How can anyone hope to comprehend the poetry without comprehending the poet first?
If the poet is good, they should be able to write poems that stand by themselves without the poet's biography to guide them. Reader's "get" Shakespeare's speeches and sonnets with out requiring the background incidents that might have been the material from which he drew his images and metaphors--the competently written poem has a coherent , if elusive language that can be understood on their own terms. One can learn to enjoy John Ashbery's fluidity of association without wondering if this is what goes through his mind when he's driving a car or attempting to prepare his taxes, and one needn't even know what or who it is he's writing about or to while they read him. It's the quality of Ashbery's writing, the unusual way he frames every phrase with something alluring and tactile that makes the guesswork we need to do to his intentions a pleasure.
Gloom is also an alluring element in a poem if it's well crafted, freshly phrased, provides a new sensation. Bukowski at his best could get you with that jab in the heart after making you laugh at his antics,but his punchlines end up as shtick too soon and too often. We leave it to Thomas Stearns Eliot to provide the elliptically phrased dread, the exquisitely burnished despair that speaks to us clearly without a hint of Eliot's crabby personality being known to us: the work speaks for itself.
For elusive poems one can appreciate the mood and tone, one needn't go further than Eliot; his dalliance with anti-Semitic movements in Europe can enlarge a reader's understanding of his famously ruined terrains, but one can, all the same, get to the larger pessimism that something special has been lost in our culture and we cannot get it back. Ryan, though, might be too transparent in her poems, if her work reflects her thinking--writing is the act of fleshing out a notion so that it intrigues a reader. Ryan is terse to the degree that you think of Joe Friday with slant rhymes.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Not mean, but...?
A poem should not mean
But be.
That said by poet Archibald MacLeish, in his piece "Ars Poetica". That thrust of that poem, in essence, was that poetry was no longer the central domain in which speculations about the nature of reality , beauty, and the pursuit of the Good Life were discussed and debated, and that it was , in modern times, not the friendliest grounds for discussions about God and his purpose for us on earth.
Other, prose dominated disciplines had quite handily usurped those topics as science handily dislodged, diminished and debunked the mystery and mythology the general consensus used to apply to the material world. A poem should not "mean" anything, as in questing for the precise definition of things and thereby making fixed, general statements about them.
A poem should "be" as a thing itself, a material item true to its own nature, a construction of words, considered by MacLeish, WC Williams and Stevens (among the poets of that generation) to be malleable no less than clay, glass or steel. The aim of the poem was not to reinforce the materiality of the world and the given political and economic realities that relied on perception that markets could define, exploit and profit from, but rather that poetry should tend to perception, free of the filters we've been indoctrinated into.
These poets were not especially overjoyed with capitalism (although one would be hard pressed to call them leftists in any sense) and it's propensity to smash and upset the unannounced world. Williams wrote (and I paraphrase) that the thing itself was it's own adequate symbol,which , considered closely, stated that there is no God and that human personality could and needed to see the things in the world on their own terms, in and of themselves.
"An American Dream" by Norman Mailer
An American Dream
a novel by Norman Mailer (Vintage)
Gone, we see, is the hard-carved minimalism of the Hemingway style, with Mailer offering a delirious metaphorical ride through the ugly side of individual realization. Stephen Rojack's character is akin to King Lear in the rain, gone insane precisely because he no longer has the staging guiding his eye and thinking. In the clutch of his tantrums, the world finally seems to pull back its shroud and reveal the shape and purring function of its true nature; Rojack sees cities of diamonds, rains of falling stars; he smells and tastes those things never served on a plate. Mailer's great chains of metaphors deliver a dissolving sensibility that sees, fleetingly, the way everything is connected, the hand of an anonymous God directing His actors in ways unannounced and never explained. Rid of the props and storylines, nothing is left, an emptiness that can only be filled with increasing destruction. This is a riveting, wild, and enthralling exploration into the romanticizing of prescriptive violence.
