A poem

YOU COME AND STAND IN EVERY DOOR


You come and stand
in every door
saying that
it is time to get going.
This is before the dew
evaporates from the slats of lawn chairs
baking in the sun all day.

Traffic, always cars,
gets thick as my tongue
at noon, u-hauls
and trailer homes
leaving for cooler towns up North.
Announcers in
steam bath booths
loosen their ties, the grass of the
playing field is brown, balls are
felled in zones of death,
announcers
are drunk and lose their tongues
as a lather of news, weather and sports
leaves a trail up I-5, alias North.

You stand in every door,
monotonous as
suburbs choking
the shrubs from
the canyons.
I lose my tongue
thinking how far
I would travel
over how many
state lines
in the grace and chase
after Manifest Destiny
to see you, just a glimpse
from the corner of the eye
that worries
the crow’s feet,
to see how
you come from a neighbor's house
clutching Tupperware
and a deck of cards
both to your breasts.

TV aerials
from the
eaves of patio living
claw the sky,
the feet
of a million dead crows,
winter settles
over the land
like a serving
of cold shoulder
on disrupted kitchen tables,
billboards
along the road
poking out from pine tree groves
promise hot meals
at family restaurants
bearing a sidekick’s first name.
Side kicks
always have
only one name,
one syllable whispers
on a road
that stretches
into architectures of high risk investment
where there are no products
any one mentions,
only the promise
of return, life in heaven.

You stand in all doors
and talk to me about the scratches
on record collections
as if the wear of years
had something to
do with the lyric sheets
whose italics express
something to do with feeding
the poor, ending war,
love lasting
until even corner stones
on ugly buildings
are worn away
by weather and wind.
Strangely, I am
in gymnasiums again,
dances, registered
desire, long hair,
wire glasses,
jeans tight as snake's skin,
hips and knees
triangulating new laws of form
and sex to drums and
guitar solos lost
in the rafters and rapture
of feeling, then,
that noise is power
and we would be marching
to live a life
based on album lyric sheets
and scarred records
we play back wards
with a back hand,
the rooms you were already in
reeked of sweet smoke, and hope
for the world
were selling
subscriptions
of underground newspapers
that would sell
us what we believed.

You stand in
doors you choose
because the light of living
room windows
is your idea
of peace in a world
where anyone else
builds walls around the walls
it already has and
thus misses the impossible
things going on
while the audience awaits
more supermarket sales,


I am still thinking
of drinking up what's
left in hours when hands of
the clocks slow down
and kill the last hour
with kindness.

I might ask you
to please move aside,
I think it is my turn
to play with the knob

Until you come and stand
in every door again
on the chance to get my attention,
there is smoke coming from
buildings on the TV set,
Manhattan is clouds and debris
as hand held cameras
show us the steel and
glass that flies endlessly into
the acres of empty air
and then down the street,

Every door is ours only by virtue
of our wanting to be here
when the days of obligation are over
and we live on hours
paid for in full,

I see the images of the sky falling
apart over New York,
you stand in the doorway
leaning against the frame,
only half way in the room
as if in a pose to leave, grab your shoes,
grab your bag,
get a cab at the curb, go home
and moan by yourself
for all the screams which are not heard
on a day when it seems every
lie I ever created and told,
every fiction I have ever constructed
and test drove in crowds
into microphones,
in front of rows of empty chairs
catch up with me,
knocks on the door,

Makes me forget you are there
even as you now stand in
front of the set,

I crane my neck to see
what is happening
but you move as well
and block the view,

I grab you around the waist
where you stand
and ask if you will love
me until the sky falls
and I can hear you breath deep,
my ear against your stomach,
your hand on my head,

forever, you say,
however long it takes.

What's killing bookstores are cheapskates and dead beats

Ron Silliman kindly provides his readers with a frequent list of links to other blogs and online publications that he's found interesting, and part of his dutiful attention is dedicated to bringing us the unfolding stories involved in the demise of independent bookstores. Resilient as these venues are, they seem caught in an inevitable movement of cultural shift-- bookstores are no longer the community centers one would go to purchase books and in turn have purchase in the larger discussion that strengthens a democracy. On line purchases are just cheaper, and in the change of national habit , customers are willing to wait so they can recieve a discount. This is a tide that threatens to swamp the big stores too, with Borders and Barnes and Nobel struggling to keep their cash registers humming. Last week I walked into the downtown Borders in San Diego and wondered if I'd walked into an oversized living room; the cash registers were idle much of the time, but the store was full, seemingly peopled by freeloaders sitting in chairs with stacks of books piled at their feet. What was appearent was that very few of those books would be purchased and the books in turn would be dog eared, bent , battered and otherwise made less than pristine. The staff, in turn, seemed as though they could give a flat fuck about the state of the store; sections were out of order. Vain as I am, I wanted to yell at someone.

