second notes for the new decade

I tend to think that the best relationship between practice and theory , as regards the arts (and poetry in particular) is when one blends with the other in a seamless fashion. It's a process that begins with the work itself, a reading and rereading of the poem, let us say, and then , after some routine reflection, referencing any number of critical schemes I think might work in bringing what's contained in the stanzas out from under the subterfuge. Seamless is the word I'd like to use, and it applies here although the handy term has diminished impact with overuse;all the same, theories of criticism , for me,are a way of extending the poem into general discourse.

Poetry works in many ways, but so does criticism, and a pragmatics of interpretation is the most useful way for me to make a poet's work something other than another useless art object whose maker adhered to someone else's rules. My gripe is a constant one, that each succeeding school of thought on what poets should be doing are too often reductionist and dismissive of what has been done prior. This isn't criticism, it's polemics, contrary to my notion that what really matters in close readings is the attempt to determine whether and why poems work successfully as a way of quantifying experience and perception in a resonating style.

First notes for the decade

Ron Silliman greeted the new year and the new decade with a reminder that we're living in interesting times and that the concerned should remember " there's no reason Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck or even Ted Nugent could not become president." Some of those who responded poo-poo'd the notion and mildly chastised Silliman for seeming a shade paranoid. Those folks, after all, were cartoon characters. Ah, but the enemies of the common good love to be discounted; they are well aware that we love to be entertained while we have our hot buttons pushed, and that there far too many Americans with the right to vote who love nothing better than taking conspicuous buffoons seriously.We shouldn't dismiss the idea that Palin, Limbaugh , Beck or, choke, Ted Nugent can become President. The electorate twice elected GW Bush and a host of other fringe-clinging hard righters, a combination that has done the country no good favor.The GOP and the like understand how to work The Big Lie, and have shown a genius at manipulating a general discontent among voters, convincing them again and yet again to vote against their interest. We would do well not to dismiss the above list and stay hard at the fight. The thousands who've shown up at Tea Bag rallies convinces me that there's still a festering, hateful insanity out there; it is no longer at the fringe and has, in fact, metastasized to the center. The Right Wing Noise Machine is louder than it's ever been. We have to make noise of our own and take over the conversation.
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Philanthropist Ruth Lilly has passed away, and there's an increase in the rumbling and grousing about the $100,000,000 endowment she gifted the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation with.It seems that if you want to kill an art form you truly love, give it's practitioners a lot of money to make sense out of. Poetry is such a fractured terrain in terms of techniques, schools, aesthetics and, shall we say, severe differences as to how to see life , that Ruth Lilly's gift was bound to create controversy and resentment; poets are picayune as it is with the meager resources available to them. I'm half way surprised that there hasn't been a blood letting over the funds.Still, I have to say that the Poetry Foundation were as deserving as anything in existence; I was fairly impressed by the fact that they never lowered their editorial standards by publishing one of Lilly's allegedly substandard submissions to Poetry Magazine. Whoring for an endowment they were not.
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I took a Facebook quiz that would tell me what famous film director I would be, and the answer, revealed after answer some insipid movie related multiple choice questions, was that I was Stanley Kubrick.I have never liked this man's movies. Impressive, yes, but for the most part I think he's all gesture, no story. He was more in love with the allegory than with the story the device was supposed to serve.I might add that Martin Scorsese shares many of the flaws with Kubrick, the bulk be of them preferring spectacle to a plausible and compelling narrative line. The difference, I think, is that Scorsese doesn't take a long time between pestering the world with his lack taste. The would have been one attribute from Kubrick he could have benefited both him and ourselves. I suspect there were nothing but superstar names in the roster of results the quiz created bothered to assemble; obvious choices, me thinks. Clint Eastwood, The Coen Brothers, Michael Mann, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Ridley Scott, Chris Nolan, Walter Hill, Sam Rami, Guillermo Del Torro, John Huston, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmasch, Quinten Tarantino, Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, now there are some names I wouldn't mind being my "inner director".

David Levine, RIP

David Levine,very likey the most important caricaturists of the 20Th century, has passed away at the age of 83. Whether his target was Lyndon Johnson,Richard Nixon , Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton, Levine took an unkind eye to the liars, scallywags and overachieving glory seekers who managed to make the world into a trash-strewn playpen. He showed them them not as extraordinary personalities but rather as chronic sufferers of delusion. Bad haircuts, unshaven jowls, necks that couldn't quite fit into the necks of their assigned shirts, Levine saw these power elitists as strange and difficult creatures who looked and sounded sane , but who seemed malformed and amoral on closer inspection. His acid-etched pen and inks were long a tonic in the middle of many a meandering political controversy,and one wonders where such clarity and moral outrage might come from next. Let's hope we get luck.

