Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Poets Gag on their Own Gore


I mean no disrespect, but most of the poets who are featured in the Slate each Tuesday sound as though they are waking up from a druggy, dreamless sleep, are bound and gagged with old socks crammed in their mouths and secreted away in a trunk kept in the storage space under the stairs, or have recently been on the receiving end of electroshock therapy. Add your own sour description. But the problem is that the good poet's habit of destroying a good piece of work with an indifferent , retarded, and emotionally stunted performance is hardly isolated; one can nearly drive a truck over the dense layering of constant droning that originates with the flaccid readings the ill-spoken bards hand us. It is as inviting as asphalt rash.

The bottom line is that few poets in that forum sound happy to be doing the reading; it sounds as if they're grumbling that they have to work , for chrissakes, and life is not fair and things are rotten, and for the money they receive, these otherwise honorable scribes hand us the slowest, driest, least-contaminated-by-joy recital they can devise in their vengeful little heads.This does not encourage me to buy their books. It makes me think that poetry is something of a self-serious sham when it's read in these portentous, un-inflected ways.

Let's put some life in these readings, OK. If one lacks the pulse sufficient enough to make these poems sound interesting, they might do themselves and the readership and decline the offer to record their voice. A bad performance embarrasses everyone.

Someone I was talking to in a net forum about this situation recommended that I observe HBO's "Def Poetry Jam", where writing and performance are more obvious than one get elsewhere on pay-TV.I agree that there are some amazing writer/performers on that show, but it often goes too far in the other direction.

Every word has to be absolutely per-formative, every gesture has to be over-sized, large, exaggerated beyond need, every line has to be declaimed as if it were the neutron bomb of punchlines, and just about every voice of every reader has to follow the same rhythmic pitch, the same inexplicable accelerations and slowing downs, the same beat-box repetition's of vowels that destroy an idea rather than reinforce it.

It's a monotony of content and presentation that makes the weekly line up seem nearly as form-fitted as the mainstream, academic, white-bread poets that are very easy to make fun of. It's something of an old joke straight from Lil Abner, where all the kids want to be nonconformists just like everybody else.

I would be very interested if HBO gave Quincy Troupe a deal where he could produce and select the talent, as he has for the last twelve years in La Jolla with his brilliantly arranged series Artists at the Cutting Edge. Troupe knows that quality needs to be matched with quality, and the poets and writers he's brought to San Diego would be an example for the producers of Def Poetry Jam as a means of livening up-their mix: Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, Tony Morrison, Charles Wright, Bei Doa, Jerome Rothenberg, Amiri Baraka, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace and scores of others, of many races, creeds, colors and politics , have all read in this series. Most, also, were able performers of their own material, and it is from these writers , scribes who've not only discovered their voice in their work but also a way in which to verbally dramatize it, who are fit and diverse models for those who imagine themselves ready to move beyond the rhythms and clicks that comes through their head sets.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Hot Night


I was trying to read Harold Bloom's brief little book The Art of Reading Poetry last night with every window open and two fans blowing in a wan hope of staying cool. All to little use, for as I read onward about Falstaff's rotund grasp of ambiguity and
the how the word "ruin" is derived from the Latin, I stuck to the sheets. Neighbors had the right idea, to sit on their porches, have cocktails , and chatter away on a clouded-over night sky. It was all I could do to finish the last page I was reading before I bent down the corner and set Bloom aside. It was a night when no one felt or sounded smart; the heat makes you stupid and grubby and very vain in the face of
other people's affairs. My mood was to toss an old shoe at the folks next door, but I didn't, I restrained myself, half because I was too lazy with heat to rise and exert effort,half because I am too old to think I could win a fight. Not in this town. Rather than squabble, I plugged in my amp, put my harmonica to the window and blasted a ten minute solo across the shared back yard, blues trills and riffs played in a fantasy of Hendrix flexing his whammy bar on "Voodoo Chile (slight return)". The clouds did not clear, the moon did not show, the heat only lingered.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Paris Pops The Weasel


Slate's pop music writer Jody Rosen makes a case for Paris Hilton potentially amounting to being something more than a smirking Barbie Doll with her foray into pop divahood. You can already feel the incredulity grabbing the back of your neck, right? Paris Hilton's attempt to become a pop diva or to otherwise break into the pop music game is fraught with peril and doomed to failure. Not grand, flaming failure, but ignoble, quickly forgotten failure, like Tim Leary's attempts to become a stand up comic. It's one thing to view Madonna these days, remembering when she was making her name as a musical performer, and view her now as spent, irrelevant, the sort of used up Professional Celebrity who used to populate games shows like Beat the Clock or What's My Line? We can still trace her career back to when she was
doing something innovative and marginally interesting, just as the curious can actually discover a list of films that Kitty Carlyle or Orson Bean had made when they were working actors. There is some dignity in their station as Has Beens. Paris Hilton, though, is a Never Been, foisted upon the world Famous and Useless from the start, a brightly colored box, full of air. She'll try her hand at various show biz niches--movies, reality shows, now music--and there will be core of
pundits who'll hyperventilate with superlatives about her emerging force, but no one will buy it beyond the next commercial. History is a Big Broom, ruthlessly applied to the likes of Paris Hilton. She can sit next to Dagmar when she ascends to Celebrity Heaven.

Friday, July 21, 2006

Madonna: reinvented beyond irrelevance


There's an interesting piece in Salon by a writer who wonders in print whether going to see Madonna in concert, "lithe" at age 47, indicates that she, the writer, is turning into an old fogie in her early thirties. The horror of turning into your parents.

Madonna, lithe or not at 47, was musically forgettable for her entire career, but she is to be admired for the sheer genius of her presentation.At 47, she reinvents herself beyond irrelevance, and is poised at becoming something like her generation's Charo or Joey Heatherton.

Nominally talented as dancer and singer, there is nothing to stop Madonna from being consigned to the feather lined cage for Professional Celebrities; being famous will Madonna's trade, not music, not lyrics, not tacky stage productions or spotty albums. It's been said often enough that she was greatest work of art--nothing new there, just ask David Bowie--but there doesn't seem to be anything to stop her from becoming a well paid Freakish Has Been as she ages further and "the edge" she seeks to keep finally and irrefutable eludes her for good.

Sad to say, but there are tales that she plans another to-do on the forthcoming MTV Music Awards where she'll again kiss a much younger woman singer. At this rate she might as well start kissing babies and run for office. That's where her true talents lie; the ability to be many things to many people and stand, finally, for nothing at all.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

I was asked this and then I wrote all this before sunrise


Isn't "deconstruction" an attempt to apply scientific principles to the analysis of language and what it implies? There is a lot of science - envy among the critics in the arts and humanities, and they've seemed to latched on to the extrapolated language of anthropology and linguistics in order to keep their jobs: there is an effort, in the mission of literature departments, to continue to prove that there is stuff of quantifiable worth to be extracted from the study of novels and poems, and that they in some way adding to body of knowledge.

Somewhere, so far as the criticism has gone in the last half of the century, the link was made with other discourses, which made much of literary study something of a gawky laughing stock: not historians, not scientists, not psychologists, not philosophers, the gamiest of theory wonks could prate on and onward on fields not his own, keeping the tenuous connection between their specialty, fictional accounts of experience, and real time bathos and tragedy obscured with an ever deepening reservoir of jargonized murk.

The result, of course, is an abandonment of criticism and theory's original mission to seek clarity, comprehension. Among the critics who are incapable of giving serviceable interpretations of books they reputedly teach, too many have produced a feeling that literary is as unapproachable to the non specialist as would a technical article in a medical journal.

The post modern critic too often becomes the things they are nominally opposed to: they become priesthood, the place where power is located! Whether Ginsberg or Ashbery are post modernists skirts this issue, not uncommon here; it's more fruitful to trace post modern poetry's influences. Ginsberg is a romantic, sure, but he was one in the 20th century, confronted with mass-media, A bombs, televised unpopular wars, the whole 60s shot, and his response to these accelerated times had to push the hackneyed envelope.
If he trusted his sensibilities to make sense of the world, apart from the mind of God guiding him (the central conceit of the Romantic Movement and its attendant schisms), Ginsberg had to expand his poetic line, blur crucial distinctions about well-rendered introspection, and essentially clear the field for further innovation.

Ashbery, in turn, developed a secret language, a self-addressing voice that managed not reveal much of the soul of the poet, but did much to reveal the writer's mind engaged with the world, musing in elegiac lines of things, their places in the scheme, their displacements by other things--this is the Supreme Fiction of Wallace Stevens, and it sought to bring harmony to a sphere of unknowable phenomenon.