Charles Taylor published published an essay in 2005 in The New York Times where he asks , point blank, when did bookstores get turned into “flophouses”. His set of choicely- phrased gripes concern the way in which huge chain stores like Barnes and Noble have created atmospheres that encourage the derelicts in the population to turn bookstores into living rooms, much to the disadvantage of browsers who’d like to find a book to read and, perchance, purchase. I understand Taylor’s misgivings about bookstores being turned into playpens for the lonely, the trendy and the socially inept, and I've seen every sin of self-absorption he's described and decried.

My principle beef is with those who treat the bookstore as if it were a library, a place to either sit and read from the shelf in stages, dog-earing and chafing the item beyond saleability (pages bent down, spines cracked, covers creased and curled), or for those researching whatever complex and vaguely outlined project they've set for themselves. This second example is especially loathsome, since these folks, students with no money more often than not, appear with their backpacks and spend some time in three or four sections, taking books here and there, and then settle in someplace, usually an aisle, sitting on the floor, books open and turned upside down, with the ersatz scholars copying whole paragraphs from texts they have no intention of buying.

I have found more than one person copying pages with their cell phone cameras, an interesting method of shop lifting. We considered banning cell phone use inside the store, but were convinced by the less soured staff that such devices were the sort of thing that had to be tolerated; whine as we might, we're not in the business of telling customers what they can't do. All the same, it grates , and it greys the hair.There is nothing more exasperating than the wounded-animal look these peculiar sorts give you when we remind them (really!) that they're in a bookstore, not a library. One girl who'd been feverishly copying passages from an expensive philosophy book from a pricey university publisher actually asked me this:

"You mean you don't want me to take notes?"
"No. These books are for sale..."

“For sale?”

“Yes.”

“Just let me finish this one thing I started to write….” Her voice took on the squeaking whine of noisy plumbing.

“This isn’t a negotiation. Put your pen away. Do you want to buy this book?”

“Do you have it used?”

“No”.



She was sitting in a graceless lotus position on the floor, holding the book open on her lapso that the binding continued to crack. I leaned over and took the book from her, closing it and smoothing the front and back covers with my hands. I only wish I had a snapshot of the clueless, uncomprehending expression she had on her face as her mouth gaped open and her eyes quite literally filmed over as if trying to grasp something as abstract as the idea that we were a store and needed to sell books. Sell books, not rent them, exchange them, lend them out, let you read them to a grimy pulp, photocopy them, borrow them or any other form of exchange that falls outside the boundary of a simple cash or credit card transaction.

Less attractive are the world travelers who have the money to take vacations in far flung corners and exotic niches of the globe, yet who are so miserly in their preparation that they won't purchase travel guides but will instead spend up to an hour in your store copying airline and hotel information from a current book onto index cards. There is an industry term for this sort of clientele. Here it is in the form of an inside joke. A cranky bookseller goes up to a young wannabe hipster who'd been lingering long and uselessly in the poetry section and say to him

"Young man, you remind me Jack Kerouac....”
The young poser's eyes widen at the apparent praise.
"Really," he says breathlessly.
"Yup," says the cranky bookseller,"you're both dead beats."

A shameless self-promotion: I HAVE A POEM IN DIAGRAM!!

I am pleased to say that the good folks at Diagram magazine have chosen a poem of mine for their new issue and that issue is now online I am in especially strong company in this issue. There isn't a weak page from any contributor

A poem by Jeffrey Yang

There is great appeal in the work of poets who can artfully contain a series of ideas in a brief piece of verse, the goal being to turn philosophical precepts into the glitter surface of a poem’s allure and still address an issue quite beyond the more comfortable subjects of beauty or an aesthetically constrained idea of Truth, capial “T”. Jeffrey Yang’s first collection, An Aquarium (Graywolf Press) is a series of poems that at first seem like they concern themselves exclusively with ocean life; indeed they do, but the author is shrewd in seeing what other areas, outside the aquarium tank, these creatures touch upon. Yang offers up a view on how we think about things. Here, in the poem Parrotfish , the creature is nearly lost as the poems starts like the first sentence of an encyclopedia entry and quickly turns into a bit of cocktail chatter seeming between artists, secret agents and critics, all of whom sacrifice the subject in favor of extending their rhetorical devices.

Parrotfish
The life phases of a parrotfish
are expressed in colors.By day,
the parrotfish replenishes coral reef
sands, and by night spins
its mucous cocooned-
room. Is this art's archetype
abstracted from politics?
Picasso thought abstraction a cul-de-
sac. The CIA loved Abstract
Expressionism. Hockney: "I
don't think that there is really such a thing
as abstraction." Langer:"All genuine art
is abstract."
What do you think parrot-
fish?

