SCHOOL OF DRONE

The length of In the Cafe, appearing this week in Slate, would have you think that author Louise Gluck is a monologist. That's not the case, we find; a skilled monologist will have a a point or an effect they achieve , more often than not. Gluck's poem long lines are merely that, long, un-inflected,without snap or spice. Instead, we have a droning account of a male friend who happens to be a serial romancer--a sensitive male who absorbs portions of women's lives and energy over a period of time and then leaves them for the next adventure. It's not that this isn't worth writing about, but this is more topic drift development, an exercise in killing time. Gluck doesn't even go through the pretense of trying to make this intriguing as poetry and offers up the stale device of disguising undistinguished prose in irregular line breaks.

Gluck's long- form poetry is part of the disparaged School of Quietude, the conservative conglomeration of professional poets who's careerism controls the major book contracts, literary awards and plum teaching assignments who's market-pleasing style, a gush of self-infatuated musings that prefer to leave the reader hanging in murmuring waves of uncommitted relativism--the sort of work that doesn't move you to think beyond your conventional wisdom but leaves you anxiety -ridden in the decorated fringes of your misery. The attitude, among the worse offenders , seems to be gutless, indecisive, reflective rather than reflexive, passive rather than active in the world. One appreciates stillness and the sharply observed detail independent of an interfering ego, but that is not what Quietude, in the worst of it's world, is about; the poets seem to be bothered that they were cursed with compositional skills. You read them time and again and come away with the idea that a requirement among this coterie is to speak of themselves in their work as attempting to have an experience. You can feel the shrug , sense the poet dropping his pen, you can nearly hear the soft swearing under his or her breath about the perception being too hard to convey with wonder, awe, as a miracle in itself. That is to say, complacency wins again and the prospect of changing one's loathesome circumstance is too frightening. One would rather suffer with what they know rather than dare a single foot step in another direction. The worst of this kind of poetry, I've heard, is like a three hour forced tour of your own living room.

Hers is better described, perhaps, as the School of Drone, a kind of outlining of unexceptional incidents involving straw figures wherein a reader suffers what would have been a tolerable three minute on -air NPR essay about a diminutive epiphany stretched egregious lengths. that provoke involuntary teeth grinding. One doesn't really care about Gluck's portrait of a man-in-process; she attempts a neat inversion in maintaining, toward the end, that this man wasn't wasn't a bastard nor a feckless creep. By the time she grapples with her reasons for having sympathy for her comrade's quest for enlightenment, we are out of sympathy with her tale. This becomes the melodrama you switch the channel from.

It's cut-rate of D.H.Lawrence, but without the erotic intensity.She does, retain Lawrence's rhetorical bulk.Like him, she sounds like she's trying to talk herself into believing her basic premise as well as the reader, a trait that makes "In the Cafe" a dry lecture that hinges on a vague and brittle point. This poem is the equivalent of the bore at the party who continues to prate although everyone else has gone home and the lights are turned off .

Adding to the despair over this poem's glacial pace is the promise of the first lines, which are bright, with a hint of witty resignation;

It's natural to be tired of earth.
When you've been dead this long, you'll probably be tired of heaven.

It's a perfect set up for a story of an every man's quest for the place where he might find contentment in love and spirit. But where there might have been a telling comedy that provides the moral that our expectations undercut what we assume are our virtuous yearnings instead turns into a drab recollection. No time is wasted in weighing down the promise of the first two lines with the leaden grouchiness of the second two:
.

You do what you can do in a place
but after awhile you exhaust that place,
so you long for rescue.

This gives the whole game away.I wonder if this would have worked far, far better if Gluck had written this as a short story. The prose -quality of these lines might have bloomed a little more, breathed a little more air, the scenario might have been more compelling.

The first lines are terrific and they could have been a poem by themselves, a condensing Gluck seemingly wants nothing to do with. Being succinct has amazing advantages.It provides an ending, a place to land. Gluck and other writers --myself at times--often mistake raw length for more substantial writing.Some writers have the gift to go long and reward the patient reader .Most do not, and few of us are Proust, few of us are Whitman, few of us are early Allan Ginsberg.

