SOME POEMS NEED TO BE TARRED AND FEATHERED

There are some poems I read that put me in a bad mood and keep me there; the insidious thing about that experience is that the mood isn't bad, it's mean, and a host of my anti-social impulses awaken and demand their satisfaction. "The White Skunk" by the lead-footed David Ferry is such a poem, offered up on Slate. Think of the Drama Club ham who treated every gesture or half sentence of dialogue into an audition in front of imagined producers, every poli-sci blowhard who couldn't jargonize obvious facts fast enough, a movie so long that sometimes you think you're still watching it. Ferry is one thing, a bore, a never ending cold potato.
White Skunk" , ironically, caused to remember a Little Rascals episode I watched when I was a grade schooler, specifically an arresting image among the usual film hi-jinx of one a young black five year old chasing a skunk into a the gang's club house, saying "HERE KITTY KITTY KITTY". The skunk darts into the building and, of course, everyone inside comes flying out of the windows. My memory, of course, is a bit hazy on the exact details of the scene, but the scenario is correct, and it's an apt metaphor for someone who gets fixed on a bad idea and labors until the end, the result a busy and messy assemblage.
David Ferry chased a skunk thinking he had a brilliant idea on his hand; the metaphor gets extended here, in that this poem stinks as badly as the maligned animal would if sufficiently provoked. The poet might as well have been a drunk lout at a party , pants around his knees, lampshade on his head, spelling "Mississippi" with the rich raspberry-tuned gases he could squeeze from between his cheeks. Musical he might have though this poem was, but with all the useless padding, the buffering qualifiers, the allusions to Homer seeming no less than a moneypit home addition that knows no end, Ferry's attempt to turn an interesting scene into a moment of dimension ripping revelation gives a wordy disaster, whole stanzas composed for a unifying theme that does not come.
Ferry makes the familiar mistake when things aren't clicking , which is to overwrite in determined fashion to compensate for inspiration. Too soon it's more than squeaking gases the poet is passing our way. Thinking of a groaning man inside a men's room stall who's sat on what's he's consumed for too long, straining for release. Ferry, though, was straining for effect, but the poem , not flushed with success, still has an odor one would normally remove themselves from.
 Ferryis a noted translator with some poetic instincts and precision when he brings his skill to reanimating Homer, should offer up this unedited mess as a finished work. The project would have worked if he made only the most oblique and distanced references to the classical poem he was paraphrasing and drawing parallels from. He needed to ennoble the skunk less with mythological freight and bring the interaction between animal and human down to a more plausible point. Similarly he would have done well to make the imperiled father and daughter less melodramatic; as it goes , it has the pitch of excited overwriting, an athletic effort to put words in place when narrative layering isn't working out.  Had this my poem, I would have pared this back to the point where the allegories all but disappeared and the reader would have instead a poem that could be read for it's own merits. Those astute enough to recognize the borrowing from Homer, well, good on them.  

Ferry wanted to do fine things with the overlays of this poem--a contemporary scene of animal v human tension segueing into an ancient Greek tale--but the result is ham handed and displays the unwieldy amateurishness of a writer unwilling to rid a work of particulars that don't enhance but only clutter and clog. There is a way to make this idea vivid and emphatic, and the first thing would be to de-emphasise the classical references; as is, it merely seems like the cultural window dressing that has more to do with bragging rights than usefulness. Second, the action should be sparer, mirroring Ferry's enamored tale, but making little or no reference to it. Third, the language can be cut back within an inch of its ideal intent. Ferry needs to spend less time telling us what's happening and more showing us.

The choice cynicism of Jack Spicer

By Ted Burke

Jack Spicer was an odd and inspired contrarian in place during the San Francisco Renaissance, who conceived poetry as "dictation" of a sort. He had gone so far as to refer to the poet as a "radio", a living device able to intercept transmissions from an other wise invisible world of sharper, bolder, more original combinations of sound, rhythm, form. This is a unique way of insisting, again, that the artist is the "antenna of the race", and there is room enough in his thought to wonder if he considered the poet the one in particular who could touch Plato's Ideal Forms, or if thought he had te ability to peak behind the curtain to espy the furniture of Stevens' Supreme Fiction. Spicer was a troubled man, though, an alcoholic, someone at odds with the poetry community he lived in, but he was a serious, sometimes brilliant poet who could calm his erudition and gives us a poetry of propositions, what ifs, things thornier and much less sweet than the soft candy a few dozen celebrity poets win awards for. Here's a a fine poem, a brief lyric essay considering the likeness of some unlike things.

Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

A cynic's view, perhaps, where the picture that's painted first has the gasping awe of young love, perfect, endless like a circle, the world itself, and later, destroyed, cut at the vital moment of greatest vulnerability, merely a thick string that starts at one end and merely ends, absent glory or beauty, at another. Even after the twists and turns of the thing itself--love, the foiled circle--to restore itself in reactionary spasams, things just end, and rapture and passion are replaced by bitter memory, a bitterness that gives way to a mellowed skepticism, if one is lucky to live long enough to be a witness their own foolish expectations of people, places, things, and especially the foolishness one might have said about poetry in whatever earnest declarations one uttered in classrooms, dorm rooms, cafes where the intelligent and underpaid gathered for a cheap drink and company.

Good poem.

More Pith than Poetry

I do enjoy apples, savor them, dice and slice them, eat them enthusiastically and wallow a bit in the crisp and sweet delight that . "Apple Economics", though, is enough to kill my taste for the prized fruit. Edison Jenning's writing misses the the whole savor experience and produces instead a set of regimented lines that neither make sense nor appeal to the senses. It might be that Jennings wants to give the sense of a listener coming into the middle, or the last third of a conversation, with all the signifiers connected to an emotion that was initially expressed at the start of the monologue but which as abated with the on going details.


Though livid and salacious, supermarket Red Delicious
don't deserve the name. But after bagging two or three,
I think of old-stock Staymans that grew behind our house
in weather-beaten, bee-infested rows no one ever pruned,
and all we had to do was reach. I must have eaten bushels' worth while balanced in the highest limbs.

This makes me think of those nauseating camera sweeps you used to see in Sixties adventure series like The Man from UNCLE or I Spy where the lens spins around a crowded terrain in the wan hope of getting in all of the incidental exotica with the fewest shots and manhours with little sense of how coherent the sequence might be. Jenning's method jumps from one stance to another, from euphonious memories of supermarket shelves to backyard harvests, with the only determinant being that apples had to be mentioned in each of the long and otherwise segregated lines.Each sentence seems like the start of a new poem, and I wonder if Jennings has read the notorious Language Poets, in the guise of Ron Silliman particularly. Silliman, an envelope -pushing writer who's unmoored referents are written with a rigorous methodology and purpose , uses images and image-born phrases in long succession that are seemingly separate from the sentence before it and the sentence that follows.Silliman's new collection, Age of Huts, brings together several books he's published as a long standing project. It makes for alterntely exihilerating and exasperating reading. Each line can well be said to be the start of another poem, and although the approach , which foregrounds language as subject matter, and while the aesthetic effect of Silliman's poetry is culminative--there is a cubist perspective that arises when one gets a hint that each of the writer's pieces, nonsequitur that they may seem, have physical locations, sites, real people with whom he's had real conversations, and there is stammering and stuttering rhythm which is oddly musical as he works through his variations of chosen icons--tone appreciates the length to which Silliman has continued his course of examining the dictions and tropes that constitute the way we address our experience in the world.

Jenning's aims are more modest and less successful, chiefly because he seems to want to transgress that troublesome line that separates poetry from prose and so produce writing that has the effect of a collage. The ambition isn't political as is Silliman's, it is nostalgic and quaint. We are meant to take this in as a series of associations , personalized with first person pronouns, as an epiphany, a rush of sensation that is elusive, powerful, and which makes us weak in the knees in the fragmented recollection.

With one hand full of apples,
the other swatting bees, I watched swallows tip
and skim the tree-rimmed skies already hinting cold,
the windfall left ungathered, the fallow years that followed,
and now this bag of garish fruit my memory grafts to vintage
among the rows of grocery aisles that green to fields of praise.

