Swimming from two shorelines

I was asked what a poet was talking about when I showed a friend a copy of John Ashbery's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and I was, of course, stuck for a fast answer. "Everything in the room" I said," and nothing in particular". An unsatisfactory response, she said. "I know" I replied,concluding "that's why he's fun to read." She made a sound and arched her eyebrows, annoyed , maybe, by the implication that poetry should have an entertainment value

The question ought to be not if the Emperor is naked but rather if the observer is blind. My take is that if one thinks there is nothing to John Ashbery's poems, they are bringing nothing to their readings.There is,I'm convinced, such as a thing as Author's Intent , an element literary critics have been trying to beat to death for four decades or so, but even so the reader is obliged to fill in the blanks and to stop complaining the poems are , alternately, too direct or too complicated. Willingness is the key; something of oneself needs to be invested in reading the poems in order to find pursuable verse.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained.He was more the walker than Ashbery, I suppose, or at least he wrote more about the going to and coming from of his strolls. unlike Ashbery, O'Hara loved being an obvious tourist in his own environment, and didn't want for a minute for his poetry to leave the streets, cafes and galleries where he treaded. Ashbery is more the stroller who gets lost in his associations triggered by what he beheld. Ever more the aesthete than his fellow New York Poets, he was interested in things a little more metaphysical, that being that the reality that exists in the inter-relations being the act of perception and the thoughts that are linked to it, which branch off from the perception and link again with another set of ideas, themselves connected to material things observed and remembered.

O'Hara was immediate, like the city he loved, while Ashbery allowed his senses the authority to enlarge his perception, to explore the simultaneity of sight and introspection. In a strange way, Ashbery is the more sensual of the two, willing to examine that even the sacrifice of immediate coherence. I'm not a fan of difficulty for the sake of being difficult, but I do think it unreasonable to expect poets to be always unambiguous or easily grasped. Not every dense piece of writing is worthy by default, of course, and the burden falls on the individual talent. Ashbery's writing, for me, has sufficient allure, resonance and tangible bits of the recognizable world he sees to make the effort to maneuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work.

Poetry, to distinguish itself from the precise mapping capacity of prose, ought to be written in a manner so ambiguity and multiplicity of possible readings thrive. .Otherwise, what would the point be? What matters for me as a tempered reader is not how well a writer coheres with a party line but rather how well they accomplish the goals of a craft that , by rights, should engage with a way of thinking of a confounding existence in a language that seeks to purify itself, continually,of easy attained tropes taken from a gallery of responses and generate instead some new ideas. Even the most conservative of poets in form and content do this very thing if they happen to be interesting writers at all; Poetry tradition is not a parsimonious use of language, but rather a deliberate expansion of what words pieced can do, what meanings they can evoke, and what sensations they can create.

Prose is the form that is, by default, is required to have the discourse it carries be clear and has precise as possible. Poetry and poets are interesting because they are not addressing their experiences or their ideas as linear matters subject to the usual linguistic cause and effect; poetry is interesting because it's a form that gives the inclined writer to interrogate their perceptions in unexpected ways. The poetic styles and approaches and aesthetics one may use vary widely in relative degrees of clarity, difficulty, and tone, but the unifying element is that poetry isn't prose, and serves a purpose other than the mere message delivering that is, at heart, the basic function of competent prose composition. I paraphrase the pragmatist’s credo: the validity of an idea is in how it works. It’s more interesting and fruitful, I think, to debate why individual poems work and why others just stay on the page, unlovable and flat, instead of holding the literary equivalent of Stalin Trials as to how well or badly a poet adheres to an approved party line. Quietude vs. Incomprehensible Quandaries? I reserve the right to swim from both shorelines.

Two concert DVDs from NetFlix

Miles Davis: Around Midnight (1967)

Filmed near the end of 1967 for the most part in Stockholm, Sweden, we have here a choice document that dispenses with the Davis mystique and allows us to hear the music , free and clear. Miles Davis didn't say much, as a rule, to his audiences, but with a band this good playing jazz this brilliant, it was wise for the band leader to allow the improvisation get the message across. Davis' trumpet work is all that is legend, crisp, curt, cool, muted, full of spatially lyric melodic forms and bursts of striking tones and angular phrasing. You anticipate the trumpeter's every solo, wondering what he'll think of next. Wayne Shorter on saxophone is Davis' perfect foil, an original voice who could provide you a sense of fully conceived and executed composition with each of his solos. The rhythm section of Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums is wonderful as well, especially Williams, who provided a malleable pulse that linked the instrumentalist’s dialogue.