Both Ginsberg and Ashbery, coming from Romanticism and moving straight ahead into the Modernists' obsession with inventing new forms from old to gain new ideas about a world that won't yield itself to the individual mind, quite cannily opened the territory for the poets who would be called post-modern poets, wh0 would be, I think, anyone from Ron Silliman, Rae Armentrout or Bob Perelman of the Language school, to the Nuyorican poets, the slam movement, rap and hip hop, and even the largely odious New Formalist group.

Post modernism, it appears, comes in as many stripes and hues and apologies as Romanticism, Modernism, or even classicism, and there is no hard rule that states that one cannot be a post modern Romantic. It's a reasonable distinction.

Though a writer can bring all their resources to bear when they write, a certified grounding in philosophy isn't required to write fiction and poetry.

The learning doesn't hurt the work if the writer is possessed of demonstrable inspiration, or genius, if you will, but what is essentially an act of the imagination is not required to furnish it's own critical apparatus. DeLillo, for example, can parse his own imagery and subject them to a cold analytical eye, and creating a haunting poetry about the signifiers fading resonance in a reality that never stops blinking, but his genius is rare. John Barth is very clever, some times brilliant in his deployment of knowing literary conceits in his work, best, I think, in the Floating Opera, End of the Road and The Sot Weed Factor, and it can also be said, though, that despite the "special learning" to attain the rarified information that was needed to construct these novels, Barth wrote the works to operate as novels, as entertainments, first before all, not as formal arguments against prior literary movements.

The process is as instinctual as it is deliberate, I think, as is good criticism, which has an obligation to interpret the books in an activity separate from the novel. Unbelievable to some lit-critters anxious to narrow the range of subject options , not everything that's written, published and which finds an audience it services for either entertainment or instruction can be discussed with the same parsing frameworks.

The artist DOESN'T choose his influences, rather, he finds himself chosen by them.

Too flat an absolute a statement to be useful here: Bloom's refinement of a dialectical model to describe, in sweeping, how influence forms new writing is spectacular, but he over reaches, and over states his case with an insistence that influences choose the writer rather than the other way around. This is a deconstructive reversal that's cuter than it is precise. It's half the tale.

Better to have it half and half: the writer certainly exercises choice so far as who they opt to read through their lifetime, and makes judgments based on their reading as to who matters more than others in the forming of an idiosyncratic aesthetic. The writer, as reader, is not a passive agent here.

A writer "being chosen" by their influences makes more sense, I think, when he place the statement at the moment when the writer is actually writing, when inspiration, imagination, and whatever other resources a writer has at their behest combine, churn, swirl, and combine in ways during the drafting that could result in interesting, original work.

Process is a word that's horribly abused and bled of meaning these days, but here it's appropriate. Creative process is a strange ritual unique to each writer, an idiosyncratic set of habits that are the basis of the discipline needed for a writer to actually stay seated long enough to produce and bring the work through all stages.

It's the mysterious clutch of protocols that unleash the influences into the creative roil, and it's here, during these churning, erupting, fever pitched sessions where a writer looses the ability to control the influences about them, large and small, whether from their personal reading, or from the larger culture: it's here where the writer is literally "chosen" by the influences and styles about them and literally have their style defined and guided. So it seems to me, anyway. For the force of the unconscious in the work, of course: memories emerge, scenarios spontaneously form, and arcs are drafted and written out to link disparate sketches on a narrative spine that rapidly becomes a fleshed-out work.

Of course.

But to get to the point where writing actually commences, I believe, begins with some conscious choices the writer makes in the world that's given to them: deciding what has value among the given--whatever we mean by that-- constitutes choice. What happens beyond that is what becomes problematic, and subject to niggling disagreement. But conscious human agency is not

How could the beliefs be useful if they weren't true? I could have many false beliefs that are coherent, but of what use would they be?
The test of any theory is in how it works, and the gauge for how it works is in whether it's employment is of observable benefit to others, i.e., does it give some one and their community a coherent and workable structure to live life, to promote what would locally be defined as the Greater Good, and likewise provide a means for helping a community absorb change, how however and why ever it happens. The test of whether a theory is useful, if I remember my James, is whether such a methodology leads one to a truth that's germane in situ.

The usefulness of a theory is judged by how it side steps the confounding and conflating "proofs" of what constitutes Truth, with the big "t", and instead enables one to find something that works in mending the immediate situation.
No one seems to want to deal with Lost in the Funhouse, which, casting an eye over this thread, I find ironic.
Speaking for myself, Lost in the Funhouse is nicely written gripe in which Barth, flowing of pen, voices a buried resentment against his own reading habits, a collection that's kind of dull: he voices the complaint against the dreary optimism of modernism, the same dull complaints, in fact, and yet wishes that had been him, rather than Joyce or Faulkner at the key moments of break-through novel writing: a Bloomian moment with his career, with his writing desperately bloated books, his "literature of exhaustion" to demonstrate how much more radical he would have been had he the power to intervene in recent literary history, and also a classic example of the School of Resentment.

Barth, I think, resents his teachers, or at least writes like he does. His work, though important in the postmodern genre, is among the dullest. Manuals for changing light bulbs could exact more excitement. The Floating Opera, though, is a masterpiece: brief, funny, unusual, unselfconscious in it's re-formation of the novel.






Allen Ginsberg, speaking of a conversation he had with his mentor William Carlos Williams, gave a definition of Modernist perception as being that "...the thing itself is its own adequate symbol..." Further, there is the strong suggestion that there is no God in this scheme, that the "thing" being perceived did not require an ideal type, or any other kind of Ideal superstructure in order to exist, to be. Ginsberg, and later poet/critic Jerome Rothenberg, gave a suggestion that this was Western writing's back-door approach toward more open structures, to decidedly unsystematized philosophies, witnessed in the Beat flirtations with Zen. This brings us knocking at the door of an extended Modernist approach--a style in which avant-garde procedure became an ironic protocol to literary writing--that became, in some critical finessing, post modernism.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Superficial


It's a little absurd for a man in his mid fifties to be complaining about the mediocrity of a super hero movie, but vanity forces me to speak up; Superman Returns is occasionally fine and well tuned, but it drags in story and it is dragged out in plot. Brandon Routh does a decent Christopher Reeves impersonation as the new Superman/Clark Kent, and Kate Botsworth is generally spiky as a petulant, pissed off Lois Lane, but the love interest between them is as uninteresting as it always has been. Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor seems like he's having fun being bemusedly evil and vile, but there is not a good line or monologue to walk away with. The writers were cheap with regards to memorable dialogue. Director Bryan Singer just can't keep this undecided, leaden enterprise afloat. Why does the world need a Superman with an identity crisis? My own are bad enough to live with.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Philip Schultz punches you in the chest

Sometimes the ever quizzical Slate Poetry Editor Robert Pinsky will publish a weekly poem that hits you like, well, a fist in the chest. Read the poem The One Truth and see the aptness of the image.What The One Truth gets across without hesitation or ambiguity is that life for the lot of us is a pulverizing grind of bad luck, heartache, debt and daily tragedy. A much too general view, one might protest, but poet Philip Schultz is one of those few poets who can align the sordid details and give you a jolt, a shock of recognition that is neither sensational nor sentimental.

This is the sort of poem the over rated Charles Bukowski couldn't write precisely because he gloried in his tales of awful jobs, alcoholism and loserhood; poverty and despair were chic badges of honor and proof of some corporate-defined notion of "street cred" where the hero, Bukowski, sticks it to the Man regardless of consequence. There's no honor in Schultz's narration, though. The life he writes of here, one that has ended, reveals that
all the matters the poem outlines hurt, they crush you, they break your heart and that there is nothing ennobling about the pain. These are conditions Hemingway would wither under, and that's the power of the poem, that rare thing Schultz has accomplished; he's moved discreetly beyond the writer's vanity to write about working people and instead shows you what it is, an ongoing tragedy that ceases only when breathing ceases.What works is the clicking, clacking, drumming rat-a-tat-tat of the cadence, each illustration of the biography giving a sharp backward glance at each infamy the poor man has gone through and tried to rise above:

After dreaming of radiant thrones
for sixty years, praying to a god
he never loved for strength, for mercy,
after cocking his thumbs
in the pockets of his immigrant schemes,
while he parked cars during the day
and drove a taxi all night,
after one baby was born dead,
and he carved the living one's name
in windshield snow in the blizzard of 1945,
after scrubbing piss, blood
and vomit off factory floors
from midnight to dawn,
then filling trays with peanuts,
candy and cigarettes
in his vending machines all day,
his breath a wheezing suck
and bellowing gasp
in the fist of his chest,
after washing his face, armpits
and balls in cold back rooms,
hurrying between his hunger
for glory and his fear
of leaving nothing but debt


A man in pursuit of the great promise of being reward for hard work and sacrifice, dreams of glowing golden thrones and the transcendent power they represent being slammed up against one disaster after another, one demeaning job after another, one failing limb and sense after another. This is the immigrant tale that is not often told nor talked about in our collective folk wisdom about American opportunity.