I think the aim is to undermine the insidious intent of rhetorical questions that frame ready made political assumptions. The question in "Is this art's archetype abstracted from politics" forces agreement from the reader though it's disingenuous appeal to a person's vanity, from which an argument may be made for agendas that have little to with art, parrotfish, or life in general. This is the use of language that treats the things in nature as if they were symbols, real or potential, for great oppositions at war in an unseen metaphysical realm.
Yang seems aware that there is a very human tendency to regard the world outside our senses as though it were a linear narrative being played out, with virtues reducible to good v evil, beauty v vulgarity, honesty v criminal intent being the principle extremes in play. The narrative form , the storyline, is a convenient way of making the raw experience comprehensible, but taking a cue from Heidegger's work in phenomenology, Yang would have us be aware that the parrotfish and its environmental niche are not abstractions of anything but rather expressions of their own life. "Back to the data", as the man said and, in the choice phrase of the confounding Ezra Pound ,"the natural object is already the adequate symbol".


He follows the erring assumptions to an unsual but logical conclusion: the symbol of beauty and abstraction must surely be brilliant intellectually, and so must, by default, have an opinion of the matter. He places us in witness to an absurdity: intelligent men, seduced by their nuanced sophistry, asking a fish for an informed opinion.
Yang seems to me to be making fun of the way we call things either "beautiful" or "abstract"; for all the sophisticated and nuanced reasons critics, theologians and agents of intrigue approach the subject, the competing philosophies all fall short, far short of articulating something truly tangible. The irony is that the embodiment of all this speculation, the lexicon-heavy guess work to a thing's essence, is not aware that it is beautiful, abstract, or is somehow an embodiment of a set of ideas that are meant to change the world. The parrotfish isn't even aware that it's a parrotfish, which is entirely the point--it is too busy being part of the the rest of it's underworld. Unlike human beings, who are continually trying to separate themselves from nature so that they may subjugate it a little more.

Don't Be Cruel: Say No to National Poetry Month

Well, yeah, I'm grumpy some of the time, and I've been accused of being a curmudgeon in regards to National Poetry Month, the annual dedication to an elusive art with a small audience that itself is divided among several hundred-seeming schools of thought as to what is genuinely worth reading or promoting. The reservations come chiefly from the attitude that poetry is something pathetic in itself, with Special Needs, and that there is a collective delusion in the publishing world that poetry can be made more popular by hyping the form with the cliched hokum that sounds culled from New Age screeds. It's a little infuriating to witness an art that you believe, at it's best, sparks the unusual idea or the unforeseen connection within a reader be reduced as something that marketers promise to deliver a consumer to an even deeper vat of circumscribed thinking.

I wouldn't say my remarks about National Poetry Month are grumpy, just realistic. On the face of it I welcome a month dedicated to the art , craft and diversity of poets and their work , and even think that the month might well bring new readers to poetry as something they'd read in their leisure time. The problem is that once we give someone or some thing a special day, week, or month for the nominal purpose of increasing awareness, most of the population bothering to observe what the calendar day commemorates will nod their head, bow their head, read a few poems, maybe buy a single volume that will likely wind up half way finished and atop a coffee table, a page bent down to mark a page,not be picked up again, and then be done with it for the year. It certainly gives major publishers significant favorable publicity so they can present themselves as more than bottom-line obsessed subsidiaries of malignant media corporations: look at what we're doing to support the arts, look at our love of poetry!!

There are poets who benefit, many of them I count my favorites, but the fact that poetry in general has a month dedicated to it's supposed welfare seems more to me that the rest of the literary world considers the form a poor, sickly relative; April as poetry month is the metaphorical gulag, a ghetto, a hospice, that space where this art, which no publisher seems to know how to market so it contributes usefully to their bottom line, is allowed to make it's noise, indulge their rhetoric for a short period in the spot light before being ushered from the stage and back to the margins.

Poets, the work they do, the theories they develop regarding their art has been the most rarefied and most diffuse of the arts as it developed since the encroachment of Modernism over turned the conventional thinking about poetry's form and purpose. It's been to poetry's advantage, I think, that the audience has been small, very small, compared to the other genres that help publishers make their payrolls and their dividends, since the relative obscurity has allowed poets of many different styles and concerns, politics and agendas to advance their art and arguments , both Quietist and Post-Avant Gard, unconcerned with a commercial aspect that wasn't theirs to begin with. National Poetry Month is something like a zoo the city folk may visit on their days off , and the poets are the exotic creatures who will perform their tricks, do their dances, take their bows for the smattering of applause and loose coin that might come their way. Generally speaking, poets and their work would be better off, and saner as well, if the illusion that a dedicated month will increase the readership and increase book sales as well.

It would be better for poets to stop behaving like their in need of rehabilitation and went about their business, doing what we're supposed to do to the best our individual and collective abilities. If the work is good, interesting, of quality on it's own terms, the audience , whatever the size, will come.

