How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read 

Pierre Bayard (Bloomsbury) 

 Those among us who struggled with deconstruction, post-structuralism, semiotics, and the like in the seventies and eighties, when we found out that language in general and literary writing in particular couldn't possibly address the world as is will remember the sweetly slippery issue of intertextuality. Promoted by Derrida and deMan, if memory serves me (and it often doesn't), this was the fancy footwork that while books fail to address the nature of things and make them fixed, unchanging situations, texts (meaning books) referred only to other texts, and the coherent systems writers seemed to uncover or create about how things are in practice drawn from a limitless archive of each text that came before the one you might have in your hand and considering it's fidelity to your experience. A futile concern, we find, since everything has already been written, everything has already been said. If this were true, we asked, how can it be that some theorists are using language to precisely describe what language cannot do, i.e., precisely describe things? I never read a response that made sense, as the answers seemed even more steaming heaps of gobbledygook that made the anchored theory before even more impassable. But no matter because at the time one had discovered a nice hedge against having to read a book; I am being grossly unfair to the good critics still taking their cues from Continental thought, but deconstruction and intertextuality were choice methods of not dealing with what a writer was saying, instead giving a jargonized accord of how all writing and discourse cannot get beyond itself and actually touch something that terms try to signify. This is the basic thrust of Pierre Bayard in his book "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read ". 

Bayard is both a professor of French literature and a psychoanalyst, and puts forth his statement in a surprisingly breezy account of why one need not have read a book to discuss it in detail and even to have a strong opinion as to a book's success or failure. Intertextuality strikes again, since Bayard spends a good amount of his time emphasizing that what really counts in one's relation to the printed word was the reputation and contexts books have, their relationships to the things they are not. This much of the book was great fun, since it is the bookseller's curse to know a very little about a great many things, and I have had to extemporize opinions and conjecture and create theory on the spot when asked by customers to discuss the merits of books I haven't read, and at times hadn't even heard of. Bayard deals with the same methodology, emphasizing that any of us, so pressed for an unsubstantiated opinion, would make do with what was available to us currently, be that the book's reputation, reviews one might have read. Bayard's assertion, satiric and attractive at the same time, is that discussing books old and new is a game of one-upmanship in how one stays current with an author's buzz factor rather than his content, and there is something gleeful in the way he describes the sort of artful improvisation a spirited raconteur can get away with as he riffs upon a tangential element. 

Tangents, in fact, are almost the real art in the literary community, and the dirty little secret is that a good number of us readers get away with our faux critiques and commentary because our audience is likewise without an idea as a book discusses in detail, in depth, with texture. No one wants to spoil the game, a matter Bayard lampoons with his own strategic deceptions. This is enjoyable to a degree, although the same repetition of his humorous application of post-structuralist residue to a generalized obsession with being well-read is wearying after a bit, even in a book as short as these 182 pages. Still, there is here the spirit of Roland Barthes, specifically in his collection of newspaper columns “Mythologies”; Barthes was that rare thing, playful in is undressing the signifiers and the signified. There is something of the poet in Barthes’ musings, which, I think, was the original intent of this type of criticism. Bayard has some of that instinct, but one cannot escape the feeling that he’s riffing to the only song he knows. This is a joke, perhaps, that is always already told.

notes on a poem by Sally Ball

Landscape poetry, like landscaping painting, seems more for the interior designer in us rather than the reader wanting a surprise. Broad strokes, lively details, a spiritualization connecting the hard truth of -ceilinged sky and sered, flat land and the allusive calm of emptiness, all of it is in Sally Ball's poem "Visiting the Real Ranch" ;had she managed to give the poetry equivalent of an Edward Ruscha painting and written about that legitimately defies the reader to give it content that reinforces their city lives, fine, nothingness is always a state worth aspiring to, but poems need to use words that create tensions with other words and their meanings, and that tension can wed the contradictions in an intriguing state of undecideability.

Landscape and the things within it in and of themselves, doing nothing except being what they are, isolated from our perception. Ball has a desire to step beyond her perception, the shell of codification and the shield of contextualizing adjectives, and be, so to speak, just another item in and of itself, to enter the plain seen only by God and feel some of what He feels for the world he set in motion, but she is locked within her defining parameters. Language is intended to help us define and mold experience and to create cultures and institutions where perception is given over to producing technology that is both glory and ruin. It exists to empower the species to go forth and multiply, casting the world as something to be conquered, tamed, harvested, mined, exploited for resources; it is not a quality that makes "letting it be" easily accomplished. One can also take a page from Derrida with his remark insisting, to paraphrase the source, that one cannot step outside language to get at those things that language imbues with significance. The attempt to use language to describe what is beyond the hegemonic grip of our refurbished metaphors produces, finally, only more refurbished metaphors. So the narrator sighs after an initial stanza describing high sky, mountains, desert curs marking their territory and plays the god card with a heavy hand, heavy as in clumsy, not profound.

