Reading, etc

The lasting pleasure of owning a literature degree isn't, often time and sadly enough, financial, but emotional, spiritual, satisfactions achieved in the late hours or those morning commutes to work when you find yourself doing an extraordinary thing.One can feel intelligent for a moment without having to look over their shoulder to see if someone smarter is frowning at a conspicuous display of vanity. You're still talking to the novels you read and re-read years before, still interrogating the author for inconsistencies of style, chastising characters for lacking hindsight or being intuitively dumb. For a moment, you have your own version of the Borgesian library, but in this scenario the shelves are in your head and the books are an apartment building,not an institutional structure. So sometimes a strange smirk comes over my face on various bus routes. Odd, yes, but imagine thinking of something that you think is clever and having no one nearby to share it with. All you can do is smirk, take in a deep breath, bring the book back to eye level.
**
I have generally enjoyed and admired the Hemingway I've read, and I think the short stories in In Our Time are among the best by an American author in the 20th Century. That said, The Sun Also Rises was amazing and To Have and to Have Not equally so. THAHN, in my view a perfect example of Hemingway's skill at creating a visceral feeling of unspoken emotion, events and actions in a brief, concentrated syntax, contains another pleasure that contrasts with his signature brusqueness. In the center of the book, the story leaves the protagonist's plight for a time and takes the reader on a tour of the Marina, where a series of long, carpenter-crafted clauses seems to skim along the surface of the water and explore, in passing, a number of the boats docked there, wonderfully and credibly making the reality of this short novel more complex . You hardly know your reading a sentence that's untypical of Hemingway, ie long, until your done. The irony , one realizes, is that the master of the short sentence went for the long line as the best method to expand the social range of his novel without adding reams of undigested research, a malady that plagued the prolix James Michener his entire career.

At his best, Hemingway really could convey large emotions and subtle movements of mood with very few words. It was a reverse virtuosity that couldn't sustain itself, though, and left him with nothing but self parodied the more he was unwilling to change his style. Old Man in the Sea, among others, are relentlessly dull and full of the kind of self-pity that makes you want to smack him. Hemingway may have fallen short of the self-actualization, but his fictive attempts, at best, resonate and move, and achieve transcendence even when he did not. Perhaps it is a male thing, that these are matters that a reader might have to be intimate with in order to enlarge their appreciation of the work, but I think not. More, I think, it comes to personal taste, as in, if one does not care for the way Hemingway described his universe, fine. But I don't believe the ability to relate emotionally to a text need be restricted to gender, nor should it be limited to any other smoking gun criteria.The college professors who instructed me through his work were men and women, and the women, I have to say, win for inspired lectures, wedding appreciation with critique, understanding the poetry of the struggle, and why the struggle was futile. It would be good to note that in the course of the struggle to rise above one's demons through art, a good amount of good story telling was left for us to enjoy. I wish, at times, Hemingway had found some solace and continued to write stories that reflected a sane, balanced personality. But I am glad for the best of what's been left.
**

Prospecting for insight through Kerouacs' journals will be give scholars reason to devastate another section of prime forest, but his novels remain , inspite of it all, maddeningly inconsistent in their best forms, and progressively unreadable in later writing years. Kerouac had his moments of divine lyricism, I admit, but the cult around his grey, sotted visage is nearly as objectionable as the devotion many give to Ayn Rand: the matter is not how good the writing was, but what the author stood for. Once the chatter about writers drifts, or jumps desperately, from concerns with style in the service of great storytelling and lands in the odious camp that insists that a writers' primary task is only to reaffirm a readers' shaky self image of being a rugged and forward thinking individualist, I reach for a good book, or ponder taking a nap. Either option is more fruitful, and both are more interesting endeavors. It galls me that comparatively little attention was given to the passing of William Burroughs, the one true genius of the Beat group, while the easily assimilated rebellion of Ginsberg and Kerouac claims the top half of the Literary pages.

**
Purple America by Rick Moody was a novel that enraged me. He's been compared to one of my favorites, John Cheever, by many well-meaning critics, but rather than a young writer taking some cues from Cheever's careful and lightly applied poetry and sentiment as regards infidelity, alcoholism, insanity and lurking bi-sexuality, Moody is as effusive as busted water main. All of the previously described elements are there, but without Cheever's wit, irony or craft. None of his grace , either. Moody is one of these young novelists who is in a hurry to cram the world into each paragraph, with the goal being not to persuade the reader to go along with a story but rather to make the telling as intense as possible. This is the kind of ham handed narrative style that is a prose equivalent of an Oliver Stone movie, the uneasy work of a artist obsessed with keeping their "edge". Moody may have kept his edge, suggested by the jittery run-on disasters this rag of a novel lays out, but it's nothing worth sitting down for. Purple America, though, is worth throwing away.

Edward Hirsch befuddles the Gnostics

Edward Hirsch is a perfectly fine lyric poet, sometimes a little obvious with the carefully placed poeticisms that crop up in his lines. There's what reads like a desire to be seen as thoughtful and sensitive to Jack Handy like "deep thoughts", a habit that will trip up what are otherwise readable and soundly evocative poems. The philosophical turns are not what he does well , as the language betrays an embarrassment from having to rely on instinct and feeling for a reason to write; intellectualizing a visceral response leaves you with a brittle, match stick construction that will simply tremble and collapse under a casual inspection. Hirsch is a superb poet of feeling and evocation, and the corrosive realm of ideas and argument are not his neighborhood to hang an address. The writing is rich in atmosphere, detail, concrete in metaphor and fleet of adjective and verb, is a poet best writing in the present tense. A case in point is his basketball poem "Fast Break":

Fast Break
In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984

A hook shot kisses the rim and
hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop,

and for once our gangly starting center
boxes out his man and times his jump

perfectly, gathering the orange leather
from the air like a cherished possession

and spinning around to throw a strike
to the outlet who is already shoveling

an underhand pass toward the other guard
scissoring past a flat-footed defender

who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man
letting the play develop in front of him

in slow motion, almost exactly
like a coach's drawing on the blackboard,

both forwards racing down the court
the way that forwards should, fanning out

and filling the lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion
for the game he loved like a country

and swiveling back to see an orange blur
floating perfectly though the net.