______________________________________________________________

(A related piece from two years ago, with a link to a useful Charles Bernstein essay.-tb)


We are here in April again, and those of us concerned a little about poetry as art need again accommodate the ludicrous thing called National Poetry Month. The hope is to get folks to change their reading habits to include poetry volumes along with their steady diets of mysteries, romances, celebrity cookbooks and memoirs written by people who will soon to be exposed as liars and cheats. Is there hope for the General Audience? The divisions in the Poetry War are drawn, both sides will wage battle for the soul of the book buyer , but the pathetic truth is that vast promotion and arguments as to the worth of verse are to no avail. Literally, no one is buying it. Or buying too little of it for the fuss and bother of having a month out of the year dedicated to poets and their obscurities.
The General Audience I speak of is vague, purposefully so, as it speaks to anyone who has an amorphous notion of how to generalize about poetry readers share in common. The war between various schools, groups and the like strikes me as more bickering between the professionals, poets, critics and academics (some of whom happen to practice all three occupations) who have status and power on the line as they advance their agenda and create an enemy camp in the interests of bolstering whatever claims can be made for a particular group's alleged superior aesthetics. Some of this ongoing disagreement is fascinating and useful, since the distinctions as they’re clarified can be informative and the criticisms each has of the other’s perceived shortcomings can potentially yield insight on issues a writer might be otherwise be too close to.

I have my preferences, sure, and I subscribe to a particular set of principles, but these rules of poetry are worn like a loose suit, not a straight jacket. Most readers who a general interests in poetry , contemporary and older, will like or dislike a variety of different approaches to verse for an equally varied set of reasons, most of which, if asked, our hypothetical General Reader would be able to explain if asked. The basic question of a poem, whether written for the lyric voice, the vernacular rant, or the experimental rigorist, is whether it works or not, both on its own terms and in terms of whether it gives pleasure or joy. Someone might suggest that teachers could increase the audience for poems if they taught the material better, but this is a strawman.We can't lay this at the teacher's feet because it's my firm conviction that most poetry, ambitious or otherwise, isn't going be the thing the large majority of their students will take after in adulthood, regardless of how good or bad a job the instructor might be. We're talking about adult readers here, those who have reading habits formed and in place for a lifetime; some are more curious about more ambitious forms, most who read poetry prefer the greatest hits of Whitman, Plath or Dickens, if they read poetry at all, and the General Audience, as we've been calling them, has not interest in poetry what so ever, except when they need a quote for a funeral or a wedding.

In other words, people who might buy a book of poems do so for reasons that are the same as they always have been, word of mouth, display, book review, and so on. Things like National Poetry Month do so very little to increase the fraction of the book buying public to have even a casual appreciation of poetry; they simply don't care for those things that are not measurable by generic conventions. Charles Bernstein wrote a cogent, if slightly smug essay in 1999 called "Against National
Poetry Month As Such" in which he derides the notion that publishers and a clatch of state and federal arts czars can increase interest in and sales of poetry collections by reducing to the level of the contrived New Age/faux mediation group think that would have us read the literature with the hope that stress and pain will go away.(I am thinking myself of Roger Housden's odious collection "Ten Poems To Change Your Life",which abuses the work of good poets by presenting them as accessories one buys on impulse at the cash register).Bernstein's main point is well taken with me, that poetry is being sold as something it isn't, like the volumes poets publish are good for you in the way that pop psych and New Age literature claim to be. What is being sold are the specious promises of poetry, not the poetry itself which, of all the literary arts, should stand alone , unencumbered by political or therapeutic contrivance. National Poetry Month is a hypocritical waste of time, I think, a commercial venture born of the kind of cynicism that enables corporations to manipulate buyers into purchasing things they haven't an honest need for.

GIMMEE THAT SHOVEL --blues harmonica

There are some who think me a vain and self-concerned fool, and I will admit to a slight egocentric tinge. I think I am modest to know when to shut up, though, and I'm certain enough to insist that there are some things I actually do well. Opinions on poets and their poems and the further concern over what it is poetry needs to strive for, accomplish and what truths it needs to adhere to will remain insoluable, with my two cents (three cents? one cent?) tossed into the the melee , but I do play well. It bores a good many others, though, and for those readers who haven't the love of blues harmonica, I apologize. This video, recorded today, is especially tasty; I ought to take out of the of the office and onto the bandstand. Meanwhile, enjoy.

