Rachel Hadas and the turntable of history

Getting older has many things that bring us down, the most pervasive being, of course, that one has seen it all and said it all ; the consequence of lingering too long in this funk is having oneself consigned to a crowded gallery of elder cynics passing judgement on a younger generation's aspirations and inventions. This is avoidable, to be assured. The earnest cultivation of new adventures, new interests, new people of which and whom one might not have investigated at a younger age--the difference between generations , let us say, being that a younger crowd believes that history has a determined end which they can influence, and the older, which would come to equate human experience as analogous to basic cable channels subsisting on reruns of old TV shows who's plot lines and outcomes are variations on a small selection of templates-- offer a cure for the cheap sense of superiority of the been-there/done that variety.Rachel Hadas' dilemma isn't nearly as global, though, being described, rather , as a sort of free-floating depression , in her poem "Generic". The joys of reading a book to a six year old elude her; perhaps the book was read to her when she was young, fifty five years earlier.

The little boy who snuggles next to me
while I read him Millions of Cats,
and we meow together
"No, I am the prettiest!" "I am!" "I am!"
is five. I'm sixty. The book is eighty-one.
I have read it before.

Hadas elects not to offer miniature essays on the subject of the dissociation from her own experience and instead attempts and, I think, achieves an echo effect with this poem. While she reads the book in the animated voices , it's suggested, elliptically yet strongly felt in the absence of fuller explication, that as she reads the book she remembers and so hears the book being read to her from a previous decade. This crisply outlined introduction sets us up rather well to the narrator's psychology, the encroaching feeling of being estranged from the history and the ongoing events of her life. She is even aware of the terms she hs used to mark the episodes, the verbs and adjectives intended to make her experience unique and significant:

Durable, evocative, stale, weary;
renewable, exhaustible, and placid;
benign or neutral, shifty as the moon;
obedient to undeciphered laws:
What we take for granted
vanishes, reconfigures, disappears.

Her psychology turn the words against themselves, the irony being that their use is supposed to define what is worth holding onto from our life and so give the longer view of few of our journey a narrative quality that will resolve itself in an appropriately poetic fashion; the words themselves are reruns themselves, becoming terms of revision rather than words that mark the singular essence of specific deeds in particular circumstances. The Hadas narrator has not only done any and all the these things before, she has already used these words to contain the problematic dynamics. Language seems, in this revelation, not the means with which we understand the world and our experience in it but rather a convenient device we are clever with to catalogue and index our lives . There is no term pondering, no introspection;one will pull from experience when it's convenient, expedient toward achieving an end."Generic" is a poem about a nagging doubt finding a clear, articulate voice. The achievement of Rachel Hadas is her side stepping the attraction of rudderless introspection and isolating instead the odd remove one feels when what one is doing in real time is no more engaging than a broadcast drama one has seen before. There is , for me, a tangible feeling of dislocation. One can almost feel the curtain drop between the narrator and the events .

Who is afraid of poetry?

April again, National Poetry Month again,and we ask ourselves, in an attempt to make conversation among the the clan, whether poetry intimidates the average American reader. The general response ,from anecdotal evidence,is that Americans haven't the collective wit or attention span to read anything that's over detailed, elusive and allusive in the way a point is made, or which doesn't offer an easy cure for an media-influenced dread of nuance.  I don't think Americans are afraid of poetry; rather it's a matter of not many Americans, comparatively, think of poetry as a resource since we, as a culture, are not an introspective culture, but instead one that continuously looks forward to a future to be created. Poetry, so far as the general reader is concerned, is a matter of one being alone with their thoughts and structuring their experience in a narrative form, a narrative that not only chronicles events along a time line, but also the nuance of experience, the fleeting sensation of something changing in their psyche.

This requires making the language do extraordinary things to accommodate an uncommon interpretation of experience, and Americans, a people reared on the ideology of what can be done in the face of adversity, have no expansive desire to do something so impractical. Language is a thing meant to help us solve material problems, to achieve material goals, and poetry, a strange extension of linguistic twists and shadings, does nothing to put food on the table, put money in the bank, to further the quest to cure an endless variety of incurable diseases.

