On reading from a box of my old poems

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

Grousing about work

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

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

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

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

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

Jean Baudrillard, Crypto Neocon, Dead

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

Don't Let Them Hear Your Write

There comes a time in most poets lives when thoughts of their own death start to crowd their concerns, and the work they produce , the poems,
start to churn in that anxiety. It often makes for great work, the "mature" part of an artists career as they assemble a life time of perceptions in the fashioning of a style that is sure and bittersweet in the the way image, stanza , line, assonance and alliteration nails the troubling awareness that each day that passes is one less day on earth. This dwelling on the inevitable tends to become a constant buzz under the civilities and rituals of routine interaction, a phase where you seem and feel distracted, distanced from the world you walk through, glancing at everything in abstracted bemusement as if through a thin, barely perceptible membrane that separates you from anything else. Only your thoughts matter, only your subsumed astonishment that some how the the world as you know will get along with the grace of your presence. And so we wonder, and wonder, and wonder again how will we be remembered; what poem, song, or artifact will someone inspect of ours will someone inspect as they muse on our absence?

Nuar Alsadir handles the issue in The Riddle of the Shrink with appropriate reserve, too much so on this score. The details are telling, illustrative, comic in the way their caricature the inopportune instances that frustrate a smooth transition to day's end and Jay Leno or Letterman before bed. But it's pat stuff, straight from poetry's version of Central Casting; you can just about see the trails left by the feather dusters on the tropes as they were readied for use; lost tickets, a disconnected phone, a ball rolling under a piece of furniture where it will stay until either interior designers or movers force the hypothetical room into upheaval.

Upheaval is exactly what this poem does not have, and it is in the well -mannered inventory of shuddering detail that makes this seem more like a list of ideas for a poem rather than a poem itself. There is a self-reflexivity here that is perfectly useless to the theme and attempted tone of the piece,

The friend you have entrusted with your death

song, an editor, has changed the words.
Now it is you, not your modifiers,

who will dangle, suspended between this world
and the next.
You could make the case that the use of language is flowing and clever, but it is the seamlessness and cleverness that makes this stick out : the obsession to have the work refer to the author's life as a poet, a person of the purposefully dissecting and associative mindset who is now aghast that she will lose control of her words after her departure because an editor reworked some of her lines. There are any other number of things to ponder and run down in detail that would benefit graduate students lost, for the moment, in the paradoxes presented by philosophies of language--do humans make the language, or does language shape the speaker?--but that is another activity, not poetry. John Ashbery, whose name has been used here many times in the last week or so, manages to blend philosophical problems and anecdotal bits of his life with a style at once mysterious , challenging and yet engaging for all the areas his work insinuates itself in. Even as a young poet, Ashbery's writing was such that the philosophical and the more recently biographical materials had no designated areas where one stopped as another began, there was no sectioning of source material, which is what this week's poet is intent on. Ashbery is seamless and unaffected, if often inscrutable; we none the less are intrigued with his wanderings. But Alsadir is orderly, writerly, too logical and conveniently ironic in her confrontations with should convince us is here as her innermost dread and terror.

The sanctity of a writer's work aside, it is hard to really care about matters such as what happens to ones eternal soul with this ill-disguised whimpering larding up the works. Again, I wish poets who feel a need to mention that they are poets or writers in the poem, or are prodded by primeval forces to write a verse with poetry as the subject would instead trust the quiet about them and write nothing at all until the world their senses cannot control engages them again. No more self-reflection on the medium, okay?

The poem is too well mannered, too writerly to really seize upon the surrealism Alsadir attempts in the second half:

The image of the future

is the memory of the dream in which
you are standing before a kiosk, attempting

a transaction with a forgotten code.

These reads less like a poem where psychic dislocation is given a glaring, austere showcase than it is something paraphrased from stacks of old Robb-Grillet novels; it experience converted into jargon, and the defamiliarized tone sounds borrowed.