Jericho Brown and James Allen Hall at D.G. Wills Books TONIGHT

MAN IN THE DARK: Paul Auster takes a nap

Paul Auster desires to be a cross between Don DeLillo and Borges, which is to say that he desires the cool surface of the DeLillo's beaut fully managed tone and Borges genius for making the inane become suffused with an nether worldly sublimity. It works , at times, as in the novels that comprise the "New York Trilogy", his novel "Leviathan" and more recently his masterpiece from a few years back "Book of Illusion"; the way he uses the element of chance in his narratives can at times be one of the keener miracles of American writing. Auster, though, is a man of limited style and a set of ideas that have very nearly played themselves out, as we see here in "Man in the Dark". A small-time professor and book reviewer , recovering at his daughter's house after a horrific auto accident, spends much of his time watching movies and lying in the dark, imagining movies of his own, in this case a narrative of an alternative America that is being torn apart by a civil war. The elements here get very convoluted, and those familiar with Auster's favorite devices will sense the writer just a shade bored with his inventions and his borrowings.What you could see coming up in this tale was the eventuality that somehow this man in the dark, the imagining invalid, will have to confront the protagonist of the very tale he's concocting as he lies there. Tension is supposed to start here, the twist is supposed to make the skin tighten and the fingers eagerly seek the next page, but these are conventional turns in an Auster manuscript. When he's taken with a set of ideas, he can make incredible coincidences believably take a reader on a trek launched by sheer caprice. Man in the Dark's action seems engineered at best. The spare, evocative style that is the writer's trademark hardly rises above a monotone. Narratives, real and imagined, twine together in such a way that we're supposed to ask which is real and what his false until we are brought to a relief, although the only relief to be had here is not from the novel's building tension, which is slack, but from the tedium that ensues. That's a feet for a book that isn't even two hundred pages long. I was a bit disappointed by this novel, less for witnessing the decline of someone who was once a reliable provocative writer and more because he repeats his good ideas here without grace, snap , or variation worth noting. This was the draft you're supposed to throw away,not submit to your publisher.

The End of Verse? Again??

Newsweek has a piece about a the results of a report from The National Endowment for the Arts that was a mix of good news and bad news for those concerned with the national reading habit; people were reading more , with increases in fiction and non fiction alike, but we were, collectively , reading less poetry. The article takes the usual dooming sensationalist slant with the article's title, The End of Verse?People love to read about funerals, I guess, or the cultural echo of re-runs have truly colonized our attention spans. This is the same used car with a new coat of paint.

There is a long history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's perception. An elitist art, in other words, that by the sort of linguistic magic the poet generates sharpens the reader's wits; it would be interesting if someone conducted a study of the spread of manifestos , from competing schools of writing, left and right, over the last couple hundred of years and see if there is connecting insistence at the heart of the respective arguments .

What they'd find among other things, I think, is a general wish to liberate the slumbering population from the doldrums of generic narrative formulation and bring them to a higher, sharper, more crystalline understanding of the elusive quality of Truth; part of what makes poetry interesting is not just the actual verse interesting (and less interesting ) poets produce, but also their rationale as to why they concern themselves with making words do oddly rhythmic things. Each poet who is any good and each poet who is miserable as an artists remains, by nature, didactic ,chatty, and narcissistic to the degree that , as a species , they are convinced that their ability to turn a memorable ( or at least striking phrase) is a key with which others may unlock Blake's Doors of Perception.

The lecturing component is only as interesting as good as the individual writer can be--not all word slingers have equal access to solid ideas or an intriguing grasp on innovative language--but the majority of readers don't want to be edified. They prefer entertainment to enlightenment six and half days out of the week, devouring Oprah book club recommendations at an even clip; the impulse with book buyers is distraction, a diversion from the noise of he world. Poetry, even the clearest and most conventional of verse , is seen as only putting one deeper into the insoluble tangle of experience. Not that it's a bad thing, by default, to be distracted, as I love my super hero movies and shoot 'em ups rather than movies with subtitles, and I don't think it's an awful thing for poetry to have a small audience. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if all the money spent on trying to expand the audience were spent on more modest presentations. The audience is small, so what has changed?

Watchmen: a grinding, verbose bore

I  thought of comparing Watchmen with Francis Coppola's epic Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now as an example of another expensive , ambitious film that combines botched ambition with a compelling visual style, but I gave up that notion after thinking it through for a couple of days. It would have been unfair to Coppola's troubled saga; since it's 1979 release, I've seen the film at least six times that I remember. Vague, grandiose and over long the film might be , and as problematic as Marlon Brando's performance as Col.Kurtz remains, you can still study the metaphors and allegories director and co writer Coppola was using from his source material, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; one does pick up on the notion of how an individual (or a culture) can drive itself to an obsessed pathology , and the images from the voyage up the river create a sustained feeling of a contracting world view. The paranoia is vivid, felt; fail as he might in revealing what "The Horror" is at the heart of this simple fable is, Apocalypse Now manages, none the less, to creative a diffuse poetry from the symptoms. Watchmen,  is well beyond the symptoms and focus's on the wounds and, sadly, fatally, has characters lecturing each other on the way things ought to be. For all it's flash and form, Watchmen is a grandiose, bombastic bore. The audience seems to think so to as well. It's not a film I care to see again short of being paid to do so.