Troubling, agitated, problematic for great numbers of readers, a brilliant novel despite its flaws. It may be even because of the flaws--the unreal dialogue, the haphazard cramming of a week's worth of events into a single 24 hour period--that bring the long runs of sentences to shriek and burn so splendidly, as there is the sense that he is in a dream within which he must confront and conquer every blatant and disguised dread. The crash and slam of the plot dynamics--bear in mind that there is very little slack space here where one is allowed to rest and gather their wits in the midst of this ludicrous plot--get an intensity of feeling just right, that the world and the things in it are crashing down upon you. Your only option in the delirium is to obey the first fleeting voice that commands to respond, attack, destroy that which is killing you by the psychic inch. Mailer had written in his infamous essay "The White Negro" that it was one's moral responsibility to "encourage the psychopath within oneself" so to be able to experience greater and more expansive perceptions, to generate new knowledge violently dislodged from murderous conformism. In An American Dream, he conducts a fictional field study of his theory by setting it loose in the plot of a novel. The results are exhilarating as they are nearly unspeakable.
Tom Wolfe, I remember, was not a fan of the novel, suggesting in a review that Mailer “lards up” his prose with too many allusions, metaphors, and similes when he ought to have taken a hint from James M. Cain and fashioned a terser, blunter style. He used Mailer’s running metaphor of boxing and compared him to a fighter who needed to get out of his corner faster. I differ with Wolfe’s conclusions and tend to agree with the late critic Richard Poirier’s reading of the novel, which considered “An American Dream” a compelling delirium of language styles fused, the elegant, the surreal, the jazzy and slang-infested, the terse and the verbose, in a spectacular, intoxicating sweep. The novel's point was to reveal Stephen Rojack’s festering self-doubt despite his nominal accomplishments as both war hero and media figure, and his deranged attempts to save what he considers his soul. Mailer’s novel is an interior view of a breakdown, an interiorized version of Lear’s final speech.
A reader who might be intrigued by Mailer's fictional realization of his existential anti-hero/hipster/White Negro wouldn't be wrong to think that the author himself is disturbed by the furthest reach of his imaginative takes on the purgative value of sudden and decisive violence. Indeed, from this point on, Mailer's ideas about violence and power come with more caution, nuance, and in a brilliant turn to begin his moral argument about the cause of aggression in the culture, he penned his brief, obscene. Fantastically incandescent novel Why Are We In Vietnam: if Stephen Rojack was the result of a psychically emasculated man given to floating voices and lunar impulses in the wan hope of being delivered from what is killing him by the inch, only to become a more complicated expression of those mechanisms that generate the larger, global evil, Why Are We in Vietnam? Takes a more expansive view. The question isn't answered, nor is Vietnam even mentioned until the book's last page. Yet, by the time you reach the end of this brief and ingeniously offered account of an Alaskan bear hunt, we've gone through something primordial, cultural conditioning that produces a need for violence at the most rudimentary level of the culture.
Mailer's habit of romanticizing violence and macho performances end with this second book, and the serious shift into the causes, conditions of our troubles begins in earnest, leading Mailer through a fantastic series of novels and nonfiction. He dared what other literary writers only feigned, and actively engaged the world in ways and manners that he thought would make reality surrender some of its secrets. The hope, of course, would be that he might be able to change the way men and women viewed themselves in a political reality that had stripped the individual of all creative drive and hence empowers them to change the substance of their world. Grand ambition, yes, and a failed enterprise, but in the attempt are left a string of brilliant books -- The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song, Why are We In Vietnam, Armies of the Night, An American Dream, Harlot's Ghost,-- that, among others, form a body of work at once daring, daunting, vain and arrogant, preening, breathtakingly on target, raunchy, clipped, rich and rolling and lyrical like the grandest music. An infuriating writer, yes, but even so, one whose work stands tall in the era he wrote.