To paraphrase Al Pacino's lawyer/Devil character John Milton in the
under rated film The Devil's Advocate
life on earth is "God's private gag reel", an aspect underscored by Schultz's conclusion,

is this what failure is,
to end where he began,
no one but a deaf dumb God
to welcome him back,


a punched up version of the Higher Power being
neither wise nor all powerful but rather closer to being a big, dumb kid with a stick torturing a harried menagerie of small creatures he's captured in shoe boxes of varying size. Schultz poses an argument with God and challenges an assortment of religious as to our assignations on the planet, about what is we're supposed to do
while we wait for revelation, signs, symbols of some sort of the meaning of our time on earth while we await death and eventual fulfillment.

his fists pounding at the gate,
is this the one truth,
to lie in a black pit
at the bottom of himself,
without enough breath
to say goodbye
or ask for forgiveness?


The final insult, the punchline, the cruelest stroke is that the man is not allowed even a glimpse of the radiant thrones he imagined his entire life, the one notion that empowered him through his pains and gather woe. The lights are out, the gates are locked, the occupants are asleep, dead, or have moved elsewhere, and he expires, spent, too late to make amends or make his peace. One needs to thank Schultz for his restraint in bringing this tragedy to light; the impulse to lard up a subject like this with witless abstraction, dripping self-pitying and metaphors that don't match either mood or subject matter--jazz musicians without sheet music, one could say--was a great temptation to resist. I am very glad he did and stuck to his craft as an effective writer.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Syd Barrett: shine on

Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd and probable acid casualty, died this past week, age 60. Although his tenure with the band was brief, very brief, it's a legacy that cannot be dismissed,nor one that we can afford to forget. Syd Barrett did one thing very brilliantly in his musical career, which was co-founding Pink Floyd and being the central creative for their debut album, The Piper at the Gate of Dawn. Usually someone who starts off bright star and budding genius who flames out early is consigned to the ain't-it-a-shame file and only recalled in diminishing rounds of generational recollection, but Barrett's name has remained constant in discussions of Pink Floyd's career in the years since his deterioration and departure from the band. Although Roger Waters, Gilmour et al found their own voice and peculiar sense of combining experimentation with mainstream expectation, Barrett's influence on the unit was never transcended, forgotten or obscured; it's more like the ground breaking work Barrett did in the short time at the band's start was rather refined, expanded, nuanced and tweaked in subtle, often sublimely achieved ways. Although it doubtlessly gores Roger Waters' ego to confront this, but the Barrett imprint on Pink Floyd was never erased. Water's claim to greatness is that he had taken Barrett's diffuse template and personalized it into a cryptic, caustic world view, just as the band maintained the blurred eclecticism and make music that was individually achieved yet contiguous with Barrett's briefly realized genius. Barrett may have been a one short wonder, but the bullet he fired went far and pierced many layers of armored conservative sensibility with regards to music. His achievement for such a short productive time casts a longer shadow than a few dozen others who've had decades to make music.

Wednesday, July 5, 2006

The Death of the Critic




A point among many is that postmodern writing has been around long enough -- since after WW ll, I believe-- for a useful literary criteria to arise around it. The re-making and the re-re-making of those values are generally extensions, elaborations or, more radically, severe disagreements with standards that formed around a work while in nascent form. Modernism, as an aesthetic movement, among scads of others in history, had it's propagandists in it's early time, critics whose views remain bed rock, the base from which reformations are made. Postmodern criticism went wrong when the discipline mistook itself for philosophers, or linguists, or cultural anthropologists. The result of this detour has been a mess of unreadable prose whose authors aim to disguise the fact that they've nothing to say. I am for postmodern literature, but I am aghast at postmodern literary criticism. Now, I think, is the time to convene a new project, a better way of dealing with the huge body of work by an interesting population of writers. It's time for a re-making, and re-re-making after that. Every man ,or woman, a critic, fine, but 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.

Line Breaks


There came a question during one of those distracting and always fun bull sessions about matters a particular clatch has a passing knowledge of as to whether contemporary poets are more interested in the eccentricities of the page appearence rather conveying a discernable message. A wide open topic, choice for PBS talk radio shows where a host tosses out one broad thesis after another, letting the dogs sniff it out and tear it apart. Among my group, the wear and tear on the intellect was a minor concern; this wasn't lifting weights. The gentleman who posed the question wasn't a reader of poetry, at least not for pleasure; it was a field he perused so he can gather examples of lexical sin against an enemy he's constructed. Some folks just can't have enough strawmen in their lives. My argument didn't satify his yearning for an admission of elitism on my part, but it did me good to form some thoughts about my general attitude toward poetry. Good writing is what I needed to be engaged, I said at last, but the problem was really in the expansion of what "good writing" is. It's not a template applicable in all circumstances, without change. There are infinite variations on a common ground.

The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but more because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of any real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliche choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop.



In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many , many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled Avant Gard has completely overtaken the conversation.

All good poets must be concerned with language,I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.

The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us.

This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in nonsequitors , fragments,

cliches, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.

More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.

I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of Avant Gard, one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as their is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land .

Monday, July 3, 2006

Dylan's voice finds him



I am , for the moment at least, sated with all things Dylan, and hope that my fellow Dylan obsessives feel likewise gorged. I'm on a strict diet of Bud Powell and cool-period Miles Davis. There is little new information in the Scorsese assembled documentary, but there is plenty of rare footage to feast on, all of which gives us a way of studying the history of Dylan's vocal affectations; one might say that he film is Biography of a Bad Singing Voice. Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Irish laborers, blues groaner, gospel exciter, drugged out whiner. Of themselves, the qualities are slurred and nasal, harsh and authentic, as it were, to the degree of being nearly unlistenable. His rendition of "Man of Constant Sorrow" from an old TV clip wasn't at all pleasant no matter how I try to approach the sequence.

Yet there are wonderful transformations with that voice, when he began writing his own material, his own lyrics. Vowel and voice met and a sound was made, dramatic, effective, beautiful in a new way. His performance of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" at the Newport Folk Festival was riveting, vocally masterful. Nasal, howling, pinched, but asserted, shaped, honed. This wonderful song couldn't have been performed any more effectively with a so called "better voice". The prettier voice would only decenter a sentiment from whatever anecdotal grit that would have the splintered hint of truth and make into an exotic backdrop for professionally trained
posers for whom emotion is not a gauge of connection with the world but instead a sickness, something to be endured in alluring, self-loathing poses.
I would say that Dylan is an especially bad singer, but I would also insist that he is an absolutely brilliant vocalist. Joan Baez seemed to be more about a pure, high note flirting sound rather than the rattle and cough of voice finding pitch and cadence through scar tissue; this isn't to say that she was insincere, only that she sounded studied. She was more sincere than Dylan was, I'm sure, but Dylan was the better actor, the genius poser, the seamless liar, the creator of a personal mythology you couldn't tear yourself from.

No one could dramatize a lyric like he could.What he does with a lyric is something other than render cozy rhymes against assuring melodies as sweetly as possible.
There is a point in his career, when he eased off topical songs and moved toward more expressive, metaphorical, "poetic" lyrics that his voice became something wholly new in pop music. It's not far off to maintain that what Dylan did vocally between Another Side of Bob Dylan up through John Wesley Harding literally forced us to reconsider what "good" singing was really was. It was Dylan more than anyone else in pop music history who gave license to the singers-of-limited means to take the microphone and create an emotional experience with vocal qualities that are less than perfect. That is fitting for songs that dealt squarely with less than perfect realities, and this an achievement no less profound than any other Dylan has wrought in folk, rock and pop music.


The most inept rendition of a Dylan song was a cover of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window" by the Trade Winds. They had a previous song that did placed briefly on the charts, "New York's A Lonely Town (When Your the Only Surfer Boy Around)" which,in itself, was a wonderful Beach Boys knock off, moderately chunky guitar chords, sweet harmonies, Phil Spector wall-of-sound production. It sounded big, empty, and over stated. Their Dylan cover was likewise overstated, overproduced, but it was merely loud and bludgeoning, not overwhelming like you imagine rock and roll being. The worst part of it all was the lead singer, sweet and melodic on the surfer song, now attempting an angry folk-rock snarl Ala Barry McGuire. It didn't work, 'though I wouldn't have been surprised if it had turned up on Roger Corman soundtrack.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Dog Story, Not a True Story

"You need to get some other opinions about your choice of dog" was what Rachel said to me," cuz that
cur you got on the end of that leash is ugly as a serving chipped beef and gravy."

