Poetry lives, it thrives, it has purchase. And a pension

Poetry does encompass all sorts of odd configurations and rethinkings, it seems to me , and will continue to do so regardless of anyone's well-worded attempts to put a fence around the form and preserve it's purity. Language , we tend to forget, is a living thing , used by millions , billions of us around the globe to get across the complexity of experience with a finite vocabulary, and to encompass new successes, new disasters. It's a malleable entity, and while the meanings of words and their syntactical constructions change with constant use, tempered by technology, politics, pop cultural, language and it's literary forms, the novel,the poem, the play, the short story, wind up settling down into a semblance of order, structure, coherence. Frayed, changed, tweaked, but in tact.

I'm not a Flarf fan--I will take William Burroughs, Godard and Pynchon over the easy ironies of a generation of bright scribes who seem intent, to hammer the remaining life from the concept of irony--but those who've been around poetry classes, workshops, reading series and have written three decades worth of material trying to simultaneously debunk previous standards and extend them yet further, we've seen this energy before. This is to be expected and desired; while there's only so many intellections one can play their variations upon in the attempt to develop an original poetic and aesthetic with which to nestle their work at a theoretical distance from a casual reader, the real energy is in the work itself, the actual poems that get written with the attitude to "make it new". Verve and innovation are what poetry constantly needs to keep in a relevant resource for reader desiring something other than coldness of a sober prose.

It's not that I don't get Flarf, but rather that the kids have discovered my old toys in the attic, in the form of old avant gardisms and mouldy experimentalism, and who have painted the notions in colors of their choosing. An aesthetic that generally suggests a preference for inappropriate juxtapositions of rhetorical pitch and tone, practitioners of flarf scour the Internet for the convolutions, crazed coinages, conflations and confusions an unmonitored language finds itself subjected to; the findings are brought back to the reader (anyone eager to be in on the joke) in poetic form,shall we say, in an effort to bring an x-ray to the pinched seriousness of a literary establishment's endeavors to pass itself off as essential to existence. It is, we guess correctly, a joke. If that's the case, it's a joke that gets told over and over, the thinking being, it seems, that a concept gets more profound and funnier with frequency. I used to have great fun with the find and replace mechanisms embedded in Word documents; I would cut and paste a straight forward NYTimes article detailing some bloodless activity only wonks would be interested in, and then used find and replace to switch-out appropriate ones for ones that were non sequiturs. Finding and replacing all uses of the article "The", for example, replacing it with with a nonsense sentence like "Jesus, your breath makes want to eat Cheeze Whiz Hunger Punks". And so on. It was instant Dada, incredibly funny, but after the glee came the tedium of just doing something in an attempt to re-ignite a mania that had passed. Flarf seems a more grandiose version of that and, as with many experimental movements of the passing moment, the rationalizations for their perpetuation is more artful than the work itself.

Poetry , meantime,will withstand this assault as it withstood the valiant energies of my contemporaries and I, the best of their efforts will be absorbed, the best work will find homes in appropriate anthologies and web site archives, and another group of writers, some years younger, will begin their attempt to usurp the current residents at the top of the heap.

One might call this a dialectic, a cycle; one might also consider terming it a pathology, having as much to do with vanity, ego, status and the conviction that one's generation is the last word at the end of history. Language and it's attendant form, poetry, however, goes on. We still breath, it still thrives.

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, stress-less state, a return to the womb, perhaps; in any event, his pining was 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, succinctly in her poem The Dead Are Not, published on line this week at Slate; 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. 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.

TO READ: nearly perfect

This is only a few paces removed from being a Hallmark greeting, but Michael McPhee's poem "To Read" is sweet and lightly likable . The metaphors are juxtaposed well , on balance, and what saves the comparison between picking up one's first book with an initial driving lesson is McPhee's delicate touch. This is an amusing, interesting effect that's constructed on the slimmest of plausible analogues, but there is a logic in the balance the poet maintains between what what he sees and what he associates with it.

He held the opened book
in both hands, at arm's length,

as if he were a student driver
practicing steering this Model ABC
that resisted his touch,
that he could tell he wouldn't know
how to control once it started,

not yet able to ease his grip
or surrender his frown
and learn to let the sentences unwind,
letting their momentum
carry him down the waiting road,

stopping and starting his way
into a world of words.