The big reason Watchmen tanked so badly was because the film was, after all, structurally incoherent. Not all the blame can be laid on Zack Snyder, since it seems to me that Warner Brothers, eager to trump competitor Marvel at the box office, went for what they considered their sexiest comic book property for screen adaptation. Any honest fan boy or gal would have told you that Alan Moore's original novel wasn't the likeliest item to made into a movie; Hollywood movies have an aesthetic and style that demands a far simpler storyline and shorter running time , and the original novel , with it's layered story lines, post modern feints and it's intangible blend of physics, history and philosophical axioms, was weighty with an ambition that is contrary to a visual medium.

Even with the substance of the novel slashed back considerably, there was still too much for director Snyder to have to contend with; even at the barest representation, there were a gross too many characters who's back stories had to be presented at inconvenient intervals in the action; Snyder tries to compensate for all this an admittedly brilliant look and repulsively violence, but even these outbreaks of gruesome mayhem could not deflate the mulled over glumness of the of monologues and voice overs. The viewers, hoping this enterprise would gel at some point, had to instead sit through nearly three hours of what came down to repeated doses of this one-two combination: TALK TALK TALK TALK TALK /MURDER MAIM SMASH GOUGE DISEMBOWEL.

Snyder had worked some magic with his historical deconstruction in his film 300; his choice of style and fantasy over factual matters was justified by a confident bravado. The excitement from that film was aided, I would assert, by a simpler story line, a better idea of what the conflicts were leading up to; he was able to re-vitalize a moldy collection of cliches from the cultural common stock concerning valor,bravery, loyalty. With Watchmen he tries , bravely I think, to reinvigorate a higher class of cliches, the sort of received notions one finds on the floors of University Department offices, and finds himself overwhelmed. The source of those cliches, the original graphic novel , itself an over rated expanse otherwise smart folks have attempted to jump categories and insert into the New Western Canon, is a property that would have smacked any bright lens man to the ground.

The Quietude is Deafening

Gail Mazur's poems have an easy elegance that can , in their best renderings, bring a number of heady matters into the same conversation without a sign of the stanzas tearing at the seams.Apparent one can read in a previous selection published on Slate,In Another Country, she has the ability to give form to a sense of sensations that you'd think would remain inarticulate and exist only as vaguely felt sensations: happy, sad, despairing, hopeful, what? She gives these sensations voice, a monologue. But as well as she brings her equivalent phrases for unnameable notions together in a smooth transition to a page , the transition is too pat, too eager for prime time. The conceits that drag her work down is the continued sense that the insoluble conditions she enjoys digging through for material find resolution in her over worked ironies.

"The Age" shows no shift in strategy and no modesty in the size of the unambables she's attempting place a sign on; no more odes for an empty house, bring on the Temper of the Times!!!This would be fine, of course, but what irritates me is the implied exclusivity , the book cliquishness of this bit of zeitgeist mongering. You feel like a friend you came to a party with abandoned you with a group of others , none of whom you know, who are enthralled by a lone speaker who seems to be synthesizing everyone else's input into a discussion you know nothing about, touching on each tidbit and making them fit some clever if predictable irony gridwork.

For what seemed an infinite time there were nights
that were too long. We knew a little science, not enough,

some cosmology. We'd heard of dark matter, we'd been assured
although it's everywhere, it doesn't collide, it will never slam

into our planet, it somehow obeys a gentler law of gravity,
its particles move through each other. We'd begun to understand

it shouldn't frighten us that we were the universe's debris,
or that when we look up at the stars, we're really looking back.

This is exactly where you and I have walked in , and there is the feeling that all these longings for historical knowledge, back in time when matters made sense as they occurred and had their effects, is wishful more than anything else; the phrases are so well chisled and polished in their response to sort of bleak declarations the narrator might have been confronted with that I'm inclined to think , assuming the poem is inspired by experience, that Mazur might have been stumped by the original inquest as to what became of our collective Sense of Hope. We'd begun to understand /it shouldn't frighten us that we were the universe's debris,
or that when we look up at the stars, we're really looking back doesn't sound spontaneous at all, it's desire for a firm place to set one's certitude studied, not weary.

Starting from small details to grander themes is a technique I enjoy when the parts are a good fit for one another, but Mazur reverses the equation here by going from grand to minute, as in the way she begins with an implied struggle against the despair of the age, settling finally on the school children chanting the name of the New President as some sign that the clouds will separate and the sun will shine again. This would be fine if it weren't such a smarmy production. This is a Hallmark Moment, an epiphany so perfectly placed in this ostensibly factual account of a personal struggle against spiritual malaise as to be incredible, implausible, phony . What Mazur is trying to get across is something that's very small yet very meaningful, yet she talks this idea to death with a busy-work string of contemplations that effectively crush the poetry .

The Locket, a poem by Peter Gizzi

I don't know if I'd call Peter Gizzi a Language Poet, though he certainly has affinities with that group of writers. He's closer in style and sensibility to George Oppen or James Merrill, two poets who appeal to me because they have an internal monologue that attempts to assess experience through the objects that represent memory but who, unlike a fellow introvert John Ashbery, prefer a brutally adjective free manner.

