Sunday, November 15, 2009

The urge to convert the unruly undulations of our collectivized speech into a hard, condensed verbal thing that makes the dull, if loud noise of lazy inference has crept it's way into a few poet's habit of phrase. We come to Wyn Cooper's poem in Slate, Daily Threads. I liken this to the way my younger brother treated radios, battery powered toys and alarm clocks when he were both the ages of 7 and 9 respectively. He would take the devices apart, typically toss out those pieces he seemingly didn't like the looks of, and then reassemble , to his own liking, what it was he'd dismantled. It didn't matter the radios or the toys didn't work as their advertising promised, my odd and brilliant brother preferred his own idea of this things in his world. Cooper looks on his narrative stream, in turn, and rids the sentences of any phoneme that doesn't make a grating sound. In surer hands this technique works, if only because the writers I'm thinking of--William Burroughs, WC Williams, Rae Armantrout-- intend their works for audiences who live in this world.

Thepoem, is Twitterdism incarnate, and it's most striking accomplishment is that it's taken brevity beyond the conservative deployment of articles, adjectives and other connecting tissues that made Hemingway the still-pilloried genius and made the style a crabby, grandstanding assemblage of barking alliteration and crash-dummy conceits. Some of this might have been effective had it suggested another medium, a painting in the style of Stuart Davis. In his canvases, a city scape on a typical walk does seem to pile on you, which makes his best work a nicely clustered terrain of icons to walk through. But Davis hasn't the curse of feeling required to be literary. Cooper boils the sentences down to the grunts, but what remains isn't believable as speech

Backstreet barricade, arcane
balustrade, hidden kingdom of wing and prayer,
details too fine to miss or mess with,
skinny escape from a netherhood
of parapets and puddle soaked oaks.


He might have veered closer to the old WC Williams' notion of writing to the rhythm and bluntness of speech as it's actually spoken, without a bookish filter to bring the impressions through. Sonnet like? Maybe, but the best sonnets get to an effect that makes you consider the technique and limitations after the emotional content registers and becomes felt by the reader. I can't get beyond this poem sounding like someone attempting a unique way of expressing itself. That is exactly the problem--it does sound unique, and it's the kind of singularity you hope remains a single instance.

Slaves to do These Things: Amy King

Slaves to do These Things
poems by Amy King



Amy King's writing is at once brainy yet coursing with a perceptible sensuality, are among the best of the post-modernist, post-Language, post-confessional style where we have. She is a writer who has surmounted the collective, generationally situated surprise that our native tongue is, in essence, slippery when it comes to addressing our experience and who has gotten on with an interrogation of both the templates one has absorbed from birth and the ones accrued through living long enough to modify one's narrative.


There is no defeatism here, no smallish voice sighing over disappointments, no staccato -cadenced anger replaying old wounds. Amy King comes through these poems, not as a survivor nor someone inclined to obscure the bare facts of her life and the reading she brought with her, but rather a poet with a firm grip on the co-agitations of joy and subtler anguish.

The wonder is that there not a place one senses that they've come across someone who thinks it's time to address themselves in a disguised past tense; these are the wonderings, inspections, musings of someone too enthralled with the discussion underway to worry what the final word will be. What hasn't been said yet is nothing to worry about, but to anticipate as a hard-verbed, sexily ironic entree to what one doesn't already know.

King's verse is sharp, witty, moving in ways that are made powerful by the emotional nuance her line breaks contain; there is the sense that everything one knew is wrong, after all, and yet it stands as a reasonably reliable filter through which one may continue their negotiation with the metaphysically inclined whispers--the ghostly reminders objects, places, faces can awake and send a chill down your spine. There is an analytical rigor here, but not cerebralization of one's history. One witnesses the sort of appreciation of personal multi-valence; the meaning of King's life has changed due to the texts she's absorbed, and her experience, in turn, has changed the meanings of the books she has been given.

Choice and recommended.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Spirituality after all the hair cuts

There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've been sober for twenty years, though, and I have a strong feeling that if I ever heard God speak, he'd tell me to go ahead and have a shot of hooch. Faith I have, but not to the degree that I think a higher power uses me as a mouthpiece for his left over tropes. The feeling passes, and I disabuse myself that poems and prayer are linked in degrees more bountiful than rare. I think the distinctions between the two things are clear and crucial, as both modes of address are for distinct purposes.