BREAK, BLOW, BURN: Camille Paglia's Poems that Matter

BREAK, BLOW, BURN--
Camille Paglia

I'd said some rude things about Camille Paglia's reemergence as a regular columnist at Salon.com, berating her for basically wasting the opportunity to be smart about cultural and political issues by lavishing each form of self-flattery. To court cliche, even Norman Mailer has more modesty. I haven't changed my mind, but I should mention her 2005 collection of poetry criticism, Break, Blow, Burn. It's the liveliest collection of critical remarks I've in years. Camille Paglia published her collection of poetry essays Break, Blow, Burn (now in paperback) in 2005, and straight away there were those neoconservatives who seized upon the firebrand professor as one of their own, someone brings "reason" back to the classroom. It was hoped in some discussion groups I've recently emerged from that Paglia is Sanity itself, ready to unfasten the chokehold of incomprehension that's been around literary criticism for decades. The short version of that conversation was that Paglia would be the celebrity academic intellectual who would sift through the Great Books and present a straying society the Values and Virtues William Bennett cherishes almost as much as he does a solid poker hand and a stall stack of chips. Hold the phone. I don't think Paglia represents "a voice of reason" since the word "reason" is the last thing you want to apply to a close reading of a poet's work. It implies, by default, rationality, and it's never been the poet's assignment to reason through experience as if he or she were a scientist trying to classify and categorize the world about them. 

Rather, poets, good poets, and their work continue to attract us because the way in which they usurp the instructed ordering aspects of language and instead find ways to integrated what is seemingly inexpressible, felt the experience, the interiority of being, with what is observed in the factual being. It's perilously hard poetry to write successfully and, even when it's done well, reviewers toward totalizing , sense-making totems that bring a reasonable and agreeable sheen of coherence to a work; the way we've come to discuss poems falls too often in the smelly troughs of conventional wisdom, received perceptions, cracker-barrel philosophy,  simple-minded platitudes, devised, by consensus or conspiracy for readers and reviewers, to have the world remains entirely comprehensible and sane. A worthy critic from the eighties, Clyde Hadlock, once wrote of the best verse being something unique in literature. He asserted, with deft metaphor, that if the prose was the photograph of how the nature of the world appears to the author, then "...poetry is the x-ray." The voice of reason is the enemy to good poetry, and that is what Camille Paglia knows better than any other commentator; a poet, she argues in Break , Blow Burn (now in paperback) is that a poet , though a conscious and determining artist, acts nonetheless as a conduit for the wild strands of personal narrative, religion, myth, comprehensible realism, rage, philosophy merge, blend, twine and twist in the same discussion. Poetry is the language of unreason, another way of taking the pulse of the culture as seen from the particular and individual poet's voice who lives within and yet is compelled to view it askew. The essays in Break Blow Burn argue that the poems under review aren't required to “make sense”, to deliver a singular meaning, easily digested and disposed of, but exist instead to provide a subtler, more nuanced , more complex sense of what experience entails. Many ideas from many sources come to bear on a poem's thesis, and Paglia pulls them out, addresses them, and demonstrates the fascinating dialectic of the way ideas, images, expressions and varied diction influence one another, offer shades of inference, change meanings. 