I hope you get to live somewhere like this,
so much yourself you could take charge
of such a solid stand of hills,
you could receive this holy light,
keen and fleeting.

At every moment the valley brimming,
the valley empty.

—Though you are nearly always happy,
and this place does not seem happy.

Happiness is for

******************—what? whom?

The one wish, it is my one wish.

I don't think it's a far reach to speculate as to a narrator wanting to get closer to what God thinks or feels from reading this poem. Ball did use the phrase "... this holy light,keen and fleeting..." and it's clear that there's a spiritual essence she desires for the person she's addressing, that he could in turn acquire bit of that "keen and fleeting" sensation she apparently received through communing with this country side. To her credit, the mention of anything of supernatural origin is brief, but it's there all the same and is worth bringing up in an interpretation.

I'm less concerned with the Biblical insistence that we be guardians, protectors and preservers of the planet than I am with Ball's attempt to describe a situated feeling outside the boundaries of language that are, though malleable , geared to keep our ideas reasonable distanced from anarchic impulse and also to make new contexts cohere with what has gone before. I do think that poets, painters, film makers, maids and all the rest of us are, at times, touched, blessed and moved by something defying our linguistic resources, and at times I think we are convincingly when we attempt to express it. Ball falters, I think, ruined, I think, by the insertion of Oscar, whom she wishes could be in this terrain and witness the fleet, keening holy light she craves; it seems a bit smug to me, and it the problem is that we have yet another poet naming themselves as the center of a poem that would be a stronger work had his or presence not been established.
The actual meaning of Genesis is right and righteous, but that's not what I'm talking about, but rather that language on our species' level of development and subtlety is a tool, and it is the nature of tools to be used to make things happen, to build things, to change , to mold, to spend.

Edward Ruscha contended no less with metaphorical traps than does a poet seeking a fresh perspective or many on an old set of ideas, but he paints images and seems better poised to deal with the zen (or existential) truths of things in existence absent an ego to round them out; his juxtaposition of odd elements that contradiction with one another, such as his series of canvases that feature single words hovering over richly muted colors capes , deflect the claim of obvious intent and successfully give you something to think about; the mind insists on making what it sees make sense,and this the sporting good of any art worth more than mere amusement or cosigning a personal code of empty gestures.

Better, I think, that Ball would have taken something the Imagist book and rid the poem of anything within the lines that acted as a reminder to the reader that this were her exclusive perception. That this is about her presence is implied strongly by the writing , which would have been more evocative and stirring, I think, had she focused on the direct treatment of the thing under inspection, being witnessed, instead of marking the territory around her vision. She could well have included the missive to the absent Oscar without addressing him directly; it makes the piece didactic and not an unblemished expression of an experience. This is a poem, finally, that would likely have benefited from having another watchful eye read; perhaps someone would have remarked on what needed to be trimmed, condensed,made purer.

Better still if Ball said less, implied less, wished less for some other person, as it conveys the impossibility of cataloguing the genuinely indescribable. The urge to tell us what it all should add up to only puts her deeper in the sand trap she was trying to escape from.

Theorized into Submission

We might as well say it, none of the “ism” terms stay in one ideological location—even with a prevailing idea that concepts and their definitions are fixed, there is incredible fluidity in how notions go off the reservation, so to speak “Modernism” proper has it's left and right wings, whether Bauhaus or Albert Speer, and it is important to note that a host of Modernist poetry’s early geniuses, Ezra Pound and Eliot in particular, were notably conservative and pugnaciously anti-Semitic. Part of bringing a revolutionizing the way we saw the world (with it in mind to change the world) meant, in the long wrong, in ridding the planet of particular ethnic groups who only diluted the clarity and brought falseness to the world. As the term "postmodernism" is used, in most instances, as a term meant to describe the clusters of habits that characterize a current age against previous ones, it only makes perverted sense that the polarities intuitively use the same devices to achieve fear-driven agendas, rhetorical tweaking assumed. If I had to clue some one in as to what deconstruction is, I would step back from my usual shuffle about it being a type of extreme investigative process into the reliability of text to contain anything of the phenomenal world, and would instead point to the series of state and federal cases involving election results.

The debacle in the Gore v Bush concern was a genuine Post Modern Moment; Republicans had to temporarily forgo an Absolutist agenda and assume the rhetoric of legalesed deconstruction to confuse, blur and disgorge their oppositions' Grundissian rants. Matters that once seemed clear and fixed in their symbolic authority to a truth we all yield to suddenly seem less firm, in fact wobbly simply because one man wouldn't yield the game. The right isn't afraid to name, nor to advance their cause. There is a living embodiment of political will behind their description the current situation, and it would be Post Modern Tragedy that we've theorized ourselves into submission.