Jimi Hendrix: Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight

We who grew up with Jimi and were saddened by his early death need to face facts and admit that he was an underdeveloped as a guitarist. In concert, anyway. While there is an oh-wow factor to consider in the man’s playing , the context is historical only, and an out of tune guitarist who sounds bored with the songs , the riffs and the stage antics he’s paid to perform does not travel well into the 21st century. For all the genius he demonstrated in the studio, he was a messy, out of tune, mistake-prone improvisor live, and this DVD shows him at his most exhausted. This is not experimentations in dissonance, as some would suggest, it's just inferior guitar work. Sorry, Jimi, but I do wish you had lived and gotten your act together, but at least you left us with "Electric Ladyland". I wish we had another ten years worth of music that amazing.

Wayne Shorter's Ensemble Straight Jacket

Alegria -Wayne Shorter

Fronting a superb brass and woodwind ensemble, saxophonist Wayne Shorter goes to expand his considerable palette with this 2003 set of compositions intended, I suppose, to highlight his talent as a master of texture, tone color and someone who can lead a large ensemble through theme and variation. This is not Ellington, this is not Julius Hemphill, this is not even Gunther Schuller. What is, though, is monotony on a virtuoso level. Technically there is much to admire, but there is little to enjoy since the project is obsessed with making Alegria match other large-group efforts at the sacrifice of the punch and flurry a richly showcased set of improvisations would provide. Oh, if they had reached a little less and jammed a little more. Davis didn't forget to swing amid the expanded contexts of Kind of Blue, and neither Mingus nor Monk forgot the blues wail or the gospel shout in the textures and subtler angles of their respective concert works. There are moments here, of course where Shorter's tenor and soprano saxophone sorties emerge from the arty murk and redundant changes of the ensemble to lighten up the proceedings, but even here it feels rootless, divorced from the melodies they should be making statements upon; one senses Shorter trying to make something happen. Nothing does as a result.

Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate

I'd be pleased if a poet preferring small matters to big themes became our Poet Laureate. But in the value of Kay Ryan, I find her work malnourished, under muscled, simply lifeless, and still as a rusty coin in a cushion crack. She is part of the School of Quietude, a dismissive term coined by Ron Silliman to describe the poets of the larger marketplace who concentrate on approaches to poetry that will not attempt to tackle more than one idea at a time. I have less animus toward poets who desire to do one thing well before moving on to the next matter at hand and have taken more than a bit of joy reading Billy Collins, Robert Haas.  Collins, though, is someone whom you "get" in short order, amused, shall we say, but his stylish effects but with no compelling reason to revisit the poem. Dickinson, certainly not a Quietuder (although she has been mentioned in conjunction with Ryan's name), shows all of us that compact does not mean straightforward; whole philosophies and shades of far-reaching intellection exist between those dashes. We read her because she's not easy to reach; with each re-reading, the reader tends to bring more to their experience of her work. Collins gets paraphrased, like a joke one half-recalls. The impression he leaves is soon smoothed into a general nothingness like the white noise that makes up radio static.

The compressed diction, the ruthlessly scoured syntax, and sparse, clean rhythms (or rhythmless, at times) is breathtaking when it works in the world of single-subject poets, analogous to rare moments when a perception, an odd and unplanned arrangement of things, surprises you when your eyes come to rest on them. It's the sight of surprise, the aha!, and the short formers, the Quietuders, likely excavate against excess rhetoric and come upon the one thing they are writing about. It's not an easy thing to do well. But more often, it is a mere shtick, a form of slick aptitude for evading the harder edges a poet would be expected to walk on. One idea, maybe too, a good turn of phrase, a quick exit. Ryan, though, isn't even this interesting.

My problem with Ryan is that too typically, she seems to be getting started on an idea, about to unravel some mystery of a material thing and connect it with an ongoing argument each poet has against Platonic idealism. Still, she leaves, darts away, and is elsewhere after her aggravations are generated.