The awkward grasp on the book, the hesitant hands on the steering wheel, the slow, careful easing through the paragraphs, the lurching starts out of the driveway, the gathering of momentum as the plot thickens and the sentences take on more detail, the increasing convolutions of the streets and their patterns; in the brief space he allows himself McPhee draws up the parallels one's mastery of their language in written form and the growing skill as a driver. In both areas, one's technique becomes reflex. Personal style and flair are expressed while maintaining a knowledge of rules, limits, the need for restraint. McPhee remembers his lessons in restraint and preserves the essence of his idea; not a vehicle for an impressionistic essay nor an excuse for a confession, the poem is focused on the young reader, the fleeting, incidental analogy McPhee imagines. It is nearly a perfect crystallization of a hard to grasp perception.


The "reader" portion of this analogy has a strong sense of trepidation and adults, generally, don't have those kinds of fears when it comes to picking up a book and reading it. Children, though, especially those who are too old for board books, picture books or the sorts of books intended for toddlers, do, as a whole , enter come to more sophisticated writing with hesitation. The books they'll read will be nonfiction in large part, fact-based books, with that they will be expected to recall and remember what they've read. I sell children's books for a living and have talked to many teachers and parents about young children, resistant to a more difficult reading, and how their lesson plans are designed to ease through their resistance and value reading, in itself.


The leap to the driving lesson is meant to give us a sense that there are times in our lives when we must leave what's comfortable with and take the next step in our progress to becoming fully functional adults. I had the combination of anxiety and excitement as a teen when it was my turn to learn how to drive--I liked being driven everywhere I had to go , or mooching rides from friends who had their licenses, but there came a time I had to find my own way, with my own means. The analogy between the two, I think, are distinct, but cogently compared.

A simpler explanation might be to not get hung up over how old the unsteady reader is and appreciate the artful way McPhee accomplished verisimilitude in such a small instance. In both images, the unsure reader and the analogous new driver have somethings in common which the poet found a right-sized set of terms to bring to our attention; beyond that, I don't think the poem means much more than the particulars directly identified. Everything else, whether the reader is a young child or an adult with a reading problem , as zinya skillfully hypothesises, are things that are suggested, if not hinted at. Some of the best things we like in particular poems happens off stage, in a gathering of our own associations that enable our imagination to fulfill it's default function, to complete story lines and flesh out sketchy details. In that sense, each more detailed explication of the poem becomes, in a sense, autobiography.

There's a maxim I heard in school that I like, that a work of art isn't really finished until an audience, separate from the artist, experiences it and invests the object with meaning. . If there's something in McPhee's poem that makes some others think the reader is an adult, that works just fine, since it's a suggested texture that occurs independent of what the words claim is going on. A poem evokes ideas that are not in physical evidence.


It's an almost perfect poem. Nearly, that is, because the last couplet, "...stopping and starting his way / into the world of words" spoils the clarity of image and idea; McPhee starts to think at this point, tacking on something that is a tactical error among many a poet, that of summing up with a punchy conclusion. It does not fit the rest of this otherwise wonderfully spare poem, an abstraction that adds weight , not gravity. It's almost an editor sneaked this into the draft before it went to print, someone who just had add the phrase "world of words" in order to connect this piece with a more rigorous discourse being conducted elsewhere. The phrase, I think, is trite and hackneyed, and wonder why there was an impulse to clutter up a poem that was almost perfect.

Richard Poirier,RIP

Literary critic and cultural commentator Richard Poirier has passed away. Clarity and diversity of interests made him one of my favorites; Mailer's best critic, amazing on the subject of Wallace Stevens, The Transcendalists, pop culture. He had a genius of connecting popular forms with long standing traditions and could appreciate it when particular artists were blurring distinctions between established fields to come up with a meaningful response to contemporary experience. He was aware that the artist was not separate from history, but realized as well that history wasn't static nor a straight jacked that limited an individual's aesthetic options. He was brilliant. And he could write with an uncommon clarity.

STORMY MONDAY BLUES 2 -acoustic

I've recorded several versions of this T.Bone Walker classic, and this is the best one, I think. As much as I love a full, blasting amplified,tone with reverb, gain and the like, sometimes I like to highlight the acoustic side of the blues harmonica. I am hardly Sonny Terry or Sonny Boy Williams, but this has it's merits; my indebtedness to Paul Butterfield is conspicuous here.

