A poem

I've been a bombastic blowhard of late, and have gotten myself into insoluable squabbles on other people's blogs. It occured to me that I've been writing the way Al Pacino acts:loudly and without variation in tone. Needless to say, there are those who think I'm a jerk who doesn't know what he's talking about. They're half right. I am a jerk , though I have my better moments. I often wondered what would happen if a poet I'd given a negative notice too met in actual circumstances; this poem is me answering my own question. A post on Stephen Burt's blog got me thinking along this line, and here is where I offer my face for a little chin music. If I've made you mad, imagine those are your knuckles meeting the stubble.


The Poetry
Critic Is Moved, Parts One and Two1.

I talk too much
when the room gets loud,
there's a shroud about my face
when I have something to say,

a siren is going off
just above my neck,

everything I think
about these words
someone else wrote
gets ugly as rabbit warrens
after they release the hounds,

my words sound
like I'm baying at the moon
because the heart that gets broken
didn't crack convincingly,
didn't fall to the rutted floor
loudly enough,
and soon, I say, yeah, so what,
we all get hurt, we all have a name
cannot stop singing
in the center of the night
as we drive from bedroom
to 7-11 for a can of coffee
and a newspaper we will not read,

make me feel something
that blasts me to through the wall
and over the lake, make my body clear
a line of fir trees where a road needs to be,

give some lift to your depression,
place some down in your graceful stride,
smile at me only when there's smoking gun
at your feet,

damn it all,
write something that moves me.

2.



He drops his pen, rises
from the table and walks
over to where I sat,
filling the room with
every slur I could sustain,
he cocked his arm back,
he threw a punch,
the last thing I saw
was where he wrote "Fuck Off?"
on his knuckles
before his fist caught my chin
and I went flying backwards,
hitting my head against the wall.

Charles Bernstein on National Poetry Month

April is nearly upon us, and it's time for us to prepare for the minor onslaught of platitudes major publishers will offer their readership as they give lip service to National Poetry Month. Expect a short flurry of big ads, poets advertised who don't usually appear in publisher promotions, and then little if anything at all once the month and the would-be mania for poets and their work abates. Doesn't it seem ironic to anyone that April was picked to be the commemorating period because of Eliot's famous line, which is that the month is "cruel"? This is either amnesia or some ad person pasting together bric a brac to add more sizzle to their pizazz. Charles Bernstein doesn't like National Poetry Month either, and waxes on the point here. It's worth a read.It's a buzz kill the entrenched poets, the few who have measures of fame, position and (yes) money garnered from activities other the popular sale of their books
would rather not grapple with. Bernstein essentially makes the point that by placing "poetry"
(as defined by marketing research in attempts to make it palatable to a reading public that could care less about poets and their poems) of a campaign to spread the word have, in effect, marginalized even more. Bernstein, a smart cookie if a didactic poet, prefers a form without sanctioned codification and conditions that can challenge , fester, disturb,
disrupt; this Disneyland approach to promoting poetry encourages writing with middling ambition, producing middling results. At that point it ceases to be poetry.

300

Fans of slick macho adventures (very) loosely based on historical events with a pronounced emphasis on hacking, stabbing and slashing are having a feast with director Zack Snyder of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300. The squabble here is the Battle of Thermopylae, circa 480 BC, where Spartan King Leonidas and a hardened band of his best soldiers head off an invasion of the overwhelming Persian armies. The excess masculinity and historical inaccuracy didn't bother me, precisely because the film is adapted from a graphic novel. Director Snyder, I think, has found the right pitch for the movie version and has, in effect, created something better than Frank Miller's original fantasy.  The results are acutely mindless, with characterization and momentum at a persistent fever pitch and dour tone found in the comics, with the potential allegories to current day debates over Bush and the Iraqi War blurred at best. The point is less to bring awareness to the audience that Imperialism Is Bad than that unchained and uncompromising masculinity is good. Suitably, the intellectual content of 300 comes off as a cartooning of Robert Bly's masculinist screed Iron John. But rather than shudder with the confused mash-up of Spartan history and homoerotic militarism, the movie moves forward with its absurdities, bombast, and swagger with impressive agility. To exploit a cliche further, the battle scenes, though hardly believable, are amazingly balletic in their swerves, dodges and severing connections of weapon to limb and neck; Synder has mastered the rhythm of intersecting slow motion and regular speeds and the constant perspective-changing the latest camera technologies avail him. This does rather well to exploit the perfect forms of the Spartan soldiers, nearly naked save loin clothes, helmets, spears, and spears, hard, sinewy athleticism poised (and posed) to jab, stick, slice. It's doubtless Yukio Mishima would have liked this movie for the amount of time the camera spends scanning the length of one sculpted body after another. 300, however, did not bore. Snyder seems something of craftsman when doling out the excess and the unneeded here; he knows when to stop and move on. He deserves credit for keeping the narrative brisk.

Ellen Wehle and Mark Strand

Not every poem an interesting writer publishes is itself interesting;I've had the embarrassment of seeing my least favorite self-penned poem printed in small magazines
that would expose my damning pretensions to an audience that mattered ato someone trying to practice the craft. I thought Ellen Wehle's poem in this week's Slate"Second Coming" was too elliptical and sparse to worry a meaning from it, which is a shame since I think poet Wehle is normally an interesting poet.This seems less writing than say, jotting , an attempt to get flashing chains of association rapidly on paper. Not every chain is worth rattling, or presenting as a finished work.There is what seems like a conspicuous attempt to create a dread here, something similar to Mark Strand's poem "The Dreadful Has Already Happened" [www.poemhunter.com]. Strand, though, isn't merely arranging choppy sentences that are glutted with iconic references; instead he creates a narrative, non sequitur as it may be, and lands us on a terrain that is palpable in spite of it's unreality.
The symbolism and private allusions remain concealed, of course, but their capacity to disturb and convey the sinking feeling that something awful has happened , for me, strikes a primordial core. It works because Strand's elements is localized, with a skewed family history, punishments. The familiar is defamiliarized. Wehle hits a slip stream with "Second Coming" and powers through the junkyard of history with the equivalent of an industrial grade magnet. The assignment , perhaps,was to sweep over the battered metal remains of political and religious bastards of the past and then to make art, a poem, from what sticks to the black, flat disk. It is ,though, a tad worn in presentation, part Dada construction, part political agitprop, part language poem, not synthesizing the energies of the three competing anti-aesthetics into something recognizably new. Or interesting.It suffers the worst fate a poem can suffer, it has no vigor. Tap, and you get a flat thud in place of resonance. This is more finger exercise, a practicing of the scales in different keys, this is something you leave in the notebook. Ellen Wehle is a good poet, and I've written well of here in a past Slate offering, and I will chalk this one up to Robert Pinsky's curious habit of pick weak submissions by good writers.

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.