It wasn't enough that the national discussion on poetry was already pathetic and contrived, a contest between assorted second and third generation splinter groups of specialized enclaves trying to inhale what was left of the air in the tiny room where the debate raged. Amazingly, the conversation had become as dumb as it was insulated. In the 2001, the New Agers and refugees from shoe gazing concerts got into the act with the publication of Roger Housden's slim collection Ten Poems to Change Your Life, in which he presented the undefined general reader with a set of poems, varied to gender, nationality, religion, lifestyle orientation, that they might consider between errands and cell phone chats: " The Journey" by Mary Oliver ,"Last Night as I Was Sleeping," by Antonio Machado, "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman ,"Zero Circle" by Rumi ,"The Time Before Death" by Kabir,"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda , "Last Gods" by Galway Kinnell, "For the Anniversary of My Death" by W. S. Merwin, "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott "The Dark Night" by St. John of the Cross . A high-quality selection, give or take exceptions according to tastes, but Housden's intent seemed less to introduce readers to the wonders and varieties of perspective poetry might offer than to bring us to the lectern where he would deliver his Message of the Day. Following each poem there was a light discussion of the life's circumstances the preceding poet wrote about and Housden would extrapolate through a number of nimbly massaged points of literature, theology, popular spirituality, to give the image reader a broader perspective, a moment's respite from that crackle and insistence of contemporary consumption. The aim of the collection, hardly surprising, was to have the stressed audience abandon their cell phones, laptops and other devices of damning distraction,  and make time to smell the roses before they were gone, trampled under the heel of progress. It's not an original premise, but it remains sage advice all the same, and one could for the moment put their disdain for the use of a poet's work as fodder for a feel-good mill, although containing the contempt was harder than it would seem. The irony was that the fresh perspectives, the original language use, the carefully crafted evidence of subtle intelligence interrogating the problematic nature of existence  used as another means of delivering readers to insights they already know. One hoped, even prayed, one hid under sheets of wishful thinking; any way of bringing readers to quality poets was worth a bit of pimping by an enterprising editor and motivational guru. Or was it? The problem remained that the skewed thinking that characterizes much of the best work would only confuse and further complicated the world for an audience that wanted assurances, not ironies from what they read and reflected upon. The mind was already a roiling with contradiction and discontent. Housden's editorial genius was his ability to ignore the problematic subject and stir his declarations skyward, looking over the hill for the displaced Gods who formerly assured us a coherent world.

Ten Poems to Change Your Life turned into a series of five similarly named collections, a choice gathering of poets per volume, followed by Houston's compulsively upbeat chats. A gimmick has been established for Housden and was performing handsomely—the books, pocket-sized, were perfect for bookstore cash register stands as impulse purchases, and in the dozens. One despaired seeing that Housden's books sold while the poetry section remained the slowest selling in the store where one worked; the audience was ready to read one poem by Walt Whitman and absorb a slight ration of cracker barrel spiritualism as an afterward, but such readers weren't inclined to pick up "Leaves of Grass" and do their thinking. Housden's audience is one that wants to be told what things mean. Housden's brilliance isn't what he says about the poems, but rather in recognizing an area of mild interest to big audiences that hadn't been  exploited and denuded of any possibility of inspiring even a minor itch.

It was enough to make one want to give up the game entirely and watch DVD reissues instead, but there is a blast of fresh air coming through the room, Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn, a collection of forty-three poems brought together for close reading by the author. Paglia is a humanities' professor at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and made her entrance on the national stage with the publication of her bulging, bombastic and usually brilliant book Sexual Personae, a sprawling study of sexual identity, its profound effect on art and culture, and the endless way that it's been disguised and altered. Personae was maddening in all its phases and investigations, with theories and declarations worthy of full dissertations popping up every few pages, yet no matter how one reads her breathless, in-your-face explications that every proverbial pore of existence, society, and culture was dripped with sexuality (repressed or blatant), you couldn't dismiss with the usual brush off lines. Paglia's basic thesis about the best way to appreciate poems is to stop worshiping reputations and the sordid prestige that comes and begin instead to read and think about particular poems. Hers isn't a sensibility to bow to fashion or someone's deeply intoned name; fame and a gimmick will not acquaint the poet under review any slack. As she says in the preface, what she believes in are great poems, of themselves, separate from larger bodies of work. What we get in the forty-one essays in Break, Blow, Burn are her intense, close readings of what she regards as the best poems in English; the selection and the arrangement of what these "best" poems come to be won't satisfy every taste or notion of what honestly comprises the best work, but Paglia didn't write these missives in order to cosign every lazy idea we've had about poets and their work.