Troubling, agitated, problematic for great numbers of readers, a brilliant novel despite its flaws. It may be even because of the flaws--the unreal dialogue, the haphazard cramming of a week's worth of events into a single 24 hour period--that bring the long runs of sentences to shriek and burn so splendidly, as there is the sense that he is in a dream within which he must confront and conquer every blatant and disguised dread. The crash and slam of the plot dynamics--bear in mind that there is very little slack space here where one is allowed to rest and gather their wits in the midst of this ludicrous plot--get an intensity of feeling just right, that the world and the things in it are crashing down upon you. Your only option in the delirium is to obey the first fleeting voice that commands to respond, attack, destroy that which is killing you by the psychic inch. Mailer had written in his infamous essay "The White Negro" that it was one's moral responsibility to "encourage the psychopath within oneself" so to be able to experience greater and more expansive perceptions, to generate new knowledge violently dislodged from murderous conformism. In An American Dream, he conducts a fictional field study of his theory by setting it loose in the plot of a novel. The results are exhilarating as they are nearly unspeakable.
Tom Wolfe, I remember, was not a fan of the novel, suggesting in a review that Mailer “lards up” his prose with too many allusions, metaphors, and similes when he ought to have taken a hint from James M. Cain and fashioned a terser, blunter style. He used Mailer’s running metaphor of boxing and compared him to a fighter who needed to get out of his corner faster. I differ with Wolfe’s conclusions and tend to agree with the late critic Richard Poirier’s reading of the novel, which considered “An American Dream” a compelling delirium of language styles fused, the elegant, the surreal, the jazzy and slang-infested, the terse and the verbose, in a spectacular, intoxicating sweep. The novel's point was to reveal Stephen Rojack’s festering self-doubt despite his nominal accomplishments as both war hero and media figure, and his deranged attempts to save what he considers his soul. Mailer’s novel is an interior view of a breakdown, an interiorized version of Lear’s final speech.
A reader who might be intrigued by Mailer's fictional realization of his existential anti-hero/hipster/White Negro wouldn't be wrong to think that the author himself is disturbed by the furthest reach of his imaginative takes on the purgative value of sudden and decisive violence. Indeed, from this point on, Mailer's ideas about violence and power come with more caution, nuance, and in a brilliant turn to begin his moral argument about the cause of aggression in the culture, he penned his brief, obscene. Fantastically incandescent novel Why Are We In Vietnam: if Stephen Rojack was the result of a psychically emasculated man given to floating voices and lunar impulses in the wan hope of being delivered from what is killing him by the inch, only to become a more complicated expression of those mechanisms that generate the larger, global evil, Why Are We in Vietnam? Takes a more expansive view. The question isn't answered, nor is Vietnam even mentioned until the book's last page. Yet, by the time you reach the end of this brief and ingeniously offered account of an Alaskan bear hunt, we've gone through something primordial, cultural conditioning that produces a need for violence at the most rudimentary level of the culture.
Mailer's habit of romanticizing violence and macho performances end with this second book, and the serious shift into the causes, conditions of our troubles begins in earnest, leading Mailer through a fantastic series of novels and nonfiction. He dared what other literary writers only feigned, and actively engaged the world in ways and manners that he thought would make reality surrender some of its secrets. The hope, of course, would be that he might be able to change the way men and women viewed themselves in a political reality that had stripped the individual of all creative drive and hence empowers them to change the substance of their world. Grand ambition, yes, and a failed enterprise, but in the attempt are left a string of brilliant books -- The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song, Why are We In Vietnam, Armies of the Night, An American Dream, Harlot's Ghost,-- that, among others, form a body of work at once daring, daunting, vain and arrogant, preening, breathtakingly on target, raunchy, clipped, rich and rolling and lyrical like the grandest music. An infuriating writer, yes, but even so, one whose work stands tall in the era he wrote.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Two poets: Aliki Barnstone, Carl Phillips
“Riding Westward” by Carl Phillips is a wonderful poem for most of its length, a knowing evisceration of a venerable American icon, a myth stripped of its power and portent, with nothing left but dress, mannerism, the predictable slew of clichés:
Compromise his very own shoot-'em-uptilt the brim of his hat self, smirk to match,all-for-love-if-it's-gotta-come-to-that halfswagger,half unintentional, I think, sashay.