The American Left certainly wasn't afraid of offending political sensibilities while there was a Viet Nam war through which the ultimately unprovable historical determinism could be obscured by a conflict whose obscenity over rode local matters. But with the end of the war, the left here about receded to theory, unwilling, I think , to realize something fundamentally decent about Americans and their sense of fairness to the right cause, and it seemed to matter little to the intellectual elite to deal with practical matters of policy , county, state and federal.

The left, in general, became generalized in theory and law, and reduced everything to an eviscerated discourse of euphemistic speech that was not allowed to defile a sense of neutrality: things ceased to have names, only vague descriptions , and in this atmosphere any talk about identifying problems about what sickens the Nation became impossible . Rather than action to change social relations, real practice, a fight for change was reduced to a ideologically perplexed course in etiquette, the practice of which made humans confront each other in ways that were nervous, nervous, ultimately insane.

Gramsci wound up in prison, but he didn't write manuals for non-offensive language in the work place: he never lost his belief that theory needed to stop somewhere, that abstruse descriptions had to halt at the right juncture and some remedy, based on sane analysis, had to be effected. One's knowledge of what produces alienation and states where exploitation is possible needed to be matched with solutions."Guts" comes to mind, courage, old fashioned and romantic virtues , but still ways to talk about the world, the city where we might live, and within in, a way to imagine and realize the ways to make it maybe make it more workable than it was then when we entered into it, knowing only hunger and the feeling of cold earth. The exact problem with postmodern theory, the intellectual and not the aesthetic texts, is that it's turned into a self-conscious wallow (often disguised under the rubric of being "self-reflective") that brandishes the idea that an awareness of it's own social construction somehow advances bold, better human freedom. As Derrida was obsessed with the undecidablity of texts to crystallize phenomenon external to it’s own system-making tendency, Baudrillard in turn concerned himself with providing a sociology of how our terms of self-empowerment are , in fact, the chains that keep us at our stations, the ugly bottom half of post modernist comes a bit clearer: it’s useless, surrender to the inevitable, every good we might ever had has been tried and failed terribly. Post modernist intent can be a resource hogging neocons best friend, as it offers an enlightened version of apathy. What it does is make the nominal partisans of just causes weak and immobile, ready to have their own conventional wisdom used against them, as they were during The Miami Chad Trials, by a foe that's true to its own cause enough to use any weapon it can lay its hands on in order to make the world theirs and sterile under one Totalizing God, who, I suspect, isn't likely to have much truck with language theory.

PAUL AUSTER'S BARBED WIRE LINE BREAKS

An ironic choice, I suppose, since I've spent quite a bit of energy railing against that reflects upon its own processes But  Paul Auster's style is so clear of superfluous adjectives, verbs and dead weight qualifiers that he gets across some of the mystery involved in composing a verse, a quality that eludes other writers. A novelist by trade, Auster's fiction often fashion themselves after mystery novels where every assumption and cover story is questioned, and in which action is moved forward by chance; whole chains of events and consequences in his best fiction-- The New York Trilogy, Book of Illusion, Leviathan-- that depend on the fickle choices of where one desires to place themselves, on impulse, on the spur of the moment. White Nights likewise comes across as a detective novel , combined with a ghost story; within in it are the themes of someone writing something in isolation wondering if anyone will read, how anything will change if a readership is found, how the writing lives on in the writer's words haunting a stranger years later, in another part of the world. I t comes , finally, to that flashing recognition a reader experiences when another's words confirms some nuance of feeling one has felt in their own travels through an amorphous existence. I think the poem is lovely, compelling, and finally undecidable to final meaning. But that is the whole point, I would think.

WHITE NIGHTS / Paul Auster


No one here,
and the body
says: whatever is said
is not to be said. But no one
is a body as well,
and what the body says
is heard by no one
but you.

Snowfall
and night. The repetition
of a murder
among the trees. The pen
moves
across the earth: it no longer knows
what will happen, and the hand that
holds it
has disappeared.

Nevertheless, it writes.
It writes:
in the beginning,
among the trees, a body came walking
from the night. It
writes:
the body's whiteness
is the color of earth. It is earth,
and
the earth writes: everything
is the color of silence.

I am no
longer here. I have never said
what you say
I have said. And yet, the body
is a place
where nothing dies. And each night,
from the silence of the
trees, you know
that my voice
comes walking toward you.