Bad Day

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

From Say Uncle, 2000

One admires skeletal purity and an aesthetic that won't be overstated or festooned with gamy rhetoric. Still, there are some things Ryan might have taken from the more formal approaches she turned her back on, central among them the need to finish a thought. As with the above, the ganging up of internal rhymes makes this poem cute as a button but not practical as a poem. It would serve, I suppose, as a setup for a more extended set of complications with the size of the clothes one is supposed to wear. Still, the theme is rather banal: one grows out of their clothes as they age and gain weight, and complications don't seem to interest Ryan anyway. Incompleteness can indeed be appealing in a poet who provides a strong sense of the absent details they address elliptically--strong points for Dickinson and the fascinating Rae Armentrout--but Ryan's is not that kind of poet. Her poems make you lean in so you can hear this soft voice suss through contradictions and the follies of fanciful thinking, but it ends in a mumble.

One should consider the work of a lesser-known but though brilliantly clear-eyed poet named Kate Watson, a writer I know and was featured within a 1996 anthology Small Rain: Eight Poets from San Diego (D.G.Wills Books). Her tone is modulated, her sentences balance tactile adjectives and purring verbs with an uncanny equilibrium, and her quiet moments transcend the perceived banalities of the School of Quietude and actually enter into perceptions that are sweetly unique, clear, aesthetically riveting. Something is arrived at. The rare thing about my friend Kate is that her version of considering the thing-in-and-of-itself is without the faux profundity so many other poets would evoke despite their best efforts to rein in their egos; poets by nature have a hard time stepping from being the Arnoldian seer/priest. Kate Watson's is a poetry that is in large part free of those posturing suppositions.

Smudge

Pussycat,

pink eared, squints

in the sunshine,

sniffing flowers.

Button-eyed, she

purrs and

furlicks my legs

in the kitchen.

Four years ago, four

kittens born

in a drawer, smelled

of a barnyard.

Mature, she sleeps

in a circle,

the slope of her head suggests--young doe.

Trinity

She meets I

in the body

which is one

with my mother

I can see

where sits by the blue fire

flame-quick knitting

Is she sighing

shall I sing

she is I

am a long way away

when the wind blows

white wall coal black

light grey hair

my mother winks

from the middle of the flame

and I rise up

and leave her

alone

In the fire a reflection

coming home?

(C) 2008 Kate Watson

This is just a way of saying that the Library of Congress could have made a better choice. Saying that they could have done worse than Ryan doesn't say much for the office nor for what good graces are to be found in her conceit-laden lines.

A windy defense of the "Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara"

Selected Poems
Frank O'Hara
Edited by Mark Ford (Alfred A. Knopf).

Famously dour poetry critic William Logan smooths a few of the wrinkles from his creased visage and assess editor Mark Ford's new Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara with a surprisingly even hand. That is, he found some nice things to say about a poet you wouldn't have thought he'd consider to have any saving graces .The upshot is that he has a peeve against massive "Collected Poems" from dead writers where the good work is buried among limitless juvenilia and failed experiments. The poems of O'Hara, he writes, needed a good weeding.

"O’Hara’s wonderful poems are all too easily drowned out by the vivifying mediocrity of the rest. At times the banalities pile up and overwhelm the poems — but then they were the poems. Rarely has an American poet so influential (two generations of urban poets have come out of O’Hara’s shopping bag) written so many poems dull to anyone except his genial fanatics — his very notion of the aesthetic courted failure as a method.... When O’Hara was lucky, he was very lucky, because his method could not help but fail most of the time."

One does have to admire this congenial sourpuss's ability with a phrase.I happen to love my massive , Donald Allen edited Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara , and think that Logan is being obtuse for the sake of not diminishing his reputation for taking iconic writers to task, but all the same, enjoy the review. What is significant and wonderfully successful about O'Hara's poem is , as Ron Silliman upon, he was the first American poet since William Carlos Williams to shy from, lampoon or ignore altogether the dominant conventions of formal, high style then current in American poetry and to instead settle on a unique idea of the patois of American cities. There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language.