Phillips reads as if he's hung around a few country and western bars and had gotten fairly tired of seeing an endless stream of gas-station buckaroos strut and preen their big hats up and down, too much sawdust and spit covered floors to put up with it anymore.
But this poem becomes a ghost story of sorts, an observation of what's left on earth after the power of particular symbols ceases to have any real, force:
The silver spurs at his ankles where maybethe wings would be, if the gods still existed,catch the light, lose it, as he stands in place,scraping the dirt with his boots: lines, circlesthat stop short, shapes that mean nothing—no bull, not like that, but scraping shyly, likea man who's forgotten that part of himself,keeps forgetting, because what the fuck?
What's left is all mannerism, gesture, cults that consist essentially of dress up parties among those in later decades who rummage through the past trying to find or at least construct a useful set of props and stylistic tics with which they can create an identity and hence a purpose. Yet, the hats, the boots, the song he sings bemoaning an idealized loneliness under red Western sunsets are iconic and empty; nothing of this comes from the need to survive, but rather the need to belong to something with a fixed certainty. This is an interesting poem to contrast and compare against Ed Dorn's epic poem “Gunslinger”, where the poet reconfigures a series of Western icons into a search for some real matter and meaning beyond what mere language can manage with its crippling dualism;it's an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.
Phillips takes in the same set of aggregated props and conventional wisdom and sees instead the gaping emptiness beyond the heady glee of being dressed up in the spare vocabulary of personal codes and principled ruggedness. It's all empty and bankrupt, a story we tell, keeping the darkness away.
Phillips hints at something more profound than the cosmic silliness he sees with the strutting, posing and atonal warbling of prairie songs: our costumes represent nothing but wishful thinking, and that such thinking is the closet we stand to being transported to a serene, transcendent place. The gods have died, Phillips states, and we are left with our lives to either accomplish something real, or to wander about deluded, reduced by stereotypical narratives of individuality.
It might be said that it was impossible to make anger a boring subject for a poem until Aliki Barnstone tried her hand at it. “Anger”, Robert Pinsky's selection for the week, is set in a situation a good many --too many-- of us recognize as awkward, strained, thoroughly unpleasant, a dinner for two who, sitting presumably at opposite ends of the table as they cut and chew their food with controlled strokes and grinding, manage a language in which they put each other on trial. Each has a turn to outline their argument, to make their case, the casing of civility chipping away with every stroke of knife and stab of fork:
Yet we sit together at the table, each to servethe other artfully poisoned morsels, point a fork,and go on and on, watching the widening distance.
This would work, perhaps, if this were a fresher take on a soured relationship, but the poem treads territory that is too familiar, and Barnstone's greatest mistake here is overwriting the scenario her template provides. The poem reads like a set-up for a knockout punch that does not materialize from the corner she's trying to fight her way out of. It goes on too long, and the device of comparing this meal and its discontents to a trial is less a metaphor than a reason to write further, to add stanzas.
You say, “You should have listened to me,”and, “But you had to be you, didn't you?”Then I become the witness who testifies against me.We deliberate all night, inventing counterpoints,narrowing our vision at spears of candlelightand we go on and on, watching from a distance,as we appeal, go back to discovery, retry, seeksympathy by recounting suffering and history,though this defense may deliver the verdict against us:
The element would have worked if it were brief, even fleeting, and if it were a means to segue into something else about the world this couple thought they were living in contrasted the world they now perceive as the relationship, presumably, slowly grinds to a stop. Barnstone might have managed something genuinely poetic if there were a sign, in images, of how the reality has changed. Rather,” Anger” reads as if Barnstone were too fascinated with the mechanics of making her -trial conceit work; the poem is damaged by repetition, needless volume. It is a mistake of perception, the assumption that the length of a piece is a measure of its value. This length equals a long wait in a doctor's office. Grating as well is the last stanza, where Barnstone's woman character, the “I” narrator, has a failure of nerve and instead wallows in the misery she and her husband/boyfriend make for each other:
our embrace will pull us downthrough the shades, and we'll hold on to our grievancesand go on, too watchful, unable to get some distance,reading and helplessly rereading the sentences against us.
