A half minute of doubt

There are the times when, after bemoaning yet again a noted poet's latest poem-about-poetry and the attending self-admiration (or self-justification) , I am tempted to do my inventory and investigate the possibility that I've turned into a bored drudge for whom all the exciting things in the language have already haven't; I dread spending the rest of what I hope of are many years of life tossing soggy bombs at the poems that come from a younger generation of bards. I suppose it's a matter , partially,of the perennial search for a usable past--is there anything in the standards and tastes one  formed thirty years ago still workable in years where tastes and formulas have been modified to relevantly account for the alterations in the psychic landscape?   I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic.

The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.

I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would prefer poets engage the ambivalence and incongruities in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of it’s own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflexing tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.

Punk rock

Malcom McLaren has passed away, the man commonly credited  by quick study journalists and water cooler culturati with creating  punk rock, in the form of The Sex Pistols. I usually sniff when I hear this; grand as they were, and visionary though he was, I thought they and their like were redundant to rock and roll's evolution. Rather than make something new, they reiterated old noise and pre-owned attitudes. I grew up in Detroit in the late Sixties, where the local bands included The MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and The Amboy Dukes, not-give-fuck punks who kicked out the jams a good decade before the Brits made what was punk rock into a design fetish. It's not that I  thought the Sex Pistols weren't called for, as the pretentiousness of the musicians and the gullibility of the audience had choked off the life force that made rock and roll exciting and worth caring about. Some of it might be laid at the feet of rock criticisms, since the advanced discussions of Dylan's relationship to Chuck Berry's everyman existentialist demanded a musical technique and lyrical concept just as daunting. This is the danger when folk art is discovered: it stands to become something distorted, disfigured and bereft of vitality. I was lucky , I guess, in that I was a fan of the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges long before the Sex Pistols caught the punk wave. They , and bands like Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath were a grounding principal--rock and roll is beautiful because it's energetic, awkward, and stupid, but profoundly so. There are "concept albums" I admire and still like, if not listen to, but I won't name them here. I am pleased, though, that the idea of the Album being a literary object has been dropped in a deep grave and had dirt thrown over it's bloviated remains. What we can thank the late Clarine for is reminding us that rock and roll is a loser's game, the noise of the empty stomache.

Life off line?

Artist and writer James Strum outlines his plan to leave the internet in Slate article where he confesses misgivings about turning 45 ; it's less about middle age than it is about having spent the previous decade and a half on the internet, both working and doing nothing important at all.A moving tale of middle aged anxiety, that naked moment of clarity when one realizes how much time has gone by in that fabled blur. Facts are, though, that the Internet is an integral part of our lives, intimately so, and swearing to go without it is likely to make life even more awkward than it already is. One could, of course, change their lifestyle and come to resemble a hardened survivalist subsisting solely on bare communicating essentials--newspapers, snail mail, land line telephones--but the amount of work and sacrifice required to sustain it makes me think that one , after a period, will likely come to a second moment of bewilderment and wonder what it was they were trying to prove. Difficult as it may be, the answer is that one needs to accomodate the technology that is the connecting tissue of our times and learn to use this tool as a means to get out of the house, away from the computer, engaged with the world. Being on line is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Finality, Beginning

The Day You Left / Mammogram  in Slate intrigues me.

This isn't so bad a poem, but it is awkward, the way it begins in the middle of a description , only adding specific detail and the associated metaphor in slow, deliberate packages of ambiguity. It is exactly like coming in late for a lecture and trying your best to suss out the meaning of terms, the importance of incidents, the interconnection between the highlighted portions. But while we slavishly attending to the imagining of back story , situation and how they inform the narrator's choice of confounding allusions, poet Terri Witek does a capable job of not giving too much away. We know only that which she allows us to know tangibly; the rest of the poem's sequence is something of a daze to an absent friend or mate , and the absence hints at the vanishing of all things certain. There are probes, there are scars, there is fear that what was young , vital, yearning is now aged and now conspicuously revealing the terms of decline .




So we're relieved both worlds include

only the grayish skies they drift through

and just one cupola or darkened hut.

These last, by signaling each other,

can gather, as the great head of Buddha

does from his amazing topknot,

all tender, contradictory feelings.



So what to do, rage, rage against the dying of the light, or slip into a cocoon of morose self pity and regret. Better to be the Buddha and embrace both the rage and the sorrow and merge them into a fluid state of being, a psychic equilibrium that might be accomplished with the acceptance of the exact facts of one's contradictory impulses and the inevitable death we are guaranteed. The body is the perfect analog of the earth, and will return to the earth at the final moments, ready to rejoin the great cycle of being and make another life possible.