"Don't be ragging on my mutt" I said. I hunched over my desk and typed a few words . The words "goddamned it all to hell" appeared on the spread sheet I was working on. Rachel dropped a file on my desk and looked at what I'd written on the monitor.
She snorted a farting laugh through her nostrils. Syquantcro, a tech seated at desk across the room, was on the phone and had to swallow a burst of laughter when he heard Rachel's nasal rattling noise. The she hit in the back of the head.

"Lose the dog or you get no more Sausage Helper".

I glared at her and typed "Great god in the merciful heavens goddamnit it all to hell."

A lightning bolt powered through the window and struck the Syquantrco, who dropped his phone as he sat upright , starting to fume. He was on the office floor, twitching madly, reaching for his cell phone.

Rachel discovered snakes in her top desk drawer, which made her scream. The scream
seemed to cause the store room door behind her to open, from which a giant squid tentacle reached out and wrapped it's slimed, barnacled
length around her waist and then pulled her back through the door.

Outside the sky had gone dark, there were screams in the street, car horns blared, tires screeched, sirens sounded, planes fell out of the sky, and Godzilla's gilled silhouette walked past our tenth story office windows. Ugly lizard, I thought.

Then my phone rang.

"Jackster here" I said.
"Dude, this is God. How am I doin' in yer regard?"
"Whoa. Who is this?"
"God, bro. Whatcha think of the show? Damning it all to hell, I mean, like you asked."
"It's boss, boss. The city is falling apart like a cheap madras shirt."
"Excelllllllennnnttttt" said God, his voice drifting off into a murmur of bliss. After a second, he said
"Yo, Jackster, open your top drawer."
I interrupted my observance of watching Godzilla
mate with a ninth floor office building window across the street and slid the top drawer open.
In there was a paper plate with what looked like
a two old serving of chipped beef on toast.
"What the holy gazebo is that" I said.
God paused, and then offered "Bro, it's time to get another dog..."

Monday, June 19, 2006

X Men 3

XMen lll was a such an uninspired dud that it makes me ashamed to have ever claimed the status a comic book fan boy. The loss of Brian Singer as the director has taken an obvious toll, and the sympathies we've built up over the competing angst of the good guys versus what is really the race hatred of the evil mutants, led by the
coyly nefarious Magneto, just becomes harsh nastiness. There are cool effects, to be sure, especially Magneto's twister-inspired conversion of the San Francisco Bay Bridge into a walkway for his army to Alcatraz, but one expects a cool scene or two in dud movies. We shall depart here , forgoing further discussion. It is anti-climatic bore.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Ted at Fifteen


I still cringe when I remember being a barely hatched fifteen year old trying to write wonderfully complex and baffling rhymes just like Bob Dylan did, not understanding a single word I'd bothered to pass along to paper yet certain, somehow, someway, that that the abstruse (read incoherent) lines of mine had worth , value, and trans formative power. The task, for Ted At Fifteen, was to change the way the people in the world saw the world and help all the lonely people to straighten their perceptions , their own houses and from there create a new, better world based on sharing, caring, hugs, good intentions, and truth.

I was a serious, silly kid, half deaf with a hearing aid in both ears, sullen ,serious, humorless, very naive, obsessed with great issues and girls, and having no idea of how to solve the multiple crisis’s that spoiled the planet, and having no idea of what to do with a girl if one ever fancied hanging around me. Oh, to be fifteen again, Dylan posters, a room reeking of incense, Moody Blues albums blaring (when I was contemplative and scratching my lower lip with a pen \whose tip I turned into a tooth-marked nub), or Mountain , when what remained of my fascination with WW2 movies turned to distorted electric guitar caterwauling. I had yet to develop a middle ground, a sense of practical action. That was something that came , alas, with age, something I lacked. No matter how I scowled or grimaced, everything amounted to a sulking and moping. My expressed cynicism was sarcasm on a bad night, my irony was a mere mocking of adult phrases by repeating them in contorted voices, my art, my poetry, was deep as any indelible ink stain you cared to stare into. Precious, pretentious, naive, that's what I really knew about myself under the subterfuge of hip reference and gesture.

I was a fraud. My harmonica playing gave people the blues, my poetry made other people's fingernails dirty from head scratching. The poems sucked royal, you understand, a deadpan imitation of Dylan and Jack Kerouac's worst habits, the sort of prematurely varicose verse that revealed that the serious lad who hunched over his desk writing these bits in Quixotic longhand had not been tested in unprotected circumstance, which is to say that I had no experience except for feeling awkward and taking a dump (although I don't remember any of that, hence there never being a poem about it in my large and uneven oeuvre.Anyway, I grew out of imitating the uneven efforts of Dylan, Kerouac and finally came up with my own distinct style of uneven work. That much I will say about my work; when I am bad, the results are distinctly mine. No one sounds quite like me, but it is fairly obvious that I had to spend a good number of years imitating a number of influences before my own voice emerged from the mimicking of other writer's cadences. So thank you Dylan, Kerouac, Mailer, Lester Bangs, Hemingway, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, thank you for the inspiration and helping become the confusing morass of uniquity that is my convoluted state. I am one among many who are afflicted with that minor narcissism of lovng to hear myself write.

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

ANN COULTER IS A SNARL ON A STICK!!



Ann Coulter is not a fan of free speech. the way she obsessively and pathologically typifies any and all who disagree with her as "traitors" , ie, all registered Democrats, makes it clear that her preferred method of resolving debates would be mass arrests, Stalinist show trials, and public executions.    This, I believe, is her deepest, most fervent desire. For a self-proclaimed "Constitutional lawyer", she seems constitutionally incapable of addressing her opponent's arguments rather than their character and motives. The fact that Cindy Sheehan and the 9/11 widows she excoriates in her new book have substantial and powerful arguments besides their moral authority as victims is a matter Coulter doesn't bother with; it's too late to make a case for the righteousness of the Iraqi War, and it's obvious to everyone that the Bush White House has squandered through unrelieved incompetence and arrogance whatever moral pretext they might have had in the fight against terrorism.Poor, poor Coulter has hitched her dingy to this sinking ship, and she is too much of an unblinking sociopath to admit that she made a very bad choice and cut her loses. She has exhausted her arguments and becomes the pundit's version of an old rock band touring with creaky renditions of yesterday's hits; liberals are bad, liberals are evil, liberals are godless. The especially unChristian rantings of Ann Coulter this time out no longer sound provocative, nor create fruitful debate, or force anyone one of us to interrogate our own beliefs, as good debate ought to. Her new book and her latest rounds of distracting ad hominem is much the same as hearing the news that the news that the Rolling Stones are touring and have a new record out; you wonder out loud who among the many you meet in the world still give a rat's ass what kind of noise this band of gnarled geezers makes. Oh hum, okay, fine, what else is on? Ditto for the latest outbreak of Coulter's crone-ish cynicism. That Coulter sticks to Ann sticks to CHENEY/ROVE talking points instead of sussing through the problematic nature of policy and the ambiguities inherent in trying to manage a roster of projects, and her inability to think beyond ideological purity, ala William Buckley or George Will, makes her views into harangues and rants, shrill forms of posturing. She ratchets up the volume as the moral authority of the Bush White House erodes and Republicans are continually mired in corruption and incompetence. Other conservatives have been smart enough, wise enough to distance themselves from the Iraq war rationale, concluding that it was a mistake, a horrible, tragic, moronic mistake. But not Ann; rather than rethink her position as a competent analyst would, she avoids talking about the White elephant in the room and continues to rail against liberals, apropos of nothing, with the same sarcasm and condemnations she was using six years ago. Her flustered, unblinking hissing fit on the Today show against Matt Lauer, who questioned her intentions in the way she addressed the 9/11 widows, shows America the image whose own fingernails are barely keeping their tentative grip on rationality. All these liberals continue to mock her and thwart her plans to make America pure and chaste, and all the effort has caused both her body and her wardrobe to loss heft. Why, those short, short skirts barely cover those bird legs, with their bony knees and those thighs that ripple with the loose flesh of someone who has lost too much weight too quickly. But no faster than the rate her credibility has waned to such substratum levels that only low-rent Machivelles find her appealing. Damn those liberals, damn those mothers who've lost sons and daughters in fruitless combat, damn those who take their right of dissent and redress at face value. Traitors, traitors all!!!