You can never have too much existentialism, French, German or Maynard G.Krebs; the idea that a writer is in his existential moment, stripped of his excuses and wholly dependent on his next action to give his life meaning , purpose. authenticity, is exactly the dilemma we discuss here all the time. It is the issue that all these poems-about-poetry attempt to take on but never grasp because of the intangible nature of the issue and because so many of the poets who attempt the task fumble with their poetics. Auster gets to an emotional core--the loss of self one can experience in writing, the dread that the words might be unheard, ;unread, when the writing is done and one is passed on--by the choice sparseness of his metaphors.I wouldn't disagree with you about the poem attempting to bridge different parts of the body, but I think the particulars aren't that important in so far as the real issue is the author's attempt to make contact to an Other , some essential part of one's sense of them self in this life that is dually absent and yet persistent in one's instinct. The question arises, is the writer talking to himself in an effort to join his separate selves, or is he seeking a common bond with a community he has no evidence actually exists? This is the ambiguity and the beautiful ache in the poem. You can never have too much existentialism, French, German or Maynard G.Krebs; the idea that a writer is in his existential moment, stripped of his excuses and wholly dependent on his next action to give his life meaning , purpose. authenticity, is exactly the dilemma we discuss here all the time. It is the issue that all these poems-about-poetry attempt to take on but never grasp because of the intangible nature of the issue and because so many of the poets who attempt the task fumble with their poetics. Auster gets to an emotional core--the loss of self one can experience in writing, the dread that the words might be unheard, ;unread, when the writing is done and one is passed on--by the choice sparseness of his metaphors.

The poem attempts to bridge different parts of the body, but I think the particulars aren't that important in so far as the real issue is the author's attempt to make contact to an Other , some essential part of one's sense of them self in this life that is dually absent and yet persistent in one's instinct. The question arises, is the writer talking to himself in an effort to join his separate selves, or is he seeking a common bond with a community he has no evidence actually exists? This is the ambiguity and the beautiful ache in the poem. He writes this poem as if hoping that in the written admission that he cannot define what is only a sideways glimpse in his mind's eye , the Other will reveal itself, in full and true form. The consequence is only more distance, more estrangement from what is desired.Writing is one of the recurring tropes in all of Auster's writing, and one of his themes is the problem of the writer who is trying to write the world into being--to establish a psychology that provides narrative continuity to existence that can provide a vague sense of purpose--who confronts what cannot be predicted, only accommodated. 

Strange to think, but the spare, undecorated prose of Paul Auster does achieve a poetic effect of sort, but it's something that comes about because he can create situations and odd scenarios that often times gives us the duplicitous ironies that are a good poem's hall mark. One is not sure where they stand after reading an Auster novel, and his poetry in kind does a trick of seeming like John Ashbery without the prolixity. Ashbery's genius is the concurrent circles of reference his hard objects inspire in his mind; they conflate gracefully, refusing closure. Auster's poems refuse closure as well, but his are stanzas that have a hard glare like black and white streets, no technicolor, just high contrast black and white. The stanzas and images are crystalline, hard, unadorned, and the dreamy language around them, the assumptive tone that starts with a given set of attitudes and finds itself changed or shattered by poem's end, is blurry, confused, and imprecise. An interesting tension results--there is the feeling of someone overwhelmed by the conflations and overlapping demands of events and walking away, blinders on, into a new identity. Here I thought of a piece of typing paper that is blank, waiting for a story to be written on it, the problem being that while the story might be good and entertaining in it's reworking of old tales and morals, it doesn't change the paper it's on, though sullied with words, it remains paper. It is the writing that gives the writer meaning, the constant advancing of his narrative line; existence itself is unchanged in its unknown virtues, if there were any in the first place.

Fidelity to Fact or to Art?

It's not uncommon to come across a feverish poetry enthusiast who turns a blacker shade of rage when they discover that a poet they've taken a liking to does not, by default, base every verse they compose on real experience. I've had this situation in several workshops where a participant or two became irate when I let on, during a critique, that some elements in a some poems I submitted for review were not wholly autobiographical. What set off the participants, I guess, was my distrust of poets who insist on full disclosure sharing, as if the slightest ebb and flow of their emotional equilibrium sufficed as finished work. Experience was merely material, I remember saying at one time or another in a dispute over the purpose of writing. Experience was like wood, glass, paper, what have you; the poet, the artist, had to make it into something else , a species of writing not contractually obligated to gets the names and dates correct. This doesn't sit well with a few of my very serious co-work shoppers.

This is , I suppose, part of the long term hang over of Confessional poetry and other styles that choose to make journal entries into the stuff of literary explication. It seems beyond some that poets, if they're any good, are writers all the same and are allowed to make things up , to invent narrative circumstance for the purpose of getting out a good piece of writing. Still, there is the thought that some immorality has taken place. A betrayal of reader trust, perhaps.

This isn't the poet's problem, though, but rather the reader's, who should, by rights, arrive at the idea that the validity of any approach to writing a poem lies in how well it works, on the page. One should think more broadly on the subject; verse plays are fictional, and yet their validity as quotable, meaningful poems isn't questioned at all--virtually no one objects to the stanzas being used to put forth an imaginary activity; this tolerance should be extended to single poems, ones not connected to grander fictional universes. The evolution of poetry into a form thought to be exclusively autobiographical in purpose is a narrowing of what poet should be allowed to do.