Please let me know what you think; all praise and criticisms are welcome.

The poet's depression

Barry Goldensohn can write with a snap and twist in his lines with the first part of "April 26,2006" his poem that prevent this from being merely a speedy itemization of habits he's had on his life 'til now. He has the sense to ease on the breaks, slow down, offer a side comment, an aside on the passing banalities he's bothering to tell us about.It's a fast list, and it is not without the slight shock of recognition:

...the century in which I've lived most of my years
on an orderly, ritual-loving continent,
with well-regulated trash collection,
public gardens,
smooth lawns, milk delivered at dawn in cold bottles,
clinking and sweating...

At age sixty nine and he's ready to burn all his old clothes, move out of the shabby house, develop interests and rituals that are seemingly irrational and ill mannered for a man who is supposed to have more dignity as he ascends to deep senior citizenship. Not so, the narrator implies, I've behaved and have been dutiful and dull all my life; why should I be more of the same as I realize there are more days behind me than ahead of me? It's a question worth asking, and Goldensohn does a good job of setting us for a rant about living a fuller life full of rage and ecstatic abandon as the days get shorter, but here he does a hard left turn and turns what 'til now was a minor key bit of longing into something angry, outraged, morally offended:

--screaming and glistening with blood
at the hour of my birth Guernica was carpet bombed
as practice for the time of saturation—
the horrified face through the window that sees
the broken bodies by the light of a bare bulb—
devastating cities thick with targets, human
and other items of civil life: school,
public sculpture in parks, music pavilion, musician,
library, literary life, the writer.

There are ways to present startling contrasts in differing views of the world , and there are ways where irony can emerge in the presentation and reveal the tenuous foothold any paradigm has on defining the all of everything. But this isn't the poem, and for all his skill as a phrase maker--there isn't a badly written line in this poem--there's a cut and paste feeling to this piece; it's as though Goldensohn were rummaging through a shoebox full of parts, unfinished stanzas, templates of recurring poetic themes and slapped them together, a jarring wedding of two poetic styles, the wistful and vaguely nostalgic, the other hectoring, moralizing, humorless and grave.

It is one thing to segue from the hour of his birth to horrible battle scenes, but Goldensohn's horror is just as aestheticized, abstracted and at several layers of remove as was his previously addressed assumptions about a lifetime of being a banal, dutiful citizen. He relapses obviously and conveniently into the seductive habit of writers using art and art making as subjects through which they tackle the confusing, the contradictory. Here he winds up describing , plainly, Picasso's iconic "Guernica" painting as a means to deliver the moral of his story, which is that artist ultimately fails to say anything fixed about existence in their work. This is material that thousands of poets, good, great, mediocre, have covered to the far flung best of their abilities, and as such all wind up saying the say thing, that the senses are fallible and that the best an artist can leave behind after they pass on is interesting evidence of their failure to uncover the big truth. Goldensohn's big truth with this poem seems something written out of boredom, or typing practice, being the kind of self-inquisition that poses a hard question and then dodges the bullet of making something interesting from their set with a cheesy sleight of hand.

It was a typical trick in high school debate class for someone to invoke Hitler or the Holocaust when the subject concerned matters of life and death, whether the death penalty, birth control, the draft. It was a ploy to stun and stall and defer, and a attempt to get the opposing debate team to cede points that hadn't , in fact, been clearly argued. Goldensohn, stuck for an exit out of what was turning into yet another flyweight screed of casual irony, slammed us with Heavy Subjects and Grave Issues, and dares us to ask him for a better linking between the two voices, or to ask what it was he was trying to talk about in the first place.

"The Wild Iris" by Louise Gluck

Critic Robert Christgau commented once that Eric Clapton was a classy blues guitarist who was perfect for the tasty, brief statement but who had the habit of playing in long form and , consequently, losing emphasis, momentum, and gaining only redundancy. Something similar might apply to Gluck, who's strengths can be seen here, a confident voice, a sense of place, a subject addressed directly and indirectly without drift in a voice that still has the capacity to be surprised. This is a wonderful lyric, as much as other of her admirers might object to the term; she sounds like she had an idea of what she was trying to achieve. --tb


The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.