MICK JAGGER , ROCK AND ROLL MANNEQUIN

Mick Jagger has amassed a troublesome track record with his non-Rolling Stones projects, the aged rock icon turning out intermittent and indifferent solo albums, film performances, duets, the whole shot. Even to the most ardent Jagger partisan, the obvious is now clear that the good man's musical instincts have found best expressions in his partnership with fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richard. Richard seems the real musical genius behind this band's amazingly resilient body of blistery, wickedly cynical rock and roll, and it's due to him, I think, that they continue to release strong albums decades after their supposed "peak"; 2005's A Bigger Bang caught me by surprise when I first played it. The trademarked weave of cranky, thundering guitar work by Richards and second guitarist Ron Wood fused quite ably, brilliantly even around a set of riffs assembled with a jeweler's touch, Jagger's vocals, a signature mix of whimpering sobs and bull-moose roars, underscore the album's unifying tone of hard-knocks hindsight and pampered fatalism. Charlie Watts' drum work kept it simple, hard, steady. This album is the sound the Stones have been famous for, turned into a refined signature art, the sense that there is a huge apparatus of attitude and consequences teetering and about to fall forward, the sheer weight of gathering gravity picking up speed, velocity, undeniability. Jagger, though, did have one album, from all his years of attempting to create a musical style independent of the Stones, where his instincts find a comparable format; as with the case with Richard, the disc's success has to do with who he partnered up with. In this case, it's Lenny Kravitz on Jagger's 2001 album Goddess in the Doorway. 

What makes I Goddess In the Doorwayworth the purchase is the fact that Jagger is singing better than he has in quite a spell; gone is the bellowing that characterized the corporate feeling of the last two decades of Stones releases, replaced with performances that underline the fact that while Jagger may be technically a poor singer, he is a supremely gifted I vocalist. The distinction is key if only to say that a singer is someone who can hit the notes of a melody with trained technicians, and maybe, just maybe manage something of a human personality, punchy and unpredictable, to come through the purely rounded tones. Jagger, with fellow mewlers Dylan, Bowie, and Tom Waits, among others, work brilliantly within their shredded, imperfect limits as frontmen. Jagger again sounds alive and tuned to the screwy grooves of the tunes. Musically, too, the album is strong, with the electro-vibe of "Gun" percolating nicely under Jagger's faux-sinister snarl and grunt. The riff-happy "God Gave Me Everything I Want" is a slam-dunk of a hard rocker, with all the crashing guitars from Lenny Kravitz bringing several generations of attitude-fueled chord bashing to bear against a four-square drumbeat. Jagger's vocal quite literally howls and twirls a keen elbow to the rib and offers a brief, blasting, well-situated harmonica riff toward the end that manages more impact than any number of witless John Popper solos. Sorry to say that the effect of all the good sounds here wither when one confronts the lyric sheet, wherein Rock's supreme ironist and cryptic cynic par excel lance sinks below the surface as he struggles to come with something resembling real, genuine, heartfelt emotion. It's a tedious assortment of a greeting card, web-page poetry where every unexceptional expression of love and its fractured derivatives finds room in these otherwise agreeable tunes. Jagger hasn't a talent for reflection or writing about others who are dear to him; his stylized narcissism is too entrenched.

Little Denny--a tale of youth and food

Little Denny kept sliding off the lunch counter stool. The waitress poured his mom another cup of coffee.
The waitress laughed, a snorting giggle.
“That's cute” she said, turning to look at Mom, a young woman in her mid twenties who'd peering at a magazine while fidgeting with her food. She slapped her sandwich on her plate and grabbed Denny's arm.
“Shit” she said, her voice a irritated hiss, “he's doing this on purpose, the rat-“
“OwwwwwwwwwwwwWWWWWWW” yelled Denny when she yanked him upright on the stool, forcing into an impossible posture. His face met the edge of the counter half way,
where he could see a history of dried and chipping wads of gum mark the rim like mountain ranges on three-dimensional globes. The hamburger Mom ordered for him sat on its plate in front of him, a mountain of meat and sesame seed buns.
“Now eat” his mother demanded. Her long finger that had been leafing through the magazine pointed to the plate, looking crooked, shaking, with a long, twisting fingernail curling toward the charred patty as if to drop something from a claw. Denny cringed again.
“Eat” she said again “eat and quit fucking around.”
The waitress's smile shrank to a chastised `o' from his bulging , full-cheeked glory, and turned to chores , her own business. She pulled half empty ketchup bottles from a shelf under the counter as Denny reached over the chasm between he and the counter and grabbed the hamburger from the plate. It was the size of a football in both his hands. Squeezing it tight, he raised it to his mouth and then turned his eyes to Mom in order to see if she could see him doing exactly what he was told, a mature boy of 4 and a half!
Mom was sipping her coffee, the sandwich on the plate with two bites out of it, staring at the waitress who was pouring the remains of the ketchup bottles into a single vessel, so to waste not a drop. Denny squeezed the burger so tight that the patty slid from between the buns and hit the floor with a wet slap that sounded like a kiss heard in rowdy cartoons. The phone rang, and when the waitress reached over to grab the line, her arm swept into the bottles and knocked them to the floor. The bottles shattered into a hundred red, bloodless shards. Startled, Mom spilled her coffee.
Little Denny fell off the stool.