I don't think poets are obliged to write solely from their own experience, since we have to remember that poetry is , above all other considerations, an imaginative craft. There are any number of times that I've written pieces of my own that are based more on an idea and inspiration ; although based or premised on some actual fact of in my life, the details are often fictional. It is the rare poet, I think, who rigorously sticks with autobiographical material who doesn't soon writing the same set of poems over and over until they finally stop writing.

The issue, of course, is balance; how much ought to be from real life, and how much should be embroider, enhance, fictionalize?One way or the other in excess can result in dullness or unspeakable bombast. Empathy , I think , is what the poet is after; can he or she write in such as way as to get a reaction from a reader who might empathize?Poets , we must remember as well, are writers, and writers tell stories they want readers to relate to in some capacity. Not all the stories they tell us are true, as in adhering to autobiographical facts; I want something better than vetted facts. What I would expect is something more than Coleridge's tirelessly useful phrase , A "...willing suspension of disbelief"; I like to feel as if the writer had taken some bit of their own experience and considered hard and long enough what they might do with it, to enlarge an incident's potential as a means of having readers made aware of a world that's apart from the comfortable references and homegrown usages.

Wallace Stevens stroll along the shore

It's interesting that some would rather argue with Wallace Stevens rather than grasping what he's writing about.Understandable: fans of Billy Collins , preferring their poems to be neat arrangements of common things highlighted with a smattering of clever learnedness, find Stevens an indefinite perspective. The ask themselves, "where are these places he writes about, and where are all the people who ought be inhabiting this piazzas or strolling these beaches?" It's precisely the lack of those things that intrigues me about Wallace Stevens' problematic take on the tension between mind and spirit. What we have in this world, his poetry informs us constantly, might be a flawed representation of the real thing, but for intents and purposes the inferior idea is all the reality we can handle. Falling short, we try harder to get to an ideal state which is elusive.

Beauty is momentary in the mind--
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.

Stevens' work is obsessed with the whole conundrum Plato introduced with the Ideal Forms, perfect in their unknowable terrain, versus the actual thing we see in front of us, aging with time, falling apart and eventually dying. The perfection , the beauty of the body we see, is a construct, a phenomenon we subject to our psychological preferences that make the world tolerable, livable. And when the body dies, it remains beautiful, in memory, in the mind that Stevens addressed in the stanza above it. Stevens , a realist, actually, and not a romantic, would suggest that "beauty" and "spirit" are actual concepts by which we arrange our lives, but that such things only have currency as long as there is someone still alive to remember the particular , place, or thing that embodies the afore mentioned qualities.


Stevens believed language, the vehicle with which we construct our complicated notions of permanence and metaphysical certainty, is finally inadequate to the task of capturing the things of the world as they actually are, in themselves, beyond the assumptiveness of our paradigms and censoring filters. This is what gave his poems their exquisite lyric tension, the pondering of shapes, concepts, places , arranged just so, altering and changing to other versions of "permanent" perfection as the personality changes , however slightly. Our heaven is a malleable place, he considered, eternal and ever lasting , ironically, only as long as their is someone who remembers to hold those thoughts in mind.

IN VIEW OF THE FACT and CALLED INTO PLAY by A.R.Ammons

Someone I showed this poem to gave back to me after reading it back the book after a cursory glance up and down the page. She asked: "where's the beef?". Then we had a beef; I liked the poem, she didn't, and we took several hours to smooth out the differences between us. Assuredly, more than a difference of view on what constitutes quality in free verse poems was under review , and yes, I realize that recollection resembles a scenario for a minor key spasm of-of "flash fiction" that would be doomed to see print in a small magazine that would reach the hands of  on the chronically poetic.The "beef", is Ammons' details, and the poem works precisely because of his plain speech and the emphasis on his line breaks. Ammons' narrator highlights a more fleshed out version of the same sort of subject, making the point that what comes at you fast in life are marriages, births, and deaths, in that order, in thick, hard clusters; before you know it, you're at the end of it all while the cycle continues for another generation. One descends either into cynicism and despair, or one considers themselves to have been fortunate, blessed, to have lived a life that's endured joy, failure, and every celebration and tragedy in between. Yes, this is a poem, there is no pretense about it, and it works very powerfully because of Ammons' couplet form; the prose reformatting turns this into something anyone converted to paragraph form would be, a series of run-on sentences.I like his language, his ability to keep a topic running through a myriad of associations that wouldn't ordinarily meet in a piece of writing, and I admire his utter lack of pretentiousness. This is quite wonderful.

