Should poems be beautiful?

There’s a bracing honesty in ugly, imperfect, ambiguous art—especially in poetry—that resonates far beyond the superficial gloss of mere prettiness. I have always prized form, elegance, the ordered clash of opposites, whose union might birth something genuinely sublime. Yet what truly stirs me is not the slavish adherence to “ideological” technique, but mastery wielded in the service of authentic expression. Beauty, in all its slippery subjectivity, teeters on the edge of banality when reduced to checklist or catechism. To insist a poem must meet an arbitrary standard of “beauty” is to hobble the artist, stifling the unpredictable vigor that is the very marrow of creation. Such demands are as senseless as telling Turner to paint with rainbows only, or Cezanne to abandon his oblique apples for the crisp chrome of official taste.

The finest poems do not merely conform to prescribed structures; their power erupts from a willingness to break, to disrupt, to surprise—much like the sudden dissonances in Beethoven, or the odd angles in Braque. What matters is not the aesthetic program selected, but the result achieved: a work that stops the reader in their tracks, compels reflection, transforms ordinary language into something unforgettable. It’s the difference between the competent and the extraordinary, between the craftsperson and the visionary. William James and fellow pragmatists generally agreed that the validity of an idea was in how well it worked in the material world, the daily problems humans create for themselves are stumble upon as natural occurence. This seems a maxim truer now than ever, in the age of relentless, empty beauty.

“Interesting” may seem a pallid descriptor, but I choose it deliberately: it encompasses more than the dull tyranny of “beauty,” which so often shackles discussion to surface effects. The artist’s true ambition is not to prettify experience, but to render its chaos and contradiction, to force us into uncomfortable recognitions. The very best poems, for me, are those which illuminate the precise contours of thought, the fissures of personality, the discordant situations that resist easy harmony. To discuss how a poet transmits the inexpressible—through shifts of tone, surprising imagery, or an abrupt stanza break—is infinitely more rewarding than to drone on about “beautiful” lines assembled for their own sake.

Let’s be clear: “beauty,” more often than not, has become a conservative and repressive concept, little more than a velvet glove used to muffle the unruly, the critical. Herbert Marcuse—writing in the shadow of late capitalism’s malaise—declared “beauty” bankrupt, its meaning hollowed out by commercialism and convention. In The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse saw the joy of art as its greatest gift, but insisted that society owes the artist freedom, not the imposition of taste. On this, I am with him. Let the artist be true to their talent and let that truth speak, however jagged, however discordant—because the function of art is not to soothe, but to awaken. Those who live lives of routine, not contemplation, depend on artists to sense and articulate what most would never dare to recognize in themselves.

This, then, is Marcuse’s point, and one I take to heart: artists—whether poets, novelists, painters or architects—are the antennae of civilization. Their heightened sensibilities serve not the bland affirmation of received wisdom, but the revelation of nuance, intrigue, and often unsettling truths. Culture would be richer if we abandoned the dull interrogation—“Is it beautiful?”—and instead asked “What does it show?” Artists are not decorators of life’s cliches; they are challengers, questioners, provocateurs. The real discussion is about whether the work pushes us beyond the numbness of dead aesthetics, into the dialectic of contradiction and revelation. The artist must challenge, and the audience must respond—not with rote praise, but with honest argument, for only there does true art live.

David Blair's Argument with Heaven

In some sense most of the poems we read tease the edges of a death wish, not in the sense that the poet desires to merge with the molecules and greet the large dark before him, but rather more like a curious soul daring the unknown and the unspoken dimension of human experience, the end of one's life, to reveal some knowledge. David Blair's  "A Poem About Heaven" poem seems something like that, a fragmented, giddy swirl of associations that have been triggered by his mother's death; what this mind creates isn't a metaphysical speculation on ideal associations remaining permanent while the flesh fails, or an autobiography to where another's mortality furnishes the punch line to one of the chapters, but rather a rush of sensation, of images, associations that bump, careen and otherwise swerve around one another.   As with the issue of rage, unleashed anger, overwhelming the mind to the degree that the world is presented as linked in a sequence of irrational targets that have misery to one's life, the shock that precedes the onslaught of grief is full of sensations of being whisked around a gallery of past events, significant and inane details dovetailing into one another against rational association. The silly and the sublime are not so much linked as they are twined and untwined in what seems like pulverizing vortex.