Who among us does want to yell “get your ass out of there”?Barnstone clings to the relationship less for affection than for a reason to continue writing poems like this one. Poems written in bad faith about bad faith provide evidence not just of bad, self-pitying verse, but give obvious clues to an underlying disorder.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Four Sonnets, sort of
Sonnet 1
You turn your head, you cough and recover,
hand at your throat, the mike buzzes but not before
you shuffle your poems and read yet again, you go on in a room
where everyone has a first line, I would read about your eyes,
wide as they are as saucers cups that are deep as pans of bread
that come from the oven and into my heart, and that’s a start, I think,
you fold your hands as you read; you’ve got this memorized,
yet it all seems extemporized from the bottom of your heart which hasn’t a bottom at all, now some one else reads, a guy with tattoo of his tongue across his left cheek, he screeches to hip hop clicks of the tongue but he’s young and not far from done as long as his homies thrown their signs with fingers that cross a language of quieting the flutters of the immature heart, I will read you later, on the phone, with every court and hand gesture, you wave goodnight, I know the line,
you’ll see me in the funny papers.
Sonnet 2
Not this day nor that one but the one after all these, rather,
when we come into town with pockets full of matches
and cigarettes in a sock, we rock the nation with big beats
in hock to no groove other than the tire tracks that
criss -cross the oceans on trade winds that carry notes
like saints carrying a crucifix to the next thorny hill
under a sky that opens only for any spirit that slides
up the ladder like plumes of smoke, we toke in gasps
and get out of the car, unload, set up amps, take up a collection
for a room to split five ways, give or take the extra guitarist,
a girl friend who snores, a nice place, we say, this world is ours,
while over the bridge, in the other life where phone lines connect,
there are meals to eat before the meat gets cold, moms to kiss on the cheek,
girl friends to lie to because we love them too much to be ourselves on a dare.
Sonnet 3
Extra candles at the table mean that there
will be more bread to butter, more sin to absorb
even as we see a motorcade and a pope in
a unbreakable box on the screen when
the first spoonful of hope is served from bowls
that a heat that escapes logic and cold fingers,
bless everything that gets in your way, says Dad,
do the sign of the cross and make the world tremble?
work your voodoo somewhere else,he hisses, hand me a roll and turn off the set.
the screen goes dark, millions of button-down faces
in crowds that line streets and make the stadiums sag
under the human pounds are gone in a small white dot against a dark green field,
and Dad smiles again, snapping his fingers,
and chews his bread with his eyes closed,face framed with lacy steam.
Sonnet 4
A fevered dream gives up its dark corridors
and invites me to stare at the ceiling instead,
with music of laughs and grunting keyboards
filling the dim sleepless niches that make up the sky
that is now filled with circling birds, black and crying,
hypnotized by advertising about home loans and
travel clubs to the farthest end of a Pacific Island where
there are no dull, all-night parties and robot music that
grinds away at unsmoothed nerves, I pick myself from
the bed, kiss your forehead, slip on my open toe sandals
and sit at the edge of the bed, the edge of my wits,
the end of what feels like the earth Columbus
must have feared all three of his ships would drift over
in a delirium born on a black, sleepless sea.
You turn your head, you cough and recover,
hand at your throat, the mike buzzes but not before
you shuffle your poems and read yet again, you go on in a room
where everyone has a first line, I would read about your eyes,
wide as they are as saucers cups that are deep as pans of bread
that come from the oven and into my heart, and that’s a start, I think,
you fold your hands as you read; you’ve got this memorized,
yet it all seems extemporized from the bottom of your heart which hasn’t a bottom at all, now some one else reads, a guy with tattoo of his tongue across his left cheek, he screeches to hip hop clicks of the tongue but he’s young and not far from done as long as his homies thrown their signs with fingers that cross a language of quieting the flutters of the immature heart, I will read you later, on the phone, with every court and hand gesture, you wave goodnight, I know the line,
you’ll see me in the funny papers.