The key distinction between poems and prayers are that poems are almost invariably written from within experience, and as a form, is under no obligation to detail and highlight it's rhetoric toward any obligatory pitch or prejudice. The poet, distinct from the praying person, has the freedom to invoke God or invoke him not at all; the poet might even insist that the wonders he or she comes to write about are phenomena in and of itself, independent of anything divine.

Poetry allows for the religious, the agnostic, the atheist and the indifferent with regards to God. The single requirement is that the poem meet the needs of literature, however the poet lands on the issue of the divine; what constitutes literary value, of course, is subject to a discussion that is nearly as abstruse and premised on unprovable suppositions as theology, Literary criticism might be said to be it's own sort of religious dogma.

Prayers, in contrast, start outside human, terrestrial experience and beseech a higher power to intervene in human affairs. While poetry , in general, glories in all things human and is obsessed with the mystery of perception (finding that miraculous enough ), prayer assumes human experience is flawed, in error, and needs a strong hand to right itself to a greater purpose. Prayer in essence is an admission of powerlessness or one's situation and one's instincts to cope with the difficulties presented; the varieties of spiritual inspiration vary and are nuanced to particular personalities and finer or lesser nuanced readings of guiding sacred texts, but prayers share a default position that human existence sans God is incomplete and in need to surrender itself to the Will of a variously described God.

It is possible to write a poem that addresses god that is not an entreaty, finding His presence in the world as we already have it, not as we think it was."Question" by May Swenson does this.

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will
I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without
roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I
hide?


It's a fine poem, and Swenson is speaking from within experience, finding something wondrous in the world as it is. Her poem is about finding God in the details of this existence, and does not beseech a higher power for guidelines about how to live a more righteous life according to scripture. Prayer assumes that human life, in essence, is merely an audition for a seat in Heaven. Swenson assumes we already have our seat and seeks God's inspiration in making the place where we live purposeful and fuller.I don't think God ordains prayers,since they commence with the human subject starting a conversation with his maker in the search for guidance, inspiration, hope. Prayers (and poetry writing) are voluntary, as humans always have the choice not to pray at all and to neither seek nor have an interest in spiritual matters. God does not micro manage what human beings do,

Friday, November 13, 2009

Twitter poetry

The commercial has a Twitter addict gleefully thumbing his message, "I am sitting on the porch." It seemed to me, momentarily, we might enter a time of New Brevity, with the language being composed less of phrases that build their way to more complex meanings and more by lexical equivalents of shrugs, sighs, head gestures, rolled eyes. The limits on the number of characters you could use for the tweet you had in mind forced you to boil your idea down to a point where even essence is seared away, and only the proverbial grunts of need remain. It would, it seem, be a potential source of making one's recognizable language do interesting things, the irony being that one begins with a coherent series of things to say but who, made to observe limits they cannot modify, are made to reduce their communications into something akin to tea leaf readings. Read between the lines, fill in the blanks, assume the Tweeter hadn't made a thumb-inclined typo and, in fact, meant something significant with an odd string of visual glottal clicks. Someone came up with the idea here, where an endless stream of Tweets is amassed, stanza style, in what reads like Modernist poetry feeding on its own armor-plated tail. There was a rule applied to the otherwise random nature of the project: each line, from different tweets, had to rhyme. A sample from today
digg this stuck downstairs... at least i have computer, TV, food, and potty!!! Mind pelicans and dropped cell phones when driving your Bugatti... gay fags put it on twilight and changed the whole song in the process. This class is becoming more and more pointless as the weeks progress. I'm about to go to the gym with my sister and brother.. Got lunch on my top so had to nip out and buy another. praising God for my life and the life of others Robin Williams and Bono look like brothers. I have a twin, and she's bad at everything. Just ate breakfast.. and i cant taste anything!! Tim McCarver is making my ears bleed and my brain hurt You might say I'm such a flirt, lipstick on my neck and shirt. you're such a mystery, i just want to stand and stare. i can't wait to go home today and smell some new air. Just woke up and I'm still thinking of you. Fuck my life. Now where did I put my hockey mask and butcher knife? Im so tired. I'll take the walk and clear my head and Star Wars was fun Awesome. I'll budget and rearrange my room and I may get one. is pumped to see what Jesus has in store for my life and my band. Good morning everyone! Got a day of fun and craziness planned!
In The American Grain, the lingua franca William Carlos Williams had faith in the metronome-smashing, multi-headed parlance. Endless lines of concern, emphasis, interest, and obsession coming at us through the air, joining up with other odd phrases and fresh banalities that give everyone who wants one a voice to spend their two cents as they please, the only limit being 140 characters at a time. Our collective conscious, it seems, seems to be something that is now ruled by an impatient twelve-year-old with remote control. Not that this is an original idea for poetry, visual art, or writing in general--William Burroughs did as much with his cut-up method, his slicing up of various texts, his own and others, and reassembling them in striking phrase combinations that would, despite their nonsequitur essence, forced you to consider the implications; it was something of a peek into a hell you denied being afraid of. The Twitter aesthetic, or the lack of it, is that now anyone can play and do so fearlessly, unafraid of the swirling materialistic signifiers that threaten to distract and dilute their ability to ask for a glass of water at the coffee shop and also at what the results of the jerking language combinations suggest. They suggest nothing and only reflect on the emptiness at the heart of a personality that hasn't anything worthwhile to do. Hell has been redefined as a life without Twitter, without Facebook, without a cellphone to broadcast one's face and quirks across the receiving universe,

