Not that, but this

I like to write poetry with long sentences, complicated somewhat with line breaks that are short and not precisely sticking with a rhythm a reader can dance too. I enjoy William's idea of the variable foot in reference to the practice of free verse; since he never strictly defined what how that variable foot is to be applied in a composition, I just assume my erratic posture is my variation on that lovely phrase's evocation. But there are doubters, the spontaneous police writing tickets , a violation of a familiar charge; this isn't poetry, it's prose in sheep's clothing. I will  not shrug and say "busted".

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



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

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

Notes in the night

Richard Rorty, in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" defines an "ironist" as someone who realizes "that anything can be made to look good or bad by being re described" (73). Are postmodern writers this kind of "ironist"? No more, it would seem , than any other writer scribing under the modernist tenet of "making it new", or to another extreme, 'defamiliarizing" (from Bahktin) recognizable settings , characters and schemes in a language that's meant to provoke readers to see their world in new ways. This is a modernist habit that the new, cubist, cut-up, stream-of-conscious takes on the world will sweep away past aesthetic interpretative models and lead one to a the correct formation of the world-- there remains a faith that language and other senses can apprehend and describe a tangible , material world and capture its complex composition, a "metaphysics of presence" that art can unearth.

Irony, in this sense, is usually contained within the story, a result of several kinds of narrative operations coming to a crucial moment of ironic intensity that then drives the story into directions one , with hope, didn't anticipate. Post modern writers start off with the intent of being post modern from the start, and rather than have their inventions gear us for a challenge to see the world in a truer light (contrasted against previous schools of lovely language but false conclusions), the project is to debunk the idea of narrative style all together.

Irony is intended to demonstrate some flaws in character's assumptions about the world, a description of the world that emerges contrarily after we've been introduced to the zeitgeist of the fictionalized terrain. Post modern writers are ironists of a different sort, decidedly more acidic and cynical about whether narrative in any form can hone our instincts.  It's a tenet of Modernism that in order for writing to be truly contemporary, it must achieve a level of difficulty that allegedly force the reader to reassess their take on experience. Impenetrability was encouraged, so far as the Modernist project encouraged any specific tendency among its early practitioners.

"Make it new" was a chief slogan at the height of the Modernist literary movement, courtesy of Karl Shapiro, and the works, assimilated into academic study, don't comprise the sort of literature that makes for lazy readers. Rather, it's techniques set up the ideal reader, say, "reared in the Modernist style", to grasp the manner and aim of a Postmodern writing, which again, I believe, in it's best expression, is an extension of the Modernist agenda, albeit tweaked about the edges with a bankrupt critical apparatus. The theory cannot keep apace with the actual imaginative writing: sorry, but many theorists seem like bright children adept at taking things apart who cannot quite put them back together in anyway that's useful, meaningful.

Words and Music

John Barth's short story, "The Night Sea Journey" from Lost in the Funhouse, is a strange little allegory that plays empty when inspected. As Bill mentioned earlier, the Heritage that's supposed to be passed on , in this instance, is only a grab bag of superstition, speculation and teleological gossip.  Substituting , presumably, a species of human fish for Christians and System-locked beings in general, we have a neat inversion of the collective self-denial that keeps a system working, churning.

It's a system here, a faith system pegged on the need to keep the population swimming to the unreachable Shore, that has all questions about existence channeled back to the anonymous need to keep the population treading water in the dark: we get traces of a theology that once might have sounded glorious, an ideology that might have once cast the future as bright and on dry land, but the disillusionment with the process is heard, the skepticism comes forth. It becomes nothing but a process for process sake: exhaustion, which Barth has used a key term in some of his essays on the problems of fiction narrative, hear becomes the theme of things being done for their own sake, unchanged to the conditions that exist at the margins of a self-perpetuation lexicon. The promise that the swimmers hold out, after the poetry of their plighted is played out, is that all will be well when they reach the shore, is revealed as bunk: it is a promise that will be kept only in the dark, when one is still blind, thrashing about.

__________________

The Hours works because author Michael Cunningham doesn't try in any obvious way to assert a connection between the women, other than a tenuous connection with Woolfe and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. It's the skillful use of the stream-of-conscious the connects the stories, really, the women and their time periods, the way in which the on set of depression and slowly inhibiting despair is explored in the ways that these women think about the world they live in.