There are not many instances when I would invoke the name of Billy Collins as an example any other poet should emulate, but in this case I think Collins' transparent "writerly" stanzas would have been a perfect match for the ambivalent nostalgia Jennings tried to get across. The failure is what I see as Jenning's willingness to flirt with nonsequiturs to get his feeling across; it reads as arch and stiff, and the worst offense, dull. Collins has the benefit of not trying to be bold or experimental in his verse celebrating the mundane . He might be a hack, but at least he succeeds in what he's trying to get across in a poem. But this is stiff as as a starched brassire, unnatural sounding for an impressionistic chain of autobiographical images; the associative leaps between the lines would be more vivid with a tongue speaking with fewer words one has copied from a thesaurus, to be used in a poem when the muse is ready to motivate an idea. It reads as if it has been worked over, concentrated upon, with new phrases added, deleted, reworked, over-thought. Edison Jenning's would- be tribute to apples sounds forced and unappetizing. Nothing convincing of either apples or his experience of them comes across here, and that's a shame.

November 22nd

By Ted Burke

It seemed for years that we were caught in a loop of empty testimonials and evocations each time November 22nd happened upon the calendar page, an increasingly hallow chorus of platitudes and crumbling cliches centering around the promise of the late John F.Kennedy's administration and how that road to our destined Eden was bombed, blasted and dug up with his assassination. So much hope, but we trudge on, there was so much promise, but we carry on the work, the world has only become more insane, but we maintain faith in our hearts of our better instincts and work all the same towards that Paradise that is the American Dream.

We've been through these waves of self laceration, self-loathing, mumbled commitments to social justice, and we've trudged on instead, weighted with hostage crisis, nuclear brinkmanship, bi-polar stock markets, entrenched meanness regarding race and economic gain for the working class, our optimism stashed in a box, crammed in the back of a closet overstuffed with dashed hopes for a better existence.

Those of us in our fifties who embody the cocky retorts of a bright boy and the spite of the laziest who disguise their apathy with a pretense of cynicism roll our eyes when the fateful date comes again, the speeches and the hushed tones are read again, that our noddings of the head will suffice in place of expressed irritation less out of respect for the memory of John Kennedy and what he represents so much as maintaining a peaceful workplace. It's a sad fate to have one's internalized values become a source of venal aggravation. Irony, easy literary devices, earnest cliches become true; hoist by my own petard.

At the moment George W.Bush is giving a speech to an economic summit and it's the lowest of ironic effects that the President who presided over the evisceration of our economic system, our prestige as a presence internationally, and who launched an unjustified war should be lecturing anyone, at anytime, in any capacity about the right way to run a nation. So much hinges on the coming administration of Barack Obama--the liberal verities are revived, the multiple crisis are in place, there seems to be a consensus among many of us, even those of us who've surrendered to an extinct to an easy chair nihilism, that we can, as a country, face up to and face down the catastrophes that confront us. 2 million new jobs? Financial help for Detroit automakers with it in mind that they get their respective houses in order? A health care plan for every American? President Elect Obama has a full in-basket, perhaps the worst set of conditions an outgoing President has handed over to an incumbent at any time in our history. Yet Obama inspires that yearning to work with the rest of the nation toward solutions to our current states and the reemergence of a Greatness that can truly benefit the World. Time will tell, and sooner than anyone really suspects--history makes a lasting judgement much faster in our high velocity times.

History : a lost beach ball among smashed bottles

By Ted Burke

A poem describing an ambivalent response to a tepid commemoration of an important WW2 Omaha Beach by By Piotr Florczyk , is the sort of poem that almost succeeds too well towards the author's intended end. It's one thing to find yourself skipping pop cultural references you grew up with when discussing things with those thirty years your senior
-- your audience wouldn't know what you're talking about--and it's a quite another to realize the important facts and reasons of our defining moments greeted with a yawn. There is a surreal tone to how this is laid out, more Fellini, I think, than Dylan, but odd and quietly unnerving all the same. It strikes me as a situation where there is an on site ceremonial attempt to revive the memory of the Great Battle for a far removed generation that might well have the collective idea of WW2 as a backdrop for Indiana Jones movies, a comic bungling of Good vs.Evil.

