BOB DYLAN IS NOT A POET

 1.

An old peeve, this: Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a songwriter. What he does is significantly different than what a poet does. In any relevant sense, the best of what poetry offers is read off the page, sans melody from accompanying guitar or piano and a convincingly evocative voice. The poet's musical sense, rhythmic properties, and other euphonious qualities are derived from the words and clever, ingenious combinations alone. A reader may appreciate the words, the rhymes, the cadences, the melodious resonance, and dissonance, as the case may be, but all this comes from the language of the poem alone, on the page, without music. When addressing such rich and soul-stirring sounds of nouns and adjectives conjoined, the musicality we speak of has everything to with the poet extending the limits of everyday speech. You can read Shakespeare to full literary potential, I think, because his verse, in the guise of dialogue, still satisfies as writing, with metaphors, rhythms, cadences swirling and ringing to a heightened sense of what the complexity of human emotion can sound like if there were words, allusions, similes, and metaphors that could give life and texture for what are, in his plays, inchoate feelings brewing at some base level of the personality before the mind can provide them with an articulate if flawed rationale.

photograph by Jim Marshall

It was the task of Shakespeare, the poet, and the playwright combined, to give vocal music to what were speeches that made private thoughts, half-plotted schemes, inarticulate resentments, paranoia, the whole conflicting brew of insecurity, self-doubt, and malevolence into something that was the equivalent of music, a sweet, and stirring sound that bypasses the censoring and sense-making intellect and which makes even the foulest of schemes seem just and only natural. The writing, that is to say approximates music from the page and provides for a more complicated task when considering our responses to a provocative set of stanzas. Dylan is a songwriter, a distinct art form, and his words are lyrics, which cannot be experienced to their fullest without the music that accompanies them. One may hum the melodies while pouring over the lyrics and mentally reconstruct listening to an album's songs, but this proves the point. Of themselves, Dylan's lyrics pale poorly compared to page poets. With his music, the lyrics come alive and artful, at their best. They are lyrics, inseparable from their melodies, and not poems, which have another kind of life altogether.

The lyrics are flat and unremarkable save for their strangeness, which is not especially interesting in verbal terms. With music, voila! Transformation. This is a condition that makes what Dylan does songwriting, not the writing of poetry. These are distinct art forms with features and rules of composition that are crucial and non-negotiable. Cohen is an interesting case since he inhabits several writing mediums, IE, novels, poetry, plays music. He's not incredibly prolific in any of these areas--over the forty-plus years that he's been on my radar, his output has been meager, albeit high quality--but it occurs to me that he's more of an actual writer than Dylan is. They are different sorts of geniuses. Cohen, of course, is a novelist overall—"Beautiful Losers," "The Favorite Game"--and a poet, someone wholly committed to making the words from their music, rhythm, and power so that the sort of splendid, soul-racked suffering he specializes in, that deliciously wrought agony that's midway between spiritual experience and sexual release, is fully conveyed to the reader and made as felt as possible.

Cohen tends the words he uses more than Dylan does; his language is strange and abstruse at times, but beyond the oddity of the existences he sets upon his canvas, there exist an element that is persuasive, alluring, masterfully wrought with writing, from the page alone, that blends all the attendant aspects of Cohen's stressed worldliness-- sexuality, religious ecstasy, the burden of his whiteness-- into a whole, subtly argued, minutely detailed, expertly layered with just so many fine, exacting touches of language. His songs, which I find the finest of the late 20th century in English--only Dylan, Costello, Mitchell, and Paul Simon have comparable bodies of work--we find more attention given to the effect of every word and phrase applied to his themes, his storylines. In many ways, I would say Cohen is a better lyricist than Dylan because he's a better writer overall. Unlike Dylan, who has been indiscriminate for the last thirty years about the quality of work he's released, there is scarcely anything in Cohen's songbook you would characterize as a cast-off. 

Cohen takes more care in words he selects to tell his tales. He creates his moods as he provides a sense of location, tone, and philosophical underpinning while subtly suggesting the opposite of whatever mood he might be getting at. Cohen is simply more careful than Dylan. In word selection, more discriminating; the architecture of literary influence is on display in the disciplined rhymes of Cohen's parable-themed lyrics, elegantly so. It is, to be sure, a matter of choice how a writer manages their word flow. Cohen's writing has a sense of someone who labors hard to make the image work, to have that image compliment and make enticingly evocative a scenario that starts off simple and then arrives instantly of fatalistic surrender to powers greater than oneself, both sensual and spiritual. I feel for Dylan's method because he is an admirer of what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac regarded as Spontaneous Bop Prosody, a zen-like approach to an expression where it was believed that the first thought was the best thought one could have on a subject.

Good poets, great poets, are writers when it gets down to what it is they do, and it's my feeling that Cohen's experience as a novelist, short story writer, and playwright has given him a well-honed instinct for keeping the verbiage to a minimum.  Cohen isn't a chintzy minimalist like Raymond Carver. And fewer words in a piece are not, by default, superior to more extended word counts. Cohen just has a better sense of when it's time to stop and develop a  lyric further.

Dylan's genius is closer to the kind of brilliance we see in Miles Davis, where the influences of unlike styles of music and other elements-- traditional folk, rock, and roll, protest songs, blues, country, French Symbolism, Beat poets--were mixed in ways that created a new kind of music, and required a new critical language to discuss what it was he had done with the influences he'd assimilated, and the range of his power. It is possible to look at aspects of Dylan's art. Fine individual strands wanting--his lyrics may be unfocused or strange for their own sake, his melodies are either borrowed or lack sophistication, his singing is nasal and grating--but taken together, music, words, voice, instrumentation fused, one experiences catharsis, power and galvanizing mysticism in the best recorded moments. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is a flat, curious scribble of a lyric read by itself. Still, with the minor critical intonations of Al Kooper's keyboard and Mike Bloomfield's interned guitar, coupled with Dylan's leering, a snarling dramatization of the lyric, we have an art that is riveting n terms that are purely musical; yes, one might go on at length and create a cosmology of what Dylan's lyrical creations make of the experience, but the emphasis needs to remain on the whole.

