Elitist Poetry

Just got off the phone with someone who decided to make their nominal inquiry as to how I was doing after a-long-time-no-see into a springboard to revisit some old resentments. Poetry came up in the course of a miserable (and loud) stumble down Memory Lane, art and practice she found effete. "You're a snob and you're an elitist and you never listened when I--" I was puzzled, of course, but that's what I get for having the same phone number for over a decade; folks can revisit you and either get square with you or start the wildfire once again. Anyway, I resented being called an elitist. But maybe that's not a bad thing (within limits, of course).

Poetry has been an elitist practice for decades, and the efforts to bring a larger audience into the fold and investigate the diversity of verse styles is a good thing, regardless of the misgivings of the abstruse few. I doubt books will vanish, nor that experimental and radical writing will cease; more likely, such forms will most likely gain readers because of efforts to get buyers to invest in Dorianne Laux or Frank O'Hara instead of Mitch Albom or Dwayne Dyer. It's likely that exposure to poetry and the creation of desire for it where none existed before would eventually get a larger audience for things that are edgier, more experimental, strangely political. The anti-poetics that flourished in the last century might gain an audience not composed of other wayfaring artistes and institutionalized revolutionaries who nod and chuckle at each botched and confounded pun and labored sarcasm. Contempt is fine when it's reserved for those who are perpetrating objectively loathsome agendas on their fellow citizens, such as rationales for social, economic and physical violence of any sort; justice is a quality that must be fought for every step of the way, and a honed contempt is a part of the mix of responses that would fuel you to oppose the tangible elements of evil. Poetry you don't like isn't a tangible evil, it's only a difference of taste, and tiresome derision on the level of blistering invective does not prepare one's community for A Perfect World; it cheapens discourse, rather, and makes the prospect of writing and participating in poetry essentially the same as inviting someone to have a free sock-in-the-jaw. Why would one lean into a left hook they see coming?

And why would an aspiring poet bother with taking up this essentially unprofitable art if there's no standard for conversation, criticism, disagreement? It shouldn't be strange to anyone why many of our best writers are forsaking poetry altogether, and even skipping novel writing and instead situating themselves in various nonfiction categories, areas, alas, where there are readership and the sort of feedback that appraises worth sans the desire to impale every perceived sinner against a vague notion of worth. Perhaps it would be an audience that might ask what it is Bernstein and a few of his friends are trying to do. Such an audience should be prepared to roll up their sleeves; not every verse is Billy Collins, transparent as acrylic. The words we use and the sounds we make to get across subtle blends of the sublime, inane, blessed and evil is strange enough to consider, and one is refreshed by having their memes and phonemes challenged by way of being made even odder. Language poetry is an honest project, I admit, and I've been taken with its peculiar power as a method, but there is a point where the personality has to surface undiluted with theory, which such a hypothetical readership would demand.

Oath of Office

Poet Frank Bidart writes about the odd and confounding ritual of issuing in a new President with "Inauguration Poem", a skimpy, momentarily evocative lyric that promises to deliver a moral but evaporates on the breeze instead. Just as well, really, since these slight stanzas are murmurings instead of exclamations, whispers rather than shouts. Bidart wants to write about the unnamed expectations come to be focused on the taking of the oath. With or without the new president's hand on the Bible, the varieties of disappointment will reign soon enough; even a god would have trouble solving every citizen's concern and dissolving each citizens unease with the empty sound that attends every step. There are no laws against loneliness. This is poem dwells on the idea that what we're actually dealing with as we witness an inauguration is ritual meant to stir ghosts; the past is present and constantly influencing the future, as the sage remarked, and Bidart attempts to isolate some elements of the allure that attracts the best and worst of us. It's a collective point where headstrong notions of putting things right which have strayed off course , grossly so, in the presence of a president who'll mount an assault on erring policies and social injustice, a public that desires a change in direction, the sociopaths, the malcontents, the would-be assassins who want to strike a blow against the organized brutality the state and the institutions have made his or her world.

Today, despite what is dead
staring out across America I see sinceLincoln gunmennursing fantasies of purity betrayed,dreaming to restorethe glories of their blood and state...

Expectation, hope, rage, rebellion, collective will--a noisy, bickering mess trying to sort itself out and praying for consensus as the new man takes an oath to do his best. Sometimes we make the right choice, history seems to smile and matters work themselves out in ways that amaze us and perhaps make us aware of a hesitant miracle taking place. Too soon, though, our basic interest, our native centers of concern, take credit for the good, we lay blame too easily outside our sphere, we destroy Eden once again with our will to have our way.

under the lustrous flooding moonthe White House is stillWhitman's White House, itsgorgeous frontfull of reality, full of illusion

There is always the chance to start over, though, this work in progress--this is a government as the boulder we roll up the hill, only to start over once it rolls down again. That seems the center essence of democracy quite despite what Presidents have to say about it--we are and will continue to clean up the mess we've made of things, to contend with the bad hands we've been dealt, the sorry slices of pie we've been served. It's not about the getting, it's about the doing, and the specters Bidart invokes at the margins serve to compel us to keep the wretched machine humming along.