Thursday, November 12, 2009

From the captain's tower

T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound weren't friends of democracy,but they did their own style of the mash up --classical and pop styles and a preferring a diffusion of coherence rather than writing a series of unifying metaphors--in ways that would better express their idea of the fracturing of reality and the destruction of purpose in culture. Someone had said that poetry was "news that stayed news", and some of us in the later decades saw fit to use that a declaration about the merging of Art and History , in the immediate guise of the New Journalists, our recent examples being Mailer, Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese.The New Journalists weren't really the mob--mobs cannot , by nature, be democratic nor fair nor be able to devise a fair and just politics. I'd say they were more the guys at the end of the bar who stopped opining about the way things ought to be and got off the bar seat to enter an argument that started without them; they were going to straighten folks out. As it goes, they did provide an interesting altnerative narrative line to what gets called the Movement of History, a choice , up close view of the insanity, the ugliness and the egomania that was chewing at the margins of the Great Society and it's aftershock.

Realty is both an indvidual and a collective endeavor, yes; whatever it may in fact be in God's mind, we , as a species, cannot concieve of reality without a narrative line, a script. We are all stars in our own movie and everyone else is from central casting; reality is close to being a multiplex theatre with very thin walls between the auditoriums. Dialogue and sound effects bleed into each other's plot lines. Pound and Eliot are interesting contrasts, one a windbag, a blowhard,a buttinski, a motor-mouthing gab-bag who happened to have some brilliant notions of how poetry can be made aesthetically and personally viable again, the other being a depressed, crabby, self conciously rigid individual who's view of the cracked surface of culture gave us some haunting images that perfectly convey the despair and longing decades after they were written.

Both were closet autocrats, of course, and very conservative--neither was a fan of corporations nor capitalism, and it wouldn't be so hard to imagine the current strains of the right wing characterizing these fellows as left wingers. A strange set of long-view bed fellows; two anti-semetic, totalitarian inclined poets who wind up writing stuff that dovetail comfortably with a Marxist analysis on the effect of capital on human relationships. Everyone brings their own dynamite to this party, blowing up the same thing for the same reason, but with each with a Jesus of a different name.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

a paragraph with general praise for David Lehman

I enjoy David Lehman's mosaics of place names, mad jazz and painterly effect; there is an fabulous improvisation in his lines that performs an activity I think is poetry's core province, which is testing language's ability to accommodate experience and offer up perception in a manner that merits a second, third or a hundredth look at the daily things that surround us.There is what sounds like genuine surprise and glee when his pieces are at their best set of finessed pitches ;the interruptions or clipped notions work as layers of many references Lehman decides to associate; it's a sloppy process, I suppose, but it's one I'm partial too, taking Frank O'Hara as my foil. There is not enough time in this life to bemoan and decry what cannot be undone. You're use of another writer's phrase merely passively agrees with him. Lehman's technique is more adventurous, more artful--he makes his borrowed references perform as he wants them to.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Put out that damned cigarette

I quit smoking eleven years ago, and one of the great things about it is that I am no longer compelled to feign being the ardent sensualist who insists on exploiting every appetite and sensation our nerve endings can stand, and neither is there the need to wallow in libertarian sophistry about my body, might rights, my choice.

I played both these roles when I was up to two packs a day, combining the aesthete with the rugged individualist, and for all the volume I could muster in protest I wanted to quit desperately . Smoking even around other smokers was a drag, to coin a phrase, and as we gasped more the older we became , the old defenses and protests didn't even convince us anymore.