There is, I think, an argument the narrator is having with herself, simultaneously mourning the loss of what had been anchors of certainty in her life--a mate, friends, her health an positive attitude--while at the same time appreciating a larger sense of things. She is, I believe, in the process of convincing herself that she is still situated in a framework that gives her life meaning, or at least certainty. It's not clear, though, that the narrator is entirely convinced, and this may well be merely a snippet of an ongoing monologue. Lack of resolution is an element I enjoy in contemporary poems--I dislike pat resolutions through lazy analogies or writing program tricks of how to get out of hopelessly muddled dead ends-- and Witek presents her protagonist as someone we come upon , in mid thought, and whom we leave, with her thoughts and contemplation, perhaps no where near the serenity she desires. What is tantalizing is the idea that her thinking, her considerations are the process itself with which she remains sane, balanced, and that this is less about the issue of the Mammogram and the abandonment than it is about how a good any of us are constantly rearranging the priorities and values in the rooms of our interior lives as an ongoing effort to keep from being overwhelmed with each bit of news that portends discomfort, inconvenience, finality.

The lop sided divide

Poet Amy King went to some effort to compile some discouraging statistics regarding women writers and the ratio of literary awards given between men and women. The survey, published here in Willa, show that for all the talk about the great distance women have come since the bad old days, the lion's share of the top prizes , with the attendant status and acclaim, still go to men.  For all the talk of progress in the task of leveling the playing field, not much distance has been gained.

A large part of the problem, perhaps intractable, is the nature of the awards themselves; most of the ones we think matter–the Nobel, The Pulitzer, The National Book Award, The PEN Awards– were founded by male editors , who created categories and criteria reflecting their aesthetic, which is male, straight and, for all they knew, the single standard by which other writers are to measured. Women writers have made gains in terms of critical reception and the receipt of awards, but the standards by which women are judged, I fear, is whether they write as well as a better known male.

Lorrie Moore is constantly compared to John Cheever, Nikki Giovanni cannot escape being contrasted against Amiri Baraka; well intentioned critics try to explain the inevitable alignments, but the enterprise of letting the girls into the boy’s domain seems a faithless affirmative action move. I am reminded that Dick Cavett had said to his guest Susan Sontag that her name is unavoidable linked to the term “intellectual”. Sontag responded that the journalists doubtlessly think they are doing her a favor by telling readers that she’s a smart woman, but noted that male writers don’t need their introductions so qualified. She said that no one felt compelled to say that Norman Mailer was an intellectual when his name came up. It was taken for granted. The sad truth is that I think this onerous habit of keeping women writers at the margins will continue until there is a new canon formation.

Bachelder and Boyle Spoil the Party

Tortilla Curtain

a novel by TC Boyle

Culture clash is the theme in Tortilla Curtain , and leave it TC Boyle to go beyond the abstract curtain of statistics, policy wonkery and three-hankie tragedy mongering and provide the reader instead with a contradiction that is harshly comic; well off Southern Californians, nominally liberal in their politics, are forced to deal with an illegal couple who are in the most dire situations. It works to the degree in that the suburban pair preferred to have their causes at several layers of removal , preferring safe memberships in organizations forever raising money for non controversial progressive causes; a check or a credit card donation was the exercise of their social responsibility, an acceptable penance for what is largely a consumerist lifestyle. Boyle does not sugar coat, euphemise nor glorify the awful trials and fate of the Mexican couple that had stolen over the border looking for a better life. Against a backdrop of  sunshine, opulence and Conspicuous Consumption, Boyle tenders life at the margins, at the edges of glittering downtowns and cascading suburbs. Boyle is stinging and blunt in the way he describes the ordeals economic desperation that drives good people. He is unsparing at offering up a priceless, painfully recognizable banter of a privileged psychology that inspects the hard facts of injustice and responds by trying to worm their way out of any sense of responsibility for others less well endowed.

U.S.!
a novel by Chris Bachelder

Chris Bachelder is a lovable prankster who likes to turn the nicely fitting glove of literature inside out. while the rest of us are looking for meanings and various forms of significance in the interior decorating of conventional fictional devices--to this day, we all yearn to have poets and novelists to tell us The Truth-- Bachelder prefers to spray paint on the props and show us the cluttered backstage of these settings. And better yet, he rather likes in tying the shoelaces together of the pompous, the serious, the bizarrely sanctimonious. "U.S.!" has him imagining a world where the true believers in an American Socialist Revolution manage, through some vaguely revealed ritual of magic realism, to bring the dead activist novelist Upton Sinclair back to life; back to life the poor, steadfast, solemn socialist does, looking increasingly awful and putrid at the edges, going on the lecture trail, writing and publishing more of his cardboard narratives, trying to convince an amazingly uninterested citizenry the exact nature of what's killing them. Nothing comes of this, as expected, and the intrepid Lewis finds himself talking himself hoarse , only to find himself being killed violently and then ingloriously resurrected yet again.