Thursday, June 1, 2006

The DaVinci Snore


There are critics and Catholics plenty enough blogging about the blasphemy and historical errors that glare in Ron Howard's film adaptation of The DaVinci Code, and I won't reiterate them here. The subject of long standing conspiracies concerning a secret Catholic society's efforts to conceal the true nature of Christ on earth has become a bore as well as cottage industry in publishing, and all I can say to that it's not likely to spur an interest in Renaissance Studies or an examination in core Christian virtues. We are in love with our distractions and special effects, and a mass audience such that that author Dan Brown has reached prefers to be lied to in the name of entertainment rather than grasp a more personal truth from the glibly mentioned philosophies and attempt a better, less consumptive life as a result. Entertainment is fine, of course, but we are being crushed by our banality. The disturbing thing about The DaVinci Code isn't the blasphemy, the errant reading of Catholic history, or even the disrespect it shows towards the Church, but simply that it's a bad movie, a dull movie, a ham-fistedly constructed movie. It's not thrilling, scary, provocative, alluring. For all the racing around, the murders, the frantic scurrying about European cities and mountain ranges, the film is static, and very, very talky, with the experts and priests talking very, very fast to outline the convolutions of this knotted plot. Director Ron Howard's usual graces--pacing, narrative construction, tight editing--
are absent here, and can assume from his absence from the talk show circuit to plug the film that he wanted a safe distance between his name and the mess the DaVinci Code movie turned out to be. A New York Times full page ad last week for the film last week featured star Tom Hanks' name in banner print over the title. One would note the lack of critical blurbs. Under the title , in very small print, were the rest of the credits, and last of all, very tiny, almost invisible,
we find the words "Directed by Ron Howard". It's doubtful Howard's lone and diminutive mention in the ad is due to modesty.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

The envy of the dead

In one of his essays, Edgar Allen Poe summarizes one the essential elements of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with "the memory from before birth", a slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place and there was nothing of the distortions or crass money, family, or religion to make us nervous, devious, only half alive (if "alive" at all). The upshot of his baroque hypothesizing was, to be sure , our constant and at times overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stressless state, a return to the womb, perhaps; in any event, his pinings were a desire for sleep from which one needn't wake up from, death in other words.

Following suit are Poe's peculiar interest in things decadent and decaying, those thin , reedy and tubercular characters of diseased gentry and errant aristocratic stock who hang on to the waking life by a mere thread, effete and defeated and gracefully blended into the material realm, waiting for gravity to take its toll and to become themselves receivers of the dirt nap, freed of the binds that only punish you for having nerve endings.

There was, among the decadent writers and artists following Poe, a literal worship of an aesthetic principal that the greatest beauty was in a person or a thing in it's decline, when it was letting go of the struggle and was reduced to it's basic, most true and frailest form. An aspect of this, I suspect, was envy of the declining aesthetic object, be it a human or a diseased elm; a deep and permanent rest awaited them, and death would be that thing that gives the lie to the certitude of philosophy or economic determinism that insist that life must forever be thus, a certain way, without change. Those who die have escaped, and there are no arms to bring them back to suffer more with the rest of us pining over a grave.

Poet Patricia Traxler gets all this wonderfully in her poem The Dead Are Not in this week's Slate, succinctly in her poem The Dead Are Not; as rob and others have already remarked, the poem is brief and each finessed line conveys the complicated, conflicting and confused set of emotions one
journeys through as yet another death comes closer to one's inner circle of confidants and family. Indeed, the dead are not dead yet,

Always they take
their time, and we wait
politely, dreading
how real it will
have to be, sooner
or later, and at the
same time longing
to know that reality.



There are arguments one has with the departed, negotiations still in session, curses and protests of undying love are uttered, self-recrimination and blaming goes on for days and nights until one tires of the their tears and breathes easier because sunrises still come inspite the weight of grief. We mutter to ourselves that the dead are
"in a better place", that they "felt no pain" or that
"...at least they died quick..." all so we get on with our lives and our responsibilities, and yet an echo of our accepting rhetoric stays with us as we shoulder our daily responsibilities, that "better place" doesn't sound so bad, and we become envious and petty all over again, we blame the dead for being cowards and laggards who would do anything to shirk their duty, and we come to envy them and that place they've gone. Gravity takes its toll, our bones ache, the mailbox is filled with bills, someone else you know has told you they have a fatal disease, your back hurts like shit:

Nights, as we reach
to switch off our bed lamps
and close our eyes,
we dare it to take us
into its mouth
that smells of tar,
saltwater, sludge,
take us up then let us
tumble endlessly,
blameless again
and helpless as any new life
forced out for the first time
into the terrible light.




Traxler gets to the center of that guilty little secret
at the core of grieving, the scourge of envy and the many faces and tones of voice it takes. Without metaphysical baloney, faux piety, or even a tone of anger, she writes in the cool, reflective calm of someone who has investigated their feelings and discovered an unknown fact about their thinking. This poem has the remarkable clarity of genuine self-sight, unnerving in its tone, beautifully expressed. Her skill gives us the chance to see something very private, unobscured by clouds of delusion. A very fine poem.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Recent DVD Sighting: Lord of War Is a Sack of Soggy Pretensions

I saw Lord of War last night from among a number of unviewed DVDs that've recently come across my desk, and all I can say, if I were one to say only one thing, is what was thinking? That lead actor Nicholas Cage finally become a good actor in a film that made narrative sense? Please schedule me for a padded room and straight jacket.What I found it to be pretentious and shallow, preachy in very obvious ways, with a "surprise" ending that was telegraphed from several city blocks away. The bits of dialogue between Orloff and his pursuer (portrayed by Ethan Hawke) about the relative merits of each other's chosen roles in life was half-baked and unfelt, lacking any real conviction in or twist upon middle brow cliches. The movie attempts in several ways to be a morality play , oozing with irony,but the pitch here is so determinedly at the bottom end of an emotional range that it's nearly flat lined. No one seemed to know how to direct the actors with a cheaply sanctimonious script, and the actors themselves appear to lack interest to do any free lance scene chewing.

Paddy Chayefsky, prolix screenwriter behind Network and Hospital, set an as yet unsurpassed standard on making socially-conscious movies that want to force the audience to dwell a little on the invisible undertakings involved in keeping them safe and secure. It comes down to a frank exchange of cliches and alarmist platitudes, but Chayefsky had a genius for infusing them with new phrases, coinages, and could contrive a flaming morass of cynicism that was particularly compelling despite what depth he failed to achieve. The movies were quoted, the issues made the op ed pages and the chat around the coffee maker.

Lord of War lacks all that, and depends on a slick video-game surface while Nicolas Cage's sad puppy dog eyes gaze upon his gunning character's fatal transactions with a detachment that is supposed to make us think of a man straddling both heaven and hell, pondering which is worse. It doesn't work, though, and it's really another excuse for another movie gallery of Cage's set-mannerisms. At least he wasn't pretending to be Elvis this time out. He is has his suffering saint visage on, the look of smacked dog lounging on the grave of his beloved , late master. Cage might as well be laying on this film.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Mission Impossible 3


There was that momentary urge after leaving the theater to rush home and write a long, filbustering deconstruction of the new Tom Cruise movie Mission Impossible Three (MI:3), but luckily for the reader a gross weariness overcame and I wound up spending the allotted time doing laundry and paying bills. As an action film, it has its moments of proverbial chills and thrills, although you notice that the set ups are suspiciously similiara to what you've already seen in director JJ Abrams'
tv show Alias. Plagiarism yourself , I guess, is not exactly immoral, especially if the gloss is tony and shiny enough, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Philip Seymour Hoffman, fresh off an Oscar win for Capote, relishes a nice pay day with his quirksome villian--he's the only one who seems to have any fun in this project. Cruise, of course, is getting worse as an actor with each film, and with this souped-up vehicle seems no more than bad computer animation in the presence of real flesh and blood. Verdict, if you need one: wait for the video.

Saturday, May 13, 2006

A short snorter from Tom Robbins


Just finished Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito, and it's a hoot and a half, about an animal spirit who parachutes to earth in an odd manner as he outruns a posse of angry gods, and spends his time here drinking sake and bedding farm girls. The creature learns to assume human form, and in his time and travels winds up in the 20th century, where he, through odd coincidence and circumstance, is upsetting a drug trafficking operation devised by Viet Nam vets who remained MIA.