These are her favorites, using her criteria, and quite unlike many skimpy or corpulent collections slapped between covers to satisfy a fleeting fashion, she will lay her arguments in solid, comprehensible and far-flung terms, returning again, again and yet again to the respective poems she's reviewing. Less a medium to make us feel warm and secure, her poems have to do with an extreme engagement with life on life's terms. Whether finding whole worlds of secular metaphysics contained in the few lines of Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of a Jar," sweetly limning the edgy and cavalierly erotic voyeurism of Paul Blackburn's "The Once Over" or marveling at the triple-tiered city speak of Frank O'Hara's fantasy "A Mexican Guitar," Paglia discusses each of the poet's work as points in which spiritual certainty and intellectual pragmatism come into conflict, war with one another, and emerge by poem's conclusion with some third perception larger than the opposing inclinations which reveal a finer, more complex, less fixed situation for the human condition. In each case, Paglia follows the poet in the process of bringing together the poem, their process of perception, beginning with what was observed, the associations the image conjures or suggests, and delicately observing how the poet controls their associations, no less careful than a great composer, giving play to the various senses and associations each phrase and delicious reference appeals to. Paglia's genius is her ability to recreate the poet's thinking at the moment of composition. This makes her discussions intimate, vital, a whirlwind of excited speculation. Flux, change, destruction, growth, all the things that make the up the endlessly repeated cycles of death and birth, are what connect these poems, and Paglia, in these vividly studied pieces, isn't about to let any of us slide by with only a nodding acquaintance with what a poem can mean as well as be. Her view of art is that it increases our awareness of life's enormity, not reduces it to some meager paragraphs of ego massage, and it's a good thing that she was willing to put her notoriety on the line in introducing some rigor into the general chat. Finally, what is especially inspiring in Paglia's fierce arguments is her refusal to grant the readers slack. None of this material is over your head, she seems to insist, Get on the ladder and see what's out there.

Poems by Debra Nystrom and Amee Nezhukumatathil

An interesting poem about snow, if you can beyond the horrid recording of poet Debra Nystrom reciting her work.As usual,the recitation of the poem is marred by the outstandingly consistent ability of Microsoft's software to suck the life and warmth from anyone's voice; I'm not being ironic here, given the title. If there were someway for the engineers to adjust the sound quality to make the voice sound more alive and feeling, it would be appreciated, As is , poor Nystrom sounds as if she's packed in a trunk. Yet it may be an appropriate tone given the downward slant of the poem's psychic terrain, a general survey of isolated farmland in a blizzard,where isolation becomes it's own reason for being. Dreary, stalled, obsessively committed to her own stasis in the surrounding field of furious snow, Nystrom gets the gloom and borderline despair grow and take hold and quite literally form a weight that sits upon you;

you think of cutting the motor off to sit
in the tractor cab awhile, radio songs slowly
fading out as they suck the battery dry

There are things to be done in this bleak world, yet the extended absence of other voices of similar age and experience, the cessation of life until spring thaw, proves to be an enervating element that is at times overpowering. Nystrom chooses the language well to get across the mood, finds comparisons with her character's interior life with the exterior climate that are swift and clear

white nonsense scattering at the windshield
like bits of wreckage hypnotizing
till some kind of sleep comes on

Snow here seems analogous to sleep and sleep, rather obviously, is some depressed longing for death, death as an idealized state where there is only silence and no voices buzzing with their chatter of attenuated relationships or failed life-defining projects. What works here, I suppose, is that the poet compresses the mood, starting in the center of it and then moving out with details of the white, lifeless landscape; Robert Lowell's confessional prolix is not this poet's style, it seems, yet neither is Raymond Carver's terse,truncated lines. She is closer to novelist and short story writer Russell Banks, who knows full well the quality of being snowed in, as if buried alive.
-------------------------------------


"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
" by Amee Nezhukumatathil is my kind of poem, funny in a way someone can be if they have a discreet sense of the absurd that might float an irrational idea just so so that it has the dual effect of initial plausibility and then lagging clarity. The punch line , in other words.

Nezhukumatathil (yes, I cut and pasted her name in this spot) smartly side steps any obvious lectures that might have occurred to her to deliver regarding prejudice, identity politics, or the cruelness we foist on another. Rather she sympathizes with the perplexed reader, the bewildered student:


On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students Don't be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can't help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels

to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor.

