class, and finds a way of speaking to their lives without swooning in faux socialist praise about "innate nobility". He respects the working class and his own experience too much to be anything but truthful about it. It's a fine poem. Stephen Burt's poem, though, has many problems. That he can write isn't one of them; this man can put together a sentence. But there are bigger fish to fry than skewed grammar.

The critical offense in Burt's poem "Dulles Road Access" is it's scarcely contained arrogance and repulsion of having to work, of having to sell something to someone who needs to be convinced to buy it. His theme was bad faith on all sides, and complains readily that our all our training in the arts and history are reduced to mere skill sets intended to move the Bottom Line. Everyone complains about work, everyone, no one wants to work, no one, everyone feels denatured and reduced in stature and squeezed for time as obligations time for hobbies and the arts, one feels less than human because of the need to fend, forge and feed ourselves and our own. Yet people work anyway, they show up on time, they do their jobs well, and somehow create lives for themselves that are worth sticking around for, and within the limits created by work, men and women create lives that are not entirely bereft of value , joy, aesthetic virtue. I've been working since I was fifteen, and though I might be deluded on the point, my life hasn't been the eternal grey wall Burt imagines the lot of us staring at while the office clocks ticks slowly to 5pm.

An old complaint, expressed at every water cooler, coffee house and bus stop across the country, and Burt's addition to this chorus, apart from adroit rhythms, merely repeats the muckraking findings of Vance Packard and Philip Wylie two generations previous. This is the poem who has dropped their rattle and can't retrieve from the crib they refuse to climb out of.

We are untrained
to manage even the pace
at which we live.

This is worthy of a groan and an obscene gesture, an insight the Hugh Prathers and RD Laings of the world offered up in the Seventies when the culture had a morbid interest in each inexplicable twitch in their individual moods. Burt can write about work as an institution and work as an experience in anyway and in any style he wants to,
but there's nothing "fresh" or generationally unique to his perspective except, perhaps, his willingness to complain more openly than other good writers have been. But this becomes bellyaching and complaining and the negative -thinking equivalent of all those feel-good bromides one comes across in pop psyche and New Age literature. In this case it's a conditioned response regarding the dehumanizing aspects of working for a living, and even the implied "we" of his generation's allegedly collective attitude toward being a professional, it amounts to the same species of precociousness that made much of the Sixties and Seventies counter-culture a morass of unfocused, clueless indulgence. It's an attitude one grows out of, provided that sense of specialness doesn't kill them, spiritually and literally. Really, the plain message of this poem is that the narrator hates his job and thinks in generalizations to convince himself that he'd rather be lazy than productive. Levine, as the title declares, actually talks about work, this bothersome, tiring, repetitive activity we with varying and tailored approaches, attitudes, responses. His poem gets across the finer and subtler dimensions of labor by actually sussing through the particulars of desire colliding with necessity; this is where he finds his poetry, and it is here where he can address the conflict in unexpected and believable ways. You trust that Levine knows something about having to show up on time for a job he hates (or loves). Burt convinces us only that he has hard to meet needs.Burt's poem is nostalgic, really, and he seemed to writing in the shadow of the truly colossal complainers and, as such, has written a poem that is sorrowful reminder of the worst creative writing classes can do. The worst they do is that teach young people to be professional poets who are more concerned with making life accommodate language and not the other way around.

Jean Baudrillard, Crypto Neocon, Dead

Jean Baudrillard, the windblown oracle of postmodern drift, has shuffled off this mortal coil—as lifeless as the concepts he once spun like a carousel at a county fair. Baudrillard’s theoretical acrobatics, for all their labyrinthine flourish, grew predictable the deeper you burrowed, each page another loop-de-loop in the intellectual funhouse. Compare him to Umberto Eco, who, in “Travels in Hyper Reality,” tiptoed through the wax museums and Vegas mirages with a wry wink—a nimbleness that left Baudrillard’s prose looking like a clanging suit of armor at a mime convention. Let’s not sugarcoat it: the man’s bibliography is as practically useful as a boxed set of Donald Rumsfeld’s greatest hits. At his most dazzling, Baudrillard’s words formed a lush tapestry—riddling, evasive, forever pirouetting just out of reach, seducing you with the promise of revelation that never quite landed. You didn’t so much understand what he said as enjoy the bravura performance, the sound and the fury, signifying… well, you decide. At his worst, he’s a cousin to Walter Benjamin: entrenched in labyrinthine jargon, afraid to be understood lest the emperor’s new clothes be exposed to daylight. What did Baudrillard really say, in all keys and registers? Only that the authentic, the natural, the solid ground we ache to reclaim is a mirage—if it ever existed at all—and that our attempts to resist, rebel, or reform are but shadow-boxing in an endless hall of mirrors. All is replication, echoes chasing echoes, history’s finale replayed in infinite rerun. Nothing to be done. So, the show goes on—consume the spectacle, play your assigned bit part, and let the powerbrokers with their microphones, their military props, their media marionettes, script the proceedings. Give Baudrillard credit: he was a virtuoso at dissecting paradox, at cataloguing the perverse, the counterfeit, the blatantly bogus. But as for actual solutions? Not a sausage. My take? Baudrillard was a high priest of nihilism, and postmodernism’s slickest trick is to seduce us into paralysis, to cash in our chips for a round of cultivated ennui. His prose chases its own tail, each argument canceling itself, leaving only the hum of unresolved ambiguity. In the end, his vaunted “liberation” is a smoke ring: after the evasions are spent, those on the margins—the criminal, the student, the LGBTQ dissidents, the perpetually othered—are left with a poetry of entropy as the powerful pocket the winnings. The prescription? Exactly what the neocons crave: tuck yourself in, shut your eyes, and let the grownups manage the machinery while you dream of authenticity that never was.