A note on preferences, subject to change

The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop.

In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled avant garde (rule breakers who don't the rules to begin with) has completely overtaken the conversation. Good poets must be concerned with language, I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.

The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from an imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us. This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non sequiturs , fragments, clichés, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.

More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before. I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs.

Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as there is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.

"Banish Misfortune"; a poem by Ralph Sneeden

It's a reflexive habit to grouse over Robert Pinsky's selections for the weekly Tuesday poem, and I even got into the extreme and admittedly attention getting spirit of the bashing by suggesting that it was time for him to do more to earn his pay as Poetry Editor, or to move on. There's been good reason for the complaints, the bashing, the dissatisfaction with his results,but there are times when one of his poems is soexquisite , finely placed and arranged that my ire dissolves .

For the moment, all is forgotten, if not forgiven. "Banish Misfortune" by Ralph Sneeden is a sweeping yet brief piece of music,a sweet and surely constructed composition that amazingly gives off the air of swift and sure improvisation. It is, I think, the poem of a poet with that well tuned ear that senses the balance of language as it unfolds on the page during the writing and who is able to sense how it will sound when spoken. The aspect I enjoy is that the language is almost impenetrable, a series of concentrated images that elide into one anotherin what can be described as an entranced narrator's soft murmuring description.

We are not out of the woods,maybe in the wrong neck,
like birds intending stasiswho weave their clot
of straw in the grill beside the headlight.

These are the things an attuned observer would almost miss had they been just a shade less impatient. This is a poem of sitting still in momentary respite away from traffic, cell phones,demanding children or creditors, where the mindbalances and weaves together a number of vaguely recalled strands of thought, while the eyes brings to the conscious level arrangements within nature that are there before our intruding gaze and seem extraordinary when noticed. Even more extraordinary is the fleeting feeling of stepping back away from the frame one's imagination has placed around the tableau and senses themselves as part of the strange little diorama, the observer feeling them self observed..Sneeden uses simple, clear words to make his motions clear and concise, and provides us with a descriptive style that gives us vision, like a slow panning camera simulating a set of eyes taking in the terrain and its incidental arrangements, as in

When we watch the dog
watch the bee's hungry circum-navigation
of the apple fallen to the fading lawn,
that burrowing amusesus,
as if the excavationof imploded rot were somehow
different than the steamrising
from our coffeeor eaves of the future's
sun-lit mud room and rusty nail

This is not a poem that tries to abolish the world in pursuit of the perfect imagistic center to find refuge within; Sneeden's soft spoken narrator acknowledges the material world beyond this delicate frame and finds a hushed wonder in actually seeing what one has known only in theory, that nature will eventually and always grow around, over and through the best constructions humanity can throw at it. The birds building a nest in the grill next to the head light of an abandoned car is the simplest , clearest evidence that nature will not be contained, fenced in, or asphalted over.

Give Robert Christgau A Writing Gig NOW!

The firing of pop music Robert Christgau from the Village Voice by their new owners gives me yet another reason to pass up the weekly on the news stand and to cease dialing up their web site. I'd been reading Christgau's insular, fannish, personal and idiomatically dense reviews for decades and rather liked the idea that I was part of the cognoscenti who could parse his sentences and follow his train of thought. Any Old Way You Choose It, his collection of longer reviews and pieces gathered from the Sixties and Seventies, is one of of my all time favorite essay collections, a brainy, chatty, at times exasperatingly idiosyncratic journey through a couple of decades of extraordinary innovation; I love it for the same reason I still cherish Pauline Kael's I Lost It At The Movies, for that rare combination of true fan enthusiasm and discovery. As with Kael at her best, you can sense the moment when Christgau comes to an insight, a discovery as yet undiscovered by other writers; he has that element of "ah-HA!"Coming to his Consumer Guide column, where he would review anything and everything available, from the varied strands of rock,disco, reggae, folk, jazz and popwas like meeting that clutch of friends you knew in college who considered rock and pop the emerging Grand Art.


His was a column where I found someone who kept the conversation going, and strange and self indulgent as it may have seen, it was a fertile ground to debate and exchange ideas on the relative qualities of music. Anyone who's been through this bit before, the obsession with rock music being an art and establishing the critical terms with which one can assess, appraise and make note of what makes albums worth the purchase, appreciates the kind of critical thinking which becomes a habit of mind. In college I was Arts Editor of the thrice weekly campus newspaper, and was required ,in addition to my studies, to write a crushing amount of column inches a week on matters of music, theatre, television, movies. Rough life, I know, but it was alot of writing none the less, and the chief debt I might have toward Christgau , an admittedly sketchy model for a minor league reviewer, was the creation of a tone, a style.

