Revenge of the Lawn

Odes to Spring are usually those bits and ditties where the earth is celebrated for the miracle of life itself, that despite what turmoil one is confronted with, fresh starts can always be had. It is one of the persistent cliches of literature, I suppose, but there is always room for another take that is less hopeful, downright depressed in fact, as one can read in Joseph Campana's poem "Spring Comes to Ohio", featured this week at Slate. It doesn't work as a poem for my taste--it seems more of a stream of conscious ramble from a novel when an author artfully enters a character's interior life-- but it does give a sense from a young man's point of view as to how the sunny and the colorful can excite an urge for violence.

This is a poem of submerged, sublimated, passively enacted revenge against the sunnier season that makes the world thaw from it's hard, icy encasements and to bloom and become green under a nurturing, breezy air. One is invited to inspect the world one had known as grey and cold and to see what was buried under all those layers of ice and slush; seeds grow and produce flowers, lawns grow and become long and green.

But one thing conflates into the other and some disguised hurt associates the sunny disposition, the natural activity of nature renewing it's life cycle with an awakening of some trauma that had been inert, hibernating. There is the feeling in the description of this skewed landscape of someone gritting their teeth while they pull the stitches from a recently mended wound

All the evening flowers

are coffins bursting with 

possibility. Why not pick 

one, why not let your 

sorrow sink into the dirt

where it will die? The first

gesture is the hope that it

will die before you will

or that you will learn to

read it like a book. Come 

read, come to the flower 

beds and the mowed-down

fields where the heads of

yellow soldiers burst in

the grass. If anyone ever

gave you something, that

gesture of fading beauty

was the first sign that

the price of generosity 

is the flower that would

rather not be ripped from

its heart

Young boys are flowers and flowers are things that are planted in place and at the mercy of whatever rogue set of fingertips chooses to pick them at random , and with the author adroitly altering the point of view to simulate a child's reality-bending fantasy. Dandelions are soldiers being vanquished brutally with a decapitating lawn mower; the violence is senseless, the very things that we are invited to inspect, to read remain secrets only a skilled therapist can interpret and disarm. But the meaning of it seems clear enough, which is that the world, in the traumatized narrator's view, is a series of layered appearances, one hiding a secret, power thing or fact, with the reward being only pain and punishment for the curious.

Come read your heart

which has shriveled 

into a flower receding

before night. If the sun

ever will come back here

the first thing you'll do is 

reach right out to touch

This poem sees the seasons as a serial sucker punch, winter is the time when betrayals, fights and other states of disagreeable experience are put in stasis and the young man return to their homes to nurse their wounds, shore up their psychic armor, prepare for the coming thaw; when the thaw comes, the pain starts anew, one may fall for the old trick again and experience the stabbing sensation of recollection. Something primal kicks in, aggression grows that becomes a lifetime habit. The reflex is that this life exists only to torment us, and one must proceed with a determination to carve it up, engrave one's name on the soil, to have the planet yield to one's will or be devastated.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, a capitalist despite his band's tendency to dwell at the edgier margins of anxiety resulting from living a life in a faceless corporate society, has decided to place his Jean- Michel Basquiat painting "Untitled(Boxer)" up for sale at Christie's auction house. Not surprising for a millionaire rebel who sued the original free-download version of Napster for allowing Metallica's albums to be gathered by poachers without a dime of remuneration; art is about more than making a living, it's about making a profit. He says that his art collecting has now gone in the direction of gather emerging artists, which is fine, though I'd be more impressed if he just said that was tired of looking at an ugly canvas.The thing about ugly objects that one has paid alot of money form is that as much as one pretends to love their purchase, said objects don't love you back. Yes, the painting is powerful and emotionally wrenching to witness, but so is a car accident; it's not an experience I try to recreate. Had I the funds to hang some paint-brushed screaming against on my wall, I'd opt for the late British artist Francis Bacon; his human subjects , in the way they seem to be morph from classically defined features to a blurring, bleeding dissolution are more the stuff of art than are Basquiat's kvetching stick figures.