This isn't all the animal spirit upsets, and Robbins, true to form, includes a goodly amount of other tangents and bits for us to chew on, including his own authorial intrusions. Not his best work, I don't think, it seems rushed, but it's very funny for the most part. I do like the way Robbins is able to mix and max genres, from detective thrillers, folk tales, and what not, weave them with bits of amiable philosophical asides, and not come off as so precious and smart and depressingly self-serious as other post-modernists seem to. It's about the story, and it's about pleasure the story give. A quick, fun read.

I used to find stashes of recently tossed porn


I used to find stashes of recently tossed porn books in a trash can when I walked to school during the mid sixties; crude art, coarse language, grubby cover art featuring innocent men and older, salacious babes in permanent states of undress. Nothing I've read or seen in the porn industry has equaled the thrill of this gamy paperbacks, mostly due, I think, to my not knowing what to do with my growing obsession with women. This is was a particular kind of private world a young man walked around in, something so far removed from his daily references of parents, teachers and comic books that there was literally no coherent way to deal with the drive save dirty jokes and whatever sticky paperbacks or back issues of Stag you could get your hands on. It was as exciting as it was secret. The thrill was increased by the aspect of seeming to get away with something that is not allowed, and made more intense by the prospect of getting caught

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Fake Poetry Manifesto for No Good Reason




The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but  because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of  real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop.In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled savant garde has completely overtaken the conversation.Good poets must be concerned with language,I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us. This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non sequiters , fragments, clichés, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as there  is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Rockism: another trivial wrinkle on an unmade bed

It's a bit of good fun a few years ago in a wacky article at  Slate whose author insisted that "rockism" is the hot fire currently sweeping that otherwise dry prairie known as rock criticism, and those arguments about what constitutes "authentic" music versus that which is corporately constructed rages on among the younger writers. Such was the case when I was an active music reviewer between the 70s through the early 90s, and from the vantage point of advancing geezer-hood I have to say presenting rock and roll as the model of "authenticity", an epicenter of real music made by individuals from unincorporated communities of the soul, is ironic; rock music is turned into an institution, its essence is codified, its purpose for being and what it's supposed to instill and inspire made into canonical law. 

It is no longer rock versus the mainstream, but rather the perplexing fact that rock and roll is the mainstream and has been for decades. Being unpredictable, free of cant and received insight, blending styles and fashioning new ways of getting folks to the dance floor is no longer possible on the scale our Utopian scribes desire. The rock revolution happened. Notice the tense. While I like a great many rock and roll bands and will insist in any debate that rock and roll remains vital and moving in much less global ways, the attempts to set a criteria for what’s honest and credible, as well as the ongoing debate about the possibility of music commentary being afflicted with a limitless set of water-fouling isms is naval gazing at best. No, really. All this intellection and meta-critical self-diagnosing is pushing rock criticism into the realm of sheer irrelevance, since guys have gotten so smart that they've become remarkably obtuse in their task. In all the talk, they (we) neglect the less glamorous task of determining whether something is any good. What stinks, it seems, is the obnoxious certainty in the use of the word "dead": rock and roll is as it's always been in my experience, mostly "trendy assholes" and an intriguing swath of credible acts, bands, and solo, who keep the edgy rigor of the music intact, and vital. The dustbin of history is always full, what survives the clean sweep is anyone's' guess. 

Meanwhile, I reserve the right to be excited, engaged but what is honest and, to whatever extent, original. If I'm tired of dead things, I should leave the graveyard. Rather, I think it's criticism that's ailing, if not already deceased, as a useful activity. Rolling Stone abandoned itself to gossip magazine auteurism, Spin gave itself over to trendy photo captions and for the scads of "serious" commentary, and much of it has vanished behind the faux post-structuralist uncertainty: criticism as a guide to larger issues at hand within an artist's work is not being done. Rock criticism, taking its lead, again, from the worn trails of Lit/Crit, has abandoned the idea that words and lyrics can be about anything and much of what goes on in the columns intended to weigh the qualities of music and make an educated recommendation whether a CD or download is worth the iPod memory is now a clash of jargon and deep arcana. Critics have been so busy buttressing the convolutions of their obsession that it ceases to be an item of joy and becomes only a fetishized object and rhetorical construction through which a writer's ability to obfuscate the obvious can be displayed with all the bells, whistles, and cell tones whizzing away like carnival rides. Somewhere, the life force and vitality were sucked out; it was no longer about what you felt from a drum beat or a pounded chord on an electric guitar; rock and roll was not a catechism you had to learn. 

What really killed rock music, if you insist on hanging with this tenuous thesis, weren't rock critics, but rather fans that bought the records and went to the shows. And I noticed in my time that the fans who buy the newer, grainier, more strident and dissonant stuff are younger than I am--gadzooks! The avant gard I matured with was now a younger listener's retro-indulgence. Simply, styles change, and much of what is new at first seems ugly to an audience whose tastes are entrenched and internalized. Rock criticism, like in any other manner of writing which interrogates a medium, makes the unknown explainable or at least momentarily comprehensible for the moment. Blaming writers, though, for the murder of the music gives them too much power--it's doubtful that the history of long, abstract, numb skull dissertations in the Village Voice, let alone Rolling Stone, ever convinced a tenth of their readership to make the album go double platinum. 

But let's forget that everyone gets old, the brain is rearranged in endless ways since the time of youthful impulse, and the world requires a more pragmatic approach to changing it. Living within the world becomes more important. It could also be as simple that our tastes change. Talent in any form will trump attitude day of the week with me, but first I have to ask what the talent is for. "Bad attitude" can be a talent by way of a trait some might think cool and alluring from afar, "chronic depression" seems to go a long way for other listeners to ignore the calculable merits of melodies, vocals, and lyrics and wallow in the sepia-toned aura of guitarist cave dwellers whose talent inhabits a dampened set of neurons. Likewise, a punk with a torn black t-shirt, crud-encrusted jeans and a spoke through an upper lip doesn't require a discourse in harmony or theory to justify the inherent value of his or her choice of belligerent tone warping. 

What it represents is the value, the noisy symbolism of rage, which means the niceties of song construction don't even enter the discussion. Attitude and persona only get you so far, though, and many are left scratching whatever body part that itches, wondering what the hell? So, I go back to the songs themselves and weigh their characteristics--no mystery here, it's melody, vocal, lyrics again, along with musicianship, production, and a host of other niggling details--and make a judgment based on a floating scale as to how the ingredients succeed or fail in doing what songs are supposed to do, which is to kick ass, make me sad, make me rage, rant, pant, behave or go crazy in the head, or, in worst-case scenario, turn off the damn noise off. 

Standards and demands on good songwriting are in constant flux, of course, and you need to have the proverbial big ears to assess material's worth against not just the history of pop music in general, but also within the genre the artist writes within. Standards within standards can make this a no-win proposition for someone trying to create objective criteria, but we're all aware of the most rigorous test: does the music catch your attention and does it keep your interest to the end of the last side? Better still, does it give you pause when staring at the CD jewel case as you cogitate over the riffs, lyrics, and yelping vocals you've sat through for 45 or so minutes? Do you want to write a long critical appreciation? Does it make you feel like starting a fight you know you can't win? Does it make you want to dance, pound a beer, take a deep drag of a doobie to get that momentary rush up the spine as the guitar and drums climax on some major-minor chord combat before you crash, depleted of spirit, despair washing over you like the foul fluids pouring from a drainage pipe?

The primary reaction is one that can't be faked with faux theory and revisionist contextualization along sociological rather than musical lines. You are either moved in a visceral, immediate way, or you are left there formulating a more intellectualized response. Considered, thoughtful, critical responses are legitimate too, in their place, but there's a lot of fakery going about the net and print media. But that riff, that drum beat, that whoop of aggression that gets your legs moving, fist pumping, jaw jutting? Priceless commentary on the music coming forth, without the vocabulary to obscure cloud and confuse the experience. It's not a necessarily accurate gauge of a song's value and worth in the scheme of recorded music, but its value lies elsewhere, in a rare moment in the week when you're responding to something that needn't, for the moment, be classified, cataloged and critiqued like it were a virus that science is trying to destroy But rock and roll, good and ill, cranks on. The spirit that moves the kid to bash that guitar chord still pulses. To say that bad, abstruse writing can kill that awards too much power to what has become an inane, trivial exercise.