The empathy she expresses leads to an unforced litany of big name diseases and conditions that are truly frightful to consider, and just as unlikely to cause anyone harm as her elongated last name. Nezhukumatathil keeps the anxiety localized , in human scale, which relieves her of the need to construct a global argument of a sort, with the attendant sweeping rhetoric that would've overwhelmed the heart of the poem. The writing is clear and graceful, just this side of whimsy; the appeal lies in the idea that this situation they all can get through if our sense of humor is in place.

What I read and heard was the sound of someone talking to a group of other people, imagined perhaps, full of perfect responses to the problematic nature of her last name, but still with a conversational thread working on that leads her audience, real or imagined, away from a source of fear so there might be some distance where humor can undermine anxiety and prejudice and discussion of a sort can begin. These items and words and definitions are nonsensical, sure, but they're not used willy nilly. Nezhukumatathil moves her ideal set of students into an ideal absurdity.


But most important, even if they did cohere, it would cohere into a poem that is still intolerably banal. The poem coheres very well, in tone, scansion and the implicit movement of ideas and their undermining. In this case, a underplayed notion that one shouldn't let an irrational and unfounded dread of new things--long names, new places, new relationships-- freeze one's possible responses to a larger world
they have to enter and act creatively in. This is anything but banal, though a straight moral lecture would have been dreadful, to coin a phrase. I admire the way she underscores her point through implication rather than direct argument. This allows some creative movement for the reader, who either gets close to her point or has license to make their own with her materials.

I wouldn't call this poem didatic, since it actually moves away moves away from didacticism, even to mock it with all the knowing references to ten syllable words and their obtuse definitions.The point of exaggeration is to reveal the absurdity of those banal items that create tension and fear, which is precisely what Nezhukumatathil does here.The imagery here is appropriate in so far as I think her escalation of complex terms and the bugaboos they define are in keeping with the logic (or lack of it, rather) that keeps individuals uptight. Effectiveness is what counts, and I think the poem, a good, small poem about a banal irritation in the poet's life, is effective in clearing ground and allaying fears without lectures, rage or insults. It operates the way a good put-on does, a straight faced declaration of some wild state of being whose meaning is grasped, or created after a particular spell of gullibility is cast.

I think it's her intent to veer to things that are not odd or eerie in and of themselves; though she never abandons her lyric bent, there's conversational quality of "jumping around", from item to item, sans cogent transition, that is faithful to the associative leaps actual talk assumes. This is idealized speech, of course--real speech transcribed is unendurably repetitive-- but I think she succeeds in blending her craft with a workable premise of what intriguing speech would sound like. Elmore Leonard writes amazing and intriguing dialogue in his crime fiction although we know full well no one actually speaks as engagingly as his characters.

Still, we suspend our protests and allow his crime novels to engage us. Nezhukumatathil has a harder time of it, since Leonard has the length of a novel to make his approach plausible and realistic seeming, and she has only the span of a poem. Her problem is not to overwhelm her subject with an excess of rhetoric or flourish and yet be "poetic" to get a sense and a tone just right, to capture some essence.

This is an elliptical monologue with the actual ellipsis removed, with the seamlessness meant to direct the theoretical students the narrator is addressing from their standoffish through an inspection of the absurdity of their fear. and finally to reassurance, provided with this:


I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam
of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will
lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full

of tiny dinoflagellates oozing green light
when disturbed. I promise dark gatherings
of toadfish and comical shrimp just when you think
you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.

Cockatiels, toadfish and comical shrimp are appropriate , I think, because the poem concludes with something of an invitation , a promise that there is more to be gained by being open minded about new experience than there is by remaining closed and unduly protective of one's set view of the world.