I've been reading a rather lavish and well-tuned book on the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basquiat, edited by Marc Mayer, rich in selection from the painter's brief career. All the same reactions and responses arise, the combination of rank amateurism and visionary determination, broom remains and waste basket scrawls combined with an idealized sense of tribal totem ism that nearly excuses Basquiat's failings as a draftsman.
The late Jean- Michel Basquiat's best trick in his short ascendancy as a painter was that he managed a fusion of street credibility and the gloss of high culture faster and more authentically than did his formally trained mentors. His mentors and inspirations Warhol, Schnabel, DuBuffet and Twombly , among many others, learned the traditions and the techniques of Western Art History in order to undercut them with the cranky, jazzy, electric vibe and artifacts of contemporary urban life. The aim overall was to blur, if not completely destroy the line between a culture's high art practice and accompanying aesthetic and the reality it was created in. Beauty, harmony, balance, and revelations of essential Truths about the Human Spirit were not the motivations for an art created in bombed out neighborhoods and abandoned factory lofts. It was praxis , an applied theory of revolution.Basquiat had no theory other than his instinct for what happened to fit his moment of composition and was interested less in fusion of cultural arrogance than in things he saw that he could use in his work. It definitely was a Hip Hop art, not unrelated to the DJs spinning the music of others in endless mixes, speeds and pitches and speeds to produce something completely new and in the moment. Basquiat appropriated their mannerisms, their studied sense of the incomplete and canvases that are "under construction", and effortlessly, it seem, applied it a graffiti style that was suited for the sides of buildings and freeway overpasses, not gallery walls.

I was never a big fan of Basquiat's paintings, and the praise he's received is , as is the estimation of artists, musicians and or writers who die young, is overblown and overstated. The body of work does not support the complexities ascribed to it; it's more a grand case of reading things into works rather than drawing things from them. Everyone loves a young, beautiful and dead artist if for no reason other than it's a handy way to keep our tenuous definitions and tropes of genius, beauty and justice ( of a kind) in place.

If we may say that someone of a particular gift passed on too young but left evidence of the best expression that the race is capable of, things that live beyond their life, we can maintain our certainties a little longer. The metaphysics of presence is shored up until the next crisis of global conceptualization.

Basquiat's work, though, has a charm that is anything but phony; he has the hallmarks of what is called "outsider" art , or "naive expressionism", the art making of the sensitive but untrained and unprofessional whose awkwardness of line and contour is something genuine in mass culture. It is an interesting display of artists thinking about the world that's given them to draw their energies and phobias from. Basquiat hit the payday, of course, but the faith of graffiti remained at the center of his paintings, which is to say that his bright and garish forms and highlights weren't make the city any prettier or revitalize old notions of harmony.

Rather,it was a way of making the city right-sized, not decoration but instead a note that says that this where he lives, this is what he has passed through, and this location of every nuanced joy and agony a life in Manhattan can give you.

The past gets better to more I talk about it.

By Ted Burke


A friend phoned from Los Angeles called down last week to discuss movies, books, politics, stuff in that order, and in the course of a long talk Ridley Scott's movie Gladiator came up; I enjoyed the film, thinking that Scott's undeniable but erratic talents found a suitable epic tale, while my friend, a reader of history, a precise noter of detail, derided for being inaccurate. "It's bad history" he said, and I , not a history buff but a lover of a good yarn told well, replied half-assedly "It's not history, it's a movie."

Movie it is, but I do understand someone for whom accuracy matters tiring unto death of college kids and their aging icons looting the historical archive in order to give us tales that can easily turned into computer games. We become disconnected from our past in terms have having an sense of where we came from, and quite easily clouds any sense of a better future--a destiny, if one prefers--that can lay ahead of us. We're left in a static present, where there is only the motion of distraction, the anxiety of cabin fever, a room you cannot leave.
The postmodern habit of mind is skeptical of the idea that History can be recounted in any neat formula: what has been useful in the deconstructive era has been the realization that written history, the record we refer to for a grounding, is no less a narrative structure than are novels and poems. Elements are arranged in interesting alliances and oppositions, conflicts are stated as plot lines in a convoluted drama, and the virtue being fought is made to seem as if it emerges, self evident, from the facts.

This tendency to make our past one long historical novel has been recognized, and we've at least an awareness of a buried political agenda being worked out. This clearing-of-the-playing field may, in fact, allow the marginal populations, the less-promoted cultures, to come to the center and have their narratives eventually woven into the story so far. But it comes back to good writing, which is the problematic element of postmodern criticism: discussions of the aesthetic, the poetry, the emotional accuracy of great literature is performed little, if at all, replaced by a critical cement, dense as the tax code, that pretends to be the theoretical prep-work that is readying the populations for a stalled insight. Living up to their own conceits, judgment to the quality of work is delayed, deferred, because such elements we use to define the artistic worth of a work are ultimately indivisible given their ultimate un-prove ability. What this results in is bad writing that travels quite a distance without anyone being able to yell tripe when tripe is served.