Despairing over despair, observing what's already perfect

I  my love for adjectives, metaphors and unhinged diction when I was a younger man attempt to write in the shadow of the Eliots, the Ashberys, the Stevens of the poetry world. Needless to say (but to be said anyway) I wrote a great deal of poems that could be blue penciled into submission, as many, many of the things I composed were done on the fly, in full improvisational rant. Most of us are lucky enough to survive and learn from their youthful indulgence, and my preference in tone , for my work, is to more concise, terser , more direct in my treatment of the world. It's an ongoing experiment in phenomenological terrorism, but we can conclude that my later offerings seeks to get back to the data, the situation under a poem's consideration. One longs for something to come from their keyboard that's less abstract and more at one with the material realm, a project destined to fail--one cannot step outside their own skin to observe oneself in their habitual habitat--but it is the attempts that are worth considering, pondering, it is the art that adds to our knowledge of the things we don't know. For others, of course, poetry is a means to classify and categorize and index people, places and things; it is a means to conquer the world and reduce to quantifiable data. Poetry here is means of missing the point entirely. 

Sadness. The moist gray shawls of drifting sea-fog,

Salting scrub pine, drenching the cranberry bogs,

Erasing all but foreground, making a ghost

Of anyone who walks softly away;

And the faint, penitent psalmody of the ocean. 

One needs to admit to Anthony Hecht's mastery of the carefully articulated tone of his work , and appreciate as well the limits he observes when constructing correlatives between interior states with the material world. Not pompous, not grandiloquent, not bombastic, Hecht's poem "Despair" finds a way to make the sluggishness of the human spirit resemble the turns of the day-- 

Gloom. It appears among the winter mountains

On rainy days. Or the tiled walls of the subway

In caged and aging light, in the steel scream

And echoing vault of the departing train,

The vacant platform, the yellow destitute silence.  

The adjectives are perfectly selected and fitted like the smaller, finer diamonds in a larger arrangement of vaguely tarnished gems, with the intent being to remind you, I suspect, that more often than not one has found themselves caught unaware that the warm afternoon has taken on a sudden chill in just the minutes it took for the sun to take a late afternoon shift of position. It does just that, but it seems a bit false; the perception seems padded by the slightest degree.  

But despair is another matter. Midafternoon

Washes the worn bank of a dry arroyo,

Its ocher crevices, unrelieved rusts,

Where a startled lizard pauses, nervous, exposed

To the full glare of relentless marigold sunshine. 

What I recognize over anything else is a world that seems to exist only for it's elements--an Edward Hopper universe of subdued tones, melancholic hues and diffuse light-- to illustrate a mood that itself seems more imagined, fanciful. The language eschews the chance to be vivid and naked with the sadness it attempts to corral and instead decorates the psychology. Phrases like "Washes the bank of a dry arroyo" or "To the full glare of relentless marigold sunshine" , for me, hang there like waiting room art that is nebulous and comforting; the real experience is abstracted, obscured, defused of potential. This makes me think less of an accounting of what one has felt and found suitable expression for than it is a rumor of something having happened . This is the kind of language one comes upon with someone who has something on their mind they aren't comfortable exposing to an honest art. Measured, well crafted, balanced, similes and metaphors synchronized , but without a single provocative notion. You're left to admire the structure of the thing, the finesse of the inner mechanisms, and leave the poem without a hint of real feeling.