Fluid, cinematic, switching between points of view,Hirsch creates a narrative line that he speeds up and slows down at will--the progress of that ball and the players trying to advance or impede its advance down the court leaves the willing reader breathless. "The Gnostic Gospels" Slate
is not Hirsch writing in current time, but rather as a voice among many in a long forgotten Christian sect which seemingly has been monitoring what Christianity has become through history and into modern time. The speaker, agitated, aggrieved( self righteous, shall we way?) announces the tenets of his faith and his suppressed gospel and eviscerates the falsification of the faith by a culture that has constructed false idols in consumer disguise:


We are like a surviving Gnostic sect,
*****living in caves and eating fallen fruit,
**********practicing our own brand of adoration,

which is devoted to wondrous signs,
*****inner mysteries, the radical unknown.
**********If you bring forth what is within you,

what you bring forth will save you.
*****If you do not bring forth what is within you,
**********what you do not bring forth will destroy you,

so Jesus said. Let others praise
*****the electrifying force of mass media
**********or kneel at the bruised altar of politics.

We keep faith with the technology
*****of the body, with the voices of pilgrims
**********naming the unnamed and resurrecting

dead languages of grief, inaudible pitches
*****of praise. We believe in the root power
**********of words, dreams, ecstatic trances, visions.

You are my twin and true companion,
*****Jesus said to the citizen, examine yourself
and be called "the one who knows himself."
It's true that our robes were stripped
from us, yet we are as stubborn as birds
searching for morsels of food in winter.

It's a plain case of us against them, the pure of heart, intent and action against the soul-less pragmatism that has de-centered Christ's teachings from care for the poor and the earth to distorted interpretations that remove the humanity from our dealings and replace them with bottom lines and expedience. It's a loaded spiel, and a hard one to say anything against; the audience for whom this poem is intended doubtlessly agrees with Hirsch to varying degrees to give him a pass for a weak poem.

The Gospel of Thomas intriguing myself and wonder if Christian faith can be re-tooled in a more politically progressive cast-- isn't it time for the Left to reclaim God and Jesus as the center of their moral certitude?-- and perhaps Hirsch does as well, but the poem he tried to write, the agony of the believer in a more human-centered Christianity toiling in their duties despite the shadow hanging over him, is more resentment than rant. Rants, when they work,get the blood pumping and instill the rage to get something done. The contrast between the gnostic gospels and the observed Christianity-Without-Christ that is the modern distortion of the Word is saturated with smug defeatism. It is the slave morality Nietzsche detested . I would call it befuddled and befogged.

The Dead and their Sucker Punch: A poem by Dorrianne Laux

Dorrianne Laux is one of our best free verse poets. She can write about everyday things and easily comprehend emotions clearly and with some genius of expression. She serves the situation with a fine, delicate balancing of the prosaic, the simple phrasing, and the higher allure of lyric speech and allows neither for overwhelming the other. Her poems, often time presented to us in the guise of prose, has an intimacy rare among a generation of poets who maintain distance from their most volatile emotion; her poems have the power of revelation, of someone sorting through old photographs or a rediscovered journal which, while recounting their day, gets a high pitch in their voice as they realize something even they hadn't realized. Laux never forgets herself as a writer with a goal; fret not, there is a point she comes to, the payoff one expects to make the listing of a poet's personal world resonate in ways it otherwise wouldn't. 

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

How It Will HappenWhen /Dorrianne Laux

 

There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch, the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying, half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door, and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how, for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it: flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language. Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.

This speaker is talking about spending a period of her life trying to talk herself into accepting the loss of her dearly departed, and goes on from there to talk about a life that seems detached, dreamlike; there is an unreal calm in this world as she struggles to push on. Laux isn't contradicting herself but instead talking about the transition from merely mouthing the conventional platitudes of acceptance of a loss and the eventual, inevitable realization that her friend's absence is permanent. She is emotionally numb, so far as I can tell, until it hits hurt, triggered by what some small matter acutely detailed her when the artifice comes apart, and the fact of her friend's absence hits hard, almost like being struck. 

 Artifice includes ritual, is the compulsive house cleaning one occupies their time with while acting as if that they're moving on with their life; the activity and the manic obsession with the details of these tasks are, for me, a conspicuous clue that there is something the person would rather not deal with. There's an intuitive leap here. The poem's power is the quick but not illogical insertion of the final remark, that instance when you realize a loved one isn't returning. Laux shows that a feeling like this is like a sudden attack, coming from seeming nowhere, leaving you in what I could only describe as a state of shock. This is not a formal argument she is making; this has that eliding quality few poets capture well, the revelation expressed as if we're witnessing the thought coming to the narrator as she speaks. The "clean house" Laux mentions, with everything neatly arranged and placed in their place, every trace of the person is gone or tucked in some burnished-over corner:

the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows shining, sun coming in easily now, skimming across the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. (...)

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

You’ll be reading, and for a moment you’ll see a word you don’t recognize, a simple words like cup or gate or wisp and you’ll ponder like a child discovering language. Cup, you’ll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that’s when you’ll say it, for the first time, out loud: He’s dead.