The Village Voice, founded in the fifties by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolfe, was formerly noted as a magazine where the pittance that writers were paid was somewhat compensated by the freedom they had to develop writing style, ideas and journalistic beats. It was a writer's publication, and that was the chief attraction for a reader who wanted more than cooker cutter reviews or cursory coverage of politics and culture. Christgau is a product of that freedom and developed a particular argot and style that was intended for those as obsessed and concerned with music as he was; he is a critic, not a reviewer distinction being that the critic assumes that his or her reader has the same background in the area under discussion as they do.
Unlike reviews, which are final and absolute and brook no discussion beyond name calling, Christgau's essays are addressed to the concerned, the convinced, the true believer that pop music traditions matter as much as so-called High Culture
expressions. This leaves him incomprehensible for many who think his writing is too dense with insular references and verbal short hand to bother with, but that was a chief part of my attraction to his writing. There were many a time when I was in my twenties when I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about-- who was Adorno? Marcuse? Sun Ra??-- but the subject matter at hand compelled me to investigate references further. It was an old fashioned enterprise, his column in one hand, a dictionary and an encyclopedia at the ready to clarify the murkier waters of his prose. Any inspiring critic does that.

Christgau and the late Lester Bangs gave me some ideas and methods in learning how to write fast, and well (or at least well enough that some light editing could be done without a major operation and my copy could be taken to the typesetter before deadline). What is impressive about Christgau is his catholicity of taste, his constant curiosity about new sorts of noise and racket, and his ability to form connections and generate operate theories. His writing is unique, and the Village Voice's loss will be another editor's gain.

Blood on the Tracks was second rate Dylan

Joel Rosen of Slate gives the new Dylan album favorable hits all the expected marks when he declares Modern Times to his best album since Blood on the Tracks, which implies clearly that he thinks Dylan has been producing crap during most of that thirty-one years. I find it ironic that thirty-one years ago I reviewed Blood for the San Diego Reader and gave it a bad review. My grievances were Dylan's straying from the kind of blues-informed surrealism that typified what I still think is his best period--Another Side of Bob Dylan through John Wesley Harding-- in favor of a more conversational, chattier, looser, more cliche bound lyric style that cast Dylan's persona as a wandering stranger. Our hero would go from town to town, from job to job, meeting interesting men, having affairs with alluring, cryptic women, and then would be off again after some minor incident, some unsaid faux pau, walking up the road, sticking his thumb out, the sun setting, the lights of the next town in the next state glowing over the hillside, dreaming up vague strands of philosophy to assuage an even vaguer heartache he was feeling. He was Joe Christmas always intersecting with Lana Grove in some desolate, anonymous America, an angle interesting enough to work once or twice, but this was a field that was over tilled. It sounded constructed and contrived to me at the time, toned up on the energy and ramped up on the bullshit, and to this day I'm of the opinion that Dylan is a miserable storyteller and someone who has a difficult time creating narrators with a personality that don't seem to be recreation of how he spends his weeks. But I've softened my position considerably and now find much that I was too impatient to appreciate all those decades ago, and yet I can't bring myself around to say that it's one of his best albums. It isn't. My review ventured the guess that Dylan had run out of things to say, and had lost his knack for saying the obvious in interesting language and locutions--Paul Simon and John Updike could show him something in that regard--but he maintains his need to talk, to write, to prate continually as if the production of songs, albums, and tours in his late career were another shoring brick in is reputation and a hedge against death. There are a couple of stacks of meandering and mumbled music between Blood on the Tracks and Modern Times, and truthfully I think it's only within the last decade that Dylan has gotten his mojo back. Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft are strong music from an artist who's persona finally fits the gathered texture of his years. There is finally things he has to say before he offers his last guitar strum, and I suspect Modern Times will only add to what seems like a long and robust third act in this remarkable man's life.