Holmes gets all twisted

I haven't seen the new version of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson, respectively, but I have come across some whining from some reviewers about this film not treating the Conan Doyle creation with a sacrosant deference. It's a good time to insert the well worn notion from poet / esthetician Samuel Taylor Coleridge about the "willing suspension of disbelief"; as one enters into a relationship with a work that is an act of the imagination, one must relinquish their insistence that narratives be realistic, factual, or adhere to signifiers that merely reiterate the appearance of a world one already knows. The imaginative work should be judged on it's own terms, and from there one is in a better position to judge the relative success of the venture. The should go, of course, for those fictional figures, such as Sherlock Holmes , who's presence in in the culture seems known to us since before birth and who's exacting particulars needn't be , I don't think, cemented in place. The reputation, context and many particulars of Doyle's creation are not about to vanish from the earth; elaborations, embellishments,improvements, extensions, elisions, diminutions, and exacerbations of the character, are, in fact, what keeps us coming back to him; we have , in any event, seen quite a bit of Holmes as the pensive, reserved scientist thinking his way through a baffling series of murderous events, and it may be time,indeed, to see some bring the genius into the arena to bash the ruffians as well as baffle them. I would also like to see a Holmes/Batman team up movie , with the the two of them attempting to deal with a time warp crisis brought on by The Borg , who intended to infiltrate earth culture by assimilating a generation of Swiss watches. All this , of course, gets hopelessly complicated and lost until Thomas Dunson (John Wayne's character from Red River) appears on his horse and bitch slaps everyone into a stunned submission. After that, the sun will explode and there will no need to worry about the purity of any character, we needn't concern ourselves with the integrity of the text or author intentions, we can stop sniveling about canons and auteurs and Nobel Prizes and perhaps read books again, novels and poetry, and listen to albums again, all the way through, and perhaps take in a concert of music composed for instruments that don't required a power source to be heard. Wouldn't that be nice.

More notes on Charlotte Boulay's "planting daffodils"

(I wrote about Charlotte Boulay's wonderful poem "planting daffodils" in 2008. I've re-read it recently, and lo, more remarks, not quite connected.--tb)

The larger evils are evident in the poem, yes, and the narrator does speak of them in the middle passage, preparing the bulbs for planting. The irony the poem contains is that despite the seeming devastation nature foists upon us and, seemingly, itself, is that new life is nearly always the result; volcano explosions, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. What existed before is tossed aside, displaced,destroyed, but not discarded, as their seeming waste become the materials that make a new life possible. A diminished note in the poem is the suggestion that the vanity that we can control nature and change its function is an illusion that we have continually smashed. It is a lesson we refuse to learn, however, precisely because we have the curse of turning our strong feelings into world views and applied philosophies that often as not result in ironic ruin.


This is a strong poem, I think, and I don't think there's a false or strained remark or move anywhere in it. The language is unpretentious without being self-consciously barren as, say, David Mamet's or Paul Auster's poems can be, and her elisions , the pause and unspoken link between the imaginative (Juliet) and the material (the garden in fall) is done with just enough spacing to surprise a reader with the association. The connections between them are presented well--there's no sense in the images being overdressed for the occasion, so to speak--and I rather like the darker implication about human vanity being under-addressed, almost not at all, but implicit all the same. It gives you the effect of a delayed shock of recognition.It's wise of her to avoid as well the mention of Easter.This poem within the scope of what man imagines and what man must actually contend with. The context is broader and the inference is wider as a result, and the reader not interested in particular religious references aren't excluded . Boulay seeks a wider empathy.

The whole issue as to what makes for a "moving poem" is as subjective as what the best ice cream flavor is. The distinguishing these differences in taste are what makes discussing poems , at times, a great pleasure. As a poem, "planting daffodils" is a lyric , analogous to music, and there is something in the sound of the words and the spaces between the images they've formed that gives me a clue to several ideas that are tangible yet beneath the surface of what the poem describes; the art of what was almost said. This poem is a useful illustration of how our concepts of life and death are layered in sets of metaphors and analogies that contrast our routine lives with our idealizations, and warns, at the margins, that we will be surprised, shocked and saddened at the end if we think we've gained control of our fate beyond our final day.

Dulled

So many poems have come our way concerning people who are dead, dying , grievously ill or otherwise three-sheeted to states that lack a pulse. This would be depressing normally, but it 's interesting to witness how the writers manage to obfuscate , obscure and botch a subject. A sudden death is confusing and I understand the attempt to write one's way from a mire conflicting emotion, but there is , often times, only more confusion. Rather than being made aware of the experience in phrases that can unmistakeably convey emotion and irony that can occur in the midst of the psychic turmoil, we are only witnesses to someone's inarticulate graspings towards a verbal effect. It's wearying to come away from a poem convinced not by the by the sentiment , but only by certainity that the writer couldn't get across a difficult set of ideas. The problem maybe , at times, that the notions were still forming; even in an art where obvious meanings are not required, there still needs to be a tangible set of figures one has considered and crafted with which a plausible surrendering of disbelief is possible.As with the fallen who are being addressed, directly or by way of intensely crowded example, the poets who've braved the page and revealed their dedications don't appear eager to really discuss anything; imagery,allusion, archaic and grating coinages emerge and make the subject disappear under the weight of description, which may be the hidden strategy after all. There is nothing less than the creation of distance from the heated stew of unresolved tension; compare this event to other things and eventually the original idea is lost , not to return to our mind. For the time being at least...