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

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

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

Billy Collins Reflects Rod Serling

470 331 522

"Seraphine": It's how you make it long

For a time after my UCSD years, I was a bit of a film dilettante , and felt cheated if a film was a merely ninety minutes long; I equated length with seriousness of intent and integrity , the way some people consider thick novels to be necessarily better than shorter ones. Getting older makes one discerning about what they’re willing to sit through and put up with, for many reasons, but for me it comes down to not having the patience to wait for a film to start to work. Time adjusted my aesthetics with my attention span. I liked Seraphine formally—the director Martin Provost did a fine job with his composition, and suggested a period in war time convincingly without turning this thing into a turgid, Scorsese-inflected costume drama, and it was a well down outlay of who this woman was, what her world was like, both private and public, and I was impressed with the way the artist’s process was incorporated into the narrative. Her mania to please her guardian angels, endearingly played by the reticent presence of actress Yolanda Moreau, was an intriguing back story to the obsessive art making, from the way she gathered her materials for her paints, the preparation of her pigments, and then the actual painting , with her fingers, on the floor, as if she were wrestling with a large vision that was resisting being captured on canvas. But it was long, very long, too long, and I found myself, like you, perhaps, getting a little antsy; maybe I’ve been seduced by the brutal efficiency and convenience of Hollywood narrative style, but I wanted the pace to pick up. It’s interesting that a director like Clint Eastwood has made a number of movies that one would consider slow-moving—Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima –but not consider glacial in the time it takes to watch them all the way through.

 The difference, I suppose, is that Eastwood , an admirer of European film making no less than any of us in the audience, remembers the best that Hollywood has taught him and remembered that movies are things that move. There’s always something going on, some bit of dialogue and visual cue that sets you for some satisfying dramatic complications. Eastwood, I suppose, would be a film maker who has wed a French eye for the small detail, the love of incidental things that make up a world he’s exploring, with the emotional impact of his masters, John Ford and John Houston. Provost, who’s work I’m not wholly familiar with, and tended to wear me out after a while. Lovely images, of course—I liked the final image of Seraphine hauling the chair out to the large tree so that she can be in environment that can enable her to find some psychic peace—but I wanted less of her and more of the others. 

Eastwood is amazing because he has an instinct in setting up dramatic contrasts, two strong minded characters having to clash, negotiate, argue, battle, make peace in dramatically plausible contexts. I wanted more about the critic and his world, his attempts to sell Seraphine’s paintings and the circumstances, cultural, social, economic, political , as to why she never ascended to the ranks of Picasso or Rousseau. The story needed to move beyond being solely about the title character and develop the lives and worlds of the people who interacted with her. The movie’s flaw is that the poor cleaning woman is the only one who is given any kind of complexity, a fact that allows the movie to remain in place, static. An interest in another character or two , with personalities amounting to more than the brief significations of the dialogue, likely would have given this beautifully mounted project a brisker tempo.

Hemingway, the Prolix Dry Drunk

Moreintelligentlife.com has a story provocatively called "When Novelists Sober Up", luring the curious reader with a hint that laying down the bottle is not necessarily the best thing for the writer's art. We have instead a gutless amalgamation of the usual tropes about bards and scribes cursed with the hooch bug; it's a shuffle through the old cards..It is, in general, a bad thing for those who have it and for those around them, and hinders, erodes, destroys, with time, whatever talent or good graces a person might already have. That we still in large measure glorify booze as a needed ingredient to creative process is evidence of a sad business: we make it okay for certain social types to destroy themselves so they can fulfill our vague idea of what an artist needs to do in society. Considering that we have no consensus as to the role of the artist in our affairs reveals our muddled thinking on alcoholism even more.

An excellent book on the subject is "The Thirsty Muse:Alcohol and the American Writer" by Thomas Dardis. Though there were some writers in this study who remained productive and frequently good during their worst imbibing, they are exceptions, with the general scenario for the alcoholic being tragic and, worse, predictable. The talent that was already theirs to use was soon enough diminished by hoot ch, and careers were ended early.

What was especially irritating in this was author Tom Shone's occasional gaffes in describing a writer's style; he announces that writers of short sentences tend to fair better in sobriety than those more grandiose, opining that the "endless clauses" of Fitzgerald and Hemingway doomed them to unpleasant late careers. Hemingway? And I had thought that Papa, with his short sentences and stingy use of verbs, adjectives and metaphors was the prototypical minimalist, akin to Carver and Elmore Leonard later in the century.

How to be flawed

Mad TV had a dating service parody called Lowered Expectations that ran for a season or so, the gist of which were the absolutely undateable citizens looking for other undateables to hang with . The effect was sadder than it was funny--the sight of characters with intractable personality quirks trying a last ditch effort to find companionship through a whimpering admission of their grosser assets. Loneliness is an ungainly crucible for anyone to bear, whether super star or twitching wretch; the confession in the Mad parodies were losers begging for love, the assumption being that those who fall short, perhaps far short , of our insane standards of style and hipness suffer from a magnified self loathing. Which is why I like this poem by Cecilia Woloch. It's a declaration of what's- really-here, the words of someone who is unapologetic about their faults, perhaps a bit embarrassed by some of them, but not ashamed of any of them. It's not in-your-face like the monotonous products of slam poets can be--this is a monologue on a human scale, a bit of a conversation we come in the middle of, a splendid speech that fills in what we've missed without the digression of backward-motion narrative. Woloch is curt, crisp, and sharp in her lines, and manages to be take-me-or-leave-me-alone without being a full time jerk. I like this poem.

