Brian Thompson smites himself

I believe it's important for anyone who desires to write to write everyday , for no other reason other than maintain the discipline of composing something even when there is no inspiration nor the germ of an idea. Norman Mailer commented awhile ago that he maintained his regimen even on the worst of days because he needed to hone a style and so become better player of his instrument; I suspect wrote each day because it was important to him to realize how potentially bad he might sound while in pursuit of a suitable voice for the project he might have been working on. It seems to have worked well for most of the near sixty years career he had a professional writer.

We ought to note that Mailer, good or less good, never sounded like anyone else stringing words together, something that can't be said for Brian Thompson, writing yesterday at Chud.com . Titled "Mailer=Hulk", Thompson attempts a big of digressions and asides trying to find a common theme that might exist between Mailer's writing and the rebooted version of The Hulk; this is where we learn that while it's important to sit down and type out something no matter how good or bad, a writer should have the honesty not to publish every small matter they happen to spell out. Babbling in print is babbling all the same, and Thompson informs us that he had known the late author and had to slap him around because Mailer had crossed him, straining to mention matters of rage, masculine grace and the potential of violence to release truth and beauty in human affairs. It's not that these sorts of fantasies aren't needed consider the kind of mythology Mailer created for himself, but Thompson's effort is unremarkable and , well, dull. I'm thinking of the penultimate spoof on Mailer in Alan Lelchuk's brilliant novel American Mischief. Among other matters, a drunk Mailer offers a psychotic professor Bernard Kovell a chance to sodomize him, where upon the professor, aswim with Mailer's theories of murder and such in his essay The White Negro, crams a gun in the fictional Mailer's anus and pulls the trigger. The real life Mailer wasn't amused at the time, and sued Lelchuk for libel.

Thompson has read Mailer, it seems, but perhaps not closely enough. He writes

I leaned over his typewriter. “'The White Negro?'” I asked. “That's completely nonsensical.” His thighs nearly burst his purple jeans. His temples radiated Kirby dots. “I AM PROVOCATIVE!” he screamed. I barely realized the hot bath towel had been torn from my hands before he wrapped it around my neck.

It's late in the day for someone to attempt to parody Mailer now; what can be lampooned, exaggerated, made grotesque in his life has been done over and over through the decades, done so often , in fact, that even Mailer haters tired of hearing the same old complaints and defects brought up yet again, and again, and still again. He outlived his harshest critics and now the unthinkable has happened, one must consider the relative merits of the novels, journalism, plays, essays, criticism and screenplays he wrote over six decades. Thompson , though, seems to resent the fact that he never took on Mailer in any meaningful way and hastens to dust off the old insults, recycle the tired formulas.The satire arrives stiffly here, but while one might debate the worth of The White Negro as philosophy, it should be noted that Mailer composed the essay in long hand, having sworn off typewriters after writing his second novel Barbary Shore. The pencil was his preferred instrument. Michael Lennon, Mailer's friend and archivist, was kind enough to post that to this blog a year ago.

The crows resent the parrots

I was walking back from the market a couple of days ago when I beheld the loud screeching wing spans of Amazon parrots flying toward a power line, where they alit
with several other parrots on a power line that ran in front of a church and some densely packed apartment buildings. Beautiful as they are, these birds are noisy, noisier than the crows that have become prominent in the San Diego area in the last five years. I could well imagine worshippers and the preacher competing with the cacophony during a service, the parrot bawks , grunts and screams a wild counterpoint to exclaimed interpretations of Bible quotes defining the definition and progress of God's creation. The parrots might seem like the rude boys in the back of the hall, punctuating the solemnity with juicy arm farts. From what I've heard from others, the parrots are especially noisy early in the morning, when they make their collective noise and then take flight at the same time; one's plans for sleeping in spoiled by species behavior. Not fun. This inspired this attempt at a poem about the parrots and the crows that might resent interlopers. A first draft, any comments, criticisms, suggestions are appreciated.

The crows resent the parrots

The crows on the wire
move over and then
take flight on burnt, black wings
as louder screeches, longer wing spans
crowd the sky and obscure clouds,
green , screaming creatures
from the lurid loop
of the Amazon
wintering in manicured palm trees
or monitoring intersections
from sagging telephone wire,
the tree in front of your room
is alive with early morning parties
taking flight , branches snapping
and feathers shed, falling to
graveled yards in dervishing twirls,
Roofs of apartment buildings
have new sentries I see coming back
from the store with bags of food
and cleaning goods,
glass rattling protests,
a flocked fluttering of wing,
each red capped head tilted and peering
with one good eye and then the other
while my shadow stops at the corner,
waiting for the light,

Squadrons of crows
fly from tree to chimney
and back again
before they align
on a balcony
in a line where they
seem to leer at the parrots,
as if intent on staring them from their roosts,
casting a slick and darkened vibe
through the air
that Winter is gone
and it's time to go home,
south, if not further.