Sonnet 2
Not this day nor that one but the one after all these, rather,
when we come into town with pockets full of matches
and cigarettes in a sock, we rock the nation with big beats
in hock to no groove other than the tire tracks that
criss -cross the oceans on trade winds that carry notes
like saints carrying a crucifix to the next thorny hill
under a sky that opens only for any spirit that slides
up the ladder like plumes of smoke, we toke in gasps
and get out of the car, unload, set up amps, take up a collection
for a room to split five ways, give or take the extra guitarist,
a girl friend who snores, a nice place, we say, this world is ours,
while over the bridge, in the other life where phone lines connect,
there are meals to eat before the meat gets cold, moms to kiss on the cheek,
girl friends to lie to because we love them too much to be ourselves on a dare.
Sonnet 3
Extra candles at the table mean that there
will be more bread to butter, more sin to absorb
even as we see a motorcade and a pope in
a unbreakable box on the screen when
the first spoonful of hope is served from bowls
that a heat that escapes logic and cold fingers,
bless everything that gets in your way, says Dad,
do the sign of the cross and make the world tremble?
work your voodoo somewhere else,he hisses, hand me a roll and turn off the set.
the screen goes dark, millions of button-down faces
in crowds that line streets and make the stadiums sag
under the human pounds are gone in a small white dot against a dark green field,
and Dad smiles again, snapping his fingers,
and chews his bread with his eyes closed,face framed with lacy steam.
Sonnet 4
A fevered dream gives up its dark corridors
and invites me to stare at the ceiling instead,
with music of laughs and grunting keyboards
filling the dim sleepless niches that make up the sky
that is now filled with circling birds, black and crying,
hypnotized by advertising about home loans and
travel clubs to the farthest end of a Pacific Island where
there are no dull, all-night parties and robot music that
grinds away at unsmoothed nerves, I pick myself from
the bed, kiss your forehead, slip on my open toe sandals
and sit at the edge of the bed, the edge of my wits,
the end of what feels like the earth Columbus
must have feared all three of his ships would drift over
in a delirium born on a black, sleepless sea.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Buy me a bottom
David Kramer, a lasped drinker from the sound of things, writes nostalgicly of what he misses about getting tanked in bars, the practice of "buybacks", bartenders and patrons buying drinks for one another. He recalls it fondly and I read his column, shall we say,
with interest. Mostly it reminded me of why I haven't had a drink in over twenty years.The thing I used to miss about drinking more than anything was the nearly erotic flush I felt course through my body after I finished the first drink, usually imbibed in loud, glottal gulps; the stressed nervous system would seem to relax, to let out a sigh and where ever I was seemed the most perfect place in the world. Often enough such occasions took place in alleys or alone in my apartment with all the shades drawn, since I drank for twenty years and the end of my drinking life came a dreary and depressed and repetitive scenario of tanking until I would pass out in my own easy chair, my shower, my kitchen; I couldn't manage my affairs in the taverns where everyone knew my name.
But if I happened to be seated at the end of the bar, near the bartender's well, it was a more perfect union between myself and the cosmos, or at least the contents of whatever ale house I landed in--the people were brilliant, the interiors showed discriminating tastes, anything that was said or done in the space of the twenty minutes to an hour my good mood lasted was nearly always extraordinary and inspired the most sublime ideas on my part. I loved where I was, and so did the other regulars who happened by those particular afternoons, late nights and early mornings when the bars could legally open--when the booze worked for us, we'd share our resources and buy each other drinks in the spirit of mounting an attack on the negative energy that cursed and tainted the world outside the front door. Sooner or later, though, the good mood faded, the good willed shriveled into rapidly encroaching resentments, bitterness nuanced our witticisms, our rapid succession of brilliant ideas soon became slurred, incoherent speech. People just got uglier, and I had no sense of time, to paraphrase Dylan, who nailed the recurring situation.