The angst of the pruney faced

Some of us have declared that they don’t care about a writer’s theories on writing so long as the work, absent an explanation , comes up to the snuff one would like it to. I do care if a poet's work add up to the sum of their theories because it's a difference between talking a good game and playing one. Sometimes the theories are more interesting and evocative than the poets’ work as an artist; Pound seemed to me to have the instincts of a good talent scout. I'm grateful for his remarks to his fellows, but I wish reading his work wasn't a path I had to go through in order to find the better poets. His protégé, T.S.Eliot, though, had poetry that surpassed his theories, giving the lie to them, in fact. For all of his stated preferences for impersonality in the stanzas, Eliot’s verse couldn’t outrun his despair. There is something felt and hurt, even moving under the abstraction of the writing, and one comes away feeling that he had hoped the layers of abstruse allusion would render the pains still and not bothersome. I doubt he succeeded, and it’s poetry’s blessing he never cured himself of his disillusion. One is almost able to forgive the anti-Semitism that creeps through the work. Not quite, but almost.

Andrew Wyeth

chistina's world
for Andrew Wyeth

brown hills of grass
where she slept

until the light
slides under
the surface of things,

she rises
hungry
as a fish
patrolling a lake's still surface,

there is someplace to be,

in a chair
at a table
with a place setting
of one plate, one fork,

one empty glass.

Metallica goes to the Hall of Fame

Somewhere in their headbanging journey a bevy of smart rock critics seeking a token metal band to extol as encapsulating the rebel virtues of the music picked up on these plodding purveyors of car wreck chord changes and have argued in earnest that their by-number anger and angst is of greater merit than the inchoate whining and flailing it actually is.

If they have captured the feeling of a generation, then it a mind-dead generation they represent; their music is a catalog of things most of us grow out of. They haven't a memorable riff, not a quotable line to shout in the car on the way to work, not a grunt nor a scream nor a rim shot that would agitate the nervous system to a creative frenzy. Metallica is the music of stalled traffic, tons of machinery grinding gears, moving nowhere.

We're left to ask when will the drugs wear off the Hall of Fame's nominating board and they realize their terrible slight of motor city punk pioneers the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges? Those are two bands who created a sound it took the rest of American and British bands over a decade to catch up with. Please, some sane choices for who deserves the pantheon for this insane music.

Big Wind, Good Poem

"
This is a surprise, a lyric poem going for the musical measure and actually achieving the end. "Morning of the Monsoon" is not an over-alliterated fruit bowl of loud colors and stray wind chimes, it is a series of low tones modulating to harder gusts, the peace of a shore line giving way gradually to the roiling plunder of seasonal storm. Diane Mehta gets it right, and elliptically fuses memories of sublime nature writing with the human response to an eden about to be turned and churned by natural process.

The blue-black curve of weather sizzles when it smacks the asphalt.
Ocean air tumbles in, loosely shaped in networks of water.

Embroidered marigolds on muslin, canary-yellow kurtas,
pelican pink blur together in the wash
flowing in rivulets down the grooves of roads

the British built. Rainwater aimless as worshippers
tilted in prayer, chanting the old rhythms.

The monsoon works itself north. Cashews infuse the air
which thrives on motion, ripe fruit, and daily appeals—
a step up in the next world, more love.

So many poems get drunk on enjambment and stall like a car engine we've just flooded with our impatience to get out of the parking lot; Mehta has the ear for the way words cascade and comment off one another, she knows which articles to drop to quicken the pace, and when to slow it down with a line or two of greater length, deeper measure. Rainwater aimless as worshippers /tilted in prayer, chanting the old rhythms is rich and resonant, a rhythm of r's purring over the collective cloistering that seeks a refuge from the disrupted air, the erupting sky. It suggests a layering of sounds, strong winds and shrill whistling through the cracks, a droning prayer that centers the community.

Ash is the color of the road,
my grandmother's ashes cold as my mother's bones,
remains that will be mine. Words don't last in me—

there are too many dialects. I tilt into finite.
The rest plug into a circular, scene-shifting pull of souls—

Nirvana and the rest, rapture—
to be cut loose from life, its repetitions
hell. Like walking into the shade.

A keen ear and a sure tongue are a combination any poet would desire, and Mehta has them both on display with this work, bringing the reader through the experience of the monsoon and out the other side without hamming up the particulars about Nature's Wrath or How I Survived The Big Wind, among other stale strategies she might have taken. It is the perception of the child after an event she had not had before in her short life, eyes full of the blend of muted terror mixed with awe, the experience of seeing everything you've become accustomed to changed in a power set of instants. A poet who gets that right is someone meriting a further read.

Patrick McGoohan

A note for the passing of actor Patrick McGoohan, known to American audiences as intelligence operative John Drake in the 60s television show Secret Agent (titled Danger Man in Britain, where it originated), and especially for the dada/surreal serial maze he created and starred in, The Prisoner.

A craggy countenance and a rumbling boom box of a voice, McGoohan had pacing, brooding presence on the screen, someone who could give you the impression that he was thinking of several different different things while he spoke to you directly about a particular item of dramatized controversy. It was a restless energy he could bring to a career of roles he succeeded in problematizing with a repertoire of ticks, manic hand gestures, tilts of the head, an abrupt change of posture; he seemed like he was about to go off at any moment. He was a smart enough artist to guide his persona into the right roles, and The Prisoner was the perfect fit; an uncontainable individualist quits an undisclosed intelligence agency, only to find himself kidnapped and held prisoner in an isolated village with other prisoners where the cryptic overseers demand information which he will not give.

The Prisoner, referred to as No.6 in the series, continually calculated his escape attempts, all of them failure, a task he would only start again because he would not be contained.
Odd, driving, quirky, The Prisoner fit neatly into a generation's reading and viewing habits where The System and The Man and The Establishment meant sterility, conformity, death on two feet, and it got the spirit of rebellion through the likes of No.6. One suspects that McGoohan's pacing rebel would do well with the counter culture that turned him into a hero: the prisoner didn't seem the sort of trade one sort of conformist rigidity for another. He wasn't a joiner.