Poetry is immaterial to purpose, function, policy; the absence of larger audiences for poetry isn't about fear from a perception that it's a mode of expression that is the least useful among several the lot of us might select on a given day. There are those of us who would argue that poetry's lack of identifiable utility is exactly what attracts us to the form--I happen to think that , like Wilde, that all art is quite useless in practical application (save for the fact that I believe humans crave beauty in form and in expression) and adhere to Harold Bloom's running definition of what literature , in general, avails the reader : to paraphrase, literature (poetry) helps us think about ourselves. Americans , I think it's safe to say in the broadest sense, have no real desire to reside individually and psychically work their way to an "aha" experience with poetry as a conduit. We do think about ourselves, but more in terms of accumulation rather than an inner equilibrium. The measure of a man is his wallet, not the subtlety of his thoughts, and this a form of fearlessness that borders on insanity.

The Take Down.

What I'm saying is that
you ought not to park campers on your lawn,
tire tracks deep in the mud
slowly becoming merely mire
with each rain that happens by.
Nor do I endorse leaving old couches and refrigerators
in the alley three garage doors down
or dumping in on empty lot
where combinations of abandoned furniture
and appliances can stare
at the world that passes by them,
mute as if in unending astonishment
that anything comes to a finish.

What I am saying
is that you don't have to give away
all your clothes because churches
don't fill the pews as do movie theatres
or ball games during a series
where so much depends on ball being hit by a stick
that might fly over the cheap seats
and into a window, into history that is.

Religion hasn't been as good
as the movies in decades anyway,
and those kinds of ball games are rare , being ,
as it were, miracles true and factual only place
where prayer makes sense
and the game is more important
than what any man or woman wants
to with their appetites.
Find yourself a face to kiss
and leave the Laundry undone
just for one day,
wait until the net day off
to sharpen the knives for battle
(while I pray that day never arrives
for that reason), stop for a moment
and think about what
you've been thinking about.
and when you're confused enough,
come see me,
when I'll put
on some coffee
and we can read each
other from any book the house,
my treat.

Marcel Duchamp and Bob Perelman Stare Back at the Ready Mades

Reanimates, an idea from artist Marcel Duchamp idea, a classic Dada gesture he offered with urinals hoisted upon gallery walls, and snow shovels on pedestals. The point, though, was that the object became an aesthetic object, denatured, in a manner of speaking, from its natural context and forced, suddenly, to be discussed in its very “thingness”. The object becomes art by the lexicon we wrap around it, a linguistic default. We are forced to look at what's been joined and view them as phenomena instead of as common place things we use, pass by and think nothing otherwise. Quite remarkably, things intended for specific uses become extraordinary, we study them intensely and notice things that otherwise eludes us.

That may or may not play in the aesthetic of poet Bob Perelman, a poet associated with the Language school and a sharp critic of poetic processes and priorities (The Trouble With Genius, The Marginalization of Poetry). Not to speak too generally of what the Language poets have committed themselves to , it is safe to say that their project has been to foreground the language we use as subject, freeing the constructed, all-inclusive, autobiographical “I” from the rhetorical practice, and presenting a body of work investigating the ways our given tongue has been formalized and arranged so that only  so many concepts of what writers and readers can accomplish are available to the imagination. The Language poets are a rich and varied lot with quite a range of ideas about their work, and methods of writing their ideas down; Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Michael Palmer, Barrett Watten, Carla Harymann, just a few among a good number of others, are distinct poets with their methods of dismantling and reassembling the factory-issued approaches handed to us since grade school. Bob Perelman appeals to me in particular because it seems he gets into the Dada mood and welds the hard, metallic surface of the phrases that spin about in the advertising culture. Phrases, slogans, bits of instruction manual babble, a quote from a philosophical essay, tangential lit-crit speak--divorced from a context that apologizes and smooths over their laconic lack of meaningful signifiers , becomes a poetry in themselves, strange phrases and neologisms full of unspoken promise and potential, liberating forces and keys to imaginary heavens. 