"It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) "is a terrific, innovative song lyric, and as a lyric does not have the same power as a well-written poem has on the page when that lyric hasn't the music to give it momentum. The power of the lyric has a sustained "oh wow" element, one line after another summarizing the sad state of the Perfect Union, the Idealized world in harsh, ironic terms, each image and beat of the intoned images, critical, lively, surreal in a seamless mash-up of different concepts, are lifted, foisted, tossed to the listener by the steady and firm strums of the simple guitar Dylan maintains. Lyrics have their advantages and can be pretty artful and subtle, but I maintain that they're a different art form; the words are subservient to the song form, where poems of every sort are autonomous, structures made entirely of language. (Unless, of course, you're a Dada poet who just arrived here with a time machine).

"Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna," two songs from what I think is the center of Dylan's most significant period as a song-poet, if you will, likewise are not to make their fantastic excursions through Daliesque landscapes alone on the page, as flat print. Dylan's chords, his voice, and his forward-march rhythms are what make these extended lyrics crisp and suggestive of metaphysical chaos under a thin the thin guise of civility and reason. Drums, organs, twangy and tuneless guitars, police sirens, his braying voice bring a dimension to the lyrics that aren't there without it. Dylan's songs especially--more so than Cole Porter, more so than Chuck Berry, more so than a host of his contemporaries--are not self-sufficient as page-poets are with their work. It can be argued that what Dylan has done is more complex, subtler, and requiring a new vocabulary to discuss than what poets have done, and something I would subscribe to on principle. Dylan remains a songwriter foremost and a poet only through loose analogy. In all, Dylan's lyrics serve the musical experience, the concept of a song, which makes Dylan a songwriter of genius, but not a poet. When they are writing poetry and not novels or songs of their own, poets are committed to making language, and language alone, the means through which their ethereal notions will be preserved. Successor failure depends on how well they can write, not strum a guitar or croon a tune.

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2.

 I do admire the work of artists who remain attractive as they get older, but it is a fact that many writers, poets, songwriters do their best, most compelling work in their early years. Dylan is one of these--the most incredible songs, in my view, were those that combined equal elements of Surrealism, Burroughs-inspired language cut-ups, blues and rural south music vernaculars, and heavy doses of French Symbolism by way of Rimbaud and Mallarme. This gave his stanzas a heightened, alienated feeling of sensory overload, making him the principal Lyricist of the bare existential absurdity that life happens to be. No one got to the infuriating heart of the sensation that life had ceased to mean anything after those matters that "mean" the most to us--marriages, friendships, tastes, financial security, spiritual or religious certainty--were changed, destroyed, or simply vanished. Dylan's writing was of the individual suddenly in the choking throes of uncertainty, batting back encroaching gloom with the kind of swinging, poetic wit that reassembles existence. It is a stance, a state, an aesthetic state of being that made it possible for him to fire on all cylinders for a good run of time. Generally, the poetic quality and intensity that Dylan produced in the longs on the list I made are a substantial body of work that perfectly matches the most vigorous work by Eliot, Pound, WC Williams, Burroughs Ginsberg. It is also not the kind of work you can keep doing for a lifetime; like Miles Davis, he had to. His mature work has often hit the mark and offers the long view of experience in an, especially moving way. Just as often, I think he misses the mark and overwrites or is prone to hackneyed phrasing. 

There is much quality to the later songs, but they are not among Dylan's most excellent as a body of lyrics. Dylan is called more often than not a poet because of the unique genius of his best songs; I don't think he's a poet, but a songwriter with an original talent strong enough to change that particular art forever. I do understand, though, why a host of critics through the decades would consider him a poet in the first place. My list is the songs I think that justifies any sort of reputation Dylan has a poetic genius. I like most of the songs mentioned above for various reasons apart from the ones on my initial 35 choices. The Songs there manage an affinity for evoking the ambiguities and sharp perceptions of an acutely aware personality who is using poetic devices to achieve more abstract and suggestive effects and still tend to be wonderfully tuneful. No one else in rock and roll, really, was doing that before Dylan was. On those terms, nothing he's written is entirely at the level of where he was with the songs on my list; this list consists of the body of work that substantiates Dylan's claim to genius. "Just Like a Woman" is one of the most refined character sketches I've ever heard in a song. What's remarkable is the brevity of the whole, how much history is suggested, inferred, insinuated in spare yet arresting imagery. I rather like that Dylan allows the mystery of this character to linger, to not let the fog settle. The ambiguity gives its suggestive power, and there is the whole element of whether the person addressed is a woman at all, but rather a drag queen. It's an open question. It's a brilliant lyric.

"Drifter's Escape "was on twice and is now a single entry. There is a concentration of detail in the lyric, a compression of Biblical cadence and sequence that makes the song telling and vivid not in its piling on of stanzas but in its brevity. He does the same for "All along the Watchtower," which I regard as a condensed "Desolation Row," a commentary, perhaps, from the tour bus just passing through; the tour guide finally tells the driver, "there must be some kinda way outta here." I regard the true "poetry" of Dylan's music in the earlier music, where he is spectacularly original in how he forced his influences to take new shapes and create new perspectives. Post JWH, I just find too much of his lyric writing prolix, and meandering, time-filling rather than revealing; the surreal, fresh, colloquial snap of his language has gone and is replaced with turns of phrase that are trite, hackneyed, ineffective;' they strike my ear as false. Even "Blind Willie McTell," a song that has been persuasively defended by intelligent fans of Dylan's later work, strikes too many false notes for my tastes. Musically, it drags and philosophically seems a victim of convenient thinking,  a PC version of Song of the South; some of the imagery is simply cloying and seems more suitable for Gone with the Wind than a poet of arguable worth.

...See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell...

Really, that is awful, a dreadful presentation of atmospheric detail meant to create historical context and mood, but it trades on so many received ideas of slavery, racism, the south, et al., that the intent no longer matters. It strikes as more minstrel show than tribute. Had anyone submitted this to serious poetry (or lyric) writing workshop, it would have been handed back to us for revision, with the advice that we rid the narrative of the creaky, questionable window dressing? "When I Paint My Masterpiece" works wonderfully because of its lack of any messages about social justice. It works because it is a short, terse, vivid travelogue, vague and evocative in equal measure. The ambiguity and absence of relevance to anything other than Dylan's need to speak offhandedly about an exciting time in the life of a particular character is what makes this song memorable.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Well, I had a feeling that the general good sense this album conveys is that Dylan wasn't trying too hard to prove he's a genius. The record is straightforward, and the language is remarkably free of affectation, a tendency that has plagued him post-JWH. I especially like "Sign in the Window"; it has the sincerity and actual and momentary acceptance of where one happens to be in a specific part of life and offers a new set of expectations. The perfectly natural language here, excellent and unexpected rhymes, telling use of local detail that give us color and history without sagging qualifiers to make it more "authentic." The lyrics are a recollection of a trip, places visited, perspectives changing, a nice string of incidents in a language that sounds like a natural voice telling real things, with genuine bemusement.  