There are no travel plans
or calendar days
in a parrot's life, it seems.
In the middle of May,
approaching June
and the death traps of July,
cats and nervous walkers
flinch and scatter
walking past big, unshorn trees
that used to disguise the blight
of the last century's architecture.

Now even the plant life is too loud
for human habitation.

More on "Just a Tranquil Darker"

John Hogden's poem "Just a Trifle Darker" has inspired a livelier debate on Slate's Poems Fray board than has been seen for awhile, and that's a good thing for anyone who bothers to click on the link hoping for reasonable modulated discussion. The forum has had it's squabbles among regulars and been visited by serial spammers, although those bits of irritation have passed and discussion has narrowed on the topics at hand. A new poster named GHarryS defends the poem against a majority who disliked it and insists that the poem is rather grand in the second stanza

What I claim is 'grand' is what arrives in the second stanza, with all that stuff still hanging in the air from before, when the movement changes, and the focus changes, and it suddenly feels like the 6 in some kind of slow-march sonnet, or as I said above, Adagio Sonnet ... I was thinking of 19th c symphonic Adagio.

An interesting distinction, and one I hope he elaborates on. He cut out after he wrote those intriguing sentences.I'd agree the confusion between "trifle" and "tranquil" is the point from which Hogden constructs his poem, but it seems more fanciful than something he actually heard. The words don't sound remotely alike, and both are common enough that makes them unlikely to the kind of comic misuse that are the staple patter of Norm Crosby, Archie Bunker or, lately, Tony Soprano. It's one thing, for example, to mistake the word enervate for meaning "to fill with energy", since it sounds so closely to invigorate.

The comic possibility exist in how closely the words are to one another in sound and and yet their meanings are in perfect opposition, as in the subversive activity in demonstrating that resolute beliefs, political, moral, religious can be unhinged by mistaken usage. Hogden's elaborations are based on something overheard that sounds too conveniently "poetic" in its error, an ill-considered phrase too ripe with speculative potential to have been entirely without preparation. The phrase is fictional, I think, and is an obvious set up for a ramble yet to come.

Mechanically, the poem works fine, it glides well, Hogden is in other situations a solid craftsman with a tuned ear to phrase, but everyone who writes poems, even those who are considered by readers and reviewers to be poets at their peak, write pieces that don't work as that seamless joining of technique and intention that would make a poem art. Splendid they may be, but you can hear the gears grind to keep "Just a Tranquil Darker" moving along.

Poem gets talked to death

"Just A Tranquil Darker" is a contrived poem I’ve read this year, more excercise instead than an execution of an idea primed for the words one would labor to give it deserving expression. This is rather odious because it is, we note, a poem about poetry, and the writer has so taken the typical license to wallow around in that mire of gooey irony and what-the-hell whimsy. It operates on the premise that the narrator has overheard some part of a private conversation, where the woman’s request, quaintly and innocently phrased, sparks the poetic response, as does the optometrist reaction to the odd qualifier, saying not a word nor giving a gesture that gives a clue that he might think her vain, precious; she is his customer, she deserves respect, he , the professional, knows what she wants and in providing her service gives her what she needs, a decent set of lenses.


John Hodgen , though, gums up the moment with literary language and cornball erudition, straining to convince us that all the large ideas of religion and philosophy comes to the simplest and most direct things we say to one another , in locutions both local and meaningful to community tasks on hand.

…maybe he is God himself, the great optometrist, or at least that dim image
we strain to see of the omniscient god who mostly does not trifle with us.
The occasional hat flown off our heads, perhaps, the tossed banana peel
with the businessman's wingtip approaching, the hurtling safe heading
down for our heads, all of us so intensely looking elsewhere, as if our lives
were God's New Yorker cartoons, all his back issues stacked up, the ones
with the Elizabeth Bishop poems, teetering, in his waiting room.