Bob Perelman has the satirist instinct and has the skill to compose in these tongues, these conflicting pitches for one's attention and wallet, with an assured tone that tames the contradictions and inconsistencies, converts an unsubstantiated claim into finely honed vowels and syllables for an announcer to intone with his or her resonating, sweetly cadenced voice. Finding ourselves in a world where very few sentences that are written are cogent on their own, as remarks who are meaning and purpose can be inferred, Perelman is our spokes-poet, the first poet to understand that the entire culture and the population's attention span has been colonized by advertisers, banks, nervous senate committees. But there is more to Perelman's poems than merely shoving the phrases back into the mess from which they came-- there is the human part as well, the emergence of someone discerning themselves among the constraining turns. “Trees” is a fascinating, layered lyric of a camera, a family situation, the capture, and use of an image. Through it, one loses the sense of what just happened; are we all together in this place to be together, or to have our picture taken, and in turn have our experience and perception managed for us?

TREES

A melody composed of solid obstacles

Dictates itself onto paper. The sky adjusts

Automatically. The most popular prison

For sight is imagery. Light separated

From matter shines on a parking space,

A lane change. I think

That I shall never see without

Nameless grasses whispering generalities

Inside the object code which colors

Once removed at various distances

Spray onto my retinas. The proper

Study of trees is trees. A live-oak leaf

Lands upside down on a madrone branch.

Inside the curve of an ear

Each point contains all lines

Drawn through it by the insistence

Of a complete world of days. Any word

Flowers in the face of the climate's

Ornamental attacks. Moving parts

Produce the voice, the airplane,

The frenchfry. The baby on film

Wants to play with the camera.

" The sky adjusts/Automatically.” And what we are to take away from this encounter with one another is adjusted automatically as well, as the images of ourselves, the trees, the baby reaching for the camera, pivots on how well a designated technology works. If everything operates as the instructions promise, all is well and good, and it's possible to walk away from what should be a joyful encounter untouched by anything. It is a memory because we have right here, on film. If the camera failed, though, we need to ask ourselves, will be remembered it at all? And would be worth recalling if our camera didn't capture the image. Perelman seems aware, under the calm of his style, that we are after strange gods here. He suggests, softly but insistently, that we look at the phrases we use to describe our presence in the world, and to find our where those phrases came from. 

We are turned into objects ourselves, ready to have something sold to us, receptive and pliant. Whether the object is art as most understand art to be--the result of an inner expressive need to mold, shape and hone materials and forms into a medium that engages a set of ideas about the world, or unearths some fleeting sense of human experience -- isn't the point here. Ironically, art, generally defined as something that is absent all utility, any definable function, is suddenly given a sufficiently economical use, which is to keep an art industry in motion; it is the sound of money. Duchamp, and other Dadaists who sought to undermine this idea of art and its supposed spiritual epiphanies for the privileged few, instead furnished a whole new rational for art vending. Duchamp and Perelman might share the desire for another kind of heaven, a space where concepts, structures, and the like weren't handed to us like crisply packaged uniforms.

The MC5 in the marketplace

Never toss out your old suits, it's often said. You never know when wide lapels will become again. You also never know which grossly non commercial, limited appeal band will become sanctified in the market place. Guitar Hero introduces "Kick Out the Jams" by the MC5 to the guitar starved:





I saw the MC5s play in Detroit between 1967-69 when they played the Grande Ballroom and teen clubs and free shows around Wayne County, and there was a real dangerous, outlaw method in the way they did their business. They did things their way and the consequences be damned. Everyone in the mainstream press and the rock press hated them, and Elektra Records dumped them after one album after the band took out a full page ad in the local underground paper The Fifth Estate for it's first album, Kick Out The Jams. A local department store chain, Hudson's, wouldn't carry the album because the title song, because the song had the word "motherfucker" exclaimed at the start; the MC5, in a likely combination of integrity and ego, had the ad read

KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKER! And kick out the door of the store that won't sell you the MC5. FUCK HUDSON's

 To the horror Elektra Records executives, the band put the record company logo on the ad, which made it seemed as if they had approved of and paid for the ad themselves. I do paraphrase the exact wording of the ad, but it is faithful to the cadence and , well, spirit of the band's marketing approach. Hudsons' was perhaps the major outlet for new album releases at the time, and the record executive quite likely didn't want to be dropped from the store sales racks. The revolutionary 5 were dropped from the label in quick order.

 I am gratified that the MC5 are getting their due. The irony is that their music has had to be commercialized with things like Guitar Hero, meaning that the 5 have had to become as consumer friendly as the artists after them who cite them as a major influence.