Congratulations Paul Guest

Paul Guest has just had his second collection published, Notes For My Body Double, and it is recommended.Guest is a pleasant fellow who's writing combines his wits and intellect in cogent twinings where one element doesn't swallow up the other. There is no wallowing in emotions that allow no relief, nor are their long strands of arrid erudition choking off a poem's circulation. He has, above all, an ear for the spoken language, and elevates it just so that it achieves a nearly imperceptible heightening; it's a stylized patois that manages to be writerly without sounding like it's written down and sterile. Paul is anything but sterile in his work, and often seems surprised by his own responses to events, people , places and things. This bodes well for a writer;s future, I wager, since it's a relief to come across a young poet who doesn't sound like he's at the end of his capacity to empathize with the large and small circumstances of existence.

Congratulations on your second volume, Paul.

Writing and sleeping at the same time

Who hasn't had the experience of dashing urgently into a dark room to do something very important only to forget what that something was once we flip the light switch? It's humbling to have the furniture seem to glare at you as if angry for disturbing their sleep. Likewise, I'd wager more than some of us have dialed phone numbers only to forget who it is we're calling, or, if we do remember the name, the very reason for the contact.

There are two choices in that scenario, hang up and feel stupid for letting your target and topic slip your mind, or stay on the line and, if they answer, bluff your way through the chat, hoping to trigger a recollection with a key word or phrase. Option two doesn't often work , and the attending result is an awkwardness one feels they'll never recover from.

Joanie Mackowski's attempt to describe, declaim and dissect Jean De Flane's 1500 painting of the messenger angel's appearence before Mary to reveal that she is to be the mother of the Son of God makes me think that she forgot her inspiring idea once she entered that particular room of her imagination. The poem, "Bad Annunciation" had a series of flashy notions she wanted to fit into a tightly compressed, succinct poem but forgot what her aim was. The problem for her may well be that she had a bad start on her composition and her determination to make the poem work structurally used up the inspiration it would have required to tie this jointly convoluted and clipped scenario with the unexpected turn that would have dissolved the problematized perspectives and placed this attempt in the reader's mind in a broader perspective. So much telescoping and collapsing of vantage points go on in this poem, that one never knows where they are standing in relation to angels appearing before Mary to announce the coming of the infant Jesus, an element that could be made to work well if Mackowski had better control of the ambiguity in her lines. Her error is conspicuously trying to regain control of the poem,(or enliven it from the deadened sentences she's written) with the clumsy insertion of a mirror trope, with a whole array of referenced representation made to quite suddenly do a the tired little waltz of who-is-watching-who:


She doesn't look

at the book, open in her lap. Not the usual book: it's a picture-
book, a museum catalog maybe, Four

Centuries of Annunciations—anyway, it's open
to a dime-sized, dim, and inverted replica of this same

painting here. How clever: a mirror in her lap,
like the pinprick infinite hope just plopped

in her womb.
This is an idea that works well for poets who've that rare skill to take an idea and explore , examine and postulate upon the conundrum and confusions arising when mind/body dualisms are engaged; John Ashberry's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror comes to mind, as does Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird or Palm Tree at the End of the Mind. The difference with these works and Mackowski's trash -compacted stanzas is that Ashbery and Stevens both harbor desires to merge with the sedate and strange representations of the material world, and imagine new harmony between earthly elements and to bring melody to formations that clashed with each other. The aim, I would guess, was to road test the imagination's limits in how it can provide a buffer and refuge against the grit and grind of a noisy, violent and vulgar reality.

Joanie Mackowski, though, was looking for the exit by the time she came to write those blithely mechanical lines, to bring order to her muddle and provide with a greased slope of rhetorical hat tricks to fast her getaway. But even this was too much work to do, and she leaves this thing in the middle of the poetry superhighway, like a car thief abandoning a boosted ride when it runs out of gas or gets a flat, or when the novelty of the ride starts to bore them.


The angel enters stage left,
as usual, but he brought no flower, just

a spear. Will he kneel? His knees
haven't yet touched the floor. Perhaps he flies

with them bent, to save time. And he's more bivalve
than angel, his wings too rigid and blue, yet to evolve.
She is, to be sure, describing an artist's representation of the famous scene, but there is a question with what she wanted us to consider, what elements we ought to interrogate. It might well be that the aggregation of art and writings about the annunciation over the centuries have made the humanity of Jesus less believable , if we're to regard the angel's bivalve qualities as sufficient reason to say Mackowski considers Christian legend to be an anti-human garble. This ending, better fitting a much longer poem where more has been introduced and twined together with the sort of Ashbery/Stevens genius for long form speculation and trope-exhaustion, does not summarize or bring out buried elements and contradictions in a hard, ironic light, but sounds instead like it's an introduction to a third act, where the reward lies waiting. But this is the room Mackowski rushed into to do something urgently needing to be done; once she flipped on the light, she forget why she was there. And so she left.

And left us hanging.

In Praise of Heartless Poetry

I used to insist that poems that didn't have "dirt under the fingernails" were without value, insisting that live as it's lived by working men and women in America were more interesting , more complex and more important than the dense, academic poems one was made to read in contemporary poetry anthologies. In full disclosure, I was an undergraduate at the time, in the mid to late seventies, an earnest poet trying to be relevant who, incidentally, was having problems in literature courses requiring same said anthologies. There might have been a worthwhile insight somewhere in my whining for a polemic I could write if I cared to take the time, but it suffices to say that I was lazy, too lazy to read the poems, too stoned to go to class, far, far too stoned to read the secondary sources to be prepared for class discussions or for the papers I had to write. I did what anyone genuine undergraduate poet/radical/alkie would do; I blamed the system. So there.