An unfair dismissal of a Walter Savage Landor epigram

By Ted Burke

Slate's poetry editor (and former U.S.Poet Laureate) Robert Pinsky joins those of us on the Poems Fray forum to discuss his most recent selection for the weekly poem, Walter Savage Landor's "On Love, on Grief". I don't think much of epigram, but I take my hat to Pinsky for rolling up the sleeve to discuss the poem with the board's regular participants. It's a pleasant surprise to have an editor descend from the mountain and shoot the breeze. He seems like a good chap.

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

Slight, compact, dense with associations that come in the form of end notes or paragraphs of prefatory remarks, this epigram does little for me as a piece of writing. What pleases one person as euphonious phrasing , an ideal aligning of vowels and consonants that keep a beat and a lift, I find instead to be sing-song and nearly trite.

The verse has an appeal for the classicist, the marm, the relentlessly erudite who recognize what is disguised by Sandor's compressing sensibility and who take a special joy in excavating the terms and elaborating on original context and usage, but this effort seems , to me, to be in service to cracker-barrel distillations of kinds of wise adages that have become cliches and platitudes; Shakespeare's quips continue to surprise, Oscar Wilde skewers us continuously , Donne can still be counted out to make you consider present circumstance in larger terms, but this?
Two lines that seem like the joined limbs of a twig, caught in the Lethe's waters, battered along the shoreline, battered by rushing rills, drowned in the crashing foam.

A forum participant, a resourceful writer writing under the name Mary Ann, posted a counter example of an epigramtic poem where what is seen is more important than what one thought about what was seen:

BECAUSE YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LINE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY

by Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

The Nemerov poem is disciplined enough to leave the abstractions alone and concentrate instead on the details and their movements, in their space, in their context. Although no poet can truly escape the trap of loading their images with the subjectivity that attends their word selection, Nemerov at least keeps his rhetoric under control and comes as close as one might at a poem when perception of the thing itself is before us. Sandor sounds poised to settle an argument with a verse that tries to make all parts of a problematic sensation surrender to a harmonious relativity, while Nemerov isn't interested in debating points but rather in seeing what's in front of him, understanding it , perhaps, without his regular filters in place. This is all that Pound extolled, that we have to rid ourselves of the lard and concentrate on the right words to get the perception right, in the sharpest focus.

By Ted Burke
Permanent Nobel Prize Committee member Horace Engdahl must have been having a bad time of it on particular morning as he finished reading yet another Danielle Steele novel, choking down a bit of soggy toast with concentrated orange juice, and commenced to crack open a Dan Brown book."American literature is too awful, too insular, to fixed with American concerns to be really play in The Big Leagues" he must have gasped, his quaking hand spilling still-frozen ice crystles from his glass of would be orange juice onto his crisply pressed pajama bottoms, "Europe, oh our writers are so superior, so much more worldly,yes, we are the world, after all, ohhhh, ahhh..."

Has anyone who's read this man's remarks on American Literature not been struck how closely akin elitism is to provincialism; not to slight anyone , but there is a small town boosterism that resonates like small, thin bell that cannot produce anything more than a flat, metallic clanking. He doesn't have the arms, one guesses, to beat the big bass drum for his beloved European superiority. I'm reminded of the old Roger Corman movie Bucket of Blood where a preening , brain dead blonde ingenue berates a bus boy in a bohemian coffee house , telling him, in effect, " who are you but a mere bus boy? We're all sophisticated beatniks..."

How on earth can the slandering of an entire country, its people and the complex and diverse culture it contains be considered "enlightened"? It cannot, even if this sort of hubris-choked braying comes from the mouth of a permanent member of the Nobel Committee. It’d be one thing if this were something said in a bar or at a sufficiently boozed-up party where baseless claims are the norm and the revealed ignorance radiates no further than the next morning when hangovers and amnesia take priority over one’s global pronouncements to the insularity of American literature. Horace Engdahl’s remarks belie his own insularity; one has a hard time imagining someone so unaware that they’re fulfilling the rank stereotype of the half-cocked dilettante who cannot support his view with anything other than a snotty tone. I’ve my doubts that he’s read Roth, DF Wallace, Oates, August Wilson, Don DeLillo, John Ashbery, Kate Braverman; one may furnish their own examples of worthy Americans not given the and consider the Nobel Prize itself irrelevant.