A half minute of doubt

There are the times when, after bemoaning yet again a noted poet's latest poem-about-poetry and the attending self-admiration (or self-justification) , I am tempted to do my inventory and investigate the possibility that I've turned into a bored drudge for whom all the exciting things in the language have already haven't; I dread spending the rest of what I hope of are many years of life tossing soggy bombs at the poems that come from a younger generation of bards. I suppose it's a matter , partially,of the perennial search for a usable past--is there anything in the standards and tastes one  formed thirty years ago still workable in years where tastes and formulas have been modified to relevantly account for the alterations in the psychic landscape?   I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic.

The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.

I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would prefer poets engage the ambivalence and incongruities in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of it’s own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflexing tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.

Punk rock

Malcom McLaren has passed away, the man commonly credited  by quick study journalists and water cooler culturati with creating  punk rock, in the form of The Sex Pistols. I usually sniff when I hear this; grand as they were, and visionary though he was, I thought they and their like were redundant to rock and roll's evolution. Rather than make something new, they reiterated old noise and pre-owned attitudes. I grew up in Detroit in the late Sixties, where the local bands included The MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and The Amboy Dukes, not-give-fuck punks who kicked out the jams a good decade before the Brits made what was punk rock into a design fetish. It's not that I  thought the Sex Pistols weren't called for, as the pretentiousness of the musicians and the gullibility of the audience had choked off the life force that made rock and roll exciting and worth caring about. Some of it might be laid at the feet of rock criticisms, since the advanced discussions of Dylan's relationship to Chuck Berry's everyman existentialist demanded a musical technique and lyrical concept just as daunting. This is the danger when folk art is discovered: it stands to become something distorted, disfigured and bereft of vitality. I was lucky , I guess, in that I was a fan of the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges long before the Sex Pistols caught the punk wave. They , and bands like Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath were a grounding principal--rock and roll is beautiful because it's energetic, awkward, and stupid, but profoundly so. There are "concept albums" I admire and still like, if not listen to, but I won't name them here. I am pleased, though, that the idea of the Album being a literary object has been dropped in a deep grave and had dirt thrown over it's bloviated remains. What we can thank the late Clarine for is reminding us that rock and roll is a loser's game, the noise of the empty stomache.

Life off line?

Artist and writer James Strum outlines his plan to leave the internet in Slate article where he confesses misgivings about turning 45 ; it's less about middle age than it is about having spent the previous decade and a half on the internet, both working and doing nothing important at all.A moving tale of middle aged anxiety, that naked moment of clarity when one realizes how much time has gone by in that fabled blur. Facts are, though, that the Internet is an integral part of our lives, intimately so, and swearing to go without it is likely to make life even more awkward than it already is. One could, of course, change their lifestyle and come to resemble a hardened survivalist subsisting solely on bare communicating essentials--newspapers, snail mail, land line telephones--but the amount of work and sacrifice required to sustain it makes me think that one , after a period, will likely come to a second moment of bewilderment and wonder what it was they were trying to prove. Difficult as it may be, the answer is that one needs to accomodate the technology that is the connecting tissue of our times and learn to use this tool as a means to get out of the house, away from the computer, engaged with the world. Being on line is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Finality, Beginning

The Day You Left / Mammogram  in Slate intrigues me.

This isn't so bad a poem, but it is awkward, the way it begins in the middle of a description , only adding specific detail and the associated metaphor in slow, deliberate packages of ambiguity. It is exactly like coming in late for a lecture and trying your best to suss out the meaning of terms, the importance of incidents, the interconnection between the highlighted portions. But while we slavishly attending to the imagining of back story , situation and how they inform the narrator's choice of confounding allusions, poet Terri Witek does a capable job of not giving too much away. We know only that which she allows us to know tangibly; the rest of the poem's sequence is something of a daze to an absent friend or mate , and the absence hints at the vanishing of all things certain. There are probes, there are scars, there is fear that what was young , vital, yearning is now aged and now conspicuously revealing the terms of decline .




So we're relieved both worlds include

only the grayish skies they drift through

and just one cupola or darkened hut.

