Poetry vs Prose

The Unwritten History of Prose by T.R.Hummer is a poem sussing through a variety of ambiguities about the competing provinces of Specialist Languages. The upshot of the poem is that the the jargon of each linguistic stronghold bleeds in the common parlance in a big way, one is left wondering, if they stepped back long and far enough from the tropes one routinely uses to discuss their life and their relations, that one's self-description of being-in-the-world is far more fractured than they thought. We are a species being, of course, but the conditions of behaviour and purpose are subject to tweaks and tunings from the experts--scientists, ministers, doctors, lawyers--who act, shall we say, in a profound spirit of self-interest. Whether it's enlightened or not depends on where you had your money invested, if you had money to start with.

Fitting that there is poem about prose, as a form, given the surfeit of stanzas about poetry or, more galling, poets talking about being poets. The difference is striking, and considering them, you can appreciate the reasoning poets, good ones, would consider themselves a stand in priesthood, the antenna of the race; poetry is the manifest destiny of the soul, an expansionist form that conspires, contrives , conflates the matters it chooses to deal with into a unified field theory of how the universe operates solely to make us feel a select schedule of moods. There is , perhaps, a theological assumption here, that just as there is a plan , with protocols, God intends for us to have in order to arrive, or not, at the off world point of this life--remember the phrase everything is exactly the way it ought to be in God's universe --poets treat the human experience as if were a fixed menu written in a language only they could read and order from; if crow was what they ordered, crow was what you ate.

Prose would be more concrete, pinpointed, appreciating the density of the concrete and the earthly essences that went in to making all these things adhere and form other things that are made by man; poetry is the tongue of God whispering his will into our ears, prose is the rumble and logical result following the fall from grace, a post- Babel of competing certainties , voices of conviction basing their expertise only in what can be measured, quantified, molded into a tool, a machine, a city of man made things, enterprise divorced from sacred intention, unmindful of consequences that cannot be felt until every enterprise is exhausted and each resource is depleted. Prose is the language of progress, capitalism, the rationale of moving on to the next thing , creating another catastrophe premised on unbound hubris.

I rather like this poem; it says prose is the medium with which we say "here I am, this is what I did, these are my explanations of my actions, my apologies for each and every failure." In the beginning there was the word , and in the end there will only the rubble of a civilization of things created from concepts those words delineated , and perhaps in the end there will be only the fragments of prose bits that survive, half-phrases, intriguing references and terms torn from context and historical fact, mysterious combinations of phrase that become, ironically, poetry all over again. A new Eden might yet arise, and we might yet again be a tribe collectively guessing the meaning and purpose of the sounds we make with the scraps of language set before us.

RON ASHETON, RIP

It's a strange turn of the New Year when we first say adieu to arguably the greatest jazz trumpeter of the second half of the 20th century, Freddie Hubbard, and then this week discover that another musical pioneer with qualities opposite those of Hubbard's has died as well, guitarist Ron Asheton of The Stooges. Hubbard was a virtuoso force of nature, to engage in an abrupt use of cliche, a technical wizard who had, additionally, the great gift of melodic invention that put his untouchable skills in the service of riveting improvisation. In the company of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Hubbard coaxed an infinite number of dialogues and moods from his instrument, and he could place in the center of the emotional core of extemporized outings--the virtuosity made you feel alive , with emotions you forgot you had.It might sound too high hat, but metaphor aside, the Stooges were an alternative all the same to the pat bohemianism of the counter-culture;Rolling Stone and other hip capitalist media convinced America that there was a consensus among those of us in the "youth culture" and that all of us rock and roll fans were docile and enlightened, ergo harmless. The Stooges , along with the MC5 , showed everyone what was under the rock, a festering mess of violence, irrationality, youthful impatience. Sooner or later the lie had to be given to the hype about the Sixties and it was fitting that Ron Ashton's guitar work, a cranky machine of attitude, served as the battering ram against the edifice.