________________

The conventional wisdom is the older artist uses bolder strokes and is more selective in the techniques they use from their assembled devices and acquired skills, and appealing prospect for older poets and readers who surfeited with the orgy of earnest self examination. Enough about you, already, we know it's you who's had these experiences, tell us what you see without announcing that you're in the act of seeing. I don't constantly roll my eyes when coming across a personal pronoun in a poem--that would be rude, even in private--and I will attest to liking poets who've a winning manner that mitigates their constancy in the work; I am a Norman Mailer fan, after all. But not everyone is so engaging, nor interesting, at least when they are the articulated persona the poetry is coming through. Much of the time you desire the more direct approach; let's skip the foreplay and go straight to the perception, the place where the new idea forms. My model is William Carlos Williams, who could, to my mind (and ear) draw a lyric from the barest of linguistic ploys. It's a clean, well lit poem. 

Spring and All 

by William Carlos Williams 

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad, muddy fields

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water

the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

with dead, brown leaves under them

leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter. All about them

the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow

the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf

One by one objects are defined-

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of entrance-

Still, the profound 

change has come upon them: rooted, they

grip down and begin to awaken. 

There seems less of the telling-the-world-what-it-mean??s I gather from Hecht's skilled outline and sense in Williams someone who has remained quiet and still long enough in the spaces he inhabits to have the world reveal itself. This poem is one of action, so to speak, activity, of how nature exudes and recedes with the change of the weather, how the terrain seems to wither under a severity of cold wind and hard snow but comes to life again as the ground softens and the temperature warms a bitter air. Where Hecht, to me, reads as if he was determined to find dour inner states, Williams finds symmetry and elegance in what the passerby might consider a rough and unrefined wood; Williams' eye is sure and his ear is tuned to the music that's already in the frame he wandered into ; there was no need to busy up his materials. Being the doctor, Williams had, perhaps, an innate appreciation of how things fit together, whether the human body, the buildings of a city that hugged a rough shoreline, or otherwise untrammeled nature itself. He is wholly aware that what he's seeing is already perfect before he arrived; the perfection is independent of his personality and his desires, and there his presence does not bring beauty to the landscape. It is his task to notice what's there , to see what is in front of him that otherwise goes unseen, to notice the world apart from his ego. That is what makes Williams one of my favorite poets.

Slam is dead, they say

Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft? - NYTimes.com
Well, not dead, but in danger of losing street credibility because of its growing popularity as a default style among a generation of urban, street oriented poets. Like hip-hop, it's a brand name, not an attitude anymore, a commercial idea, no longer a community ideal. Slam poetry has arrived, and it bothers more than a few. The New York Times recently worried whether slam poetry was going soft and in danger of losing whatever potency. The slammers are virtually everywhere you go when you investigate the further reaches of what comprised the unincorporated, unassimilated branches of contemporary poetry, but like rap, the style has become just that, a style, another among many.

The anger, rage, the colloquial playfulness and in-your-face strategy that had made these bracing bards a phenomenon worth considering has become predictable. A large cause of slam's deadening is the monotony of presentation--choppy, click-track, scratch-popping momentum, hip-hop style, almost invariably defines the poets 'performance style. One tires of being exhorted to, waved at, lectured, or otherwise badgered to show the poet some love. The School of Quietude could offer a lesson to the young, the eager, and the impatient: dial it down, quiet it down, and don’t forget to breathe.


One poet after another seem to ape the maneuvers of the one who'd been on stage before them, only with their gestures, nonsensical accelerations and ramping down of recitation temp, their whoops and hollers, their sudden gushes of near rhymes and forced analogies pouring forth, unguided by nothing but gravity, like a collected detritus falling from a crowded closet. As with listening to streaming heavy metal rock on satellite radio, might have spent their time listening to the machines in a laundry mat. At least some clothes could get washed in the bargain.

What further kills the buzz with slam poetry is the incessant, braying, unreconstructed egotism of the poets who cannot leave the autobiographical style behind and place distance between themselves and the world they live in. Even in the bleakest situations, the sorriest locals, a poet worth their good graces could drop the personal pronouns and study the relationships of people, places and things without the need to intervene with declarations, objections, ineffective protests. As with the pacing and the cadence, the effect of nearly every poet delivering a hasty rant glutted with self referencing becomes an ironic form of group think--think of the old joke about someone attending a convention of Independent Thinkers. The motto: I WANT TO BE A NONCONFORMIST JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. The poet has the right, sure thing, to talk about things in entirely whatever fashion they choose to, and solipsism isn't rare at all in the far-ranging universe of poets and their assorted schools, but variety, we think, would be expected from an emerging school of poetry. One shouldn't feel compelled to write and perform in the same manner. The might as well be wearing school uniforms, complete with a crest.