There is a remove in the approach among these three writers that evokes the dislocation of coming across unfamiliar things and attempting to link the details in some useful way. Gizzi's poem , I think, is like looking inside some one's desk drawer and observing, up close, a layering of items that have been shoved there over a period of time--odd material items gathered together for no singular purpose or reason other than the collection is the doing of one individual; you stop trying to make sense of the pile as a whole and seek, instead , to profile the person, unknown and unseen, who placed the details together in the first place.

THE LOCKET
Peter Gizzi
Here is the ashtray and here
the plastic cup of cool water.


And here is the known world.
As fingers duplicate the event

of hunger. Get up. Go
to the division of various

stories and look for the naked
man beneath the stream be-

hind the house. The same
house that I does not inhabit.

The car is there. The letters
are there. And this street

leads to no particular day.
The way home remains

a mystery to those who are
looking. How else recover

what otherwise is. Lost
to the open. Space between

leaves and stones. Here
also is the neighborhood.

Lost to the open./ Space between leaves and stones./Here also is the neighborhood. The world opens up rather suddenly from the hard, specific detail one inspects and interprets, only to lose it as more details and their nuances align with the first set of assumptions; what was to be a simple explanation of a photograph, a book of matches, an odd sentence written on the back of a business card becomes complex until the accumulation overwhelms the simple timeline one preferred. The particular thing loses significance in a nuanced history that cannot be reduced. Implicit in Gizzi's poem is the idea that any recounting of personal history is something of a fiction: it's the arrangement of vaguely vetted details on which one tells the tale. But what fascinates me here is the disruption of the process--the narrator sounds like he's starting over again and yet again. The objects are concrete, but their meanings are tentative, their positions seem to shift in retelling.


There is a gaze here, a tangible poring over of things that are distinct--every object has a story as to how it arrived at the spot upon which you witness it--and it wouldn't be unusual to consider that there is an actual locket, with a photo graph or image of a kind, that itself becomes obscure as other associations are conjured. A house, a place where one lived, a photograph of a man showering naked in a stream behind the house, a familiarity of images that cannot be isolated to specific incident. Something has spurred the clipped stream, and what happens as with most times when one is attempting to assemble a full picture from the dimmest of recollected memories is that the deep past is anonymous.The way home remains a mystery to those who are looking.

What attracts me to this is the yearning to know more about the vivid glimpses, and the ache of realizing that the object is beyond your grasp. The observer of the details is denied the certainty of details the objects and their fleeting images suggest and is left, he chooses, to merely imagine what might have happened in the narrative gaps; beyond a certain age, reconstructing the earliest memories of time on earth isn't unlike interpreting what goes in in the unseen narrative leading up to what we have of Sappho's writing. The guess work becomes the work of art.

Tale of the proscratinating Horn dog

"All My Senses, Like Beacon's Flame" by Fulke Greville, a formerly obscure poet who is now being revived and rehabilitated three hundred plus years later by the preferring mentions of Harold Bloom and others, is a superb poem of directed ambivalence. It's the tale of a man who chooses the ache of desire over the pain of losing himself to the power of another being over him.

Caelica 56: "All My Senses, Like Beacon's Flame"
All my senses, like beacon's flame,
Gave alarum to desire
To take arms in Cynthia's name
And set all my thoughts on fire:
Fury's wit persuaded me,
Happy love was hazard's heir,
Cupid did best shoot and see
In the night where smooth is fair;
Up I start believing well
To see if Cynthia were awake;
Wonders I saw, who can tell?
And thus unto myself I spake:
"Sweet God Cupid, where am I,
That by pale Diana's light,
Such rich beauties do espy,
As harm our senses with delight?
Am I borne up to the skies?
See where Jove and Venus shine,
Showing in her heavenly eyes
That desire is divine.
Look where lies the milken way,
Way unto that dainty throne,
Where while all the Gods would play,
Vulcan thinks to dwell alone."
I gave reins to this conceit,
Hope went on the wheel of lust;
Fancy's scales are false of weight,
Thoughts take thought that go of trust.
I stepped forth to touch the sky,
I a God by Cupid dreams;
Cynthia, who did naked lie,
Runs away like silver streams,
Leaving hollow banks behind
Who can neither forward move,
Nor, if rivers be unkind,
Turn away or leave to love.
There stand I, like Arctic pole,
Where Sol passeth o'er the line,
Mourning my benighted soul,
Which so loseth light divine.
There stand I like men that preach
From the execution place,
At their death content to teach
All the world with their disgrace.
He that lets his Cynthia lie
Naked on a bed of play,
To say prayers ere she die,
Teacheth time to run away.
Let no love‑desiring heart
In the stars go seek his fate,
Love is only Nature's art.
Wonder hinders Love and Hate.
**None can well behold with eyes
**But what underneath him lies.