It's not about personal choice versus what a creeping totalitarian state would force us to do, it's a public health issue, a big one. More cities should go smokeless, and more will, I suspect, as more of us get with the idea that someone else's freedom to light up stops any where my lungs are likely to breath in the second hand smoke.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

A Neruda poem I like


I'm not a Neruda fan, since it seems most of his poems are self-referencing slices of two-faced baloney, but recently a friend posted a small gem he’d written , Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market I was rather taken with. It shines because it is very unlike Neruda’s typical style, a murmuring buzz suggesting revelation but revealing, in fact, mere appetite for more consumption. This poem is splendid, and reads as if it were composed by another poet altogether.Better than most of his work manages to scan; he concentrates on an image out of himself rather than examining his own vanity for a change, and winds up rendering something that seems a true poetic vision, perceptions seeming captured "in themselves", free of an intruding ego. Would that his other poems had these same virtues.

Among the market greens,
a bullet
from the ocean
depths,
a swimming
projectile,
I saw you,
dead.

All around you
were lettuces,
sea foam
of the earth,
carrots,
grapes,
but
of the ocean
truth,
of the unknown,
of the
unfathomable
shadow, the
depths
of the sea,
the abyss,
only you had survived,
a pitch-black, varnished
witness
to deepest night.

Only you, well-aimed
dark bullet
from the abyss,
mangled
at one tip,
but constantly
reborn,
at anchor in the current,
winged fins
windmilling
in the swift
flight
of
the
marine
shadow,
a mourning arrow,
dart of the sea,
olive, oily fish.
I saw you dead,
a deceased king
of my own ocean,
green
assault, silver
submarine fir,
seed
of seaquakes,
now
only dead remains,
yet
in all the market
yours
was the only
purposeful form
amid
the bewildering rout
of nature;
amid the fragile greens
you were
a solitary ship,
armed
among the vegetables
fin and prow black and oiled,
as if you were still
the vessel of the wind,
the one and only
pure
ocean
machine:
unflawed, navigating
the waters of death.


Skinny lines or no, the is packed with sudden feints, shifts and sly insinuations; Neruda uses his senses to see and to compare things to other things and so suggest a world large and mysterious and beautiful that exists outside his personality. The modesty is appealing,and the poetry is more potent. Better than most of his work manages to scan; he concentrates on an image out of himself rather than examining his own vanity for a change, and winds up rendering something that seems a true poetic vision, perceptions seeming captured "in themselves", free of an intruding ego. Would that his other poems had these same virtues. Perhaps you do need to be a woman to find a male obsessing over the magnitude of his own responses to the world. He writes as if he's in a constant state of arousal, spurred on by the seamless sensuality that makes up each surface, skin or material, he sets his hands upon. But I find this to be so much hokum and shtick much the same that I find an awful lot of Whitman's poems to be little more than the results of a machine left alone to generate variations of a self enamored template. Whitman, of course, wrote reams of verse, and far enough of it transcends the less convincing echolations of his reverberating self esteem that we may claim him as an unimpeachable genius. Neruda, though, does not write beyond his own skin often or long enough; the world is not something he discovers anew but instead a mirror that returns not himself but his admiring gaze. Too much schtick, too little light.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Distances made swiftly

Distances
Philippe Jaccottet


Swifts turn in the heights of the air;
higher still turn the invisible stars.
When day withdraws to the ends of the earth
their fires shine on a dark expanse of sand.

We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,

from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand.




The compactness in "Distances" here serves Jaccottet's purpose elegantly, conveying motion and emotion, a natural phenomenon with an internal stirring with a sweet and , carefully construed twining. The poem works with an analogy that treats us to a moral of the story, normally something that would come off us preachy , didactic, dry in our time of shying away from universal declarations, but the poet doesn't gush, doesn't exclaim or otherwise rattle his cup, Whitman style. The indirect reference to Diogenese, looking for an honest man

The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,

from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand.


is swift and firmly applied to the underlying idea that life is a journey for that essence, that ephemeral something in the ether that will it meaning and purpose, a light of hope as our lamp. This is a poem by a writer who had fully gathered his thoughts on that inexpessable thing he wanted to get across.