David Bromige

David Bromige, a poet with an ongoing interest in seeing how the language operates in the many schemes a human mind can present for it to map out, passed away yesterday, leaving behind a large body of work that is, as the saying goes, too broad for a simple explanation . He was, from my too infrequent readings of him over the years, a poet who continued to go the outer perimeters of form , intrigued by how one might come up with new cadences to contain the accelerated rate of experience. He seemed also to be someone who wouldn't allow lazy expression be what represented the emotional core of the poetry, either from dog-eared templates of conventional poeticizing, or hastily contrived experiments that missed a human connection in their haste to be striking. In his best form, which was usually the case when I picked up one of his books, he was a poet who thought we could do better when addressing a remarkable life we've been given.

Ocean, song, death

Sleep is a foreign country sometimes, that place we can't get too long into the night because there's some nagging concern , some godawful dread has escaped the compartment we've placed it in, assuming a blunt and repetitive voice, a sound, a melody that will not let up, denying us a visa to a restful night. Matters trivial or grave, it does not matter the contents and their meaning, we have all, more or less, spent the night staring at the ceiling, memorizing the grain of the wood beams above. Jason Shindler had bigger fish to fry in his poem Ocean. It's clear that the narrator cannot sleep, a song and a probable loop of thoughts replaying through his mind--he has something on his mind that will let him rest. It is a rush of ideas that contradict each other and then blend into a single stream, the hankerings of a desperate man struggling to maintain a narrative coherence to the life he knows is coming to a final dawn.The opening lines --

Good bye again. Say there is a little song in my head

And because of it I can't sleep or change my mind
About the future.

--pretty much establishes the fact that Shindler's narrator isn't particularly thrilled with his prospects as a going concern--"...I can't...change my mind /About the future."--and gives into the general wash of the language, the variations on the undisclosed phrasings in the song and attempts to imagine an ocean with the sound of water merging with is troubling melody. Now the song runs all the way down

To the beach where I sit as if the sky

Were my room now. No one, not even you,
can hear me singing.

As if the music rose from the mouth of the ocean.

The respite from the song, the sleepless state is to imagine the breeze of the sea air , the night sky, and imagine, vividly. that the walls of the room have given way to the larger world that this person knows they will be departing. It seems to me that this the need to deny the isolation of the end, the end, and to have the senses feel more fully, again, what is unique and textured; we might be reading about someone trying to change the tune that will not stop from a dour funeral march to a moving, rhythmic sound that might reanimate the muscles, give strength to the bones, make the labored breathing a full intake of wind. More than that--"No one, not even you, not even you,/can hear me singing./ As if the music arouse from the mouth of the ocean."-- there's a feeling that we might have walked into a room where someone was talking to themselves, speaking in odd referents as though rehearsing some lines of a sad monologue, in preparation for a large, all transforming transformation. Shindler's hero has a desire to be merge with all things that he has known and with all things that have formed him, to sing and have himself become integral to the planet.

Like rain before it reaches us.
Like wind twirling dresses on the clothesline.

Who has no one has
the history of the ocean.

Lord, give me two more days. So that
The last moments may be with someone.

It's less the prospect of death that incites the dread than it is the knowledge that one stands to be alone at the moment of passing and forgotten afterwards; delicately, persuasively we enter into the thought stream of someone in some half-awake delirium, drawn between the desire to merge with a the essence of a life bringing ocean and to remain , at the end, on the less abstract plain of being in the company of an intimate. These are the thoughts of someone on the way out, weighing up the imagined options of their end.it would seem to me that the narrator does not want to leave this life and is , at first, insisting that he deny an eternal darkness by somehow melding his spirit with the churning, endless, life giving power of the ocean. Later, though, there is acquiescence and the speaker accepts his fate, it seems, and ceases to make demands about the terms of his death and instead prays humbly for a more modest favor, two days for the arrival of the nameless "you" whom the poem addresses. There is a transition here that is quick and seamless, but not seeming arbitrary. Rather than live on forever, somehow, there is the right sized desire to have what one sees at the end be a person for whom a lifetime was worth all that came with it.