Ron Asheton, though, was of a different sort, a merely adequate electric guitarist who harnessed a narrower array of moods, attitudes, those being, I think, anger, diffidence, defiance, indifference to authority, characterized by a grainy, fuzzy, brashly fumbled yet heavily set of major and minor guitar chords. If Dave Davies of the Kinks invented the power chord with "You Really Got Me", Asheton reduced the formula to an even more primeval essence, his guitar work droning, groaning, distorting , aggravating and lumbering a set of teenage attitudes that crystallized the state of being inarticulate with a mind flooded with sensations and drives that had no experience nor wisdom to grant the spectre of coherence. He was the perfect foil for Iggy Pop, rock and roll's master of the throwaway lyric and the over driven ego; Asheton's primitivism had the gravity of a great boulder teetering precariously on a high cliff, finally sliding off with a crash, gaining momentum and mass as the huge rock approaches the bottom of the canyon; whatever was at the canyon floor was about to be smashed. Asheton made it clear on Stooges tune "No Fun", "1969" , "Search and Destroy", "Gimmee Danger" that whatever bad mood and impatient being lay at the center lay at the heart of Pop's lyrics wound up in the barbed wire snarl of his bleeding fuzztone and wah-wah pedal. Ron Asheton, an American rock and roll genius, one of the most influential fretsters of our time. Thank you, sir, and rock on.

Freddie Hubbard, RIP

I had the good fortune of seeing the recently passed away jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard several times when he played San Diego, most memorably in the Seventies when he played at the Catamaran Hotel. At the time Hubbard had made a switch from the straight ahead style on which his considerable reputation was made to a more commercial, funk and fusion approach, heavy on back beats, simple melodies, with a minimum of improvisation, and this was the material he concentrated on for the first hour of his show. Technically impressive, I remembered thinking , and I leaned over to my date and said that I thought it was a shame he was performing the recent radio-friendly hits that had brought Hubbard's name to a broader,non-jazz audience. It was as though Hubbard had heard me, for as yet another anemic ballad finished, he turned to the rhythm section and began an uptempo count and BAM! the group snapped into a head-twisting bop.
Hubbard, who was an imposing figure on stage and had a build that reminded me of a fast, hungry boxer, blew the finest trumpet solo I'd ever heard, a brilliant, fast, blinding succession of lines that skittered, danced and pirouetted in configurations that seemed alive, serpentine. For the rest of the night Hubbard was in command of his trumpet, the strong , bell like clarity of his tone and the sense of fast-witted sass and unexpected delicacy on the slower numbers continually surprising a crowd that, perhaps attracted to the gig by commercial records geared for popular acceptance, quite possibly had no idea that they were coming to see the best jazz trumpet player of his generation.

Hubbard, like many great musicians, made some dubious style choices, and was, at times, a pain in the ass, as I learned when he had a week long engagement in the eighties at the Summer House Inn's jazz club Elario's, where I worked as a reservationist. Hubbard stayed in the hotel during his gig, and was, shall we say, difficult in temperament. I answered the in house phone at the front desk one afternoon and it was Hubbard calling from his room, asking the bellman to bring up a pack of Marlboros; I decided to bring him the smokes myself, seeing a chance to actually meet a musician I admired. I knocked on the door of his room, which opened with a jolt, and saw Hubbard standing there, in his underwear and t-shirt.He tilted his head and looked at me through squinting eyes.

"Marlboros" I said, and handed the pack over to him.He took the pack and shuffled around a bit, an awkward moment. "If you need anything else, just give us a call at the Front Desk" is what I said. Hubbard said something and closed the door. The following morning I spent most of the afternoon answering phone calls from customers who'd come to see Hubbard perform at the restaurant; it seems he got into an argument with the pianist on the band stand between tunes and fired him on the spot, adding a gratuitous remark about the size of his personal business.

Let's say here that Freddie Hubbard was the greatest trumpet player of my lifetime and that what I concentrate on are those records where there seems to be no disputing the fact, Red Clay, Outposts, Body and Soul, Hub Tones. The composer of the classic "Red Clay" had clay feet it seems, but when all is said and done it is the work great artists that lives on, not the foibles and contradictions. Freddie Hubbard,thank you. Thank you very much.