Hecht's hammer



A little guilt mongering is just what you need to deliver several stanzas of applause ready morality. Anthony Hecht loves to bask in the glow of Points Already Made.The idea seems to be that even with the advance of decades since a horrific event, later generations still bear a moral responsibility for atrocities committed in their country's name; one cannot consider themselves excluded from the fatal commotion that had come before--there is no statute of limitations as to when no longer carries the blood stains and the culturally inscribed rationalizations that made the murder of millions a massive event performed both for the greater good and a fulfillment of an historical inevitability. There is no generational privilege; whatever one tries to do in occupation, hobbies, lifestyle, the routines of contemporary life, on grand and smaller scales, echo the terror, whisper of one's connection to the evil that was perpetuated, implies without subtlety one's responsibility to change the culture to the true nature of a collective personality that made the unthinkable an historical fact we must confront.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day:
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.


This ending is straight from the Twilight Zone, which would have been fine if this were an early sixties television show emphasizing a then-controversial Humanist perspective. Controversial ideas, though, are mainstreamed over time, and this poem seems to occupy a space on the shelve of Subjects No Sane Person Would Argue With.
Hecht, though, is heavy handed in this delivery of what is history lesson and moral that would make for an easy round of applause; one can't argue with his politics or his sense of morality, but the parallelism he uses goes quickly from being an effective device to a trick used a few times too many. As with some other poems of his I've poured over, there is a smugness in his work I find grating, even on points I would otherwise agree without pause or reservation. Hand wringing is what occurs to me, a routinely glum observation that humans are fully capable of being evil , despicable bastards, and that the people who make such monstrosities possible are likewise horrible. This would make a fine speech,but it makes for a poem that wears it's morality like a loud suit of clothes , clashing and garish colors that obscure substance.

There's a clue in the Martin Luther quote Hecht uses as an epigraph, ,Martin Luther’s translation of John 19:7 (“We have a law, and by that law he ought to die.”) 
An ironic counterpoint, I think, given the discussion that's already go on ; Luther believed in a higher order and a Higher Law , and was inspired to disregard Papal rule in pursuit of what he considered God's true nature and calling. Laws are written for the convenience of man's convenience, greed and fouler purpose, and the laws the ancient Jews obeyed to justify Christ's crucifixion, as well as the legal and moral right Nazi's claimed for their genocide were cruel, thin fictions that collapsed under historical weight. Hecht seems to want to set us for how consistently small minded we are in our variety of evasions and excuses for the horror we've done; the poem, obviously, reminds the reader that we cannot escape what we've done to one another; my problem with the poem isn't the moral, but the delivery in general--hammering, heavy, lecturing. It's a message without grace .


A large part of his problem may have been his choice of writing this as a sestina, which limits variety.He's obliged by requirement to repeat phrase and idea in conspicuous variations that extinguish the possibility of surprise. Good poets work through their metaphors and themes so that a premise they begin evolves into something larger later in the work--a reader, when the poems are successful, gets an idea of how ideas are not fixed things, unchanging, but rather change when made to interact with a crucial "otherness" that coincides a verse's codified vernacular. There can be, I think, some playfulness in the language that can make even the most baleful subject stick with you without cramming your face deep into the moralizing. Hecht's choice of sestina, though, coincides with intent. He obviously didn't want his audience to miss his intended ironies and picked a form that would make interesting obfuscation difficult, if not impossible.

Friday, November 6, 2009

The joys of reading Ron Padgett



Ron Padgett is every bit the off hand and fresh-phrasing poet Billy Collins wants to be, and it's his particular genius to write in such a way that he hears what is truly and spontaneously poetic in actual speech and yet has the sense to contain the vernacular with real cadence and rhythm. Only a poet tuned into the weights and varying degrees of gravity a line of phrases and images can sound like if they're managed well can write these types of visual astute poems. His is a poetry of framing a perception at the moment it occurs, a sense of the banal giving rise to new formations of thought; the world is askew despite what appears to be sameness and order, and Padgett's method of ordering it all is askew as well. There is in him a capacity to be surprised without sounding like he's a taffy-headed cretin. There is wonder here, not wondering, which is to say he provides the reader with a clarity that incredibly manages to add to the mystery of the thing or emotion he's trying to contain.

Rialto

When my mother said Let’s go down to the Rialto
it never occurred to me that the name Rialto

was odd or from anywhere else or meant anything
other than Rialto the theatre in my hometown

like the Orpheum, whose name was only a phoneme
with no trace of the god of Poetry, though

later I would learn about him and about the bridge
and realize that gods and bridges can fly invisibly

across the ocean and change their shapes and land
in one’s hometown and go on living there

until it’s time to fly again and start all over
as a perfectly clean phoneme in the heads

of the innocent and the open
on their way to the Ritz.