A surreal fish-out-of-water story, Bachelder has a perfect ear for duplicating the static prose of the late novelists, and excels at demonstrating the striking contrasts between those who think that literature can make populations shed their entrenched and deeply rooted versions of Bad Faith and rise to the selfless cause of The Common People; this is a story of where the idea of the progression of history toward a final and just time, intersects with a culture where history does not end anywhere at all. Rather, it splits off into many tributaries, a crossroads every five metaphorical miles. Sinclair Lewis, tragicomic figure he is, stops at each of them, scratching his head as to which road to take.

An overwrought after taste

The problem with The Sweet Undertaste is the straining effort poet Philip Schultz takes to make it a significant, moving poem. Less poem than it is a narrative broken up with pained intellection and verbal padding, this tale of a WW 2 survivor suffering his end in a Stateside hospital seems like a small drawer into which Schultz tried to cram too much material. Perhaps a longer, more vivid form is needed for this storyline, a book, a novel perhaps, or a film where the thick language can give way to stunning, convincing visuals. We have is something that makes me think of the worst aspects of novelists Russell Banks writing, an absent sense of when to stop a description, of when to clip an adjective or a verb. Condensed though this poem is, it has overwriting to spare:

What accounts for the sweetness of human beings?

For the fragile, inexhaustible longing in the eyes

of the slowly dying, the sweet undertaste of

a tune sung in a moment of unutterable delight?

The attempt here is to be discursive and conversational at the same time, an achievable balance we know, but Schultz's word choices, his enhancements of the tone he attempts to construct, undermine the sentiment. "The fragile, inexhaustible longing.." would ordinarily be ring true if a sparer sentence were written, but the two qualifiers, "fragile, inexhaustible" indicates indecision ; Schultz doesn't sound convinced that he ' making his case and opts to use both terms, connecting them with another term, "longing", meant to suggest a state of being, a condition of unmet desire, but which is , in itself, a vague, indefinite description. A more concrete image for the Uncle's interior life would bring us to a situation that is already complex, where there needn't be the flourishes that gum up the works. The reluctance to pare this back to more definite language results too easily in comically arch writing:

What accounts for the ignorance and hate

that chased him from the German side of Poland

to the Russian side, from the honeycomb of innocence

to the boomeranging cold of a cattle car rushing through

the moonless Siberian night

The rhetorical question is a set for a rush of language meant to pick up the pace and create momentum, like the stock film cliche of showing calendar pages flying off the wall as time marches on through futures none could predict, but the effect is faintly ridiculous in the lack of sure footing. We have,  I suppose, an attempt at film montage, verbs turned into adjectives as in "boomeranging cold from a cattle car rushing through the moonless Siberian night". I confess to liking "boomeranging", although it's an imprecise use; boomerangs, if properly tossed, turn back toward their point of origin, and the implication is that Uncle Sigmund is traveling in circles. He is, though, going straight ahead into the future. But the issue again is the padding, the added weight inserted to lend the descriptions urgency and impact. I would have jettisoned boomerang, moonless and have the line read as a bare depiction of a cattle car racing along the tracks at night. A more vivid,if an unspoken sense of the horror that awaits might have arisen between the spaces where the excess once resided. And yes, I would have dispensed with the "honeycomb of innocence", an awkward line, a self-parody of a poet stuck for a phrase. There is the tendency to think to that every line in a free verse poem has to ring with coinages, phrases that are quotable in other contexts. One might compare it to a virtuoso guitarist thinking that he is obliged to the most complex improvisations in all spotlighted situations. Monotony results, and the displays of craft, the insertion of particularized style, begins to have no effect. More Joe Pass, less Yngwie Malmsteen. 

...the unalterable fact that once a man has run for his life

never again can he sleep through the night, that once salvation

is torn out of us we continue to run, on one leg and two,

to crawl like a worm through the stony anonymous earth?

Some unifying truth about ideals and human resilience is being looked for in Uncle Sigmund's story, but Schultz doesn't bring us to the point of his realization about the culminating effects of adversity and aging , he begins to lecture us, a style that awards us with an awkward image of worm working its way through a "stony, anonymous earth". This approach gives this relatively brief poem a glacial pace, a thick brick of words. The hospital room at the end, I hope, has another bed next to the dying Uncle Sigmund, reserved for this poem.