The Poverty of Theory and the Burial of Poetic Meaning

Jean Baudrillard is dead this past week, and what I remember from this postmodern French scold wasn't the sense he was making about how our reality is inauthentic and comprised only of ceaseless simulations of some archival idea of authenticity--an ordinary notion in cafe society better writers have finessed and fudged over the course of worrying about their legitimacy in the mythical public sphere provided by print. No, not that at all. It was that his theories reached the incomprehensible beauty of a John Ashbery poem, streaming, steaming strands of sheer pondering that gave one the feeling that what's being said must matter and must be important and is something one must struggle with and fabricate opinions on because JB's prose was damnably dense, rendering every specific detail it might come across abstruse, bruised and convoluted as matted hair. Tom Wolfe, fading New Journalism hot shot and junior league Veblen, had his uses, in this case providing a fine catchphrase when he mocked the New York art world in The Painted Word; critics and theoreticians of art had risen in importance, creating a situation where one could "see" the art unless they knew the theory. Theory, in general, is an all-consuming monster these days, formerly a habit of mind that would clarify issues, now a thing in itself, blocking the view. A theory is a guy in the row in front of you who won't remove his hat.
I like theory well enough when it's an aid to comprehending a work, but it's gotten so that theory itself is the be-all in literary writing, and that is the tragedy of much poetry that gets published and acclaimed. Theory is unavoidable when it comes to any attempt to outline why poetry works or doesn't succeed in accomplishing what a writer set out to do; dealing in broad outlines appropriate to the poems that might be considered, you set out your details, draw from the work, cite other instances of similar work, set up contrasts, make comparisons. Presto, you're theorist elaborating at some length in order to reveal the subtler aspects of what one hopes is work worth the parsing.

It's useful, though, because theory, in this case, is an activity secondary to the art it tries to address; if the poet is clear, if his abstractions crystallize contradictions between emotion and intellect, if he or she creates that remarkable language that is at once graspable and yet tracing the edge of invisible meanings, the astute critic is there to explain, draw out, praise and explicate those values that make the work click. Similarly, in this idealized relation, a poet full of his or herself, drunk on convolution, overblown language, large concrete slabs of pulse-less abstraction, and all sorts of crabbed, cubist intellection, the critic is there as well to address the problems of an art that is created for no audience in mind other than a small circle of sycophants.

A large part of the problem is that criticism and theory have achieved parity with creative writing, with the result being a generation's loss of heart in the lines they wrote. The intuitive, the gut level, the anecdotal was distrusted, and poets had to exercises something like a critical self-flagellation in their nominal poems that carried the caveat, implied or directly asserted, that the "I" writing the poem was a social construction, and that the responses the poems contained were part of particular political hegemony which had made slaves of us all. The function of creative writing, of writing poems, became one witless bit of onanistic deconstruction after another. Where difficult poems by Eliot, Stevens, Bishop, and Ashbery at least tried to (successfully, I think) leave with a sense of the things they spoke of and allowed for reader interrogation, much poetry since has become incoherent for its own sake. I do think there was a generation of poets who did not know how to write about the world or their experience in it.

Billy Collins, not a favorite poet of mine, is correct when he says that we're still in the early stages of recovering from the bad faith difficulty that's hounded us for twenty some years. It's just that theory, in the hands of its practitioners, doesn't know its place. There are not enough decent, good and brilliant critics as there used to be; there seem to be no Alfred Kazins, Frank Kermodes, Leslie Fielders on the horizon to continue the task of sussing through, inspecting, and interpreting novels on the basis of what's actually in the work, and thereby establishing a base from which to grasp how particular works succeed or fail or wallow in the middle in their attempts to enlighten.I'd call this criticism for the engaged reader, the ideal person curious enough about their entertainments to want to discuss the issues they arise further.

The criticism-as-closed system begins, I think, with the advent of the New Critics, ala I.A. Richards and F.R.Leavis who, though paying tribute to the idea that the study of literature, specifically poetry, needs to be reduced to nothing other than what is within a given work (excluding all other details such as historical context, biographical information, influences, etc), I suspect the intention was to create a systemic jargon that was intended to mimic the analytical esoterica of scientific inquiry; there is an envy within that particular circle that wanted the authority and power of what hard scientific investigation was thought to have. Though New Criticism has waned in years with the advance of new fashions and trends, the impetus to remove criticism and theory from the mainstream hasn't gone away. It's gotten worse, let us say.