with interest. Mostly it reminded me of why I haven't had a drink in over twenty years.The thing I used to miss about drinking more than anything was the nearly erotic flush I felt course through my body after I finished the first drink, usually imbibed in loud, glottal gulps; the stressed nervous system would seem to relax, to let out a sigh and where ever I was seemed the most perfect place in the world. Often enough such occasions took place in alleys or alone in my apartment with all the shades drawn, since I drank for twenty years and the end of my drinking life came a dreary and depressed and repetitive scenario of tanking until I would pass out in my own easy chair, my shower, my kitchen; I couldn't manage my affairs in the taverns where everyone knew my name. But if I happened to be seated at the end of the bar, near the bartender's well, it was a more perfect union between myself and the cosmos, or at least the contents of whatever ale house I landed in--the people were brilliant, the interiors showed discriminating tastes, anything that was said or done in the space of the twenty minutes to an hour my good mood lasted was nearly always extraordinary and inspired the most sublime ideas on my part. I loved where I was, and so did the other regulars who happened by those particular afternoons, late nights and early mornings when the bars could legally open--when the booze worked for us, we'd share our resources and buy each other drinks in the spirit of mounting an attack on the negative energy that cursed and tainted the world outside the front door. Sooner or later, though, the good mood faded, the good willed shriveled into rapidly encroaching resentments, bitterness nuanced our witticisms, our rapid succession of brilliant ideas soon became slurred, incoherent speech. People just got uglier, and I had no sense of time, to paraphrase Dylan, who nailed the recurring situation.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Who wants to be a bard?
There is a bright fellow I know from Ireland, a grand poet , a beautiful writer, who thinks that there are too many poets in this world and that remedy the glut with the closing of MFA Writing programs that he feels cranks out sock puppets rather than real bards. It’s not an unusual grouse, all the wrong people are getting published, and it’s too much of a burden to get the truly gifted among us between covers. Mentoring, sponsorship, some kind of affirmative action from the established poets to the lesser known is due, no , it is owed.
I'm not so sure that published poets owe anything to their unpublished kin; even if there are vast differences in the amount of circulation a particular publisher can give a poetry volume, technology makes it possible for virtually anyone to get a decent looking volume of their work published. One can pool their resources with other writers and form a publishing cooperative. It's not easy promoting a new book, especially books of poetry--the audience is virtually non existent in most communities, and that community , as such, does not buy the book the poet on hand might be trying to sell.
But the case is that literally anyone can get a book published, by some publisher, for virtually any poetry style they happen to be writing in. The impossibility of having something between covers is a grossly exaggerated myth.Those who attend MFA programs, earn degrees and make their contacts among highly placed poets and publishing contacts deserve, more or less, the broader spectrum of attention they might get if only because they did what was required when one chooses to be a poet by profession; we might sneer and think them privileged and the lot, but their path was one involving work and dedication and, incidentally, talent. This is a path any one of us with enough determination can follow as well. One can't be assured of the results, but the mechanisms exist for all who bother to find about them to use.
I don't know if there is too much poetry being published; one can say as well that there are too many movies being released, too many competent tenor saxophone players, too many decent cups of coffee being served. I rather like the bounty and would consider it an awful situation if there were less to choose from. Meritocracy is fine as an ideal, but more often than not in nearly all human activity, luck has as much or more to do with the recognition someone garners as talent and hard work. Aiming, by design, to make a system "fairer" for poets encourages even more mediocrity, since such a system would be bureaucrat default. Poetry, above all other things, is subjective to the extreme as to the nature of quality, and subjecting such an ephemeral thing to institutionalized standards would further the death of the art faster and farther than any of us would like.