I am such an impressionist.
My legs get cold;
my arms get cold,
weird thinking of my mom dying
in my old bedroom, now the den.
And kneeling is weird. The northern lights, 
weird. Arcade lights. Wildwood, New Jersey,
weird, inside my eyelids. But I'm not thinking
of Poe again and the dance of colors.
I'm thinking of the hierarchy
that my mind wants Heaven to be.

A house keeping is suddenly in order, a reinforcing of what one knows in their world is required; Blair gives is a hurried desperation of one examining the things of their world, their experience, their accumulation of habits, talents, material things, in an attempt to repair the gap a family death creates. What he does here with the fast jumps between stanzas, the giddy and the reserved clamoring against each other to set the tone for the young man's attention, is create the sensation of being in free fall. It's not unlike being thrust into the reality of an old cartoon where the coyote, during his chase, missed the bend in a mountain pass and finds itself in mid air, falling only when it realizes that there is nothing supporting his feet; I think the feeling of spiraling down, clawing at the air for anything that might be there to grab onto, is unmistakable.

Why else
these figures
from a deck of cards,
kings and queens kneeling down to Jesus
in the neon shoreline,
tunnel of love, of horrors, boardwalk
attractions—
only these
are blissful religious figures. They kneel 

because they are weak in the knees.

So much goes through the mind, combinations of shock, anger, denial, fleeting relief; the narrator argues against the concept of heaven and assigns the kneeling tribute to a Jesus figurine not as an acknowledgement to divine presence but rather to weak minds or merely fatigue, insist instead that the things in the world he has grown to know, his family, friends, his community, have a significance that provides him with everything with everything Heaven was promised to be. The doubt is palpable, and the argument Blair's narrator tries to make lacks coherence, but this is someone trying to regain their balance, to brace themselves for the inevitable rituals he knows are coming.

<i>I go back downstairs
to a house full of the voices
of all my family, my whole life,
sure, we are going there.  

There comes the point in all of this frantic self-scrutiny where one the dissonant, radio like static of doubt, denial, anger becomes white noise of kind and fades and one is left numb, finally, alone with a stark

set of facts that makes the best lyric poetry and most inclusive philosophies seem no more than an archive of chiseled sophistry; there is the irreducible fact that whatever one thinks the meaning of their life happens to be, whatever one thinks about how things should be or how they should turn out, that however high or low one climbs or descends on the scale of measurable things , we all, finally, going to the same place. Blair's protagonist, it seems to me, isn't at this moment convinced that it will be place where they will all meet again; he is convinced, though, that it will be a situation when the arguments stop and there is a peace only eternity, by any definition, can provide.I think of the last lines as a paraphrase of Samuel Beckett's famous line " I can't go on, I'll go on." The whole enterprise of living becomes an intolerable burden, and yet one pushes further and deals with what's in front of them--family, job, friends, --because one cannot simply resign from their commitments. It's not that one cannot resign, of course, only that it's not simple. Blair's narrator by poem's end appears to come out of the conflictied swirl of sensations and decided to return to the family that quarrels, cries and banters, thinking , perhaps, that in the meantime, the time before one's own demise, it's better to be amid the clamor of the irresolute than be be  self-sustaining and isolated.

Oscars

There were no surprises at the Oscars, and I have to go along with the consensus that "The King's Speech" deserved Best Picture; in a year where there was some strong competition, the "The King's Speech" was seamless perfection in film narrative, from the script, cast, and direction. As much as I enjoyed "True Grit", and admit that I am a Coen Brothers partisan who will find genius more often than not in any of the films they make, there were times in their otherwise inspired remake where their energy, which is to suggest their enthusiasm, flagged. This, I think, was their downfall in the Best Picture category. Also, I was heartened to see Christian Bale get his Oscar for best supporting actor for "The Fighter"; he stole the movie and was blessed with a role that allowed him to show off his considerable acting chops. As with Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman", the role justified the scene chewing; I do hope, though, that Bale doesn't repeat the riff ; it didn't do Pacino that much good in his subsequent films; save for a movie or three since his Oscar win, his RANDOM VOLUME!!!  the method has become a means of self-parody. Give that man a Soma soaked Twinkie. I was especially warmed by Melissa Leo's winning best-supporting actor as the domineering mother in "The Fighter"--I've been a fan of hers since she portrayed detective Kay Howard in the television show "Homicide: Life on the Street"; she was terrific, nuanced, crabby, an emotionally pinched person slow to change her distorted worldview, and Leo played it wonderfully.