These last, by signaling each other,

can gather, as the great head of Buddha

does from his amazing topknot,

all tender, contradictory feelings.



So what to do, rage, rage against the dying of the light, or slip into a cocoon of morose self pity and regret. Better to be the Buddha and embrace both the rage and the sorrow and merge them into a fluid state of being, a psychic equilibrium that might be accomplished with the acceptance of the exact facts of one's contradictory impulses and the inevitable death we are guaranteed. The body is the perfect analog of the earth, and will return to the earth at the final moments, ready to rejoin the great cycle of being and make another life possible.

There is, I think, an argument the narrator is having with herself, simultaneously mourning the loss of what had been anchors of certainty in her life--a mate, friends, her health an positive attitude--while at the same time appreciating a larger sense of things. She is, I believe, in the process of convincing herself that she is still situated in a framework that gives her life meaning, or at least certainty. It's not clear, though, that the narrator is entirely convinced, and this may well be merely a snippet of an ongoing monologue. Lack of resolution is an element I enjoy in contemporary poems--I dislike pat resolutions through lazy analogies or writing program tricks of how to get out of hopelessly muddled dead ends-- and Witek presents her protagonist as someone we come upon , in mid thought, and whom we leave, with her thoughts and contemplation, perhaps no where near the serenity she desires. What is tantalizing is the idea that her thinking, her considerations are the process itself with which she remains sane, balanced, and that this is less about the issue of the Mammogram and the abandonment than it is about how a good any of us are constantly rearranging the priorities and values in the rooms of our interior lives as an ongoing effort to keep from being overwhelmed with each bit of news that portends discomfort, inconvenience, finality.

The lop sided divide

Poet Amy King went to some effort to compile some discouraging statistics regarding women writers and the ratio of literary awards given between men and women. The survey, published here in Willa, show that for all the talk about the great distance women have come since the bad old days, the lion's share of the top prizes , with the attendant status and acclaim, still go to men.  For all the talk of progress in the task of leveling the playing field, not much distance has been gained.

A large part of the problem, perhaps intractable, is the nature of the awards themselves; most of the ones we think matter–the Nobel, The Pulitzer, The National Book Award, The PEN Awards– were founded by male editors , who created categories and criteria reflecting their aesthetic, which is male, straight and, for all they knew, the single standard by which other writers are to measured. Women writers have made gains in terms of critical reception and the receipt of awards, but the standards by which women are judged, I fear, is whether they write as well as a better known male.

Lorrie Moore is constantly compared to John Cheever, Nikki Giovanni cannot escape being contrasted against Amiri Baraka; well intentioned critics try to explain the inevitable alignments, but the enterprise of letting the girls into the boy’s domain seems a faithless affirmative action move. I am reminded that Dick Cavett had said to his guest Susan Sontag that her name is unavoidable linked to the term “intellectual”. Sontag responded that the journalists doubtlessly think they are doing her a favor by telling readers that she’s a smart woman, but noted that male writers don’t need their introductions so qualified. She said that no one felt compelled to say that Norman Mailer was an intellectual when his name came up. It was taken for granted. The sad truth is that I think this onerous habit of keeping women writers at the margins will continue until there is a new canon formation.

Bachelder and Boyle Spoil the Party

Tortilla Curtain

a novel by TC Boyle

Culture clash is the theme in Tortilla Curtain , and leave it TC Boyle to go beyond the abstract curtain of statistics, policy wonkery and three-hankie tragedy mongering and provide the reader instead with a contradiction that is harshly comic; well off Southern Californians, nominally liberal in their politics, are forced to deal with an illegal couple who are in the most dire situations. It works to the degree in that the suburban pair preferred to have their causes at several layers of removal , preferring safe memberships in organizations forever raising money for non controversial progressive causes; a check or a credit card donation was the exercise of their social responsibility, an acceptable penance for what is largely a consumerist lifestyle. Boyle does not sugar coat, euphemise nor glorify the awful trials and fate of the Mexican couple that had stolen over the border looking for a better life. Against a backdrop of  sunshine, opulence and Conspicuous Consumption, Boyle tenders life at the margins, at the edges of glittering downtowns and cascading suburbs. Boyle is stinging and blunt in the way he describes the ordeals economic desperation that drives good people. He is unsparing at offering up a priceless, painfully recognizable banter of a privileged psychology that inspects the hard facts of injustice and responds by trying to worm their way out of any sense of responsibility for others less well endowed.