Sunday, May 7, 2006

Driving to a protest

Driving to a protest march in Washington DC
especially for Jack_Dallas


there are throngs of
singers with songs
about guitars
unstrung and
love gone wrong
worse than wrong turns
on New Jersey turnpikes
on your way to Virginia,
you raise your sign
because it's time
to dine at the table
of the fat cats who
malign our honor
and are able
to make us all goners
'cuz cops and Crusaders
don't give a starvation
wage over our rights
or in what language
they're in
nor read them
on the precise page,
i am tired
is all i say
and take the turn
into the gas station
while a rain
hits the windshield
and garish clouds
hang over the fields,
TV antennas
are bent
on pitched roofs,
bolted to crumbling
chimneys,
life is unfair
and these rhymes
suck significant
lengths of bad tasting
flesh is what i say
fuckin' A,
right now
the Bozo cartoons must
be filled with lines
and fluttering pictures,
damn
that is so unfair...

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

The genius of Dan Bogen

Don Bogen writes with a cracked, dry Prairie voice and suggests to some that he’s a latter day Carl Sandburg. Perhaps, but the comparison deals an unfair hand to a good poet, since the late poet’s name evokes certain qualities that are carved in the soft clay of consciousness; should the contrast stick, Bogen will never get fair reading for his own work. He’s obviously influenced by Sandburg, but like any writer with a style he or she can rightly claims is theirs, he's developed a voice wholly his own. He has a particular mastery of negative capability, assuming a guise hardly his own and not of human form at all and manages without winking irony or obnoxious purple passages to describe the construction of a house from the house's point of view . We see this in his poem “House”, recently posted by poetry editor Robert Pinsky at Slate.com.A neat trick, a hard one to pull off, since it requires keeping so many things in balance and a great many potential bad writing habits in check. Interestingly, it is a poem about something being built, an architecture that is coming into being rather than the easier ploy of composing a poem to mark the degradation of a landscape, a house, a whole town; writers write so much about things in decline simply because the worse and gamiest things of existence are the easiest to imagine. The final effect of this, we know, is reader weariness over reading yet another poem writ in fits of routine despair or template-constructed ennui. All the polarized words , the sad similes, the morose metaphors about aging, decline, failing eyesight, death blur into one another not unlike one Bill O'Reilly self-deconstruction after another, a sheer babble of grief , and despondency that moves the reader only to turn the page, or close the book they thought might give them a spark. Bogen achieves his problematic task with an efficient set of divisions that has the house quite literally describing the progress of his construction by declaring what it was he was at each stage , with the addition of planks, floor boards, the whirl and grind of band saws and slamming of nails with appropriate hammers,I was plaster, I was rubber and glassMy joists, my iron ligaments grew invisibleI took on angles, gable and dormer and plumb back doorI blocked the wind, I was rooms each linked to anotherDucts and vents gave me unityWomen came, their hands on my wallsI was whitewash and would be paint and would wear clothEqual parts pain and anticipation, the silent yet aware intelligence of the house narrates its own becoming, speaking of said Schmidt only as his builder, his principle designer, assigning him, it might be suggested, the position of an archetypal God , suggesting a culture of houses, created among themselves, a shared cosmology this house shares with "my brothers" who all "stood up in the field". Sandburg wrote the haunted "I Am The Grass" where the obvious message was that all things that come from the earth will, in time, return to the dust from which they symbiotically sprang, and Bogen's poem is a response to this famous ode, giving the reader the message that death is always eternal is and unforgiving, then creation and construction and the embrace of life with all imaginative force is constant and unstoppable. Bogen masterfully embeds that passion to live and create community within the houses we build for ourselves to live in. I am envious of his language, with its sparing use of adjective and overactive metaphor, and I quite admirable at the poetic resonance he provides--the suggestions of qualities and significances that fall just outside the sentence content--using this sweetly idealized plain speak. One of the best poems I've read in this series in a long while.Sandburg is the crisp realist that rob says, but the style, evoking curling paint, eternal autumn and hills full of leafless trees and occasional farm ho uses very often lends itself to greeting card sentiment. The dark side is there, yes, and therein lays his genius, but often times his scenes of Americana reduce themselves to Norman Rockwell paintings. Technical mastery, a huge popularity, an undeniable brilliance, and a conspicuous streak of the corny.

The interesting thing about good stage set design is that the two- dimensionality of the props, when done well, make the theater attending to consider the context deeper than had the scenery been ruthlessly "realistic". The abstracted, simplified and stylized look of the scenery, the props works with the text and brings about a theatrical result. Bogen does this rather well; giving the house human speech and having it tell us of its construction, its "birth". All consideration of this being a "real" house go out the window, and we suspend our disbelief long enough to gather some impressions about houses and what we call homes in another way, a perspective not previously available.
The Williams is good, great in fact, and he's one of those who can discourse at length about something and not allow himself to get weighed down with the sheer bulk of his details or to get stalled in a tangential cul-de-sac. There is a discourse going on here, the work of a noticing eye that can bring description to a more discerning level; the relations of the things in the world man has created them for are revealed and surprise us.

The difference between this poem and Bogen's, though, is that "House" is not merely a detailing of how comes to stand on a particular hillside alongside other homes. The house, in fact, is the narrating persona, a consciousness of a sort that Bogen presents, subtly, as recounting its "birth" and, perhaps, retelling a creation myth. What is implied here--a community of buildings with shared purpose, culture, familial bonding, mythology--are large but smartly kept off stage, conspicuous by their absence.
The description of the house in the various states of creation all give indication that there is a fulfilling of a fate here, a sense of predestination the house, in this imagining, is aware of and both accepts and looks forward to.

Let's not generalize too much about the difference in tastes between men and women. The language contains those references that could handily appeal to both sexes, touching lightly on gender stereotypes; the talk of materials, tools, techniques for the men, and the declaration of what kind of home it would be for women. A house, a home more specifically, is made of many elements, and the house's persona speaks to those distinctions.

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Sidney Bechet Deserves Better Than This


Poems evoking the names of jazz greats is one of the favorite gimmicks of writers who are stuck for an honest opening line; the mention of an improvisor's name from the early days of recorded music gives you an instant atmosphere of the old and serious sort, and gives the writer a fast entrance to the expressway of half-realized musings. Most often, as I've read them, the ploy , the name dropping does not working. Irony is still something that needs to be worked for. A seeming homage Sidney Bechet and to the ease and perfection of his playing becomes a tale of envy, a dwelling on the ideal of form of women that reveals itself to true artistic masters, becoming, in the end, a dual edge cry of resentment against better , more masculine artists able to coax the "burnt sugar" from their metaphorically female muse, and against women in general by way of a not so subtly implied extension of his thinking.Moss has some issues here, I guess, but there's nothing I can read that suggests he's working them out in an interesting way. It's one thing to be enthralled by Bechet's reed work as he improvises and whirls like Nijinsky over the band's rapid changes, and it's admirable that it inspires to write a poem in inspiration.

It's admirable, that is, if the inspired work equals and even surpasses the wonder and awe Bechet might have stirred in Moss's observer Michaelangelo.Even a nasty, power loving grouch like Pound believed that art was supposed to galvanize every creative and aspiring force in a human being and deliver him or here to a state of transcendent creativity, a higher plain of perception from which to alter the world.One may disagree whether that goal, in itself, is a plus or a minus so far as poetic intent goes, but the point is that Moss's narrator is evidently disillusioned with the whole process of art, of creating and finding new ways of seeing the world. It's implied that he feels his own work is inferior to those he isolates as untouchable geniuses, and then complicates his ambivalence further by casting a specious erotic edge to his musing; inspiration, lyricism, heightened perception were a sexualized essence from the feminine muse that it was their duty to attain through coaxing, seduction, or force. The implied picture with Moss's last few lines is as unattractive as the mood that seems to have motivated this poem:The sunrise bitch was never mine.He brought her down. In twelve bars of burnt sugar,she was his if he wanted her.This is not a poet sitting under a tree on a spring afternoon contemplating clouds and heavenly wonders; rather it's a guy at the end of the bar slugging away at beer as he broods and gets angrier about a universe of smarter men and unattainable women conspiring to make he feel like scum. It's an ugly creation here, and I'm convinced that Moss is being ironic or creating a character not himself.

This is less a poem than an outburst you wish an associate hadn't blurted. But there it is, out in the open, a snake pit exposed.I think it's simply a failed attempt at an ironic gesture. What's complicated--as opposed to complex-- about the work is stuff that's not in the work and still in Moss's head. What he manages, his protests to the side, is to write a piece that envies violence, metaphorical or otherwise, to achieve gratification. He travels periloulsy close to endorsing rape as an unspoken yet viable option for the Walter Mittys among us to use.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Boss



Where the trend had been for old rock stars to attempt to give their careers a third act with the issuing of albums wherein they croak their way The Great American Songbook, aging Blue Collar Hero Bruce Springsteen goes the other way and releases an album of old folk songs. The search for authenticity continues, and the plain-spoken Springsteen--remember when each of his lyrics was interminable operas of intemperate desire?--sings it plainly, clearly,
simply. No swelling melodies here, no subtle segues or seducing counterpoint.The new folk album, some have said, is suitable for Bruce, as he was never a great melodist anyway when he was doing the songwriting. I'm not a huge fan of The Boss--it takes too much work to reissue the same objections, and after twenty-something years of bitching and groaning, I'm willing to maintain he's done music I've liked without embarrassment.