The good graces of Mary Karr

I haven’t been to church in decades as a matter of habit, and confess the only time I set foot in a pew is for either funerals or weddings. One will have to take it on faith that while I haven’t renounced God nor made statements to the effect that ours is a reality without a spiritual r recourse, my ideas of spirituality have changed over the last forty years; it just seems to strange to think of God as being willing to be a bully demanding ritualized acts of devotion and loyality while a fate he won’t reveal , the “meaning of life” we drink too much booze and coffee to discern, unravels. Is the All Powerful a vain micro-manager? I don’t think so, and entreaties to Him can be done, I think, without wishing for more for oneself, or wishing harm to befall those who we think smited us. Yes, I turned my back and have little interest in investigating the religion of my youth, but surprise again, sometimes my curiosity is aroused, as it was when I happened across this fine poem by Mary Karr in online version of Poetry Magazine, a sly hymn called “Disgraceland”/Strange and wonderful; I am a lapsed Catholic at best (a curious agnostic, perhaps?), but I recognize the parallels Karr draws here with her truly ethereal poem.
Christ was of this earth and of the human race because his task was to suffer various degradations for preaching a moral philosophy that would, after all, deliver humanity from its base motives and actions, all this so he might transcend and come into that state of grace that is tempered, conditioned by experience. We come to know what it is we are being delivered from, the sins, their consequences, and their horrible toll. Karr's narrator, born into a Christian life, goes her own way, feeling each pain, pleasure, the exact quality of being human:Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths,
get stewed, and sulk around. Christ always stood
to one side with a glass of water.
I swatted the sap away.
Christ was always there with the glass of water, that thing that refreshes and gives life to tired limbs, but he would not intervene to make Karr's wayward soul come into the house of his father; she must know her own experience, have her own narrative to fasten a merging faith upon, and come of her own accord to another way of being;
When my thirst got great enough
to ask, a stream welled up inside;
some jade wave buoyed me forward;
and I found myself upright
in the instant, with a garden
inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that
and eat it.
A phrase you might have heard of; she had to get sick and tired of being sick and tired. This has all the trappings of things I hear at AA meetings, yes, but AA shares are either drunkalogues or hard-core sales pitches that will speak of an intervening Higher Power in Street terms. The quality of a good AA share is that one This poem is jargon free, as I read it, and the mention of Jesus and references to spiritual things are voiced in a tongue that is plain but not dull; her rhythm is sure.
It has been remarked that this poem isn't much more than what you'd get in a better class of women's magazines and that what delivers is a rather conventional story, but I think there are crucial distinctions to be made.This is quite a bit different than what you'd find in women's magazines, in that the ground covered in those articles are tear jerkers, better class or no, and there's an inescapable residue of self pity/self congratulation through out these publications that creates a particular consumer mind set that is perfect for delivering an audience an empathetic audience to corporate advertisers. The swings of the downbeat and the upbeat do not go against the not so subtle requirements of the revenue stream. Karr's poem is somewhat different, and she tells the tale differently as well; it is the form of testimony, of confession and reclamation, and there is no wallowing in the details of a wasted past; as per the requirements of contemporary poetry, pace Pound, Eliot and Yeats, there are associative leaps in the narrative, elisions, ideas contained in images that convincingly, for me, convey the more abstract notions of life with and without grace. Poetry isn't required to dramatically thrust a reader into areas of consideration they wouldn't have thought of or might have been too lazy to explore, but rather work well on its own terms, within its particular structure, congruent with its unique ambition.
This needn't be the grand entrance of Christ as one can read in Flaubert's tale "The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator" from his book Three Tales. Karr , in her own fashion, speaks of the Personal Jesus much is made of these days and finds Him in an unconventional, almost banal manner, after a life that, while not chaste nor righteous, isn't portrayed as especially heinous or glutted with evil deeds. What takes me my surprise is Karr's conception of a savior who speaks not to saving one's soul for eternal salvation but instead a Christ who can help her appreciate the life she has and make something useful of. This is a Christ who wants her to live fully on this earth, not to treat her religious experience like it were an audition for American Idol. Surprise, this is a Jesus who wants us to live as adults, not pavlov'd dolts who drool when a bell rings.
What I especially appreciate here is that Karr
 This is quite a bit different than what you'd find in women's magazines, in that the ground covered in those articles are tear jerkers, better class or no, and there's an inescapable residue of self pity/self congratulation through out these publications that creates a particular consumer mind set that is perfect for delivering an audience an empathetic audience to corporate advertisers. The swings of the downbeat and the upbeat do not go against the not so subtle requirements of the revenue stream. Karr's poem is somewhat different, and she tells the tale differently as well; it is the form of testimony, of confession and reclamation, and there is no wallowing in the details of a wasted past; as per the requirements of contemporary poetry, pace Pound, Eliot and Yeats, there are associative leaps in the narrative, elisions, ideas contained in images that convincingly, for me, convey the more abstract notions of life with and without grace.
Poetry isn't required to  violently thrust a reader into areas of consideration they wouldn't have thought of or might have been too lazy to explore, but rather work well on its own terms, within its particular structure, congruent with its unique ambition. 