We have an erotic poem here, a distended stretch of rhapsodizing the brings us in the center of a train of thought that is sparked, fired up and colored entirely by a long and obsessive gaze. It's an interesting comparison with T.R. Hummer's poem in Slate last week, "Bad Infinity" , where the reader was likewise situated in a psychology that was arguing with the world and attempting to reconcile combating approaches to a world that appeared to be failing the narrator, much of the power of which comes from Hummer deploying a set of images culled from what seemed to be reconfigured tropes and semantic turns that might formerly neatly contextualized the world with grace and nuance but now which seemed to be falling grossly short.

Greville's poem, written over three hundred years earlier, has the narrator at the most severe pitch of an arousal wherein he wrestles with all the conflicting motions. He is something like Hamlet, lost and stalled , perhaps impaled by the metaphorical scaffolding he constructs for himself; he cannot take action so he does nothing but instead continues to settle for the satisfaction of having fashioned a new kind of language to describe an intensity that finds no resolution. As the dear Cynthia, falling under the dually imperious and self-critical gaze of Greville's horn-dogged suitor, is subjected to a stream of artful exaggerations that compare her and the feelings she creates to grander things greater than her would be lover, we have the metaphorical flow taking a turn, at first describing all that is desirous of the good lady that the observer would like to physically encounter, only to have the rationale undermined as the poetry assumes its own authority and becomes the ruling edict in this stream of obsessed thought processing. She is too fine to be touched, too near the perfection of angels to be violated, hers is a beauty that is stunning to the degree that all who behold her are made motionless, made hapless, made powerless.

Some years ago I attended a lecture on eroticism , and in a section where the speaker needed to make the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic, the point was made was that what we find erotic in a situation lies in the very fact that contact, the actual coupling, is suspended, deferred. Anticipation is the essence of the erotic impulse, the rituals of seduction, the contemplation of the shape and good graces of the other one is attracted to, the psychic moment when the pride and embarrassments and degrees and self-doubt cease to matter and one pursues something outside their daily concerns.

Greville's character, it seems to my meager estimation, was hoist by his own explosive rhetoric , considered something thing truly beautiful and worthy of possessing but deemed himself finally unworthy, preferring instead the ache of yearning, the pining after, the perfection of a feeling that made his imagination become gloriously alive. A fear of commitment, perhaps, but most of all I think it might have to do with a fear losing of what power one things they legitimately have. The force that could coax such brilliant from a man could surely rob him of as well, and that would leave him sans anything he knew was truthfully his. This is almost a comedy of a sort, albeit a richly musical one; a man choosing his muse over the woman he believes he could love.

The new book?

The death of the book, that paginated, bounded thing we carry around with us, dog-eared and highlighted, a friend to turn to in the moments when our attention isn't spent talking about what others want you to hear? The romantic in me says no, I want my books to be forever things, and love the illusion , now waning, that bookstores will be with us forever, but I did someone the other day using Amazon.com's reading device Kindle recently, and without bother describing it too much, the ease and comfort of use looked very, very appealing. Books in a another form, perhaps, abetted by a different delivery system? Probally so.


I can see the future of selling books being in on line downloads from a seller like Amazon or Barnes and Nobel, but I don’t think anyone will ever get in the habit of reading whole books from their computer screens, as a general habit. Rather, I suspect the fate of reading lies in reading devices that have a comfort and ease of use ; the issue, I think, is portability, since the basic advantage of the book over an internet text is that the book can become something of an intimate partner with you as you go places, travel, or just sit in a comfy chair , absorbing and considering the prose or poetry you’re witness to. There’s a need most readers have, older or younger, for the physicality of holding a book as they read –that seems to the way things stay in mind after a book is finished. So many column inches of prose I’ve read on line over the last ten years has stayed with me, superb as the writing may have been: all that wit and wisdom has vanished in the ether, passively taken in and mindlessly expelled like microwave cooking.

Not nearly as high; the attrition of the print material from memory is due more to the sheer volume of books I’ve read during my fifty six years. Getting older takes a toll. The point, though, is that what I’ve read with books, those intimate, portable, bendable, malleable objects that contain our language, has become integrated over time–the content and ideas have been better assimilated than from the materials I read on line. It might be a generational difference, I’ll concede, but I think it’s a safe guess that people won’t be reading from computer monitors, cell phones, lap tops or net books; they’ll prefer something cozier, like Amazon’s Kindle device for the book downloads they sell–it seems a device that invites the interaction between reader and the page that are the biggest allure of books over on line reading.

The move toward buying books via download is inevitable, in my view, and the real issue is what one means by “hard copy”. Without indulging in knee-jerk Tofflerism, my current best guess that book buyers will prefer a device like Kindle , or something similar, to reading books either on line or from a computer monitor: as I said before, portability and ease of use are key for the consumer instinct.