Bruce Springsteen isn't Duke Ellington or even Burt Bacharach as a melodist, but that was never the point of his work since his sound is big, brash and in-your-face rather than, catchy, seductive or otherwise subdued with subtler chord selection. His music is equal parts rhythm and blues, Phil Spector, British Invasion and folk rock, with generous portions of Kerouac, Dylan and a wee tram of Whitman stirred into the mix. For the sort of blue-collar exhorting he does about love, death, being broke and struggling for a better future, Springsteen's melodies are exactly as they need to be; at their best, they work as well as anything a popular pop-poet has managed to do. When his work is contained and crafted, sufficiently edited, he's easily as good as Dylan as a melodist, the equal of Seger, the equal of John Lennon.I have found too much of his music overworked, grandiose and cluttered with the kind of business indicative of someone who hasn't found the central theme of what they're writing about; we see this in poets who compose at length, leaving no trace of a parse-able idea behind them, and one can witness it as well in novelists--Franzen, DF Wallace--who haven't in them to cut away the excess so the art may show. Springsteen has this problem as well, a habit of overwriting, and the effect in his longer, louder pieces tends to be a little Maileresque, circa the mid to late Sixties, where he keeps preparing to say something profound and yet the message is deferred. I prefer the punchier, grabbier, riff-based rockers he puts forth, or the terser, grainier ballads. The big band material he comes up sinks as fast as any Jethro Tull concept album has in the past. It's about songs, not the arrangements.

Springsteen singing old folk songs and protest songs interests me not in the least, although it might be a means for him to ease into the writing decent material for his next great period. Dylan landed into a profound late period, as did the Stones and certainly the quizzical Neil Young. Bruce would be a dandy addition to the grand pantheon of old guys,\ Productivity isn't, by default, a desirable trait. Talented artists can dilute their impact and lessen the esteem they've held in with the rapid issuing of mediocre, substandard or half-baked albums. Costello and Dylan are prime examples of this, although both songwriters frequently rebound with strong albums after some artistic lagging. There's an appeal for artists who aren't in a hurry to release product--I am a fan of Paul Simon's solo career (not crazy about Simon and Garfunkel music, which hasn't worn well) who has released albums at a snail's pace over the last thirty plus years; he's a careful writer, and his body of work is therefore rich with strong, moving, intelligently evolving music. His musical ideas work more often than not. The same may be said for Steely Dan, a band I've always admired for their consistent excellence for melody, production, oddball melodies and especially well-crafted lyrics. Being slow to release albums of late places Springsteen in honorable company.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

The Enduring Relevance of "Howl"


The real paradox of "Howl" is that it's a poem, a great poem that addressed the great unwashed elements of American culture and their plight outside the mainstream which is now very much part of the Establishment it railed against and, in some sense, sought to disassemble.

Only truly great pieces of writing do that, and regardless of what one thinks of the later Ginsberg work where he abandoned Blakean visions and allegory in favor of a relentless and largely inane species of self-reporting , "Howl" is the inspired and wonderfully sustained work of a young in full control of the language and rhetoric he was using.


It's a masterpiece by every criteria, and it remains a powerful indictment against repression, censorship, the closing off of the soul against experience and vision.


Even as its been absorbed into the American canon, it continues to transgress against expectations of conservative decorum and other constructions of serene and apathetic community relations; it continues to howl, quite literally, over the fifty years since it's publications.

In the increasingly control-freak environment of that pits paranoid nationalism against civil liberties , "Howl" and it's piercing message is perhaps more relevant than ever.

The fact that one still finds room to discuss the poem's politics and philosophical biases seriously attests to the quality and originality of Ginsberg's writing; mere political tracts, like Baraka's "Someone Blew Up America", will grind you down with polemic and are rapidly, gratefully forgotten.

"Howl", poem, vision, political screed, confession and testament in one, is read and debated over and over again, its choicest lines cited, each quote resonating and stinging as great work ought to. A great poem.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Henri Cole's peachy poem



The latest Robert Pinsky offering on Slate is Henri Cole's "Eating A Peach", which made me feel as if I was undergoing a gruesome regime of aversion therapy.I read some Henri Cole a few years ago and remember that his work left a bad taste in my mouth. There's nothing I remembered specifically that put me off Cole's work, only that minor, creeping dread that goes up your spine in a chilling rush as you come across a dreadful totem. Now it comes back to me, and here we have a compression of bad habits and awful writing that lends you the momentary urge to fall back into deep, restorative sleep, or swear off sleep altogether.The problem here is tone , which is arch, Gothic, over generalizing in reach and utterly unconvincing in how the epiphanies and moral connections are unleashed. Cole writes as if he were a racing dog who has no mind or use for the residential build up to a point and instead chases after profundity mechanical rabbit from the get go.



Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer.Time and darkness mean nothing to me,moving forward and back with my white enameled teeth-and bloated tongue sating themselves on moist,pulpy flesh. When I suck at the pit that resembles a small mammal's skull, it erases all memory of trouble and strife, of loneliness and the blindings of erotic love, and of the blueprint of a world,


These are lines revealing a protagonist with Geiger Counter sensitivities who cannot so much as snack on fruit without the Ghosts of Significance wailing and carrying on and making so much racket in his head that he simple joys like fruit deserts cannot be enjoyed in themselves alone. Instead Cole's eater is beset with all sorts of confusions and conflations, feeling like a murderer but also probably not a little like a vampire and rapist as he violates "moist pulpy flesh", and considers the pit at the center of the orange as would a taxidermist, suddenly locked on a site erases the squalling mess of "erotic love" and all trace of the outer world's intricacies. There is the possibility, I suppose, that Cole intended this as a send up targeted at vegetarians and vegans with the archly phrased message that even eating fruit can involve you obsessively in the entrails of a once living thing one his consuming, but the humor, the punchline eludes me. (Which wouldn't be the first time obvious matters have eluded me). It depresses me to consider that Cole is dead serious with this poem, sober as a Mormon barn dance:

Eating the peach, I feel the long wandering, my human hand—once fin and paw reaching through and across the allegory of Eden,mud, boredom and disease, to bees, solitude and a thousand hairs of grass blowing by chill waters.


This eager wallow in vague supposition and preening dilettantes reminds me of the absurdly pretentious lyrics that decorated the album sleeves of Yes and Jethro Tull , or worse, Vandergraff Generator. Cole has managed something both unique and odious; for decades rock lyrics have been ruined as songwriters tried to sound like poets mulling over, contemplating and examining the heaviosity of existence, and now Cole returns the favor by writing bad poetry trying to sound like bad rock lyrics. Another post-modern moment, but one where there is no irony to what strands of high and low culture are being brought together and being given a gaudy coat of bright, speckled paint. Irony at least makes a point about the interpretative baggage one carries with them and demonstrates, through incident, the crucial information that intellection and systematic thinking donÂ’t alter the course of things.Cole's invention is absent any form, exists in  arenas that are liberated from a concern as to how one wants to sound when serious matters are discussed. Each trick and gizmo is used to make the unspectacular seem resolutely violent, dramatic, decisive. The endless renderings of metaphor riven reality wearies the imagination, exhausts all patience. It is too much foreplay. No one should have a life so persistently dramatic, nor should another have to read such over ripe accounting of clouded perception.Cole gives us the physical details and tactile elements that I would normally insist are crucial for a poet if he or she is to wander off into the language of near-philosophy and the attending subsets, but there is more to it, which is an ear, a sense of shape, a sense of proportion. This piece is an over stuffed suitcase, and our poet couldn't decide what to leave out, reasoning, perhaps that each little clause between commas, each writerly riff or pun on death and the food chain might come in handy should a smart remark be needed in his daily wallow in ersatz angst and tubercular tedium. He could have whittled this down to a sharp, pointed perception, a chiseled image and a powerful, understated idea, or he could have gone at greater length, perhaps fashioning a language and rhythm that would accommodate his Gothic metaphysics and save them from their current pomp. As is, he hasn't a poem but rather a humorless, droning groan of self-importance.
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