Used Books: "Pastoralia" by George Saunders

A funny book

Author George Saunders is a crazed ,surrealist comedian who , in his tales of conflated literary genres and cultural traits defying any personalized sense of proportion  you might have and cherish, reminds you in moments of  the three year old for whom there is no required separation between ideas, things and the places where they may belong.  That is to say what ever makes sense in the telling of a tale is okay, is alright, is perfectly natural, "natural", that is , because it occurred to the three year old while his mind gathered it's narrative materials. Nothing is excluded, no matter how out of wac. So it is with Saunders, who's 2001 story collection Pastoralia is simply an inspired and condensed can of insanity.


Something about this world reminds me, fleetingly, of The Bed Sitting Room, a film directed by Richard Lester, where addled Brits go about their business after a three-second nuclear war, as if nothing had happened, unaware that their actions are very odd permutations of old habits. This , along with the fact that some characters are morphing into inanimate objects.

What's similiar is that they way you, like Lester, treat your inventions less as weirdness for it's own sake--Tom Robbins when he's boiling over--but how you keep the descriptions and the details of your character's lives in scale; your tone has the unfoldings and detail bask in the light of their own skewed logic: the details relate to one another. "Sea Oak" , with all it's reversals and inversions , pretty much gets the internalized logic of diminishing returns in strip clubs. The returned aunt from the dead, pissed an aggressive economic agenda for a family of whiners, was genius.His use of brief sentences and jerky dialogue makes this skewed universe clang and clack with a sound and feel not so removed from the actual world: his attention to the banal, and his twisting the items just so, makes this a wonderful set of satires. "Sea Oak" is particularly brilliant.

A basic and important strength in your writing is the spare style you prefer to use, as it allows you, it seems to be, to accumulate the carnivalized strangeness and build on it credibly, if that's the word to use. It gives your zaniness a subtle, additional dimensionality that makes this series of tales read like descriptions of a fully realized universe. 

Monkee Grip Glue

 The Monkees are evidently reformed and touring to cash in the 45th Anniversary of their being manufactured by Hollywood producer Don Kirshner and his cronies. An item in The Telegraph would have us believe that the fellows overcame the general scorn heaped upon them and ascended into what there was of the hallowed Rock Pantheon.  At best, the article was a vital piece of nonsense. 

Author, please pick up your last check on the way out, as this is the worst sort of puffery one could imagine. Precisely no one took the Monkees seriously as a band, and their chops as comedians were not held in high regard. Yes, they sold... millions of units, but so has Kraft Cheese, a product whose popularity reveals how scarce good taste actually is. The Monkees were a band for teenyboppers with allowance money to burn. It is possible to compare them to the Beatles or the Marx Brothers, but this only demonstrates their lack. They might have been pioneers of a sort, but they were and remain a fancy you grow out of as your tastes mature; there is the hope that a music fan discovers the excellent stuff. Theirs was music glutted by fads, gimmicks, and tricks heaped on albums of songs that were at best cast-offs from professional songwriters; it sounded corny back in the day, and the Monkees has aged poorly. It sounds pretentious, inane, flimsy constructions gussied up with every studio trick available. The Monkees problem is worse because, 45 years later, they haven't their youthful cuteness to help get away with the slithering saliva trail they called rock and roll. They are bound to look pathetic. Is this what fans really want to see? 