Padgett has a contagious high spirit , and a large part of what attracts the reader to him is constant sense of surprise; right at the point when matters of thought, situation and action tend towards a fatal gravity, we come across one of his zany associations. The effect is of driving for a long period while listening to an ernest, or at least a belligerent discussion on talk radio when your passenger suddenly changes the changes; sometimes it’s sudden and hard, like the hard jab of fingertip to radio button, or screeching, chaotic and questing, like someone turning the knob up and down the AM dial. A mixture of different measures and accents of modulated speech covering news, weather and traffic conditions and a class struggle of music zips by you while the world the car barrels through promises only more commotion, kinetics, and, for Padgett, surprise and joy .

FixationIt's not that hard to climb up
on a cross and have nails driven
into your hands and feet.
Of course it would hurt, but
if your mind were strong enough
you wouldn't notice. You
would notice how much farther
you can see up here, how
there's even a breeze
that cools your leaking blood.
The hills with olive groves fold in
to other hills with roads and huts,
flocks of sheep on a distant rise


Padgett’s poems at their heart expose the commotion we set ourselves off on as we struggle with what we think existence is doing to us, leaving the effect of a supremely comic sense that’s been honed, whittled and made coolly efficient by pratfalls and even further extremes of snit-fueling agitation.


NOTHING IN THAT DRAWER


Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.



There is in him a capacity to be surprised without sounding like he's a taffy-headed cretin. There is wonder here, not wondering, which is to say he provides the reader with a clarity that incredibly manages to add to the mystery of the thing or emotion he's trying to contain. Padgett is inside his engagement, not separated from it; what works in his poems is his capacity, like Frank O'Hara in his best, unguarded moments, to remained stunned at a flashing perception; a dozen or so combinations of thinking about what's unfolded in front of you rush by like so many film frames even as the phenomenon is still in the process of revealing itself. This is meant as a compliment, as sincere praise; Ron Padgett reminds of someone who is constantly gathering his wits.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Who needs heroes

Allen Ginsberg , as much as anyone, influenced me to get a typewriter and strive to write poems that cut through what I perceived, in teenage fashion, to be the falseness of cultural norms . His counter cultural assimilation of all things that ran contrary to the middle class life I knew was an attractive one, and it seemed, for a summer and an naive spring, that this might be the way the world once the young, the poets, the musicians took the reigns of the culture from an aged one that was sounding a protracted death rattle. He was, once, a good poet who cared how his poems resounded, all this before his full immersion into Spontaneous Bop Prosody ,first thought best thought, and all the rest. Afterwards the poems were transcriptions of journal entries, chatty, repetitive, self absorbed, artless in their flow, although artful in the presentation of Ginsberg as a transparent celebrity who was only what you saw. On balance, Ginsberg has written a handful of the best poems of the later twentieth century, but there is that element in him that makes you cringe, especially his support for NAMBLA. He's someone with a character have to compartmentalize, creating firewalls between his good and his bad writings, and certainly a thick barrier between Allen the artist and Allen the lover of little boys. It's something a great majority of his vast, nominally liberal audience doesn't want to deal with.

Camille Paglia, from who's column the above question was cited some time ago, expressed an overwhelming admiration for the poet for both his work and his support of man-boy love. She connects him (figuratively) with Whitman as an artist of Vast Vision who wouldn't separate their expanding verse styles from their over riding conviction about the power of erotic love. Paglia, of course,is a libertarian in politics and personal choice, and her admiration of Ginsberg's interest in young boys leaves me ill at ease. It seems something those of us who admire Ginsberg's best writings will have to live with and offer up a shrug, a sigh; yes, this writing is great and fantastic, and no, this belief or action is repugnant and horrible. Pound was a fascist supporting anti-Semite, Mailer stabbed a wife, Ginsberg advocated sex between grown men and small boys. It reminds us that audiences are not drawn to writers because they embody ideas of mainstream sanity. Writers bring something extra to the table, and not all of what's in their gift basket is attractive.