In View of the Fact 

By A. R. Ammons 

The people of my time are passing away: my

wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's

Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and

fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it's this that and the other and somebody

else gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)

and now it looks like we won't: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know

what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like

to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,

brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now

are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,

Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so

many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the

congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or on

the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we'll

drink wine together and think of what used to

be: until we die we will remember every

single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to

others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength

and getting more precious all the way. . . . 

In other news,  I've ranted on occasion that there should be no more poems about poetry, I thought why I liked "Called into Play" and not the work of other writers. Attitude is the difference, I guess. My basic gripe is against who regard poetry as a vehicle of relentless self-revelation, the sub-Nerudians and faux Rilkeans who seemed to have skipped the other qualities their inspiring source's poetry had and instead are determined to make a cult from the practice; the poet as priest is not an image that appeals to me and even the most supreme of egoist geniuses, Walt Whitman, would likely find the conceit a bit vain. But there's always exceptions to anyone's "rules" about the proper tone and stance a poet needs to maintain when bringting their stanzas into the world, and Ammons is an exception indeed, a brilliant one , and he's exception who doesn't sound like he intends his poems to please anyone's gilded sense of the proper. He will talk about what he wants to, what he needs to, in whatever manner he deems fit.  Good for him. 

 Called into Play 

A.R. Ammons 

Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry: 

some flurries have whitened the edges of roads 

and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: & 

turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to 

find something to write about I haven't already 

written away: I will have to stop short, look 

down, look up, look close, think, think, think: 

but in what range should I think: should I 

figure colors and outlines, given forms, say 

mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is 

behind what and what behind that, deep down 

where the surface has lost its semblance: or 

should I think personally, such as, this week 

seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is 

something going on: something besides this 

diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I 

could draw up an ancient memory which would 

wipe this whole presence away: or I could fill 

out my dreams with high syntheses turned into 

concrete visionary forms: Lucre could lust 

for Luster: bad angels could roar out of perdition 

and kill the AIDS vaccine not quite 

perfected yet: the gods could get down on 

each other; the big gods could fly in from 

nebulae unknown: but I'm only me: I have 4 

interests--money, poetry, sex, death: I guess 

I can jostle those. . . .

 I don't include the Language Poets, as someone had asked me, even though poetic language is at the forefront of their work; the effort there, I think, is an honest and exciting investigation into new ways of thinking about how language can be written to more creatively engage the complexity of experience. Ammons, of course, is much less formal, and has an the appeal of some who'd just gotten out of bed and is trying to get the sleep from his eyes. What he sees is the same old things, only completely different, to paraphrase comedian Steve Wright. I like the way Ammons demystifies the subject by simply talking about search for something to write about. What he mentions here, things like lawns, mail, current events, are brought up as things he might impress into being the details and subject of a poem he wants to write. He might have been talking about a mad search for missing car keys; there's humanity in this momentary frustration.There's the suggestion that Ammons is tired of his old turns of phrase and wants to forge new ones:

...should I try to plumb what is 

behind what and what behind that, deep down 

where the surface has lost its semblance: or 

should I think personally, such as, this week 

seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is 

something going on: something besides this 

diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I 

could draw up an ancient memory which would 

wipe this whole presence away...

Ammons admits his limits as a seer or oracle and speaks of language as something he works with through the craft of poetry, a practice he works at diligently in an effort to find an expression that transcends mere competence and achieves an artfulness. The poem is funny and moving in it's way, as Ammons' work is constantly aware of death, which makes philosophical certainty a cluster of moot points. This all puts A.R.Ammons' musings on poetry in sharp contrast to a host of others who'll essay forth in verse about poets being the intermediaries of Truths and Principles only a select few are able to deign and decipher for the less gifted. Without repeating my previous misgivings, I'll say that this his Hogwash and Elitism, and these are the sorts of people I imagine Ammons himself asking to go away.

Camille Paglia, wind-up firebrand

Camille Paglia has been taking some heat lately for writing the dullest column the internet has ever witnessed; some have called for a boycott.I will maintain that her book “Sexual Personae” is a first-rate piece of critical thinking, but then again it's an academic work, where one's wildest declarations have to be defended with a close study of the materials. Being columnists requires a lighter scrutiny on the subject, since it's opinion, not thesis writing, but Paglia's chief sin is that she's very predictable in her remarks. All columnists are predictable, you may argue, once you get accustomed to their prejudices and their riffs, but Paglia's failings have little to do with her positions than her tone-deaf prose. George Will's conservatism is an enervated husk, but he's worth my while to read if only for the elegance of his prose.