 T

The Monkees are not remembered for their songs but rather more like a disease a generation of love-sick tweeners shared; it was some overwhelming fever whose recollection involves the heat, not the melodies. I still run into people bringing them up in music discussions except as a bad example, and the book on the day-to-day mechanics of this money machine seems geared at a niche market, small but profitable. This just reinforces that they were musically mediocre and sub-minor in importance. I don't blame the band for going after a payday; after all, the Sex Pistols did precisely the same thing in the Nineties. However, the Pistols were at least honest about and called their trek the Filthy Lucre tour. What irritates me, among other things, about these hired hands as they still act as if they were involved in something that mattered. 

I should say that the mini-rant was not about these guys individually; Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork have chops, to be sure. But the distinction is that they were members of a combine that was a commercial venture... that was disguised as a rock band, and as far as rock bands go, they were lacking in whatever good graces it takes to be actual pantheon members. As an entity, the Monkees were a disgrace. The same may be said of the Sex Pistols Brit wastrels Malcolm McLaren hired to fulfill his fashion sense. The difference is that the Pistols had the integrity to break up unceremoniously. To paraphrase, Johnny Rotten asked the audience if they ever felt they'd been cheated at their last US gig. The Monkees, collectively or individually, never had the honesty to admit that they were a money-making fraud.

Of course, it complicated their eventual desire to be taken seriously. On the one hand, you had critics in the serious journals arguing that rock had become an art and whose collective preference was for bands and songwriters who had an organic quality to their music; music as authentic expression, experimental, poetic, reflective. How many artists actually made music that achieved these vague standards or created a piece worth listening to after the craze had passed is a matter of debate. The Monkees, to those writers, were a corporate monster, a Frankenstein's monster of borrowed parts taking bits and pieces of whatever was popular at the time--heavy rock, folk-rock, psychedelia, youth-quake lyrics, and so on--and slickly fused everything together in album packages geared to a teenybopper's desire to be both enthralled and convinced that they were "hip" despite being too young to go to nightclubs where the actual music was being played. Mike Nesmith turned out to be a fine songwriter and an influential singer and had an estimable if obscure solo career post Monkees, but his signing on with the Monkees was his Faustian pact. It doesn't seem that he ever quite lived down the fact that he was in a very popular and very profitable entity created by management to cash in. It's an unpleasant fact that the sense of irony in the Music Press hadn't yet increased to the degree as it had when Malcolm McLaren assembled the respective members of the Sex Pistols in 1975. McLaren's intention was to disrupt the music biz, being the Situationist he was, but also to make a bit of coin in doing so. The fact that the Pistols were thrown together, a contrived unit if one ever existed, only enhanced their authenticity as punk rock instigators. They got a very different result in the long run through what became one of the decade's central postmodern gestures.

Art and anger

Anger as artistic virtue is short-lived and becomes, too often, monotony. The idea that the artist must get himself into a full , frothing lather, burst out of his clothes while his engorged (and enraged) muscles morph to sizes beyond a believable scale is absurd on the face of it; the writer, the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the photographer,  the artist, whatever the medium, would be too intent on screaming "Hulk Smash Puny Critics" rather than focus their energy on the literal and metaphorical canvas in front of them. 

The artist, if nothing else,is that person who occupies themselves with expressing their sense of things in an externalized manner after  the things that they've taken in--a heartbreak, being fired, a wedding, good sex, a death, a disease, a visit from the In Laws--has gestated for a period, has been assimilated, so to speak, into one's being and the artist can attain equilibrium, for a while at least, through the  artistic act. 

The experience, that is, becomes the raw material the artist will use after  the rage has subsided and the painter, the poet, the  novelist has had their offended ego return to human proportions. Passion will remain, to be sure, but the anger, well...I would venture that the anger is an impediment and needs to cool to something that one can pick up and examine and , eventually,  use as something that motivates one to make reconfiguration, not commit homicide. This has presented a credibility problem for both aging punters and wrinkled heavy metalheads who find themselves trying to live up to a past decade's reputation with a gasping exaggeration. 

I find Chrissie Hinde attractive because she never lost her sense of humor or irony. Interestingly enough, she didn't market herself as an angry punk woman; the tone is bitter at times, more often bittersweet, and the attitude of her lyrics is that she pushes on toward the goal of making her life a good fit for the reality she's found herself in.