We have, in fact, a site of a terrible and crucial battle where so much was at stake and the sacrifice of a generation dedicated to patriotic service was inestimable the memory of which is receding into the historical archive as references fewer and fewer recall first hand. The important fading event mingles with a drifting attention span that conflates matters, dithers and ponders an absurd connection between past horrors and the calming banality of what these beach now seems, dark, rained on, cold, only as violent as the weather and tourist attitudes

There is a tendency for collective memory to extend only so far after a generation's sacrifice for the good graces of their country. What had been vivid, immediate, absolutely crucial to be dealt with resolutely , what had been shared as a sense of urgent mission, inspires just a tad less with each succeeding generation, until the critical elements of a Great War and Vindicating Victory become like cliches and stock events from various pulp fictions and their derivative; young people coming up five or six decades later might come to know World War 2 as a template for old and new Hollywood movies, as a only a cartoon like battle between competing stereotypes. Dates are blurred together, names misplaced, place names of bloody struggle are widely known but fewer people these days know why , or care. The telling of the carnage and the stakes becomes a drone that invites quizzical responses.

Returning here, it hasn't been easy
for them to find their place in the black sand—
always too much sun or rain,
strangers driving umbrellas yet deeper

into their land. The young radio host said so,
speaking of the vets. When the sea had come,
some curled up inside the shells;
others flexed and clicked their knuckles

on the trigger of each wave, forgetting
to come up for breath.

There is the presence of one who remembers, of course, perhaps someone who'd been there as soldier, observer, or the adult child of a veteran who'd grew up with a father who came home changed and who managed to confer the profound events and consequences to his family. There is distance here, in the ears of someone listening to a radio voice intone deeds and dates while the eyes gather in a view of the beach and the events it once hosted; a lachrymose reading of the facts is the backdrop for a recollection of steely nerves coiled to the the breaking point.
The telling of this historical summation comes across suggests tedium, an over familiarity of a saga that's been told , glorified and considered from different ratios for so long and so often that there is a desperation for a digression, a distraction, a resounding need for the ceremony to collapse upon itself. It's a tale over told, a memory over burnished, further removed from flesh and blood recollection; though we all know the historical facts of the event, the bloodletting, fewer of us know what we're talking about. This is rather like an announcer's bored professionalism, full of false enthusiasms, make- believe earnestness, prop department gravitas. It's a pitch one hears and though realizing what emotions and sentiments the spoken cadences are supposed to suggest , none the less recognize the make believe emphasis that disguises an intractable boredom. The audience in turn is bored and considers the commemoration as bad entertainment instead of sincere tribute to those a nation owes a debt to. The poem, powerful as is, presents the irony that arises when even nostalgia fails to elicit a genuine response.

"Genuine response" , that fleeting issue of authentic awareness of the Great Good that was defended against the Great Evil, might well be impossible as generations roll on and history is taught and told in increasingly fragmented ways. Something is missing at the center of the tribute the well intentioned might bring:

But he didn't
give us a name at the start or the end.
Nor did he explain how to rebury a pair of
big toes jutting out from the mud

at the water's edge. In the end, it's a fluke.
A beach ball gets lost. And a search
party leads us under the pier, into the frothy sea
impaling empty bottles on the rocks.

The enormous inanity of daily life goes on, and as one moves along looking for the scars that marked a culture for decades to come there is , instead, dislocation of the facts ; history is an anonymous parade of shadows playing melodramatic charades against the wall of a collective memory. What we do find, though, are those things we make for our consumption and leisure and which we cannot hold on to either, a lost beach ball, smashed bottles. History, it seems, has poured out of the dustbin and gathers at a shoreline that cannot gain be made pristine.

Daydreaming among the paper mache

Peter Everwine's poem, Aubade in Autumn, published in the New Yorker in 2007, caught my notice last night when I was recycling magazines that had stacked up over the last couple of years. I chanced on it when I paused during the chore and flipped through a random dog eared issue and paused instintively when the poem appeared.

Much as I enjoy the writing of the New Yorker--I am one of those who consider it the best written large circulation magazine in America--the poets they publish over the decades too often take on a passive tone that strikes me as simply the equivalent of perceptual passive aggression, the pursuit of poetics in a limply progressing string of associations that haven't the muscle to involve my interest in the stretch.

These are poems you open the door when they ring the bell and then collapse barely three steps into the hallway. I am pleased with their recent inclusion of the estimable Rae Armentrout into their pages, but theirs is a reputation for for poems that prate will take a while longer to live down. Everwine, a Detroit native, offers up a swoon for an ideal childhood; this is a dollhouse full of paper cutouts.