Punk'd

By Ted Burke

The poetry blogosphere has been abuzz with the doings of some folks who've promised and finally delivered a massive, nearly 4000 page PDF file promising the work of many, many, many, many poets. In fact, the list of who would be featured in this work, from a blog that's named itself with unspeakably obvious literary reference, seemed to include every poet who has a blog, myself included. With delivery of the down loadable file, I quickly searched for name and the poem I supposedly submitted to editors I've never spoken with.

I was will to suspend any disbelief I had thinking perhaps that those folks had cribbed a choice verse I posted to my poems site , or some other place on line, usually obscured by word clouds. No wish fulfillment here, as the poem was something I didn't write. Not that I'm all that smokin' a poet, but the poem attached my name is rather bad, in the way one writes an awful set of stanzas on purpose. And lo, it turned out that I wasn't the only listed writer who hadn't composed the verse assigned their name; you can view the down loadable file here and read through the responses as well at the website where this hoax was perpetrated.

The project is not about what poems "belong" to an author as much as how many authors there are on the Internet who regularly check their status in the blogosphere with periodic Googlings of their name. The sheer quanity of names here, my own included, rather assured the instigators that there'd be a sizable , blog heavy response. It's a Dada gesture and a provocation made with the intention of upsetting a good number of poet's sense of themselves as autonomous agents and authors of their own experience. On that account, the anthology, fake poems and all, succeed famously. The aesthetic effect is the ripple they create among a scattered group's perception of a single event, small change as it maybe. Further disquisition on the relationship and fragility between the concept of authorship in an amorphous sphere like the Internet is, of course, fascinating, but secondary. It's gravy, but it's npt essential to what these fellas had in mind.Perhaps the instigators are Rove-like neocons who specialize in changing the subject; what better way to make people forget their economic ills than to appeal to their base insecurities. Rove would appeal to a poor American's nervous patriotism, while these fellas mine the thin vein of self-esteem too many poets have. In both cases, the ploy prevents one from the duty of the poet to change reality rather than merely describe or complain about it

Hayden Carruth has died

By Ted Burke


Hayden Carruth, as fine a poet who has ever taken a drink and recovered from the culminated grief of the fact, has died at the age of 87. Not a serene soul nor a seeker of quick exits from a line of inquiry, Carruth had what James Dickey called “a kind of frenzied eloquence, a near-hysteria” . Carruth's range of interests was, to use a quaint usage, flabbergasting, and there was in his work an effort to penetrate the convenient shells that disguise the things of the world and to sense, instead, the orbits friends, occupations, ideas keep around each other. Perhaps influenced by a personal philosophy informed, in large part, by European existentialism, his poems, and his critical writing resisted the temptation to arrange or discourse upon scenarios that would finalize an idea or an arrangement of images. His view was broader, his view was that something happens after we read the last line and raise our eyes from the page if only to see what is in front of us now and how we might consider the complexity with our own nested recollection. He was a fine stylist, with a command of the speaking voice that could cut to the quick, serve up the essence, isolate rich sediment of association with the inspired riff, the punched-up phrase. Plus he wrote one of my favorite drinking poems, this one:

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey
by Hayden Carruth


Scrambled eggs and whiskey
in the false-dawn light. Chicago,
a sweet town, bleak, God knows,
but sweet. Sometimes. And
weren't we fine tonight?
When Hank set up that limping
treble roll behind me
my horn just growled and I
thought my heart would burst.
And Brad M. pressing with the
soft stick and Joe-Anne
singing low. Here we are now
in the White Tower, leaning
on one another, too tired
to go home. But don't say a word,
don't tell a soul, they wouldn't
understand, they couldn't, never
in a million years, how fine,
how magnificent we were
in that old club tonight.

What gets to me is that Carruth gets the imbibing culture precisely because the poem deals not with the drinking itself , the confessional rants as to what drove one to the bottle, or the good glory of one's drunken vision of a spiritless present the arch romantic is imprisoned within; there is no mythology, but there is the idea that the camaraderie one thought they'd achieve the night before at bars, with toasts and the buying of many founds is now fading with the rise of the sun. The geniuses, the wits, the beautiful company one kept under bar light and streetlight now seem wizened, human, full of aches, wrinkles, slight limps, and all are united by hunger and encroaching hangovers. It reflects my history of all-night drinking; the bare fact that the next morning comes and you haven't been to bed yet and the only real question to ask yourself after the bent-elbow heroics and bravado on the barstool, once you're on the street, looking for your keys or loose change, is "now what?" This is space being the dying buzz of the booze and the accursed remorse that will settle soon enough, too soon enough.