U.S.!
a novel by Chris Bachelder

Chris Bachelder is a lovable prankster who likes to turn the nicely fitting glove of literature inside out. while the rest of us are looking for meanings and various forms of significance in the interior decorating of conventional fictional devices--to this day, we all yearn to have poets and novelists to tell us The Truth-- Bachelder prefers to spray paint on the props and show us the cluttered backstage of these settings. And better yet, he rather likes in tying the shoelaces together of the pompous, the serious, the bizarrely sanctimonious. "U.S.!" has him imagining a world where the true believers in an American Socialist Revolution manage, through some vaguely revealed ritual of magic realism, to bring the dead activist novelist Upton Sinclair back to life; back to life the poor, steadfast, solemn socialist does, looking increasingly awful and putrid at the edges, going on the lecture trail, writing and publishing more of his cardboard narratives, trying to convince an amazingly uninterested citizenry the exact nature of what's killing them. Nothing comes of this, as expected, and the intrepid Lewis finds himself talking himself hoarse , only to find himself being killed violently and then ingloriously resurrected yet again.

A surreal fish-out-of-water story, Bachelder has a perfect ear for duplicating the static prose of the late novelists, and excels at demonstrating the striking contrasts between those who think that literature can make populations shed their entrenched and deeply rooted versions of Bad Faith and rise to the selfless cause of The Common People; this is a story of where the idea of the progression of history toward a final and just time, intersects with a culture where history does not end anywhere at all. Rather, it splits off into many tributaries, a crossroads every five metaphorical miles. Sinclair Lewis, tragicomic figure he is, stops at each of them, scratching his head as to which road to take.

An overwrought after taste

The problem with The Sweet Undertaste is the straining effort poet Philip Schultz takes to make it a significant, moving poem. Less poem than it is a narrative broken up with pained intellection and verbal padding, this tale of a WW 2 survivor suffering his end in a Stateside hospital seems like a small drawer into which Schultz tried to cram too much material. Perhaps a longer, more vivid form is needed for this storyline, a book, a novel perhaps, or a film where the thick language can give way to stunning, convincing visuals. We have is something that makes me think of the worst aspects of novelists Russell Banks writing, an absent sense of when to stop a description, of when to clip an adjective or a verb. Condensed though this poem is, it has overwriting to spare:

What accounts for the sweetness of human beings?

For the fragile, inexhaustible longing in the eyes

of the slowly dying, the sweet undertaste of

a tune sung in a moment of unutterable delight?

The attempt here is to be discursive and conversational at the same time, an achievable balance we know, but Schultz's word choices, his enhancements of the tone he attempts to construct, undermine the sentiment. "The fragile, inexhaustible longing.." would ordinarily be ring true if a sparer sentence were written, but the two qualifiers, "fragile, inexhaustible" indicates indecision ; Schultz doesn't sound convinced that he ' making his case and opts to use both terms, connecting them with another term, "longing", meant to suggest a state of being, a condition of unmet desire, but which is , in itself, a vague, indefinite description. A more concrete image for the Uncle's interior life would bring us to a situation that is already complex, where there needn't be the flourishes that gum up the works. The reluctance to pare this back to more definite language results too easily in comically arch writing:

What accounts for the ignorance and hate

that chased him from the German side of Poland

to the Russian side, from the honeycomb of innocence

to the boomeranging cold of a cattle car rushing through

the moonless Siberian night

The rhetorical question is a set for a rush of language meant to pick up the pace and create momentum, like the stock film cliche of showing calendar pages flying off the wall as time marches on through futures none could predict, but the effect is faintly ridiculous in the lack of sure footing. We have,  I suppose, an attempt at film montage, verbs turned into adjectives as in "boomeranging cold from a cattle car rushing through the moonless Siberian night". I confess to liking "boomeranging", although it's an imprecise use; boomerangs, if properly tossed, turn back toward their point of origin, and the implication is that Uncle Sigmund is traveling in circles. He is, though, going straight ahead into the future. But the issue again is the padding, the added weight inserted to lend the descriptions urgency and impact. I would have jettisoned boomerang, moonless and have the line read as a bare depiction of a cattle car racing along the tracks at night. A more vivid,if an unspoken sense of the horror that awaits might have arisen between the spaces where the excess once resided. And yes, I would have dispensed with the "honeycomb of innocence", an awkward line, a self-parody of a poet stuck for a phrase. There is the tendency to think to that every line in a free verse poem has to ring with coinages, phrases that are quotable in other contexts. One might compare it to a virtuoso guitarist thinking that he is obliged to the most complex improvisations in all spotlighted situations. Monotony results, and the displays of craft, the insertion of particularized style, begins to have no effect. More Joe Pass, less Yngwie Malmsteen. 