It seems something those of us who admire Ginsberg's best writings will have to live with and offer up a shrug, a sigh; yes, this writing is great and fantastic, and no, this belief or action is repugnant and horrible. Pound was a fascist supporting anti-Semite, Mailer stabbed a wife, Ginsberg advocated sex between grown men and small boys. It reminds us that audiences are not drawn to writers because they embody ideas of mainstream sanity. Writers bring something extra to the table, and not all of what's in their gift basket is attractive.What shouldn't the two things be brought up in the same sentence as examples of famed author behaviors that are morally reprehensible? Mailer had a life-long interest in exploring the nature of violence, and even hypothesized in his famous essay "The White Negro" that acts of violence might work as a curative to help people, men especially, to lead more authentic lives. Mailer has modified his take on violence, but the fact that he wrote romantically of violence and of "encouraging the psychopath within oneself" (to slightly paraphrase from the essay) and ends up in that tragic episode merits comment , and it's not beyond the pale to consider the act a culmination of a major part of his thinking; his idealization of personal violence, I think , can be very much be considered a "lifestyle" choice. That Mailer, my favorite writer , expressed regret for his violence is well and good, but it doesn't change my point, that the stabbing, like Ginsberg's desire to legitimize his attraction to young boys, is a nasty fact of the respective artist's lives an admirer has to come to terms with. The point is that heroes have clay feet. Heroes exist to inspire you to do as they have done, and then inspire you in different ways when their actions or words clash with your expectations. The anxiety of influence continues apace—you move on, you do better, until someone else notices you, admires you, does as you have done, and then comes to despise you for daring a human quirk rather than a godly gesture.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Big Idea, or a bunch of small ones hidden in the details?

Steinbeck is of the generation that arrives just after the Muckrakers,Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, who thought that fiction was something of a sociological/anthropological tool in getting at the skewed relations between races and classes in a capitalist economy. Some larger truth, discovered by a focus imagination, could get beyond supposition and provide the correct vision for reform. Steinbeck had the spirit of reformer as well and sought to give an unsentimental account of the working poor in this country; but sentimental he remained, a quality that mired much of his other work besides Grapes of Wrath.

His drive to give the truth in story form needed to be fueled by tangible emotion, and so his tales take on familiar rise-and-fall themes we find in conventional tragedy.Thomas Pynchon is perhaps the novelist version of Chaos Theory, which is to say that all is not chaos at all but rather that the relationships between all narrative angles, as in the relationships between all biological systems, are far more intricate and intertwined than a conventional accounting would have us know. Pynchon steps back several yards from his subject and masters the rhetoric of any style he fancies to pay attention too, and is able to grasp the eternal absurdities of plot lines are made to perform. His aim, I guess, is to the notion of Grand Narrative is actually too modest a term; the tale that's told has multitudeVery post-modern, I'd say, but it's disturbing to think that men and women who are nominally good writers can fill up pages and bandwidth with a tweaked yammering that exists only to avoid the ideas they begin with in the subject line. This is very much like Samuel Beckett's novels, Malloy, Malone, The Lost Ones, More Pricks than Kicks, and here we have the link with the Late Modernism that had the creator (author) and subject (novel) rising , in their unperishable need to produce, from the noisy clash and clutter of an aesthetic philosophy that demanded new ways of putting the world together, of making the world non-liner and multi-valent, sufficiently prepared to be remade with technology and criteria. The point for many is that bleeding-edge writing has been around long enough -- since after WWll, I believe-- for a useful literary criteria to arise around it. The re-making and the re-re-making of those values are generally extensions, elaborations or, more radically, severe disagreements with standards that formed around a work while in nascent form. Modernism, as an aesthetic movement, among scads of others in history, had it's propagandists in it's early time, critics whose views remain bed rock, the base from which reformations are made.

Sadly typing


The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there were an expiration date on grief.Yes, one moves on with their life and tries to have new experiences and adventures, but poets, like anyone else, get older, and the longer view on their life and relations comes to the for. Poetry will tend to cease being the bright and chatty record of one's impulses, leavened with fast wit and snappy references, and will become more meditative, slower, a more considered rumination on those who've are gone yet whose presence remains felt and which influences the tone and direction of the living.

It's hardly a matter of getting mileage from a tragedy as it is a species of thinking-out-loud. We speak ourselves into being with others around us to confirm our life in the physical world as well to confront the inescapable knowledge of our end, and poets are the ones writing their testaments that they were here once and that they lived and mattered in a world that is soon enough over run with another generation impatient to destroy or ignore what was here only scant years before so they may erect their premature monuments to themselves and their cuteness.