"Set the bar higher"? Who sets the bar, and how do we begin this vague process without violating the rights of publishers to publish who they want, as little or as little as they want? Arts are a free market, above all else; sorry for the libertarian analogy, but regulatory practices on the matter of taste, whether a reader's,, a poet's, or a publisher's, is repressive and totalitarian. I am a liberal by nature and believe in fairness and justice for all, but you cannot legislate taste any more than you can legislate morality. The Soviets tried for decades and stifled quite a few good writers who might other wise have found voice in a freer market of ideas and expression.
America, has always been on the margins so far as book sales and exposure, and there have been many attempts to bring it to a wider audience to my memory, none of them successful beyond a short-lived media splash, what David j. Boorstin called "the pseudo event". Save for those rare sorts who become celebrities and manage to make their poetry book sales into respectable revenue streams--Allan Ginsberg, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, John Ashbery--the rest of us will have to resign ourselves to being at the margins of the reader's attention. When I picked up my first copy of Poet's Market, the editor in the introduction warned against expecting to make more than contributor's copies or bus fare as remuneration should they have poems accepted. You wrote poetry because you loved the medium and published poems not expecting to make all that much money. He said, essentially, don't quit your day job; that's been some of the best advice I've every gotten as a genius-in-waiting.
I'm not so sure that published poets owe anything to their unpublished kin; even if there are vast differences in the amount of circulation a particular publisher can give a poetry volume, technology makes it possible for virtually anyone to get a decent looking volume of their work published. One can pool their resources with other writers and form a publishing cooperative. It's not easy promoting a new book, especially books of poetry--the audience is virtually non existent in most communities, and that community , as such, does not buy the book the poet on hand might be trying to sell.
But the case is that literally anyone can get a book published, by some publisher, for virtually any poetry style they happen to be writing in. The impossibility of having something between covers is a grossly exaggerated myth.Those who attend MFA programs, earn degrees and make their contacts among highly placed poets and publishing contacts deserve, more or less, the broader spectrum of attention they might get if only because they did what was required when one chooses to be a poet by profession; we might sneer and think them privileged and the lot, but their path was one involving work and dedication and, incidentally, talent. This is a path any one of us with enough determination can follow as well. One can't be assured of the results, but the mechanisms exist for all who bother to find about them to use.
I don't know if there is too much poetry being published; one can say as well that there are too many movies being released, too many competent tenor saxophone players, too many decent cups of coffee being served. I rather like the bounty and would consider it an awful situation if there were less to choose from. Meritocracy is fine as an ideal, but more often than not in nearly all human activity, luck has as much or more to do with the recognition someone garners as talent and hard work. Aiming, by design, to make a system "fairer" for poets encourages even more mediocrity, since such a system would be bureaucrat default. Poetry, above all other things, is subjective to the extreme as to the nature of quality, and subjecting such an ephemeral thing to institutionalized standards would further the death of the art faster and farther than any of us would like.
"Set the bar higher"? Who sets the bar, and how do we begin this vague process without violating the rights of publishers to publish who they want, as little or as little as they want? Arts are a free market, above all else; sorry for the libertarian analogy, but regulatory practices on the matter of taste, whether a reader's,, a poet's, or a publisher's, is repressive and totalitarian. I am a liberal by nature and believe in fairness and justice for all, but you cannot legislate taste any more than you can legislate morality. The Soviets tried for decades and stifled quite a few good writers who might other wise have found voice in a freer market of ideas and expression.
America, has always been on the margins so far as book sales and exposure, and there have been many attempts to bring it to a wider audience to my memory, none of them successful beyond a short-lived media splash, what David j. Boorstin called "the pseudo event". Save for those rare sorts who become celebrities and manage to make their poetry book sales into respectable revenue streams--Allan Ginsberg, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, John Ashbery--the rest of us will have to resign ourselves to being at the margins of the reader's attention. When I picked up my first copy of Poet's Market, the editor in the introduction warned against expecting to make more than contributor's copies or bus fare as remuneration should they have poems accepted. You wrote poetry because you loved the medium and published poems not expecting to make all that much money. He said, essentially, don't quit your day job; that's been some of the best advice I've every gotten as a genius-in-waiting.
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