It took a bit of doing--sobering up, bad grades, failed relationships--for me to get wise(r) and actually read the work I thought unworthy, and the remarks of critics who've done their own work considering the aesthetics at length, and I've since backed away from trying to shoe horn all poetry into a tight fitting tuxedo. What was learned was relatively small, a revelation for the truely dense; poetry works in many ways, and the task of the critical reader cannot be merely to attack and opine but to make an effort to weigh a poem's elements on their own merits , studying how effects are accomplished, and then, finally, lastly, to offer a judgement whether the poem works . Not that I adhere to this prolix method--I shoot from the hip and often miss the whole darn target--but I try. Now the issue, from Slate's Poems Frame, is whether a poem can work if it lacks the glorious thing called "heart".

Anyone seriously maintaining that a work of art, be it poem, novel or painting is doomed to failure because it lacks this vague quality called "heart" has rocks in their head. Artists are creative people, on that most of us can agree, and by definition artists of narrative arts make stuff up from the resources at hand. Whether the source is actual experience, anecdotal bits from friends or family, novels, biographies, sciences, all these are mere furniture that go into the creation of the poem. The poet's purpose in writing is to produce a text according to some loosely arranged guide lines that distinguish the form from the more discursive prose form and create a poem that arouses any number of responses, IE feelings, from the reader. "Heart", I suppose , would be one of them, but it's ill defined and too vaguely accounted for to be useful in discussing aesthetics. Confessional poetry and the use of poetry books and poetry readings as dump sites for a writer's unresolved issues with their life doesn't impress me generally, as in the ones who do the confessing never seem to acquire the healing they seek and instead stay sick and miserable and keep on confessing the same sins and complains over and over. Journaling would be one practice I would banish from a poetry workshop I might teach. We are writing poems, not an autobiography .

I would say, actually, that one should suspect that poet who claims that every word of their verse is true, based on facts of their lives. I cannot trust the poet who hasn't the willingness to fictionlize or otherwise objectify their subject matter in the service of making their poems more provocative, worth the extra digging and interpreting. Poems and poets come in all shapes and sounds, with varied rationales as to why each of them write the way they do, and it's absurd and not to say dishonest that "heart", by which I mean unfiltered emotionalism, is the determining element as to whether a poem works or not. My goal in reading poems isn't to just feel the full brunt of some one's soggy bag of grief or splendid basket of joy, but to also to think about things differently.

Two books of poems worth owning

Gunslinger
poems by Ed Dorn
The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorns' narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.

Civil Noir
poems by Melanie Neilson

Melanie Neilson has a genius for tearing apart the suggested givens of an image ,and then reassembling the details in ways that confound meaning. She gives a long look behind the set designs of our social construction, and inserts a heated zaniness into our negoitations with the normal. Her sense is visual, her language--exploded, elongated, twisted, resolutely reshaped---sensual and snaking with percolating pleasures.

A flurry of Poets published in Slate

James Hoch's poem "Draft" reads like notes gathered from a shoe box kept under a bed, only just recovered only years later after the weight of accumulated life has made the mind a field of circuitous memory. Small boy, too young to comprehend the ways of married adult life, sees his father leave and what seems like the resulting decline of his mother's health:

Some things, I knew,/were beyond choosing /father leaving, the endless /caring for mother, that love /is a salving: what medics and nurses do.

Fodder,/I was too small to object,/the conscription too severe.
A lifetime of growing up with the gnawing certainty that those you come to love and depend on will leave you in the lurch without a clue to their motivation or feeling. Every conversation not having anything to do with work or sports becomes a mine field of self-fulfilling prophecy.Years later , an argument his wife gives him a good rocking:

So when you said / you felt drafted / into marriage, the shutter

screwing up my face, you / quickly followed, just a metaphor,
The fleeting thing being reached for is that it is not a metaphor to the narrator, but instead very real and existing at some primordial level of consciousness where the hapless child still cringes in the while the adults around him scurry around in agitated melodramas. What she takes to be a mere figure of speech instead sends that expected bolt of dread through the narrator's system. We have here a scene from a marriage seen through a crack in the kitchen door, through a window left open on a hot night; she sees the anxiety on him and assures him it's only a word.

Try another,

I said, closing the window, /drawing a breath between each / sentence, trailing closely every word.
This is a sour situation, and it hasn't anything all that interesting going on in it's asymmetrical lines to warrant much more consideration. I'm thinking of Sylvia Plath Lite. Plath could get up a full boil of language when addressing the failings of her relationships with men, and she could get sufficiently global in her references to make her brooding lyrics worth a curious read. Hoch here seems too indebted to Raymond Carver as this poem plays out; I appreciate and pursue the thinking that a reader can be left guessing to larger actions "off stage" as they read a dramatic unfolding, but it helps if there is electricity in the events. One wants to be convinced that this narrative is something that needs to be told.

This is weak tea, not strong coffee, and is a bit too defeatist for my liking. The narrator's child self we can take pity on, but the narrator as adult, seeming not to have become not the least bit resilient with age, we find inexplicable weak and gutless. I am sure James Hoch is not gutless, but this poem sure is. An ode to spinelessness? It reads more like a snippet from a confessional novel Philip Roth would be writing, minus the rage, and rage is exactly what this poem lacks and needs , in an accurate measure, to make it live and become memorable.

This is a sigh, an oh-hum, a dejected kicking of the tin can down the street after a minor disappointment. What we imagine off stage for these two is a tedious existence of purse-mouthed conversations and silent dinners, a series of compartmentalized daily chores and rituals that affords them the maximum amount of time away from each other. There might be a bigger drama here, some family catastrophe that might inspire a stronger and more responsive muse. Hoch has here a faint sketch that would matter to the vaguely depressed.

I can't , 'though, get much excited over a couple of scenes connected through a soft-focus eliding. Hoch may have meant this to be suggestive of hearing a snippet of a tense conversation through a thin apartment wall or an open window you happen to be walking by, but this situation lacks sufficient tension. It is arguably neurotic in that it suggests a personality that requires unnaturally high maintenance. After the wife explains her use of the word "draft" as a "metaphor", we have a glimpse of a relationship that is going inexorably to the dogs. Hoch's narrator may have been placed at ease with his wife's clenched jaw assurance, but he sounds petty, controlling, and resentful that his control of his environment had been threatened:

Try another,

I said, closing the window,

drawing a breath between each

sentence, trailing closely every wordThis is not a man of grace and consideration; closes the window to make the cold and the outside noise stop unnerving his indoor world, and a taunt for the wife to "try another" metaphor while he weighs the words that are said and the manner and posture in which they're uttered. Co-dependency at it's most skeletal and repulsive.