Curtains for Christo

Christo is a ridiculous celebrity who has managed to make a famous and assumedly profitable living repeating the same trite idea, in this case a matter of convincing townships, city governments, government bureaucrats to grant him permits and permissions, and donors to give him sufficient funding so that he may wrap another building in massive amounts of swaddling cloth, or hang a Leviathan laundry line across an expanse of inaccessible space. Okay, we get it, you introduce one aesthetic element into an area where we wouldn't have expected to run into it , thereby creating something of a framing device which decontexualizes the familiar and forces us to reconsider our relationship with the spaces we inhabit, the spaces we pass through, the spaces we create where there were no space before.

It's a not a new idea, and scale does make the make the project any more important, let alone profound, nor does it make Christo and his cult seem any smarter, except one does admire the craft with which they manage to get usually positive press and use an accumulated reputation to marginalize critics (or just plain non-experts) who might wonder aloud how one succeeds in getting paid for engineering these philistine notions of art in public places. For the Gates, you suspect he and co-worker Jean-Claude were inspired while shopping for bath mats and shower curtains.

The fact that there is a line of them, going along a path doesn't diminish the out-scaled tackiness of Christo's singular idea; we have in our midst the equivalent of the bad joke teller who repeats a punch line not once but three times in the course of a stop-and-go round of small talk, with the wan and waning hope that someone might chime in with feverish paragraphs to explain the punchline, to create context and criteria, to invent terms from whole cloth (appropriate analogy) , couched in vague and mysterious use, that have the sound of authority in defending the failed attempt at humor, but lacks something in the area of a tangible , comprehensible idea that gives us a spark and makes us say aha!.

It seems unlikely that Christo and co will have as many defenders and contexualizers and exploiters of invisible success at their side with this effort; he is simply too old to get away with this stuff anymore. What he ought to consider is a marketing himself as a celebrity spokesperson for Tide, or Cheer, or some such miracle whitener; it would be a chance for him to admit that he's a hack in a way that's more artful than the work he's managed over the last dozen years. Metaphorically, it would a chance for him to come clean on his deal.

The ephemeral essence of Christo's applications of swaddling cloth can't hide his bankrupt aesthetic. Christo's body of work consist of one idea, and what's obvious is that it's the application of a gimmick, a trademark rather than an investigation of problematized proximities. There's more than a hint of the Dada gesture in the projects , but there comes a point where "Oh wow" is replaced by "So what?"

Nearly every artist who wants to commit public art gives a variation of this apology for what they've foisted on public space, and in fact this sounds like an echo of my paraphrase above for same such explications. Fine as the reasoning might be, you really can't escape the fact that large scale works are oftentimes only measurements of ego , not intellect nor talent. Had Christo done things with more variation in his life as a celebrity avant gardist, he might not be producing yawns.Art in public places is no less subject to criticism and value judgement than that safely on the walls of museums and galleries. There are public works that succeed brilliantly, like this from Picasso , in Chicago. Why and how they work are issues for larger discussion, but we in these famous cases we have the work of painters translating their visual notions from canvas to three dimensional space,working with materials they were not accustomed to. The spirit of surprise exists in these pieces, and it's both are in situations where one may indeed scratch their and wonder productively about their relationship to the community sphere. Christo is oblivious to such a real inquiry, and you're stuck with the idea that he was eager to clear off his drawing board and get the piece erected and ocumented in order to fatten up his portfolio. Where The Gates
went up seems unimportant

Time for Robert Pinsky to Pack His Tent

Robert Pinsky is a good if unspectacular poet, and acquited himself as well as anyone could have in his tenure as U.S.Poet Laureate, but there is an accumulating since among those who read Slate magazine's poetry section and discussion board that the man has outlived his usefulness. The selections he makes are maddening, half-hashed, and phony as the bulge in a castrati's leotard. His current choice, Jill McDonough's"December 12, 1884: George Cooke", from a series of sonnets she's been writing drawn from actual events in American history, has only one good virtue going for it; it spared me the purchase of the book.

This reads as if it were a combination of dry facts from a history book blended with a student's marginalia. Scissors, paste and yellow highlighter are all over this assemblage, which indeed seems more assembled than composed. There is a punchline McDonough wants to land on, an example of Fate's anonymous wit, but there is not enough here to make us, meaning me, the reader, care enough to interpret the poem so that it becomes whole and coherent. It would be easy enough to dwell on issues such as how a sensationalist media twists historical fact into personality driven events and fictionalizes the record with romantic constructions in the interest of selling papers, but that would be too much weight to lay upon such a slight and underfed piece of writing. Such speculation would be more than the critic's invention than the author's intent.The mistake was to approach this set of information as a poem, as this is a clear case where an unambiguous prose format would have achieved what resonance McDonough wanted to have us experience; prose seems better suited for such terseness. I'm thinking of Ernest Hemingway, who's masterly avoidance of qualifiers still provides a powerful kick, particularly his short story collection In Our Time is a masterpiece of what wasn't included in the telling. The italicized sketches between the longer stories are what McDonough should pay attention to, as they show how only a few facts conveyed in a paucity of words can still pull at your heart the way she wanted with "George Cooke" .