This is quite a bit of language to consider the slight mystery that exists between the women requesting the tranquil , dark lenses and the doctor who anticipates her desires and knows her needs. What ought to have been, I think, a sequence of images, a record of gestures, a scenario composed of sight, sound, smell and light, is talked to death. What we are presented with isn’t so much an incident or a statement that would inspire a testimonial or a breakdown of the high and middle brow references that might be read into or drawn from the small request and the effort to fulfill it, but something quieter, nearly as fleeting as the incidental itself. Arm waving and loud as he may have been, Frank O’Hara would have written a poem that was right sized in the rhetoric brought into play, as in his masterful “The Day Lady Died” or “Why I Am Not a Painter”

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
--Frank O'Hara

Robert Creeley comes to mind as well, a poet Hodgen might have thought about as he considered the off hand remark he wanted to memorialize. It's a fitting influence, since so much of Creeley's writing inhabits that space between unadorned expression and a spatially terse elegance. But Creeley, even in adding to bits and pieces of small things in his poems and then stepping back a little to give them a longer look with some authorial intrusion set upon their essence, doesn't lose his subjects exactitude in rhetoric;

The Rescue
by Robert Creeley

The man sits in a timelessness
with the horse under him in time
to a movement of legs and hooves
upon a timeless sand.

Distance comes in from the foreground
present in the picture as time
he reads outward from
and comes from that beginning.

A wind blows in
and out and all about the man
as the horse ran
and runs to come in time.

A house is burning in the sand.
A man and horse are burning.
The wind is burning.
They are running to arrive.

The issue, I think, is that O’Hara and Creeley understood the situations when what the poet thinks of what’s happening inside his poem isn’t important and is, in fact, the least interesting aspect to consider; what’s missed in “Just a Tranquil Darker” is that lack of humility that prevents a writer from forgetting that they are a poet and so be able to get at something out of his control, a phenomenon that just wandered into his perceptual field by the odd chance. There are those things which occur that stop time the slightest bit, amaze and confuse our codes, and then are gone, sketchy and yet vivid, a perception that remains in memory and which changes us a bit each day, each year that follows. Getting these incidences right in poetry –right in feel, tone, texture, pitch—and Hodgen hasn’t done it here. But he did remember that he was a poet, and that is exactly how he chose to behave here, and that’s a shame.

2 poems I like by A.R.Ammons and Marvin Bell

Called into Play 

A.R. Ammons 

Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry: 

some flurries have whitened the edges of roads 

and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: & 

turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to 

find something to write about I haven't already 

written away: I will have to stop short, look 

down, look up, look close, think, think, think: 

but in what range should I think: should I 

figure colors and outlines, given forms, say 

mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is 

behind what and what behind that, deep down 

where the surface has lost its semblance: or 

should I think personally, such as, this week 

seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is 

something going on: something besides this 

diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I 

could draw up an ancient memory which would 

wipe this whole presence away: or I could fill 

out my dreams with high syntheses turned into 

concrete visionary forms: Lucre could lust 

for Luster: bad angels could roar out of perdition 

and kill the AIDS vaccine not quite 

perfected yet: the gods could get down on 

each other; the big gods could fly in from 

nebulae unknown: but I'm only me: I have 4 

interests--money, poetry, sex, death: I guess 

I can jostle those. . . .

Since I've raged and ranted more than once around here about how there should be no more poems about poetry, I thought why I liked "Called into Play" and not the work of other writers. Attitude is the difference, I guess. My basic gripe is against who regard poetry as a vehicle of relentless self-revelation, the sub-Nerudians and faux Rilkeans who seemed to have skipped the other qualities their inspiring source's poetry had and instead are determined to make a cult from the practice; the poet as priest is not an image that appeals to me and even the most supreme of egoist geniuses, Walt Whitman, would likely find the conceit a bit vain. I don't include the Language Poets, as someone had asked me, even though poetic language is at the forefront of their work; the effort there, I think, is an honest and exciting investigation into new ways of thinking about how language can be written to more creatively engage the complexity of experience. Ammons, of course, is much less formal, and has an the appeal of some who'd just gotten out of bed and is trying to get the sleep from his eyes. What he sees is the same old things, only completely different, to paraphrase comedian Steve Wright. I like the way Ammons demystifies the subject by simply talking about search for something to write about. What he mentions here, things like lawns, mail, current events, are brought up as things he might impress into being the details and subject of a poem he wants to write. He might have been talking about a mad search for missing car keys; there's humanity in this momentary frustration.There's the suggestion that Ammons is tired of his old turns of phrase and wants to forge new ones:

...should I try to plumb what is 

behind what and what behind that, deep down 

where the surface has lost its semblance: or 

should I think personally, such as, this week 

seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is 

something going on: something besides this 

diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I 

could draw up an ancient memory which would 

wipe this whole presence away...