 Maureen Dowd,though her turns and nuances are familiar to millions, remains a master of varying her targets and polishing the quotable, the snappy line. William Buckley, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, gadflies all, knew how to make the repetition of their essays tolerable with a shrewd instinct for entertainment value; it's just the thing to get a reader who thinks you're a louse to read every word you've typed out. There is an art to column writing, even political column writing,but Paglia hasn't the ear nor the verbal grace to keep us intrigued by her topics. That is, her topics are fine, but her opinions are derailed by an ungainly presentation of self. It was suggested to me that I write as I spoke , as a way of getting out the ideas on paper, and then work to remove glitches, awkwardness, tired similes. It was bad advice in my time, and I had to strive to write better than I was capable of speaking.(This isn't to imply that I've shown the discipline to revise as much as I should. Yes, I need to heed my advice). Paglia, however, writes precisely as she talks, a self-declaring, stammering, redundant bag of rocks tossed right into your face--the sort of talk you hear around the dinner table of large, talkative families. 

But would work in real life annoys on the page; even a first year writing major would have advised her to ease up on the persona pronouns. The same student would also have suggested that she'd consider honing a sleeker, more flowing prose style. The reader ought not feel as though they're walking through dark room with a floor full of toys to trip over. She is a blowhard, and seemingly cannot give an intelligent reply without talking about herself in the main, evinced especially in her habit of telling you, redundantly, when she first wrote about a subject and how time has proven her right yet again. Under it all is chattering nervousness that just gets on my nerves. I imagine she is a good teacher who can keep  her student's interests, and, if she ever gets back to publishing serious books again, a first-rate intellectual. To describe what she's been doing meanwhile as “coasting” would be dressing up the truth; Paglia is more in line with the class of professional celebrity those of us of a certain age remember, the former columnist, actor, book publisher, actor who took to being permanent celebrity panelists on TV game shows, offering America bite-sized versions of their former selves. But as a columnist she is a washout. Bite sized Paglia is not appealing in any respect; it would a fine thing if she had a song to play with that horn she keeps squalling on. Joan Walsh and company should have realized this some years ago and realized her name brand is aged badly.

A poem that says "give me some"

Sometimes it pays to revisit an old friend, such as this splendid poem by Paul Guest, posted in Slate in 2005."Nice" is the word that comes to mind when I read "Water"; a man and woman of undetermined age or relation-husband and wife, lovers, strangers just met in the parking lot or local library?-- visit an aquarium whose inhabitants of snout nosed fish and spine coated sturgeons moves them to do the deed in an elevator, surrounded by water, tons of it, contained in tanks in which the fish of the world swim. It's very nice in the sense in that it operates cinematically, a seamless move from what the narrator was saying, presumably afterwards, away from the fish tanks, in a quiet minute between love makings, to the dissolution of all pretense of casual speech and the acting upon sheer lust.

There is so much poetry happening in the aftermath of seemingly meaningless couplings; the brain, especially the brain of a professional poet, is an meaning creating machine where the smallest items in the universe come to serve, after the fact, in the creation of a legend of good intentions and deeply felt loss over what goes unsaid at the time when the fleeting opportunity was there, waiting to be filled with meaningful talk.

Evidently the meaningful talk comes when the poet is alone, speaking to the mirror. I half expected to have the camera pull back just a little more and reveal the poet not only alone, speaking to a mirror, but also that the mirror and the room that contains it are situated inside a movie set, braced up with particle board and duct tape.What I like is that the poem doesn't explain its situation, and yet isn't busy being trying to be mysterious, cryptic , impenetrable. Penetration, if I may, is precisely what the poem is about, but fluidly so, in language of water, memory, things that seem to slow down jack hammering lust and brings one into momentary awareness of each sensation and twitch of limb and slide of presenting and receiving appendage. The world is all motion, smooth, fluid as water, every moment intense, nuanced, suspended in the mind yet over too soon. Our friend Paul has written the perfect erotic poem and furnished a perfect backdrop for the ideas he had been working over at the time he took up his keyboard to compose. A poem of intense tactile moments, reflecting on the incredible nature of surfaces, the spines of a fish, the skin of a lover, the regions unseen yet which beckon us as limbs, zippers and defenses against the world are surrendered and one is without arms in front of another person, taking the path of least resistance. We need to remember that this a poem, not a police report:

I forgot
my place in the story I idly told you,
as we rose in the elevator,
as your hands found in my neck a knot
your fingers could untie
with ease. Love, you know
that language failed me
early with you: in my mouth you found
a hidden stammer. In all
the days since, what have I said
that was right? So little.
But know: when we stood on one side
of thick glass to watch
a world of water ignore our entire lives,
I kissed your fingers
and each one in that light was blue.