"AUBADE IN AUTUMN"


This morning, from under the floorboards
of the room in which I write,
Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues
in a soft falsetto as he works, the words
unclear, though surely one of them is love,
lugging its shadow of sadness into song.
I don't want to think about sadness;
There's never a lack of it.
I want to sit quietly for a while
and listen to my father making
a joyful sound unto his mirror
as he shaves - slap of razor
against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice
singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,
coming from so far back in time:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood...
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him ...
as now it opens around me, the light shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across
the bedraggled back-yard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
Who am I, if not one who listens
for words to stir from the silences they keep?
Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven -
hey sweetie sweetie hey.

In college , a host of us had a competition to see who could write the best parody of a New Yorker poem, our central criteria being who among us could write a poem that best falsifies an experience of city life with the kind of sticky rhetoric this poem gives us. Peter Everwine goes for the old trick here, constructing a poem based on something he heard or misheard, which is fine, but here he lays it on too thick for my liking. That a handyman's singing a floor below him would spark an unraveling recollection of his father's shaving rituals and the sound of his singing voice is entirely too convenient to be plausible; this almost reads like a parody of John Ashbery's poem "The Instruction Manual", (one of the very rare poems where Ashbery actually mentions work experience) where the narrator, a technical writer at work, diverges from his task at hand and allowing his mind to roam in a fantasy of vacations, islands, various exotica.

Think what you might of Ashbery's style and purpose, but he does have the skill to convey the daydream and the unrooted associations the mind creates as it strives to create narrative continuity with the day to day. There is the matter of knowing how to use length to one's advantage, which Ashbery does with effectively. One does have the sense of having caught a ride on the narrator's train of thought and then feeling slightly changed once one reaches the end. Everwine's poem reads more like a series of jump cuts in a movie who's script had undergone too many rewrites. The tape holding the film together are very visible.

I might suggest that the dreamy set up be jettisoned and that the poem start with the father's shaving rituals, his singing, to start at the point the recollection commences, and then pare back the self references. He'd have more poem, and less window dressing.

Selected Creeley

By Ted Burke
ROBERT CREELEY
Selected Poems, 1945-2005.
Edited by Benjamin Friedlander

There's a new collection of verse by a great American Poet, Selected Poems 1945-2005 by the late Robert Creeley, and I'm obliged to go out and buy it. My paperback editions of his books are, sad to say, falling apart with that rare affliction for poetry volumes, poetry books with a cracked spine.It's a fine time to remember Creeley's mastery of the terse lyric poem, a major characteristic in a time when "lyric"for most writers mean lazy associations, odd line breaks and a verbosity that is more about extended a line than treating a subject.

Myself

What, younger, felt
was possible, now knows
is not - but still
not chanted enough -

Walked by the sea,
unchanged in memory -
evening, as clouds
on the far-off rim

of water float,
pictures of time,
smoke, faintness -
still the dream.

I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women are

so torn, so lost,
why hopes cannot
find better world
than this.

Shelley is dead and gone,
who said,
"Taught them not this -
to know themselves;

their might could not repress
the mutiny within,
And for the morn
of truth they feigned,

deep night
Caught them ere evening . . ."

Robert Creeley's poetry was the terse vocabulary of a man who feels deeply and yet has hardly a voice to equal the sensations that warm or chill his soul. It is the poetry that exists at the margins of and in the spaces between the huge language blocks of what is commonly deferred to as eloquence: they are thoughts, full formed and fleeting in their unmediated honesty of a first response to a new things or upsets, a poetry where heart and mind have no natural boundaries.

America

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

I sometimes consider the poet to be a film editor of perception, isolating key images and spoken lines in their spaces and arranging them in sweet and near silent succession where mood and sentiment are restrained but clearly present, nakedly expressed, without embarrassment.The surprise of his poems is that he seems to bring you to the "thing itself", without the contextualizing and taming rhetorics that buffer our responses; this is his ability to move you in ways that never feel like coarse manipulation. Creeley's was a vision with sharp-stick wit, the straightest line to a truth no one will admit seeing.

Thomas Gunn called it a "eloquent stammering." I can't think of a better superlative.