FIREFLIES
by Cecilia Woloch

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn't hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who've wronged me -- for bitterness --
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toylike mice
whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

WAHRENBROCK'S BOOK HOUSE, RIP: A Letter from Dennis Wills

Wahrenbrock's Book House, a literary resource in San Diego for decades, has suddenly closed it's doors forever. Information about the reason for the abrupt closure is scant, and the loss of this store leaves a significant gap in San Diego's reading and cultural life. Bookseller Dennis Wills, owner of D.G.Wills Books , was a good friend of the esteemed late owner Chuck Valverde and wrote this letter to all who've loved and found solace in Wahrenbrock's crowded stacks, finding the odd, the unusual, the rare, the crucial book they had in mind when they entered the store. Dennis expresses as well as anyone can the gravity of the loss:

To whom it may concern:

I have just learned that Wahrenbrock's Book House will close. While I remain unaware of any pertinent details which may have led to such a decision, I heartily implore any powers that be to reconsider the grave and momentous implications of such a decision. Sylvia Beach, publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses and owner of the renowned Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the most famous bookstore in the world at the time, was compelled to close down the store in the 1940s only because occupying German soldiers threatened to confiscate their inventory.

While Vernon Wahrenbrock may have founded Wahrenbrock's Book House in San Diego in 1935, for two generations booksellers and book buyers from around the world have come to know this flagship bookshop repository in this part of the United States as entirely a reflection of the work and the personality of Chuck Valverde and his very able colleague Jan Tonnesen. While Chuck is no longer with us in person, his legacy continues onward as reflected by the vast holdings of inventory available to the many thousands of gentle book lovers who seek out Wahrenbrock's from throughout the world, but also from the thousands of arcane and unusual items listed on the internet. To deny the book public throughout the world access to these vast holdings would be a terrible tragedy.

I sincerely hope and implore that some transitional equation may be created that will allow the legacy of Chuck Valverde to continue. The loss not only to the world but especially to the countless thousands of San Diegans who frequent Wahrenbrock's constantly is inestimable and unimaginable.

Sincerely,

Dennis G. Wills
D.G.Wills Books
La Jolla Cultural Society
www.dgwillsbooks.com

Poetry is what ever gets you to the next page

There is a long history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to the imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's perception. An elitist art, in other words, that by the sort of linguistic magic the poet generates sharpens the reader's wits; it would be interesting if someone conducted a study of the spread of manifestos, from competing schools of writing, left and right, over the last couple of hundred of years and see if there is connecting insistence at the heart of the respective arguments. 

 What they'd find among other things, I think, is a general wish to liberate the slumbering population from the doldrums of generic narrative formulation and bring them to a higher, sharper, more crystalline understanding of the elusive quality of Truth; part of what makes poetry appealing is not just the actual verse interesting (and less interesting ) poets produce, but also their rationale as to why they concern themselves with making words do oddly rhythmic things. Each poet who is any good and each poet who is miserable as an artist remains, by nature, didactic, chatty, and narcissistic to the degree that, as a species, they are convinced that their ability to turn a memorable ( or at least striking phrase) is a key with which others may unlock Blake's Doors of Perception. The lecturing component is only as intriguing as good as the individual writer can be--not all word slingers have equal access to solid ideas or an intriguing grasp of innovative language--but the majority of readers don't want to be edified. They prefer entertainment to enlightenment six and half days out of the week, devouring Oprah book club recommendations at an even clip; the impulse with book buyers is a distraction, a diversion from the noise of the world. 

Even the clearest and most conventional of verse, poetry is seen as only putting one deeper into the insoluble tangle of experience. Not that it's a bad thing, by default, to be distracted, as I love my superhero movies and shoot 'em ups rather than movies with subtitles, and I don't think it's an awful thing for poetry to have a small audience. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if all the money spent on trying to expand the audience was spent on more modest presentations. The audience is small, so what has changed?

notes on poems by Mark Strand and May Swenson

The quiet side appeals to me as well, much as I love abrasive post-bop jazz improvisation ala Cecil Taylor or the raucous cacophony of Charles Ives. Strip-mining the mediums alone won't satisfy what I can at best call a sweet tooth, a need to have pleasure. Sometimes it's instructive to appreciate things that are well made, whole, nicely put together, and to keep the sword in the sheath.There are those moods when what I need from art—and art is something which is a need—is a short harmonica solo, a small water color in a simple frame, or a lyric poem that dwells comfortably, musically on it’s surface qualities. One loves grit, but that doesn’t exclude finess. Mark Strand’s poem here won me over with it’s surely played music.

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer
by Mark Strand

1
When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon's ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

2
Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour's spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3
My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures --
the mouse and the swift -- will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.

Strand is someone who often works overtime to make the small things he chooses to write about into subjects that are poetically overpowering. Though he wouldn't be guilty of some fever pitched overwriting that makes the work of Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott seem like a riotous thicket of over -similed commonplaces--it has been said that the prize winner has never met a qualifier he didn't fall in love with and promise a home to--Strand has always seemed to fall just short of adding an item too many to his verses.

He does have a leaner, more genuinely lyric movement than does Walcott, whom I find more ornate than satisfying. Strand , to his credit , doesn't obscure the emotion nor the place from which is figurative language is inspired, arch as it occasionally reads. Walcott the poet, the world traveller, the cultivated Other in the presence of an Imperial Culture, reads like someone how is trying to have an experience. Strand convinces you that he has had one, indeed, but that he over estimates the measure of words to their finessed narrative.