This reads to me very much like the beginnings of a seduction, with the woman taking the initiative with her bookish, nervous companion. There is much to assume here because much is suggested--not said outright, but teasingly suggested-- and it's not inappropriate to infer what might continue, off the page, out of view, based on what evidence Paul gives out. I wrote earlier that this poem reads as if it were a daydream, wherein the material reality and the objects in immediate proximity serve as counterpoint to the narrator's
arousal, more metaphor for a sort of slow, fluid action he is thinking of acting upon as soon as he is able to conclude his spoken foreplay. Absolutely nothing might have happened, of course, but the purpose of this poem is more about how the senses run over reason and will virtually change the texture of real life.

The poem has that "fade to black" feel to it. The lens goes dark, and we can only assume that the best of what's possible between men and women is taking place away from public view. But the poem has a lyric, appealing unreality to it, a surreal sensation wherein the act of recall is more intense, more spectacular than the actual event from which we compose a history. Paul, I think, may be inclined to have us in between all the sensations, all the associations of tactile arousal.The narrator's perception is skewered by his attraction to his companion, and everything around him--fish tanks, lights, odors, surfaces--are aligned in his psyche to underscore his emerging desire. I spoke in a previous post as well as the things of this world seeming more props on a set in the effort to bolster the pitched desires being described. Since it remains ambiguous what actually happens between the two after "I kissed your fingers/and each one in that light was blue " the "fade to black" remark is a perfectly reasonable thing to say.I like this poem because, among other things, I've written dozens like this because I'm an incurable romantic who finds it easy to write an enthused lyric about the mysteries of women.

Happy 4th of July!

Poetry is for grumblers

It's hard to write good poems, period. I have to admit that I've generally little or no use for most rhymed and metered poems, basically because there are so very few poets who are able to compose as such without seeming like they sacrificed emotion for a metronome and a rhyming dictionary. It is not something that pleases my ear under normal circumstances. Free verse, in turn, is in large part willful obscurity and arbitrary line breaks where the point is to disguise one’s lack of anything interesting to say.

The drone replaces the metronome, and a Cuisinart of unconsidered images and arty inferences take the place of an interesting arrangement of materials that, though quite different, find an atmospheric and tonal coherence in the hands of the genius, that rarest thing among us all. The dirty little secret is that most poems written by most poets are mediocre, substandard, self satisfied little noise machines composed by scribes who are, to some degree, either delusional or self-aggrandizing.

I have to include my own poems among the verses that were written by someone seduced by his vanity , the ones I wrote and still write that attempt a short cut to genius by a sheer force of personality."Force of personality", though, is being grandiose in retrospect. It's more accurate that at the time, in the late seventies and through the mid-eighties, when I sobered up and saw much of my effort for what they were, slack, cryptic and untested by a discerning ear, I had the confidence of a kid who thought poetry was the place to hang all my entitlement fantasies on. I was lucky, in the main, that there were some superb readers of my stuff who weren't hesitent to make particular note of the crap I wrote and to highlight what it was I actually good at. I even listened to some of the advice, to measurable effect.

There seems to be few places where a good poem, confident of it's parts, neither chintzy nor baroque beyond human use. I've just put down a volume by new formalist poets, those who insist on rhyme and meter, and found most of the stuff stiff, and then I opened up a volume of Jori Graham and got p.o.'d all over again, abstruse, ungirdled swill. So yes, it's hard to do well, but half the point is in the search.

It's a gross over generalization, to tell the truth, and unfair to all the serious, well intentioned poets who attempt to come up with something that simultaneously references tradition and adds something original, daring, as yet unspoken into the mix. The quality of the line breaks interests me the least ; form, I think, follows function, to borrow Louis Sullivan's dictum for his architecture. If the writing is good to begin with, inspired by an idea that sets the mind blazing with a head of bold, fulsome language and that language is tailored, adjusted, made new and perverted in ways one hadn't thought imaginable, then the line breaks take care of themselves, almost on some macro-instinctual level. For me line breaks, in free verse, are the equivalent of a musician's note selection during an improvisation--the phrases, the pauses, the gradual introduction of the dramatic arising from the simply and sweetly stated-- and a writer with that sense of where and how sentences and their words can best display underlying melodies , meanings and less obvious inferences can arrange his or her words with a surety of place a solid idea can give them. Line breaks are the least problematic part of a poet's task.

I distinguish between difficult poetry and the obscure--Eliot, Ashbery, Stevens, Clayton Eshelman, Robert Kelly, Ron Silliman are difficult, for example, with the implication being that there are some things the writer has been thinking about and considering for awhile, Poetry is the vehicle, aside from criticism, that the sort of problematized perceptions they want to get across and interrogate . Obscure poets, I think, are correctly called "vague", the implication here being that there seems to be an awful lot of effort spent buttressing banal brainstorms with a morass of references and closed-off syntax that seems not just evidence of incompetent writing, but purposeful. Ann Carson, Jori Graham and a good number of others seem more careerist than inspired, and their work seems more inclined to keep their allure as deep thinking poets in tact rather than spark something magic in someone else's imagination.