We survived our foolishness and quick readings, a poet writes, we lived here and mattered to a community of friends and enemies in ways that no novel or epic production can capture, and we wish you the same luck, the chance to live long enough in this world you seek to fashion after your own image so you may write about your regrets, your failures, the things you didn't get around to doing.


Despair isn't the default position for poets to take as they get older; as I think is plain here, poets will in general treat their subject matter with more consideration, more nuance, more acuity as they age. The host of emotions, whether despair, elation, sadness, celebration, aren't likely to alter, but the treatments are bound to be richer, deeper, darker. One has aged and one has experienced many more things since they were in their twenties, and convincingly casting off the same flippant riffs one did in their fifties as they had while a college freshman is a hard act to pull off, emphasis on "act". One grows up, if they're lucky, and acts their age. Acting one's age doesn't necessarily mean one becomes a crotchety old geezer yelling at kids to get off his (or her) lawn; those character traits are formed long before the onset of old age. But what I think is a given is that an aging poet would be inclined to be more thoughtful as he or she writes. And why shouldn't they be. They have more experience to write about and to make sense of.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Some prose on not writing

So many would be poets, critics and furiously scribbling visionaries and spell-check philosophers are, at this minute, this very second that you take to read this sentence, gnashing their teeth, cracking their knuckles, running their fingertips over the surface of their keyboard as if to start a cadenza of rhytmic assault that would split the room in angry, splintering halves, all this as the cyclopean computer stares unblinkingly at them, revealing a characterless word document in the center of it's digial iris, and nothing comes to these poets desperate to make art, to sock it to their internet pals and enemies that theirs is still the words that come with the ceaseless flow of a muse that's fallen in love with a mind that cannot be contained, damnitallagain!, the words do not come this time like a lover who told the truth when he or she said they were leaving for good, the words don't come, the stream is dry, there is only the room and a man dying on the vine, jacked up on coffee with nothing to say except goddamitallagain!


Picture, if you will, a poet sitting at their desk, drumming their fingertips (if they're inclined to drum) on the mouse pad, taking long and (always) furtive drags from a cigarette (if they smoke), staring through the window into a distance where we they hope to see the returning silhouette of inspiration getting off at the bus stop, suitcase, back from travels hither and yon, trudging up the street, smiling, waving, delirious to be back on the block with a fresh cache of first lines and snappy endings and clever slant rhymes to fuel another half-collection of poems. Only there is no bus stop pulling away, no lone inspiration repatriated with the homeland, no life at all in the distance no matter how hard, how furtively the poet stares to where the horizon meets the last grove of trees and house. The poets stopped drumming their finger, crushes a cigarette (if they were smoking) and sits upright in their chair, they begin to type, they type anything at all, they must fill up the monitor with sentences with broken right margins that don't lend themselves to immediate sense, the piece under construction seems to be one set up after another, a series of private rituals that are as quaint as the writer's concerns with ordering the world in a sing-song rhyme scheme, the fingers rattle on, they pause, the monitor fills with words, something seems at last to be gelling, but no, it got away, the idea, the pay off for the relentless set ups, the description of each minute ritual, all the stalling statics that come to mind only when there is writing to be done, are met only with frustrated expectation because the world the poet tries to traverse and transgress is too damn slow. The writer has their ideas of each thing he or she knows in community where they ply their craft, and he or she has done a psychic mapping of where the objects-- each animal, tree, billboard, car, television antenna--will reside and how they will resound, but the world of it's own accord isn't as fast as the writer's wit, nor has the shabbiest idea of irony or other literary effect.

More panic, maybe another hypothetical cigarette is lit, smoke inhaled, a thought, another thought, the same thought: am I writing the script for the planet, or am I trying to remember what's already happened?I've nothing to write about, the poet sighs, but keeps on, the boulder is being shoved up the mountain, here we go again the poet complains, and what had been a late after noon growing serenely dark in a wrap of inactivity , small breaths , becomes instead an agitated wrap of stalled desire, a membrane one cannot get to the other side of fast enough. The sky darkens further, there is only a slight rime of orange-gold light remaining of the sun as it falls behind the line of trees and slides the other side of the earth where there may well be someone in a room at a desk hovering over a keyboard inscribed in the characters of another language, watching the sun rise as odd birds start to sing before the first light breaks on their street, staring at the corner where they hope public transportation might bring back an inspiration which has eluded them on too many wordless mornings.