Family, duty, loyalty to others, all the things that the characters have to be loyal to and whose cause the central figures argue for, are seen to come into a continuing conflict with personalities whose centers are eroding, slipping into darkness. Like Woolfe, Cunningham continually deploys the facts and the images of the external world, a sign that the alert mind is struggling to stay engaged with the world, but we see these images become abstractions, mere definitions , blurry and meaningless as the corridors get darker, colder.

Applying this to Woolfe herself, as a character, was a brilliant touch, perhaps critiquing the notion , the myth that one may write their way out of a chronically dour state. In any case, this trio of tales is delicately rendered, and the author's touch here is sure, if not invisible.
__________

Corea Concerto: Spain for Sextet and Orchestra
--Chick Corea w/ the London Philharmonic Orchestra featuring Origin (Sony Classical)

The word "pretentious" comes to mind, as well as "waste", in so much as Corea, one of the surest and most ingenious musician/composer talents alive, takes one of his most perfect compositions, "Spain" and elongates into a series of "movements", no doubt meant to explore new ideas, poetry, impressions. What he has here is near unrecognizable from the original, except when the orchestra kicks in with some obligatory figures: the improvisations from Corea and the worthy members of Origin are tentative at best--they sound like they are sitting next to insane wrestlers on a crowded bus-- and the piece, long, shall we say, stops and goes with no real dynamic emphasis or emotional wallop delivered, or even hinted at in the foreshadowing. Corea  should have known betterought to know better; he can certainly do better.

Rae Armantrout Wins The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Rae Armantrout has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Versed; it is a great and glorious event. I became aware of Rae Armantrout's  work in the Seventies while an undergraduate literature student at UCSD, and whatever value or lack of it one thinks the Pulitzer Prize has in terms of distinguishing the best work from the passably acceptal, I am glad that someone I know (if only slightly) has grabbed A Big Prize. It means not only that she will have here tightly constructed poems read and considered in a more mainstream context--the broader readership is now part of a discussion on poetics some of us have been having for years--but it gives the lie to the notion that her work, and the work of other poets falling outside the peripheries corporate press deigns to cover and review, is too difficult, alien, abstract or incomprehensible to bother an over taxed reader with. The idea that Rae Armantrout's work is difficult is, as has been remarked about "Ulysses", is made too much of. There are items, phrases, condensed cadences and references that need to be parsed, examined, considered thoughtfully , but as with Joyce's musicality , wit and sensuality, there is a tangible presence in Rae's work with which a reader can frame their own response.

1.  It's an old distinction that one notices in the best voices--the emphasis is more on creating a sense of things rather than making sense, "making sense", in this case, being that the one wants to define and contain experience as if it were a commodity. What Rae achieves (and what Stephen Burt spoke to in his New York Times review of  her previous collection "Next Life") is that the facts of our lives, the joy, the agony, the aches and illnesses, are too slippery in their larger implications to place within convenient brackets. She understands what happens when a recollected event and a later idea merge in the stream of the alert psyche.

Her method, perhaps, is the reverse of that of John Ashbery or A.R. Ammons,two poets who have, with frequent inspiration, written at length to suggest the collisions of subjective responses to the material plain.Their musings have different notions--Ashbery is ambling between the perfections of Ideal Types and the contradictions of felt experience and memory while Ammons prefers a direct address of how the senses fail the organizing mind as the years stockpile upon him--both write at length, inspecting each stone and exotic plant on their path, each otherwise unconsidered detail a topic sentence inspires, until they're satisfied that they've explored enough nuance, refined or rough hewed. Rae Armantrout has something more closely resembling radar; she gathers the precise details, chooses the right words; her poetry balances a breath taking clarity with the sense of the ephemeral, that what she isolates is fleeting , soon to be lost amid the stream of continuous thinking.  Rae Armantrout gets the exact moment when a history of impressions meet each other on the long highway. She places the reader in the moment, amid the particulars her poems highlight. The reader finds something of their story in her rigorously pared-back sharing. The readers get it, and it would be nice if her being awarded a Pulitzer indicates that larger media are done ghettozing poets. In the meantime, it's a good thing that she has the award. A very good thing.

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.