But all this happens under the surface of the spare descriptions, and what he have is an outline freighted with too many signifiers to indicate a greater psychological turmoil; this is a soap opera, filled with long , unsmiling stares, monotone deliveries of barely contained contempt. I don't often say this, but Hoch has underwritten this piece, and the "subtle" maneuvering between the different meanings of "draft" are clever more than revealing; it seems more a nice trick than a stunning trope. This poem comes off as all short cuts with no main road.

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Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky has an affinity an abiding fondness for poets whose work reads and sounds like a series of interrupted ideas. This might be revealing, since I get the feeling that the stammering sequence of lopped-off exposition makes me think of the youngest kid in a large family, one constantly piping in and yelling and talking too fast and abruptly over a crazed din of babble so their lone voice and smothered perceptions can be heard and gain some air.

Sometimes it works, since I enjoy David Lehman's mosaics of place names, mad jazz and painterly effect; there is an fabulous improvisation in his lines that performs an activity I think is poetry's core province, which is testing language's ability to accommodate experience and offer up perception in a manner that merits a second, third or a hundredth look at the daily things that surround us. I find surprise and glee in his work, at it's best, and the interruptions or clipped notions work as layers of many references Lehman decides to associate; it's a sloppy process, I suppose, but it's one I'm partial too, taking Frank O'Hara as my foil. There is not enough time in this life to bemoan and decry what cannot be undone.

Too often, though, the Pinsky predilection for gives us material that isn't poetry at all, but only muttered aspects of pains and regrets that will not heal. Sometimes it seems like we're in a cheap motel with our ears pressed against the well trying to hear what's happening in the next room

under the blare of the constantly on TV. Creating the effect that we're eavesdropping on some private ritual is not , in itself, evidence of art; the writer has to provide something that will convince the reader that this is more than the conventional weirdness that anyone of us is capable of when we're not seen by the public eye.Picking at the perceived wounds will not hasten the cure for the pains, nor will it transform them into poetry, an art that one might want to paraphrase, quote and make one's own because the language caught an essence of emotion and a salient detail that cleaved to the imagination and eased, for a moment, the dread feeling that you're always alone, unheard and anonymous.

Twichell's poem “Sling" does none of those things, and we are again stuck in an elevator or on a cross-town bus listening to someone talking to themselves, continuing a conversation that should have concluded decades earlier.



The meanest thing my father ever said,
he said to my cousin, who told me:
She'll make the world's worst wife.
Thank you, cousin, for tearing away
one of my veils.

When Mom came to see us
I fell from the tree house, and had to lug
a pail of stones around all summer
since the elbow healed slightly bent.
That straightened the arm.

O when does childhood end?
In the globe of the night sky,
the inner stars are falling.
I leave him in a room like a baby's
but without toys.
It’s a list of grievances that presented in an unremarkable way, save for the conventional wisdom that if one is cryptic and unyielding about the few comprehensible bits in a verse, then one has succeeded in writing a credible poem; this isn't the case with Twichell's poem, which demands that you fill in the blanks and do the work of giving it coherence. Interpretation is one thing a reader must do, of course, but there is the expectation that the writer has offered up something that is worth the excavation and which can sustain the inferential, layered analysis .This poem isn't the one to warrant such an effort. Contemporary poetry is fairly much defined by autobiography, confession, full disclosure, private languages and the lot, and it's a stylistic given that's been pursued by any number of brilliant poets who had the talent and will to make their demon-wrestling the stuff of compelling poetry-- Robert Lowell and Plath and John Berryman wrote with a mastery of language as mighty as the egotism that made them use their collectively deteriorating self esteem as the focus of their work. Big talent will make you forgive almost anything, since it always comes down to the work itself, that set of lines one has written that must stand by itself, sans the poet's protests.



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Mark Strand is a poet whose work I've gagged on when I had to read him in college thirty years ago, and the effect is the same this morning with "Mother and Son". There is something patently fake about Strand's poems and the sentiment he tries to get across, and for all the sign posts that signify misery and hurt that crop up in this poem there is not a sense that he believes a word of it. He tries to be surreal and hushed in his lines, but his business is stagy and arch instead of evocative. He approaches his scenes as a scenarist would trying to pitch a movie idea to a potential financial backer.

The son enters the mother's room
and stands by the bed where the mother lies.
The son believes that she wants to tell him
what he longs to hear—that he is her boy,
always her boy. The son leans down to kiss
the mother's lips, but her lips are cold.

There is no empathy here, only declaration and instruction about how to appreciate what he intends. It fails even as journalism.This isn't poetry, but rather stage directions. In another medium, theatre, this might may add up to powerful, wordless acting, but it is without resonance as a reading experience; these are jottings, you think, notes at the margin of a page that might find themselves elaborated upon later, in a stronger, more vivid context.

It has the feeling of summer reruns, something you've from this author before, and each exposure is more listless and bored than the last. Strand cannot purge himself of childhood images of death, and has used this seemingly autobiographical element as a running gag through his decades as published poet; there is a stifled fear and dread of death , detectable here in "My Mother on a Late Evening In August " and in "The Dreadful Has Already Happened" .

The earlier poems are stronger , with greater vigor; despite the conspicuous aspects of wallowing in the mythology of traumatic childhood, Strand still writes with a power that achieves the quality of stifled terror. It becomes a different story decades later, when the sure footed moves of youth loose their grace and what was once grace of a sort becomes a leaden shuffling, without uplift or rhythm. "Mother and Son" is the premise worn to it's thinnest , least viable point; if this poem were a floorboard, it would give under the weight.

The burial of feelings has begun.
This is not just a bad line, but resembles as well a grunting short hand of a writer who is too familiar with the situation he's committed to verse about over and over. In other genres Strand would be called a hack.