That said, I like this, in that Strand trusts what his eyes sees, a series of things his mother was doing in a wonderfully framed triptych that might have been conveyed by Andrew Wyeth. It is a little idealized--the lyric spirit is not interested in the precise qualifier,but that adjective or verb , that rather, that both makes the image more musical and reveals some commonly felt impression about the objects in the frame--but Strand here has a relaxed confidence that is very effective. Brush strokes, we could say, both impressionistic and yet exact.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour's spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

This is the image of someone going about there daily chores and fulfilling their obligations thinking they are out anyone else's view, or better, the agenda of someone who hasn't interest in impressing any set of prying eyes. The mother seems less a figure in solitude than she does to contain solitude itself, comfortable and with intimate knowledge of the grain of the wood the floor is made of, the smell of the changing weather, the different pitches of silence and what the nuances of small sounds forecast for that evening and the following day. Most of all, this is about watching the world, the smallest world , both grow up, grow old, become frail and die, finally, aware of the seamlessness of going about one's tasks and the preparation for the end. This is a poem about preparation, I think; we, like the Mother, come to a point in their life when the gravity of things are finally felt through accumulated experience, as one's responsibilities have been added too over the years, and one develops a sense that what one does isn't so much about setting ourselves up for the rest of our lives, but rather in preparing the ground for what comes next, who comes next.

Somewhere in the work , toil , the bothersome details we get to rest and earn an extra couple of hours to keep our eyes close. The change happens slowly, unperceived,but it does happen, and the planet is a constant state of becoming, of change, and what changes too are the metaphors one would use to determine their next indicated jobs.

Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

While Strand writes of his mother's preparing the day for the days that will follow,May Swenson finds comedy and tragedy lurking in the same set of skewed images with this poem. It has a fine elegance that nearly obscures the ominous tone that clouds the final lines, an effect that's artfully deferred.

Water Pictures
By May Swenson


In the pond in the park
all things are doubled;
Long buildings hang and
wriggle gently. Chimneys
are bent legs bouncing
on clouds below. A flag
wags like a fishhook
down there in the sky.
The arched stone bridge
is an eye, with underlid
in the water. In its lens
dip crinkled heads with hats
that don’t fall off. Dogs go by,
barking on their backs.
A baby, taken to feed the
ducks, dangles upside-down,
a pink balloon for a buoy.
Treetops deploy a haze of
cherry bloom for roots,
where birds coast belly-up
in the glass bowl of a hill;
from its bottom a bunch
of peanut munching children
is suspended by their sneakers, waveringly.
A swan, with twin necks
forming the figure three,
steers between two dimpled
towers doubled. Fondly
hissing, she kisses herself,
and all the scene is troubled:
water-windows splinter,
tree-limbs tangle, the bridge
folds like a fan.

As with the Mark Strand poem , this is a wonderful piece of writing, a string of inversions and reversals of stance that make the grace and balance of the world seem comical and awkward. Where there is equipoise in the world above the water, the surface of the pond has a universe that appears to constantly teeter for balance and negate the general cheerfulness of the forward-moving world; birds fly upside down, a swan seems to woo it's perfect visage, the sky is a hard ground and cherry blossoms bloom over a bottomless, blue-tinted void. This eases neatly from the comic to the threatening,the foreboding occurs, a warning sounds that one ought not look into a reflective surface too long:

Fondly
hissing, she kisses herself,
and all the scene is troubled:
water-windows splinter,
tree-limbs tangle, the bridge
folds like a fan.

What was comic rapidly becomes distorted, and the infatuation of one's image, revealed, I think, by the saga of the swan's seeming narcissism; you are sucked into a world of reversals and turn into yourself rather the world outside yourself. "The bridge folds like a fan" , and one's ability to hold their own in a world of appearances is compromised. All may be mere appearence, as Plato maintained, but there are proper dualisms with which we can navigate reality and common to mutual terms on how to cross the street,what restaurant to meet at, or if the parking spot is large enough for what he drive. "Water Picture" is a reminder that we need to turn our gaze from the reflective surface and and set toward the other side of the hill, where we can join the legacy of the bear who went over the mountain, to see what he could see.

A familiar set of reshuffled notes

Critics without a malleable framework are talking only to themselves, finally. The value of criticism is in how it deepens the reading: an ideal criticism, I think, ought to be the sieve through which the variety is taken in and studied. A criticism that counts should, I think, help re-imagine the world and provide us with a plausible, doable, political feasible way of doing just that. Re-imagining the world requires action to effect the change. Re-description is precisely the problem with the Left in this country, which mistook the on-going circle jerk of language theory as a practical substitute for activism. The wan hope might have been that enough people might hack their way through the many books and monographs and learn, as a matter of habit , that their written and spoken responses to the world they navigate would be tempered so as not to privilege anything according to old hierarchies and that the a fairer existence would result. Literal or not, one needs to gauge the words in a sentence against the world the words are assigned to describe. Language, being a living activity that functions with a mind and consciousness that must adapt consciously to the constantly changing state of Nature, cannot contain meaning that is self-disclosing, absent at least a superficial gauging against the world. Even at the " most simple" levels, a reader constantly goes outside the words themselves to judge their veracity, their usefulness, and hence, interprets the words to come to what sentences mean, in their contexts and their subtler permutations. Interpretation isn't always the circuitous method of the academic, or the specialist: the activity is instinctual, I think, as we use language and change language to accommodate changing requirements and conditions.

Writing after drying out

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 truly 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 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 fictionalize 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.