...the unalterable fact that once a man has run for his life

never again can he sleep through the night, that once salvation

is torn out of us we continue to run, on one leg and two,

to crawl like a worm through the stony anonymous earth?

Some unifying truth about ideals and human resilience is being looked for in Uncle Sigmund's story, but Schultz doesn't bring us to the point of his realization about the culminating effects of adversity and aging , he begins to lecture us, a style that awards us with an awkward image of worm working its way through a "stony, anonymous earth". This approach gives this relatively brief poem a glacial pace, a thick brick of words. The hospital room at the end, I hope, has another bed next to the dying Uncle Sigmund, reserved for this poem.

A drive through an old neighborhood

Debating what constitutes authenticity is a nice way to chase your tail, but is a fun way to pass the time when there's nothing else making demands on your time. It's not a waste of time since it is a way for us to define and articulate What Matters in life beyond our bond with the Banks and the Legal System. It is what makes life a pleasure, and a large part of that pleasure is maintaining the capacity to be pleasantly surprised.I've preferred to remain agnostic in matters of musical taste; pragmatic might be a better word. Or perhaps my tastes merely change with time. In any event, I tend to think that anyone committed to trying to earn living playing music and performing, activities from which there are no guarantees of financial security (or even an audience) can't help but be sincere. One might dislike the motive or the personality, but the emotion is authentic enough. Better to consider whether the music is at least honest, or better yet, if it's done well: whether music, lyrics, voice, style work on their own terms, makes for a more interesting set of topics, and a more compelling record collection.  What those terms turn out to be might be, at first, seemingly unacceptable or contrary to everything you held as essential to quality. But to paraphrase a famous line contextualizing Modern Art, most original art forms seem at first ugly and horrible; they emerge ahead of the curve and the rest of the culture has to catch up. Not everything gets past the finish line, though, as a review of your record collection reveals. I'd wager we all have many albums from bands and artists we thought were heavy and groovy back in the day that now makes us scratch what's left of our hairline, wondering what we were thinking. It was after I slid into my forties where the other songs and albums by Zeppelin reemerged on my radar and revealed a band that was more diverse, musically, than the popular invective allows. Where I lived at the time, Zeppelin fans were just as likely to be listening to the Band, Van Morrison and CS&N, along with other folks "sissy" artists as they were the macho sounds of hard rock. Like the Beatles or Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin were studio artists, where the studio was the proverbial third instrument. Live, they were one of the worst bands I've ever seen--though they sounded pretty damned good when I saw them in '67 (?) on their first US tour with Jethro Tull--but in the studio, their music was finessed and honed, typical in those days. For all his faults as a faulty technician in live circumstances, he is a producer who brought a fresh ear to the recording process and came up with ideas that circumvented the routine dullness and rigor that's become the bane of less able hard rock and metal bands after his Zeppelin's break up.The only real bad aftershock of " Sgt Pepper's" and other "concept albums" from the period was the mistaken notion by other artists that there had to be one grandiose and grandiloquent theme running throughout both sides of their albums in order for their work to be current with the mood of the art rock of the period. The Beatles succeeded with "Sgt. Pepper", "Magical Mystery Tour", and, and "Abbey Road" ( easily their most consistent set of material, I think) because they never abandoned the idea that the album needs to be a collection of good songs that sound good in a set: overlapping themes, lyrically, are absent in the Beatles work, unless you consider the reprise of the Pepper theme song on a leitmotif of any real significance (its use was cosmetic), although musical ideas did give the feel of conceptual unity track to track, album to album. 