The son touches the mother's hands one last time, then turns and sees the moon's full face. It is a sure sign that a poet has nothing new to say about a subject if he or she employs "the moon" as the means to create an eerie mood, or suggest realities that mere human senses cannot register. One can't really ban the use of the moon as an image for poets since the phenomenon of the thing has so saturated our reference points that we would likely lose an entire literature if it were no longer available to writers to use at will, but one does expect some real work to go into the employing of such an accessible symbol. Strand's moon is something of a prop, a deux ex machina in which the white orb in the black sky makes things poetic and pregnant with nearly unsay able knowledge sans a human intelligence creating the psychological frame work for the aesthetic operation to achieve an effect of real meaning. That is the staginess of Strand again, directing our responses instead of engaging. He can be a bossy poet. For Strand, though, it has gone on too long, and it's unseemly that a poet his age still hangs around dead things in the night, refusing to let an old wound heal. But then again, more than a few poets enjoy picking at their scabs when they're looking under rocks for smoking guns.

Some good words for Duncan Shepard

No one in San Diego seems to like the Reader’s film critic Duncan Shepard but me.Well screw it all, I’ll come out and say it; he is the has the best prose style of any chronic writer of compound sentences I’ve come across, and still manages to make it all come out snappy as a towel snarling at the behinds exposed in a high school shower.Shepard's prose style is hardly boring, and he's in perfect control of every coma and subordinate clause he produces. Again, his absolute lack of cant and his unwillingness to produce hyperbolic word spasms that can be excised from the reviews to contribute to the pollution of empty-headed praise for bad product makes Shepard a supreme relief in film commentary. Shepard is possessed of a terrific writing style that needs no editor, and it's to his publisher's credit that they allow him the length to write essays rather than requiring him to keep his remarks bite -sized. Any critic worth paying attention to is didactic: you either believe that film is a popular art that merits a knowledgeable and detailed discussion, something more substantial than snack-line wise cracks, or you don't. In that case, wise cracks and reviewers, rather than critics will suffice. Shepard is unique, a wit, a wonder of film knowledge, a first rate sensibility. He is a critic I differ with on most films, but he brings to the table a depth of argument that requires one to reinforce and rethink their position: responding to his pieces requires better thinking.

That is what a critic is supposed to do. Wise cracks and didactic-ism are fine in a critics style, provided they do more than crack themselves up with each droll remark that happens to them, or drone on about some matter entirely estranged from the film under review. Shepard weaves skillfully between the extremes, and handles his points with a rare deftness and precision. Over everything else, though, he has the skill to piss people off, not with just the knee jerk button pushing oh-so-common among bloggers who’ve only a glancing familiarity with their art, but with background, aesthetic distinction, a grasp of art history over all, and an unwillingness to to put up the mob rule that makes up the sorry state of “critical consensus”. He is not a critic you’re likely to see blurbed in Sunday movie ads; there is too much he dislikes, and he takes great pains to tell you what irks him in a movie, and why.

The usual complaint is that he’s in love with the sound of his voice, and that what he does is more nattering than analysis. Interesting that these charges usually arise from readers, so called, who can’t wait to say little more than that he ought to fuck off.The "wall of noise" charge is irrelevant on the face of it, if only because the sound of a critic's prose, or what one imagines the prose to sound like, is a chief reason to read a particular writer to begin with. It's not as if I insist on those who insist on composing long sentences that creak with dependent clauses.I just insist on the skill to handle the style and manage the sounds one makes. Ideas about the subject at hand, an actual argument, does much to make the "noise" musical. You hear a traffic jam? I hear Coltrane. And a first rate sensibility he is, whose contrariness is far less obvious. He's got the chops to back up his pronouncements, and, again, redundantly, he forces you to come with a better case than you might have started off with.

John Ashbery Hooks Up

Eighty year old John Ashbery, our most awarded and praised and poet, has been named poet laureate for something called mtvuU, MTV's new 24 hour network geared toward college students. One understands the executives of MTV wanting to re-brand itself and regain it's edge in selling products to a mercurial youth market; what they are all about is making money and satisfying stockholders, and incidentally marketing some good music. It's understandable as well that they'd use the poetry angle as a means to rope in those liberal arts majors who are young and suffering and have a need to express their inner workings in various styles of experimental verse.

And yet , even here, the choice of Ashbery is an odd one, as he is one of the most difficult of America's few famous, not-quite-celebrity poets. Not a rebel, not a polemicist, hardly a rabble -rouser who makes speeches and writes incendiary essays against injustice, Ashbery is an aesthete, a contemplator, an intelligence of infinite patience exploring the spaces between what concioiusness sees, the language it develops to register and comprehend experience, and the restlessness of memory stirred and released into streaming associations. Ashbery's are hard to "get" in the sense that one understands a note to get milk at the store or a cop's command to keep one's hand above their head, in plain site. Ashbery's poems have everything the eye can put a shape to in plain site, clouded, however, by thoughts, the cloud bank of memory. He wrestles with the still-engaging problems of Aristotle's metaphysics, that the things in the world are only the expression of an Idea of that thing, which exists prior to manisfestation. It's a slippery metaphysics, an guarantor of headaches, but Ashbery wears the problem loosely; he pokes, prods, wonders, defers judgement, and is enthralled by the process of his wondering. Reaching a conclusion for him seems to mean that he is done writing, and no poet wants to think that they've used up their vocabulary.


One might think that the mtvU audience might be more attracted to arch romantic and dedicidely urban poet Frank O'Hara, whose emphatic musings and extrapollations had equal parts rage and uncontestable joy which gave a smile or a snarl to his frequent spells of didatic erudition. He was in love with popular culture, with advertising, movies, the movies, he had an appreciation of modern art, he loved jazz and ballads, he loved being a City Poet.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 is the written form where ambiguity of meaning and multiplicity of possible readings thrives more than others, and it's 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.

In any event, no one can begrudge Ashbery his fame, or his accepting an appointment as MTV's poet of the moment. Who can dislike a man who earns a living doing what he likes to do, and who of us wouldn't want that for ourselves and everyone else in the world?

Veiled Truths

The point of personal experience is something we assign later, when memory arranges the particulars in some fine fashion that makes the data resonate like some kind of grand or sad music that needs it's expression in talk, a phone call, poem , novel, blues guitar.