The best relationship between practice and theory , as regards the arts (and poetry in particular) is when one blends with the other in a seamless fashion. It's a process that begins with the work itself, a reading and rereading of the poem, let us say, and then , after some routine reflection, referencing any number of critical schemes I think might work in bringing what's contained in the stanzas out from under the subterfuge. Seamless is the word I'd like to use, and it applies here although the handy term has diminished impact with overuse;all the same, theories of criticism , for me,are a way of extending the poem into general discourse. Poetry works in many ways, but so does criticism, and a pragmatics of interpretation is the most useful way for me to make a poet's work something other than another useless art object whose maker adhered to someone else's rules. My gripe is a constant one, that each succeeding school of thought on what poets should be doing are too often reductionist and dismissive of what has been done prior. This isn't criticism, it's polemics, contrary to my notion that what really matters in close readings is the attempt to determine whether and why poems work succesfully as a way of quantifying experience and perception in a resonating style.

Courage

A fellow contributor to an internet forum I frequent presented this quote for general discussion

In "Time Out of Mind," Leonard Michaels wrote: "Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds; not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations; and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any more."

My two cents, uncommonly succinct:I agree with the quote to an extent, with the idea that someone with responsibilities and problems should just "man-up" , as the phrase goes, and live up to their end of the bargains they strike. I am taken with Robert Hughes' The Culture of Complaint that cogently described a country where complaining , whining, and victim-hood were taken to be the proper response to one's daily burden. Getting proactive with one's problems and obligations wasn't admirable at all. There are times, though, when there is too much on one's plate--the thinking remains that one should be self-sufficient and handle their affairs without aid, but this is a recipe for disaster, for oneself and those about him. Asking for help when help is required isn't a moral failing.

The other side of it, though, is just as odious; suffering in silence. The Hemingway code of personal stoicism makes for a fine trope filtered through a literature dealing with a male perspective of a post war generation, but one's life isn't a short story with obvious external mechanisms dictating how events and actions lead toward an ironic result. One does need to speak up, voice what it is they find objectionable, correct the record when lies are told by government and cultural elites, we need to critique, we need to debate, we need to keep stay vigilant.

How God Created the World

I heard during a lecture that Thomas Pynchon had written somewhere that God is the original conspiracy theory; I haven't found the source of the quote, but the saying appears in many places around the Internet, and it seems that the sentiment has resonated loudly with quite a few. Whether there is an all powerful Deity really isn't the topic of the following poem, originating, rather, from a frustration of a good number of folks to invoke his name when the conversation, in print, on a monitor, or in person, touches on the intangible, the unanswerable, the unknowable. It's a mystery, it's god's will, it's part of a plan not revealed to us--all these, in variations both subtle and dumb, emerge when the chasm yawns before the assembled.

I understand the reluctance venture forth into things where there is nothing concrete and all else is supposition--it would be a tacit admission that our daily lives are guided by habits of behavior not directed by natural, embedded imperatives and mandates from heaven, but are rather instinctual/species behavior which we conveniently decorate with a language capable of turning our thoughts into fine arts, culture and technology.

Ours would seem to be a species with an alphabet, nothing more, a variation from the gene pool which, in the meantime, could be developing an even more intriguing species to supplant our loud presence on the planet. who wants to think that they are merely passing through , merely in line on the evolutionary chain of happenstance? Invoking god's name would be the fastest way to block out the sun.

Ah well. I say that we have the capacity to think and may as well do so, chasing every loose thread and inconsistency we happen upon. We can't just call the problems of existence acts of Providence and leave it at there. Thinking, discussion, analysis, poking at eternal mysteries are the Acts of Providence each us are the recipient of. To lie down is to deny a miracle, and that can't be good for anyone.

How God Created The World

No god I know
waits for a chat
as he waits
in a garden ripe
with words that
are first in line.

There is no garden
until he desires fruit
rich in the taste
of particular soils,
there will be no desire
until he creates hunger
and the need to sit down,
there will be no table or chair
to put anything
that belongs on them
until he contrives the
things that go there
and makes it all look
like they've been present
for the ages.

There will be no ages
unless he makes things
with tongues, mouths,
tastes of all sorts,
something alive
with a memory of what's good
in this life they discovered along
the way as they experimented
with ways to talk to a god
who seems so busy
thinking things through,
he realizes
nothing will age
unless there are creatures
that die.

The god I know
thinks of big words
and broad strokes,
he's been asleep
since the beginning
time, which he invented,
he will wake up
and create, I think,
the cell phone, on a lark,
and will notice
at once
that his voice mail is full.

The D chases its tail

 Deconstruction, which arises from a tradition of structuralist and post-structuralist practice, seems a more trivial pursuit these days. So much time was spent belaboring such bromides like "every text contains its counter-argument" and "there is nothing outside the text" (to perhaps crudely paraphrase) are not so revolutionary once you realize that you've come to a blind alley if you've followed the bread crumbs these chatty fellows left for the rest of us. Nothing worthwhile was revealed, and clarity, the essence of criticism in its concentration on how literature works succeed or fail as both art and socially valuable objects, is the thing that gets hidden. There comes a time when the critic, the honest critic unafraid to sidestep cant and convenience and willing to interrogate an author's work, has to decide the emphasis a text, a book, takes, and contrast against other contingent forces. The critic, I'd say, needs to transcend those theories that excited him and decide what an author means by something he wrote and whether, on its terms and in more generalized considerations, that piece of writing works as either an aesthetic or a social object, or whether it succeeds or fails at both. Deconstruction was an attempt to demonstrate that all our judgments are lifted from an archive of binary opposed concepts that form our infinite replenished dualisms; one may say yes, fine, very good, that's very interesting, but this is the world we recognize and that we live in nonetheless. It is possible to make statements about this sphere that creates meaning, context, empathy. Deconstruction was a dead end, really. A bad cold took the American literature departments a few decades to shake. Investigating the style and substance of a writer's ideas was no longer a priority, and critics took this to mean that they were taken apart the clocks and radios apart (figuratively speaking)without a worry about rebuilding them. This was liberating at first, of course, but deconstruction, as it was misread in turn, encouraged academics to not even try to parse a writer's novels or poems. I instead think that deconstruction, as a method of taking apart arguments and reducing them to the rumble of disassembled rhetorical devices, is late in the game.