What do with Pinsky. Nothing ,truthfully, since it is the Washington Post that must decide whether they think they are getting the most bang for their cultural buck.The truth is that Pinsky does precious little for Slate other than select a poem for the week.Such is not a labor intensive activity,speaking from my own experience. What's gallling isn't just the log-rolling that goes on with the poets selected for the week--former students, colleagues, the like-- but it's the non-existent interaction Pinsky has with the readers. It would be one thing if he were to write a commentary each week about the poem and provide with some idea what appealed to him.

His remarks would most likely give Fraysters informed points of departure. He doesn't, though, and there's an inescapable feeling that he's getting a paycheck from Slate accounts on the basis of being a former Poet Laureate.

His Washington Post column is slight as it is and could use more heft and controversy in what it declares; he could at least give us the other portion of his half-measures in a column writ especially for Slate. If Christopher Hitchens can meet weekly filing deadlines for a half dozen publications, Pinsky should be able to manage an extra four brief paragraphs a week so it doesn't seem as if we're all getting rooked.

Ellen Wehle and the Art of Not Getting It Right

Ellen Wehle's poem "Augury" , printed in Salon in July of 2003 and which I came across last night surfing through that magazine archive of previously published, is a wonder, a poem about memory that achieves the epic without the expected drag of self-dramatization.There is none of the photographic exactness of detail that makes me think that there is fiction being passed off as truthful episodes; poetry is in large part fiction, I think, but poets (like myself) are reticent to admit that not every line we write is directly autobiographical. If it were so, we would have reams of duller poems, dreary and inane; there would be no art. Art is artifice, after all, and there is no good reason to equate artifice with lack of honest effort or glorious intent. But I like about Wehle's poem is the realism here, the way she gets at the moment when memory fails and details and context dissolve into dust. This is the art of not getting it right.This is a small and minor poem as I read it, but I like it fine, and think there's something honorable in the way Wehle left her undefined problem (her ennui, soul sickness, and terminal boredom) unresolved.

The language is mythic in the rhetoric it assumes, obvious in the choice of "fortune teller" or in sections that literally drip and ooze poetic flourishes, as in
": gabled night, the secret trees
spilling darkness around streetlights, blown roses
singing hosannas over a fence."

What makes the poem interesting, though, is that the world itself, the one the poet is actually walking through, does not really yield anything, become more profound, nor offers the slightest clue to a deeper, life-sustaining argument for all the beautiful used to describe the activity as it unfolds; this poem has the jammed-up literary haste of a restless mind that is certainly too self aware as it goes through the simple activities of executing the banal obligations of daily life.

The mind describes details in literary language, and yet the banal remains banal, ordinary and unreconstructed in spite the epic attempts at metaphorical largeness.
"Don't get me wrong, nothing was solved." is what Wehle writes in the middle of the poem and from there we see it all come apart after that meticulously scripted first stanza. This is a poem that is contrary to Wallace Stevens's notion of poetry being the intuitive and elevated means to get to the Supreme Fiction that lies behind the mere descriptive alacrity of words.

Wallace had a notion that art and life become unified in such a way that the barriers, intellectual and basely instinctual, that separate the primal and the abstract vanishes, disappears, and is gone as perception is heightened and we see the world we are born into as an entirely new place.

Implicit in that is the notion that to see the world differently is to also make it possible to make the world new and revolutionary.
Wehle, in this verse, can't make use of this mythic ability to penetrate into the secret heart of things; her malaise, her situation remains the same, though festooned with the garlands of intense description. The moment of the narrator's admission in the single line middle stanza marks the poem's wonderful disintegration. The language becomes choppy, monosyllabic.

Attempts to re-ignite the dramatic language turn into exhausted mumbles. I actually get the feeling that this a poem Wehle started in good faith and then soured on by the middle, and allowed the poem to gag on its failure to remain grand and dynamic in a field crowded with exclamatory poets and their noisy, incantatory verse. "