Since experience is the hardest thing to convey --it is not an argument I'm making, it's a tightly knotted cluster of feelings and emotions linked to a sequence of events that I have need to relate to you, to bring you into (in a manner of seduction, dropping the suspenders of disbelief)-- I generally favor any writer to use any and all materials available and appropiate. At best, we see an outline of the truth, a blurred reconstruction, and it's here we , as readears, need to give our trust to the writer to take us through an implied but imaginatively plausible world. Mastery makes us forget the lines we're reading, the very words we're taking in. Good writing , whatever it's style, origins or intent, quite literally pulses , and is that shape, the "truth" we want to pull the veil from.

Are artists creating wonderful veils, or 'pulling' at some pre-existing veils? Important distinction, wouldn't you say? The idea of the metaphor is metaphorical, and since the 'truth' it's protecting is metaphorial , or at least figurative in some way, it seems like a dead issue. There are the same thing, though we can say are seperate units of the same perceptual operation. What's useful is to consider the process 'through' the veils, or, in conventional literary lit speak, the arrangement, tone, and orchestration of the narrative events that lead a reader finally to the last chapter, the last page and he last sentence, where one arrives at the author's sense of an ending, and their implications of whether the tale really does "end" there, done with, having served its purpose of illustrating a 'given' moral lesson based on a nominally 'realistic' event, or whether the lives of the characters go on, after the last page, changed after an arduous narrative, braced for an unknown future.

Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine is a (fairly strange and light) novel that recounts a trip up an escalator in a department store.
Strange, but thats' the general reeling I get from the Baker work I've read, U and I, Mezzanine, Vox : aimless wandering around a subject, speculation for its own sake, a kind of dithering response to extrinsically urgent circumstances,something very much like going up and down an elevator. This is the writing of distraction, and its a body of work that is compellingly shallow in its aim, a window display. Baker's goal seems to be the making of a narrative continuum from the slimmest of materials, intense and close inspections on as few particulars as possible in order to produce clausterphobic, breathless results; this might the fiction to contemplate if one wants to imagine being bound, gagged and locked in a closet. The world is too small, too close,too in-your face , not friendly, not useful, not anything you want to interact with. I think of a maximal rendering of minimal components.Very post-modern, I'd say, but it's disturbing to think that men and women who are nominally good writers can fill up pages and bandwidth with a tweaked yammering that exists only to avoid the ideas they begin with in the subject line. This is very much like Becketts' novels, Malloy, Malone, The Lost Ones, More Pricks than Kicks, and here we have the link with the Late Modernism that had the creator (author) and subject (novel) rising , in their unperishable need to produce, from the noisy clash and clutter of an aesthetic philosophy that demanded new ways of putting the world together, of making the world non-liner and multi-valent, sufficiently prepared to be remade with technology and criteria.

The Beckett/Baker writer seems to face the endless variations they may take for a narrative, and instead defer the decision about which one to take and what sort of fictional ethos to manufacture.The deferral is the subject itself, the eye-averting technique that wills itself to be endlessly about the undecidability of how the reality should be written into being. This is a sub-stratum in the thinking of writers, the avoidance of death through the refusal of becoming engagement of any process of decision making that would definition to a sphere of activity that must then be engaged, acted within.

The renewal of Irony

Are postmodern writers choking on a kind of shoulder shrugging "irony" that excuses them from the toil of creating a committed art while operating under the claim that they are refusing to impose a white man's meaning on the world?No more, it would seem , than any other writer scribing under the modernist tenet of "making it new", or to another extreme, 'defamiliarizing" (from Bahktin) recognizable settings , characters and schemes in a language that's meant to provoke readers to see their world in new ways. This is a modernist habit that the new, cubist, cut-up, stream-of-conscious takes on the world will sweep away past aesthetic interpretative models and lead one to a the correct formation of the world-- there remains a faith that language and other senses can apprehend and describe a tangible , material world and capture its complex composition, a "metaphysics of presence" that art can unearth.

Irony, in this sense, is usually contained within the story, a result of several kinds of narrative operations coming to a crucial moment of ironic intensity that then drives the story into directions one , with hope, didn't anticipate. Post modern writers start off with the intent of being post modern from the start, and rather than have their inventions gear us for a challenge to see the world in a truer light (contrasted against previous schools of lovely language but false conclusions), the project is to debunk the idea of narrative style all together.
Irony is intended to demonstrate some flaws in character's assumptions about the world, a description of the world that emerges contrarily after we've been introduced to the zeitgeist of the fictionalized terrain. Post modern writers are ironists of a different sort, decidedly more acidic and cynical about whether narrative in any form can hone our instincts.

"John From Cincinnati" caught a wave back to Hooterville

Alas, but the HBO surf drama John From Cincinnati has had it's season finale, and the network quickly announced after the broadcast that the eccentric program would not be renewed. This isn't a surprise, since this David Milch series (NYPD Blue, Deadwood)could find the credible (and endurable) balance between spiritual weirdness and the gritty, noir elements the writers and producers sought to beguile us with. There was a time in many a young man's life when strangeness and ambiguity by themselves were enough to satisfy a naive hankering for
subjects of greater depth and complexity, but one requires more as they get older. John, very much in a hurry to introduce it's skewed admixture, never seemed to get beyond the fevered brain storming stages wherein subplots are offered rapidly, and Twilight Zone/Twin Peaks components are offered to baffle you with their quixotic oddness.

This was a mixture that never came together as a palatable whole, and it was frankly incoherent in ways that telegraph the probability that MiLch and his writing staff hadn't the slightest idea what any of their ideas would add to: the connection between the titular character and Jesus were rather obvious, and the failure here is that one was not made to care with the Yost family "got back in the game" or not. This was a static show where no one really worked at any jobs that demanded attention who instead spent the whole of their time hanging out in surf shops, beach houses, public beaches or dingy motels in inexplicable states of rage, anger, swearing in impossible combinations in the club-footed cadences Milch has been famous for since NYPD Blue broadcast on ABC in the early nineties. None of it had that much to with surfing; the sport seemed an exotic backdrop for all this grousing and grumbling, which is a shame. The sport and the culture and the region where it exists is largely unexplored dramatically, and there are some quality scripts to be written and produced.David Milch had his chance and wiped out.