Ammons admits his limits as a seer or oracle and speaks of language as something he works with through the craft of poetry, a practice he works at diligently in an effort to find an expression that transcends mere competence and achieves an artfulness. The poem is funny and moving in it's way, as Ammons' work is constantly aware of death, which makes philosophical certainty a cluster of moot points. This all puts A.R.Ammons' musings on poetry in sharp contrast to a host of others who'll essay forth in verse about poets being the intermediaries of Truths and Principles only a select few are able to deign and decipher for the less gifted. Without repeating my previous misgivings, I'll say that this his Hogwash and Elitism, and these are the sorts of people I imagine Ammons himself asking to go away.

DOO-WOP

Marvin Bell

He believes the tar pits hold bones but preserve

no emotions, and he believes space is matter.

He still thinks a kiss with full lips transformative,

the hope of a country boy with an uncultivated

heart, from the era of doo-wop and secret sex,

when the music was corny, cliched and desperate

like teenage love. Who now will admit that poetry

got its start there, in the loneliness that made love

from a song on red wax, from falsetto nonsense.

Who does not know that time passing passes on

sadness? A splinter of a song lyric triggers shards

of memory and knots in his gut. He regrets he was 

lashed to the mast when the sirens called. He

believes the sea is not what sank or what washes

up. There are nights the moon scares him.

Marvin Bell is one of those poets who can offer a string of non sequiturs and still having you following the heart under the odd contrasts in his lines. Associative leaps are not the easiest thing to do when so much of what your attempting to get across has more to do with a transitional state of mind than it does an position that can be easily parsed and contained.  Unlike Tony Hoagland's poem, "The Story of the Father" (featured at Slate last week) , where what should have been scene from a longer prose narrative got compressed beyond human caring with mannered, showy language, Bell has the ease of line transition, the ability to jump from one nervy island of reference to another and provide a sense of something gathering speed, assuming nuance. The young man going forth into the world of the senses, sparked by music, sirens, scents and touch; there is a skillfully maintained idea, implied and not editorialized as an intruding and infeffective aside, of music as that thing that bypasses the mind's censors and entrenched protections against foolishness and lands and seeds the desire to experience more with the senses, to test one's expectations against experienced fact.

He believes the tar pits hold bones but preserve

no emotions, and he believes space is matter.

He still thinks a kiss with full lips transformative,

the hope of a country boy with an uncultivated

heart, from the era of doo-wop and secret sex,

when the music was corny, cliched and desperate

like teenage love.

This is a fast run of language, streaming , quite literally, with all the elements that compose it melded together in a fluidity that rushes towards a crashing and overwhelming satisfaction. Tempo, rhythm , what the hip hoppers refer to as “flow”, this poem is simply perfect, simply lovely. This makes you think of magic nights in a music club where the lead soloist is at the very heart of an intense improvisations he or she is assembling, destroying and recreating in seeming simultaneity, absolutely transcendent in the spotlight and oblivious sounds of drunk talkers, dropped silveware, or the arguments of traffic noise coming through an open door. The soloist is in the moment, in Steven's land of Supreme Fiction, discoursing with a world that should be but is not. 

Poem as Dagwood Sandwich

I wanted to like Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Story of the Father” more than I did, if for no reason other than the description of the father burning the photographs reminds me of a potent scene in Reynolds Price's bittersweet novel Love and Work. In the novel, a middle aged English professor finds life closing in on him as he tries to balance the demands of organizing a literary festival at his college, becomes more estranged from his wife, and quite suddenly has to realize that he has to close the house of his recently deceased parents. The professor is an especially loathsome schmuck, self involved, resentful of the needs of work and family on his time and patience. Coming upon boxes of old family photographs, the beleaguered teacher throws them into a metal trash can and sets them on fire and it is there, watching the photos curl and bubble and finally obliterate the youthful faces of his dead parents that he looses it, breaking into tears, confronting the frustrate, clenched assholism of his current life. Price is a splendid writer, not one to over describe or tell you with an excess of verbal flair how to read the scene; he is very able to get across the tension, the unspoken dynamics of a situation without so many metaphors or flashing similes and allows the scene to make you think of some of your own touchy circumstances. Empathy is the word.