Rosenthal's "Morophine", while not dealing with a fatality, prefers jumping from one image, metaphor, simile to the other instead of establishing a series of ideas through the imagery to bring us to a perception a reader would not otherwise have had. It begins nicely enough, concretely, but quickly and seeming to plan it is lost in a parade that seems less a poem than devices gone amok:

The window to this world opened again
as the drips slowed, and she became
whippy as a sheet of glass improperly
annealed, ready to smash at any
indefinite touch in a whining matrix
of stresses,the bed frame a museum box
where she lay, encased as a mummified
kestrel tailed with a fleece of fetid cloth
laid out by the mongoose (pharaoh's rat)
cradled in the nook of a dead arm,
and her eyes were intensified as soup
with beef bouillon and parsnip, potato,
celery ends, the candor of bread and butter
to swallow the fact of what happened.

Different ideas come to me, none related to what Rosenthal had in mind; I am thinking more of the Clampitts arriving in Beverly Hills in an old truck crammed with every gougedand dented piece of property they ever bought through the Sears Roebuck catalogue, the toys in many an old cartoon who come alive when the shopkeeper leaves for the night, a bargain table full of sundry used merchandise, slightly worn, marked down . The succession of metaphors is overdone, and the idea --that there is a human need,it appears, to numb and distance ourselves from the unfiltered sensations of both the worlds we have both in and outside our head, and that one desires to be delivered by means greater than themselves to an plateau where the material stuff matters not--is ironically mummified by Rosenthal's desire to make this brief verse vivid. This is a baroque diorama, a box of strained effects, without the lyric imperative. It's a noise maker only, static and crackle.

Artificial, yes. Intelligent, no.

Salon has started a rather fine film section in it's redesign, and it was a surprise to see Chicago Reader movie critic Jonathan Rosenbaum highlighted in a brief piece defending Steven Spielberg's maligned sci-fi meditation on the human soul, A.I.Artificial Intelligence. His defense of the feature , brave as it is, has the benefit of being a pithy:


Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense -- an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what's human and what isn't, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.

I am glad someone thought this was a good movie. I had the good fortune to take a couple film courses with Jonathan Rosenbaum in the seventies when he was a visiting film lecturer in UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department. The topic of one class, Paranoia in Films, was an especially engaging, if diffusely defined course, and it was of particular interest that the required text for the course was Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, from which Mr. Rosenbaum would bestow cryptic quotes from the book like "God is the original conspiracy theory" while showing acutely observed studies in monomania such as Nick Ray's Bigger than Life. That film in particular was apt for a course in paranoia on film, as it dealt with a meek school teacher's growing dependence of a mood altering medicine (cortisone) that converted into an arrogant, edgy, lunatic who needed eventually to be placed in a straight jacket. The print Rosenbaum received for the class wasn't the theatrical print he expected, but rather the cropped version, intended for television screens, where much of the image was cut away and the focus was on the talking heads. Viewing a tightly contained James Mason screaming larger than life on a large auditorium screen made you feel like you were watching someone trying to escape from a shrinking glass box. Paranoid indeed.

It's with this back story that I understand his appreciation of A.I.:Artificial Intelligence, but where he sees a brave vision from Steven Spielberg in the way he attempts to sort through the ways technology threatens to blur and eventually erase the distinctions between human and android programming--the eventual point was that both these creations are subject to a hard wiring that needs to bond with others as a defense against the lurking solitude--but it remains for me a vague, grandstanding mess. The buzz was that this was intended as the last film Stanley Kubrick was to make but never got to, and that Spielberg had gained access to the notes and developed his own ideas about how to flesh out, so to speak, the bare premise. Kubrick , is not the best person to pick if you're in the market for a useful idea for a film; more than a few of us have felt that the late director's reputation was inflated beyond sane justification, a man who could indeed shoot an engrossing sequence but was ill at ease to explain what thinking lay behind his imagery. It was a matter of monumental style in Kubrick's films, and he's lucky enough to make a hand ful of movies that haven't had their reputations collapse after their initial release and the wave of awestruck reviews.

His final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, was as pompous and preposterous a botched project as anything Ed Wood had made; you suspect that he had actually died before he had a chance to repair the raw feed in post production. Even the director's skill for making capable actors appear like sleepwalkers wasn't enough to calm the antsy Tom Cruise; he remains within his emotional range as an over-eyed wind-up toy. AI,in kind, was a half a bad idea from Kubrick's mind, was was reason enough for Spielberg to pour on the effects, flash the lights, go crazy with the colors, with abrupt and unconsidered cuts between broad humor, family hour sweetness and uncorked violence and villainy. The last set of clauses sound like a Coen Brothers movie, sure, but the Coens have a tone that runs through through their vexing genre variations and character studies; there are links, there are connections, there are matters in the frames that can be discussed, debated, but which are very tangibly present in the movie. Spielberg is muscle, flash, loud noises; his idea of subtext is a Cliffs Notes of discussion points--what morality play that can be discerned operates only on the surface, and it is when this happens--as it does all though this messy, ill-lit narrative--that you realize what button-pushing schlock meister the director really is. The whole A.I. enterprise comes off like that horribly cropped scene of James Mason yelling on an auditorium screen. Nothing at all fits the slim premise.