 I would also consider its alleged intent to debunk the notion of totalizing accounts of human experience and reveal the limits of how far we can assert our ability to make statements about human experience in the world through writing, redundant among the spread of critical approaches. It can, at best, be the particular means by which specific individuals come to realize the limits of their own assumptions and from which one may push their thinking harder. Criticism is the sort of writing that already acknowledges some existing takes on various literary approaches. One is compelled to decide which of the ethical/moral/political outlays are useful to frame their arguments to the greater significances of narrative method, which is to say one decides what is useful among the theories they've investigated in bringing new thinking to bear on texts that, one hopes, makes an ostensibly recognizable set of metaphors of an experience something quirky and quizzical. I prefer a subjective response rather than one that adheres to a systematic checklist. The point of having an ongoing discussion of literature, fiction, drama, poetry, isn't to demonstrate one's recollection of their graduate studies, but how one's reading has blended over time and broadened, broadened to the extent that one finds a cohesion of New Criticism, Marxism, Structuralism, existentialism and classicism providing ones with a habit of mind that is flexible and able to articulate value and beauty.  My own thinking about literature is a mix of the approaches I mentioned, though I am loathed to call myself any one thing; an overabundance of one theory that seems to smooth out all problems and contradictions, which appears poised to explain everything, is a tendency that becomes dogma too quickly. In that case, one finds themselves in a sealed box they cannot see beyond. Indeed, which I think is the irony of deconstruction; a tool meant to expose the allegedly arbitrary criteria used for making our language produce meanings turns out to have been a clustering of prejudices that turned a generation of critics into abstruse sloganeers. 

Derrida himself was reticent to discuss deconstruction , after a point, because he thought focusing too long on on what he considered merely as an effective analytical technique would distract from what he considered the longer, larger ongoing project, which was to realize how power is invested within language . He wanted to defuse the power that provides only a limited variety of templates with which to map our impressions and thinking. His skepticism of given discourses was one that he intended to lead us to a harder way of thinking about the words and their trace meanings. The circular and exclusive thinking of religion, the arts, sciences and hardened ideology (which is ossified political philosophy) he brought an exhaustive critiques to seems to have rusted the very tool intended to scrape away the rust. ... wasn't part of the problem that teachers taught students that deconstruction should be their primary or sole form of exegesis, rather than suggesting that it be merely one of a variety of ways to understand a text? 

One of Derrida's concerns was to invert the hierarchies of writing classes and intended to make criticism not subservient to primary literary writing but rather equal to it. All forms of writing were identical to one another since texts don't actually refer to the external world or real experience but instead solely to other readers, in his idea of intertextuality. This concept does all writings on a par with each other. The trend declared that the task of edifying what an author intended was a dead end, which enabled one critic after another to concentrate on establishing the mastery of their theory rather than the novels, the poems, the plays others of us consider as the real object of study.

a poem from Clive James: those who criticize can also do

Critic Clive James has complained that ours is an age where everyone is writing poetry yet no is able to write a poem. A formalist at heart, we can properly assume that he means that very few have the old graces of scansion, rhyme, meter. It would figure that he decided to write a poem of his own to show the rest of the untrained waifs of modernism just how it's done, as he did in The New Yorker with his ode "Monja Blanca". He shows his technique rather well and, surprisingly, this fellow has an ear.

Well, yes, this is quite lovely, and it rhymes in ways that William Espy's robot rhythms could not, which is smoothly, musically, with the poetic descriptions serving an isolated image instead of weighing it down. James is smart, as well, in that he resists what seems to be the overwhelming temptation for many rhymesters to be cute. He is instead lyrical in a manner that is the hardest essence to convey, the description of a l thing, person, that successfully suggests the author's--or narrator's--psychological engagement without casting his subject matter into an unreal and unreadable muddle. Even in what could be considered an imaginative context, James' tone respects the musicality of his form and correctly treats elegance as that state when technique, emotion and style achieve an exquisite balance. It is not one note too many nor to few, not more embellishment too light nor too little.

As a critic James is a polymath with an impressive range of things he discusses with authority, though given the regularity with which he produces essays, columns, blog entries and books, you can't escape the feeling that he has, over time, solidified a number of finely articulated positions on literature, music, the classics, politics, painting, poetry and films, among other subjects, and has been especially artful in the way he can shuffle his positions, cross reference them, draw them up and deploy them at will. This reiteration of his ideas is noticeable especially in his other wise masterful collection Cultural Anxiety. Coming across an idea you've read elsewhere by this author , though, is hardly a bother--James has a style that is at once informal and approachable and yet demonstrates no laziness in thinking. He is an engaging intellectual who I enjoy as he rummages through the subjects he has mastered, bringing his learning to the present tense, bucking conventional wisdom , discussing what of the ideas we've learned remain vital, and which ones need to be taken off life support.

Poetry about Poetry gets poesied

An associate recently tried to persuade me that rhyming is okay and very modern in our time, and suggested that I read the work of the late William Espy. To appeal to what he assumed was my elitist proclivities, he selected this poem

YOU'D BE A POET, BUT YOU HEAR IT'S TOUGH?
You'd be a poet, but you hear it's tough?
No problem. Just be strict about one rule:
No high-flown words, unless your aim is fluff;

The hard thought needs the naked syllable.
For giggles, gauds like pseudoantidis-
establishment fulfill the purpose well;
But when you go for guts, the big words miss;
Trade "pandemonic regions" in for "hell".