Lennon and McCartney and Harrison's greatest contribution to rock music was their dedication to having each one of their songs be the best they could do before slating it for the album release. For other bands, the stabs at concept albums were routinely disastrous, witnessed by the Stones attempt to best their competitors with the regrettable 'Satanic Majesties Requests". The Who with "Tommy" and "Who's Next" and the Kinks, best of all, with "Lola", "Muswell Hillbillies" and "Village Green", both were rare, if visible exceptions to the rule. "Revolver" and "Yesterday and Today" are amazing song collections, united by grand ideas or not. I buy albums, finally, on the hope that the music is good, the songs are good, not the ideas confirm or critique the Western Tradition. The conventional wisdom is often wrong, but not always, and I think the popular opinion that Sgt. Pepper is a better disc, song by song, than Satanic Majesties is on the mark. Majesties had The Stones basically playing catch up with the Beatles with their emergent eclecticism and failing, for the most part. That they didn't have George Martin producing and finessing the rough spots of unfinished songs marks the difference. Majesties, though does have at least one great song, "2000 Man", and a brilliant one, "She's A Rainbow" For the rest, it sounds like a noisy party in the apartment next door. The album sounds like a collection of affectations instead of a cohesive set of songs. Cohere is exactly what the tunes on Pepper did, good, great, brilliant, and mediocre. The sounded like they belonged together.

Criticism vs Theory

Celebrity writers are writers nonetheless, and their notoriety doesn't reduce the value of there work, if the work is good. That is the real issue, I think, coming to a new framework that the worth of a work can be determined across the field: artistic, social. The situation is that postmodernism, as a writing style with discernible notions about how a tale will be told, has outstripped contemporary criticism's ability to discuss the work in any really meaningful, useful way. That was the point initially. While postmodern writers are actually engaged with the world through their writing, postmodern critics, a different breed entirely, lose themselves in undecidables and have turned vacillation into a pathetic , minor art. What  concerns me is whether the work is any good,  and the task for criticism, it seems to me, is to determine under what terms  are that bring the desired qualities to life, or instructs us, to a degree, how a writer's book is lacking. This is the short coming of much modern theory, in that "theory" has replaced what we used to regard as real criticism, the starting point at which a conversation starts. A good amount of literary thought of the last fifty years informs us that such a conversation, about what a text means or what can reveal about human experience at the farthest or most intimate edges, is impossible.

It's useful, I think , to separate  "postmodern" novelists,etc, from postmodern theorists. I propose that a new critical language be created to help us deal with the work of Pynchon, DeLillo, Acker, Burroughs, Gaddis, Reed, Kundera, Wallace, Eggers, a language that can see the links between postmodernism and other literary styles, such as Magic Realism, and expand the study as to how different cultures respond to their increasingly variegated existences. Pomo theory , as is, is nothing but a stop sign. A point among many is that postmodern 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.

Postmodern criticism went wrong when the discipline mistook itself for philosophers, or linguists, or cultural anthropologists. The result of this detour has been a mess of unreadable prose whose authors aim to disguise the fact that they've nothing to say. I am for postmodern literature, but I am aghast at postmodern literary criticism. Now, I think, is the time to convene a new project, a better way of dealing with the huge body of work by an interesting population of writers. It's time for a re-making, and re-re-making after that.

Critics without a malleable framework are talking only to themselves, finally. The value of criticism is in how it deepens the reading: an ideal criticism, I think, ought to be the sieve through which the variety is taken in and studied.

This is ultimately about discourse: discourse needs to go somewhere, though, needs to have results, because it is about trying to figure what ways there are that we may engage each other in ways that are honest and mutually satisfying, whatever market system you think this goal is possible under. The exact problem with postmodern theory, the intellectual and not the aesthetic texts, is that it's turned into a self-conscious wallow (often disguised under the rubric of being "self-reflective") that brandishes the idea that an awareness of it's own social construction somehow advances bold, better human freedom. What it does is make the nominal partisans of just causes weak and immobile, ready to have their own conventional wisdom used against them.  by a foe that's true to its own cause enough to use any weapon it can lay its hands on in order to make the world theirs and sterile under one Totalizing God, who, I suspect, isn't likely to have much truck with language theory. 

I don't think understanding ever stops.