Not unlike the live-wire architectural cubism in Stuart Davis paintings, with their jazz inflected angles , bright,bursting colors and idiomatic use of advertising iconography (but avoiding the entombing tendencies that doomed Pop Art), O'Hara's writes the poetry equivalent of a man supremely stimulated by what the boundless blocks and tall buildings of New York could bring him; his was the rhythm of someone wanting to talk to you about a dozen items at once, and there in is his genius; with so many things to relate, to remark upon, to marvel at and express the accelerated rush of emotional response, the poet allows matters to drift, topics to drop, creating an impressive verse that is at once of it's time and yet timeless in the sense that a reader to this day recognizes the exhilaration and sadness of O'Hara's valedictorian missives, both compact and expanded, generalized and specific to friends, lovers, situations.

There is something wonderfully askew in the poet's work, and a good amount of the poems in the Complete Poems succeed because of what I suspect was a canny knack O'Hara developed and honed as he wrote over the years; a speech that was endearingly familiar, with an elegance that didn't announce its beauty with trumpets summoning the reader to a poem's epiphany, but rather something that caught you in wildly conflating stream of language. As others would learn from him, O'Hara was the master of not getting to the point. The point , if any, was that he was alive in a life that was simply too incredible for words to contain.

GOP parody a flat tire

Daniel Nasaw writes the deadline:USA news blog for the Guardian , and ran an item regarding an ad produced by the Republican National Committee intended as a parody of Obama's recent speech in Berlin. The point, one would guess, is what would an Obama election ad look like if he were running in Germany rather than in the United States. We are meant to shiver with the slight yet obvious Nazi implications and indulge our Europhobia yet again. The fear card is a hand these guys cannot stop playing. The ad here.

A weak parody that lands far afield any target the would-be propagandists might have had in mind. One wonders how the fact that Obama is liked by Germans should bedistrubing to American voters. The opposite is more likely.Disgust with the war policies and subsequent disasters of the Bush Administration would cause a good many voters to be heartened with the prospect that there's a major Presidential candidate Europeans actually like,respect and are eager to cooperate with. Those of us in the States are sick of going it alone and being the bane of Civilization's existence; we're more than aware that the cowboy antics of our current group of election-hijacking thugs have made matters domestic and international a miserable mess. What's clear is that the RNC is desperate to undermine the success of the Obama trip; McCain and his surrogates dared him to go to Irag and Afghanistan with the expectation that Barack Obama's alleged naivete and inexperience would cause to make mistakes, commit gaffs and otherwise look unprepared and ill suited for the job he's running for. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, and the Republican Noise Machine is reduced to seeming like a nitpicking, complaining, embarrassed and whiny bunch of playground bullies who are trying to recover from a humiliating and deserved public spanking.

This would be a suitable footnote for a dictionary of famous phrases, specifically "hoist by one's petard", IE,

"To be caught in one’s own trap: “The swindler cheated himself out of most of his money, and his victims were satisfied to see him hoist by his own petard.” A “petard” was an explosive device used in medieval warfare. To be hoisted, or lifted, by a petard literally means to be blown up"

---(from Bartleby.com).

In a less literary vein, this is the equivalent of an inept robber getting shot with his own gun. That's gotta hurt.

poem: This page & a pair of pants

No romance for dental ovine modular cordless
Coltrane sheets for loud wall paper, habitue
lounge jazz frisky changes bandstand waltz time
allegro tropic corridor rhyme scheme , harmony boned up
like homework under iteration sans antidote to anecdotal
grave-cleaning, take the pennies off a dead man's eyes,
Yes to negative figuration as Madonna herself
gypsy queen of the Kick Stand Church of Low Heeled
gas line, stretch pants show the gender and the money
she and he carry as they travel between drainage ditches,
in my mind there are always factories gone behind forests
quiet as the commas gracing this page & a pair of pants
zipped up, sans legs, arms, a useful torso.
No time in half acre barn dance
means quarter notes and bandstand antics
grappling with third moon erasing
cruel ripples trails never clear
in diacritical manager's special,
the choice leaves on the absent pages
crack with what's made of history
but there are no bannisters to slide
down in Oakland
where you house exists
on a lake cured of flat fish and mud sharks,
after tonight everything is in the present tense,
But what you said even then,
as the strawmen fell out of their jeans
and shirts and their hats floated across
the stained planks of the gymnasium floor,
that our lives are less
now that bull whip politics
has an attitude
about spiral notebooks that
come undone and get stuck
to the notebook it lays atop,
all the notes are written at an angle,

What was said about masters and slaves
crawls over the slippery finger tips
of land lease, yeah, he said
I pull the trigger until it goes “click”.