…Important poems? Oh…excuse the snort…
Sack scansion, then -- and grammar, sense and rhyme.
They only lie around to spoil the sport --
They're potholes on the road to the sublime.

And poets with important things to say
Don't write Important Poems anyway.


Copyright © 1986 Willard R. Espy

I thought my associate might know my tastes better, but no matter.I'm not crazy about the Espy poem for the usual reason, it rhymes , it clanks, it clicks, you can here the parts move as you read it. And, despite the notion that Espy is a public poet, accessible, readable, "gettable", this remains a less-loathsome example of a loathsome narcissism among poets in general, a poem about poetry. It is ironic that a poet who bucked the tendency of Modern Poetry to be abstract, coded , enigmatic and self referential would choose to exercise their whimsy on his own medium. This habit, whether requiring an extreme hermeneutics or graspable after first read, is an elitism that has done much, I think, to keep potential readers away from the investigating the craft. His readership isn't the Ideal reader, the nonspecialist who potentially is interested in poetry and the stylistic perspective the art might bring on how ideas and experience intermingle, but rather other poets , who, as a class of professional, are not likely to change their ways. We have, in essence, something that's more an inter- office memo or motivational talk to boiler room of smile-and-dial telemarketers. It's a clever, wind up contraption that , in it's own way, forsakes the mission of any poet, regardless of aesthetic preference: to be in the world. This is as much an Ivory Tower as anything more elliptical , diffuse.

It might have something to do that poems like these are the ones that become heavily anthologized or reprinted in various places by editors who are attracted to works that would rather gavotte among it's particulars rather than chance a subject matter a reader would recognize and, in turn, interrogate. The potential reader, wondering if poetry has anything to say to them, picks up a volume and comes across like this, and places the volume down again, thinking that the poets are thumbing their collective nose at those unfortunate enough not to have had good English teachers in high school. It doesn't really matter who writes Poems About Poetry--post-avant poet, School of Quietude mood monger, whimisical rhymesters--it's a bad habit.

Writing in the captain's tower

If Pound's poems work for reasons other than how he wanted them work, fine, that can be explicated interestingly enough with entirely new criteria extraneous to the author's aesthetic/political agenda, but it begs the question, really. It confirms my belief that Pound was talking through his hat most of the time. In this case, based admittedly on my learned dislike of his poetry, I think he gussied up his theories in order to usurp the critical commentary he knew would follow his work: no matter what, all critics had to deal with Pound's flummoxing prose before they could render an assessment, a trick he garnered from Poe, and one deployed by Mailer, a somewhat more successful artist/philosopher/critic (though failed poet).

Eliot had better luck combining the two virtues: The Sacred Wood and some of his other critical assessments have merit as purely critical exercises, self-contained arguments that don't require Eliot's work to illustrate the point. The problem with his criticism was that it was less a system of thought than it was a nice articulation of resentments or one liners that weren't further developed. Eliot, the Royalist, the Anglo-Catholic, the anti-modern Modernist, thought himself too busy to explain himself, and reveals the conservative impatience for inclusiveness; things simply have gotten worse in our culture once alien hordes began infiltrating our borders. It seemed to him so obvious a matter of cause and effect that the relative succinctness of his views, articulated in aesthetics, needn't dwell on what everyone already knows. The criticism would be the equivalent of how he described "The Waste Land", a species of rhythmic grumbling.

It's less about what one can call his "despair" than what his operating premise has in common with the post modern aesthetic: Eliot, the Modernist poet extraordinaire, perceives the world the universe has having any sort of definable center, any unifying moral force formally knowable by faith and good works. There is despair in the works, behind the lines--one responds to them emotionally and intellectually--and the power behind the images, the shimmering surfaces the diminished, de-concretized narrator feels estranged from, comes from a felt presence, a real personality. Eliot , though, turns the despair into a series of ideas, and makes the poetry an argument with the presence day.

There is pervasive sense of everything being utterly strange in the streets, bridges over rivers, strangeness at the beach, and we, it sounds, a heightened sense of voices, media, bombs, headlines competing for the attention of some one who realizes that they're no longer a citizen in a culture where connection to a core set of meanings, codes and authority offers them a security, but are instead consumers, buyers, economic in a corrupt system that only exploits and denudes nature, culture, god.

Eliot conveys the sense of disconnection brilliantly, a modernist by his association with the period, though at heart he was very much a Christian romantic seeking to find again some of the Scripture surety to ease his passage through the world of man and his material things. There has always been this yearning for a redemption of purpose in the vaporous sphere, and much of his work, especially in criticism, argued that the metaphysical aspect could be re-established, recreated, re-imagined (the operative word) through the discipline of artistic craft. Modernists, ultimately, shared many of the same views of postmodernism with regards of the world being an clashing, noisy mess of competing, unlinked signifiers, but post modernism has given up the fight of trying to place meaning in the world, and also the idea that the world can be changed for the better. Modernists , as I take them in their shared practice and aesthetic proclamations, are all romantics, though their the angle and color of their stripes may vary. Romanticism, in fact, is an early kind of modernism: the short of it is that there is a final faith in the individual to deign the design of the world, and in turn change its shape by use of his imagination .

Eliot's poems, as well, stand up well enough with out his criticism to contextualize them for a reader who might other wise resist their surface allure. The language in both genres is clear and vivid to their respective purposes. Pound, again, to my maybe tin-ear, really sounded, in his verse, like he were trying to live up to the bright-ideas his theories contained: The Cantos sound desperate in his desire to be a genius.

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.