Hoagland's poem is all editorial, though, a clinician's report of a depressed patient. Whatever the intent, this poem is etherised upon the table.The writing is actually better than "a clinician's report", but there is the sense that what was over written in first draft was cut back but with the full intention of keeping the poem weighted with two generations of family grimness; the over writing still shows in lines that hope to be clean and elegant in their lack of qualifying distractions.

How quiet the suburbs are in the middle of an afternoon
*****************when a man is destroying evidence,
breathing in the chemistry of burning Polaroids,

watching the trees over the rickety fence
****************seem to lift and nod in recognition.This would be expected in a Rick Moody novel, who has tried to revive the darkly humorous melancholy of John Cheever with writing that combines battling metaphors and inclusions of botched, deadwood imagery, so glaring in his novels like Ice Storms and Purple America, the kind of writing that is a stall for time until the author can finesse a transition. Hoagland's lines here are self conscious to the degree that he expects to gain respect for telling an anecdote so close to the Everyman’s grief-sick heart, but this poem seems no less a template of sad tale telling than what one is likely to hear or say when no can figure out what the proper words are when trouble arises and troubles formerly smooth waters.

Hoagland sticks with fussy details that he writes about as if he were still mentally arranging their order as he settles for the one among many unsatisfying options. The contained and compressed form of the poem might well be his trouble, as these are details that fit a short story or a novel where family interaction and private rituals emerge in a more expansive narrative. You read lines like these and wonder what Richard Ford or Russell Banks might have done if they were used in the length of a novel;

Over and over I have arrived here just in time
to watch the father use a rusty piece of wire

to nudge the last photo of the boy
************into the orange part of the flame:

the face going brown, the memory undeveloping.

It is not the misbegotten logic of the father;
it is not the pity of the snuffed-out youth;The writing is fine as is, but the effect is toppled with a narrator’s remark, a summary that draws attention to the rote dynamics, as well as showing a writer trying to condense a bulkier cargo of ideas.

It is the old intelligence of pain
********************that I admire:

how it moves around inside of him like smoke;

how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside of them forever

This is a sentence that begins a work of fiction, along the lines of “Call me Ishmael” or “They through off the water truck at noon”, a fast and arresting introduction to a character that then tells of his immediate situation and then recounts the events that have brought him to his present vantage point. Hoagland’s attempt to crystallize the unspoken alienation, anger and stunted grieving with phrases that don’t introduce character but rather attempt a wistful acceptance of what cannot be explained leaves too many things unattended to. This poem is a Dagwood sandwich that spills from between the bread slices.

A page for Paul Blackburn

The Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), an online resource for information and works of major contemporary American poets based at Suny at Buffalo NY, has gone live with a page for Paul Blackburn. He was an amazing poet who could parse the spoken idiom and make it sing with a unique tone and personality better than any poet since W.C.Williams, and he could insert the most subtle of philosophical paradox and shifting viewpoints with writing that seemed off hand,an effortless expression.The seeming ease of line indicates the attuned ear, the steady pen, the economy of a master who could arrange his blocks of language, position the line breaks, compose the length of the line to a rhythmic sense that doesn't escape you as you read his work. If there was anyone who understood and achieved great effects of Williams' theory of the variable foot, Blackburn was that poet. There was always an electric current in his best poems, the thrill of the mind racing while the body is charged with energy, excitement.

Definition



Long ago and far away


and the swimmer
heading out into the bay
arm lift, plunge down, the head turning;
my heart you may swim forever
out. Look,


there is the horizon
Sea and sky meet, change; why
are we not this real intensity forever?
surrounded and known.
The world else is brown and calculated.


There on the beach, the
woman watches.
Between her legs the dog sits,
wiggling, wanting to go
too. It is a kind of death watching him swim out,
away from her, his head getting smaller and smaller, flash
of arm in sun, down,
distant churn of water between the small waves. She
holds the dog's two haunches in her hands.


He is hardly to be restrained, and love
is manifest, is felt from the two of them
differently.


The swimmer is himself.

There was a large world his eyes beheld, and he had the skill to get his perceptions in tuned with a personality framed the ironies and contradictory impulses in that odd space our language skills that allows us to hover over our own views, ambivalence and ambiguity. Not that Blackburn himself was distanced from his subjects; rather, his poems, his finest work, integrated his ideas with the terrains and the personalities within them. Please go to the page and read the wonderful poem above with the line breaks intact. Click also on well on the links for splendid Blackburn commentaries by Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly among several other notable poets and commentators.

Thank you the folks at EPC for their work, and to Ron Silliman's blog for the link.