The Problem with Women is Men 2: Love letters as last call

Drunk men and angry women seem to be a theme in some of the prose sketches I've written in the last five years or so. No, I don't drink, not for twenty years, and no, the women I know aren't angry, but this writing was, all the same, a way to picture what it was like in terms I couldn't deny or minimize through convenient amnesia. This is what I was like, and this blog is what I'm like now. A grouch, sure, but sober as a hammer, and with a better sense of humor about myself. Please indulge me, and tell me if you think I'm full of shit. --tb
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Shouts and screams from rolled up windows tells me it's the end of august in a parking lot behind a beach bar that's about to get robbed, and then shut down by the cops for serving minors, ahem,

everyone is in a hurry to get ripped and ripped off, jerked off and jacked around. ravaged and raped and taped to the side of a car on the way home along the side streets down alleys in residential neighborhoods that shadow the free way on the thought that police are at the beach listening for shouts and screams from inside rolled up windows, burglars trying doorknobs,

This is what I heard, “give it to me, godddd dammnit all, give me allllllllllllllllllllll your love, babykins, I know you want it”
“you're a slob and a drunk and you're disgusting, get off my foot , get your hand back where I can see it, GET OUT OF MY CAR!!, JESUS, what the fuck are you about??” “ohhhhhhhhhhh, baby, don't be so cold like a cone with no cream to lick from the rim, just love my seething sweet thing and let's be a noise only god hears on a good night..” “ watch the hand, grub boy, GET OUT OF MY CAR!! I'm gonna crown your buddy Frank for setting this up, FUCK OFF! GET YOUR DRUNK FACE OUT OF HERE…”

It's a night of extremes because the car bounces in it's spot, next to a dumpster, as the bars empty and bartenders check their keys, dishwashers hose down dishes and waitresses do another line of speed to make the night come home faster as patrons roll over each other, going from hugs to handshakes and all manner of gestures that melt into wars that are declared and over with out a shot being fired, the moon sweeps the street that fills with loud jokes that wakes the neighbors with swear words and car alarms that make the punch lines a home invasion, there's nothing else to do after the little and big hands fall where the do each night about right now,

Cops have their smokes, their batons, riot guns, their back up bottles,

The cars all rock with ignition, roaming hands in the middle of what is now becoming morning, some fingers trace the line of a thigh , other fingers fold together, it's the end of the summer, and there is no more spending money.

God does not wear a seat belt

A Guide for Spiritual Tourists" by Hannah Faith Notess is a mere scribble of a poem, a set of lines unmarred by an phrase of distinction or music worth singing out loud. It is as poetic as a pounded flat iron. But it has other merits, which is sociological. Not so much the overworked clash of culture theme as it is an accute gaze at the sheer shallowness and folly of those who think they can find wisdom if they hurry just a little bit faster.This poem is an anti-epiphany, or one that works in a strange twist of perspective; this is a piece of journalism breathlessly enumerating the spiritual blitz going on as tourists seek to have an epiphany, a clear vision of things unobstructed by the ego, as if they can be ordered up like pizza.

This poem captures what I suppose one would belatedly call the post modern moment, that situation where one finds themselves rushing through alien environs , trying to match captions from tour books to crumbling facades and blistered artifacts, coming away with dizzy sensations that one mistakes for spiritual uplift but which is, physiologically and psychologically, no different than having weathered an especially abusive ride at one of many elephantine theme parks.


It told us whether to cover our heads,

where to remove our sandals.

It told us not to wear shorts if male

and if female to be careful.It said Speak slowly please. That's too expensive.

Drive slowly. Stop here. Please call a doctor.

It said to tip the man guarding the shoes.
Pastiche, bricolage, and congenital looting of historical and cultural archives are the hallmarks of the post modern dilemma, a situation where one may breeze through the past and appropriate what the what and decorate their cosmology with the exotica that’s stricken their fancy the way clueless decorators would festoon a house with any odd thing they like, with no relation or reason. There is here that uninflected monotone that comes across in the newsreaders who intone news headlines. Everything bleeds together and becomes a dizzying swirl, which seems to be this poems bragging point. The guidebook, with its broken phrases and the distanced descriptions of the temple and its artworks and caretakers, has a skimming quality that is all tour bus. One feels herded, poked to move along.


Inside, rows of sandstone saints

with extra eyes. Or a black-tongued woman.

Or a rosy square with pigeons and a bath.

Or a cupboard of scrolls. Or a gilded man,

cross-legged or on a cross. Or tree limbs

coiled with flags. But always incense,

worn pavement, smoke-stained walls.This is a poem about witnessing life and not having any result nearing what one may rightly call an “experience”. What’s been seen is mere gloss and glance at best, there is nothing from the stop that indicates that anything has resounded. And the poem stays there, unworried about the likelihood that the metaphysics of this whole thing are based on nothing more than whim and giddiness.


As recently as twenty five years ago one could have described, straight faced, this situation, the touristy rush through another culture’s spiritual domiciles, as an existential moment, with the similar depth-less abyss of non-being looming just the same not far in the dark. The difference, of course, is that the existential poet brooded and pondered the severity of the spread of the lack of the innate significance of things, and worried deeply about how their actions either bring them closer or drives them further from achieving an Authentic Existence. Not that the issue was ever resolved, but it was a fertile premise for a good amount of novels, plays and poetry, especially poetry, some of it good, most of it dreadful, but all of it, I think, painfully sincere. The postmodern moment, the postmodern poem hardly seems to care what anything means, is fairly undisturbed by the incessant pilfering that is it’s chief aesthetic method, and in turn wallows in the absence of Big Ideas under whose broad umbrellas we find security and reassurance. It is the mentality of consumerism , of identifying impulse acquisition as a sort free-play of unchained semiotics.


The mashing together of concepts and images from disparate sources, the universal conflating of what were formally exclusive concepts is entirely the point. Institutions and their symbols are emptied of significance in this kind of marketplace. Comprehension is frowned upon, the equivalent of a buzz kill, while the glancing giddiness of crash-and –snap tourism is preferred. It’s not that what was seen in the temple remains a mystery, or inscrutable , as it were. The poem , like the attitude it bears witness to, does not have extra layers of dread and loathing formed around it because of the emptiness at the heart of what it talks about. The poet is perfectly happy to let the poem be something of an uncaptioned snapshot of a mindset that is too looped on it’s own giggling and ogling to be bothered with anything as presumptive as learning.