Thomas Hardy as Inaugural Poet

Thomas Hardy finds something beyond his idea of reality that gives him hope despite the rigors of crisis and tumult in his poem The Darkling Thrush, published this week in Slate by poetry editor Robert Pinsky. The scenario here is that the planet is colored by the most dour of moods, seemingly shrouded and engulfed in a corrosive, soul killing pessimism . And yet, amid the foul weather and declining mood, comes a hint of something lighter, a clear wisp of clean air. Hardy seems to have learned that perception is not , by default, fate.

I leant upon a coppice gate
…..When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
…..The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
…..Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
…..Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
…..The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
…..The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
…..Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
…..Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
…..The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
…..Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
…..In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
…..Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
…..Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
…..Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
…..His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
…..And I was unaware.

Confronted with gray, rainy day, a terrain of alienating spires and barren trees, the funeral day is suddenly lit up with the swelling song of the oddly-placed bird. One feels hope, optimism, from an unexpected source. It is a perfect poem for the day as we anticipate the forthcoming Presidential Inauguration .
Optimism isn't the easiest matter to get across convincingly in a poem, but there is something about the arrival of Obama in Washington that calms me more than a little. The reason might be that the new president is willing to stop arguing all the distinctions-without-difference¬es that have all but obscured our dilemma and instead confront our national and cultural issues straight on, without flinching. The point here is that there is some hope from an unexpected source that we may soon have leadership that an older guard was unwilling or unable to produce; whatever happens through this, we seem ready as a country for whatever comes after the collapse of the status quo.

Hardy's ode convinces with its uplift fairly much because his lines are melodic and they swing rather loosely for such a constricted form--there is that feeling, as we catch the beats and the galloping rhymes , that one might get as they struggle forward in a wrestling match; one senses an advantage looming, an opening about to gape widely, and this sudden expectation charges you hard, pumps a bit more adrenaline, takes you over the finish line . Through it, one is exhausted, sore perhaps, but stronger, more confident, in a state where one does not take anything for granted. Hardy seems to point out that nothing gets better without change and change is invariably struggle.

Hardy seems to be talking about the fact that creatures other than man , who have nothing invested in thinking their species special or blessed in any way, have the ability to withstand and transcend trauma, and ironically appear stronger, nobler for the struggle. The song of the thrush is theatrical, a tad melodramatic, but for poetic effect it does serve to remind the author, lately suffering a depressed mood, that life isn't about the all of existence between in place only to confirm, challenge, or test the philosophy he has developed from the gathered wisdom he has read; there is sorrow, of course, but life goes on separate from expectations and personal bitterness and beauty is not only possible despite awful events and traffic circumstances, but in fact exists, plain, clear, unselfconscious. We have the poet here at the moment when a small perception gives rise to an ongoing re-examination of ideas and relations that have sustained one so far and to appreciate the truth that what a cosmology should be a loose fitting suit rather than a tight fit.

Which is to say that Hardy finds himself awakened to the possibility that even as life goes on, it needn't be a grudging trudge, and that one can experience the wider variety of emotional and aesthetic life than before, when one found himself sure of their ideas and knowing everything without experiencing a tenth of what the world has in store.

Poems and personality

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.

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)

Mailer's meditation on violence and evil will not be everyone's idea of a good novel to read on the beach. Still, An American Dream is a fully realized male fantasy wherein one set-upon, White, alcoholic protagonist berserks himself into sequential delirium fueled rages to rid himself of the crushing banality of the culture that he feels is killing him by the inch. To complete this, he commits a series of violent and insane acts in an alcoholic haze; challenges sent to him by the moon (really) whose successful completion might give him a hint of the freedom he dreams is beyond the neon-lit tarp of the Manhattan skyline. This pilgrim's progress is nothing short of an obscene fantasy, wherein our hero, a decorated war hero, former congressman, and talk show host, strangles his maddening estranged wife, buggers the German maid, steals a Mafia Don's girlfriend, and proceeds, in 24 hours, to lie and deceive the New York City Police Department, the Mob, with intimations that the FBI and CIA are involved in the mess he created. The plot, of course, is lurid, absurd, and the product of a particular time, but Mailer's novel comes at a time when the Hemingway cult of quiet, a manly stoicism managed through a singular, privately held code of honor, was exhausted of compelling narrative potential. Mailer’s idea was to see what would happen if the man who might have been the Hemingway hero, suffering his hurts in some poetic privacy, had a psychotic break instead.

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.