Saturday, April 23, 2011

Don't Name The Chickens, a poem by Charles Simic

DON'T NAME THE CHICKENS


Don't name the chickens, says poet Charles Simic, because doing so is to find yourself leaning  into  a perceptual left hook. . As the poem details, in  details inspired by the spare , weathered cadences of WC Williams, chickens in the barnyard are not really the kings of their domain as folk tales and cartoons would suggest, but merely a creature inhabiting a niche on which some things depend on; lording or majesty have nothing to do with it.  We have the terrain Simic sets up  beautifully, a small niche in the natural order  that is overlaid with expectations that suit the man or woman gazing from a window, from the porch, on their way to the barn to repair  a machine.



Don't Name the Chickens

Let them peck in the yard
As they please
Or walk over to stand
By the edge of the road.

The rooster strutting about
Will keep an eye on them,
Till it's time for them
To step under a tree

And wait for the heat
To pass and the children
To return to their toys
Left lying in the dust.

For, come Sunday,
One of the chickens may lose its head
And hang by its feet
From a peg in the barn.


This is beautifully done, I believe, a  cold and crackling laugh coming from the throat, and winding up echoing through the nose, a  combination of  bemusement and revulsion with  the vanities  citizens dress themselves in, the  idea that persists even on the most micro level, that the events of the day revolve around them.
Naming creatures implies ownership, that the animal given  a Christian assignation is now part of the family, like the dog or the cat, embedded in the good graces of human social structure until death , a natural death. But again, the power to name things and bestow upon them the complexities of far reaching relationships with kindred human significants are projections of  our collective ego, personalized, brought down from the global to the specific, the back yard, the barnyard.

Friday, April 22, 2011

GRAB BAG OF GAB

A New Yorker cartoon shows two dogs in a den, one on chair, in front of a computer monitor , talking to another dog seated on the floor. The dog in the chair tells his friend "No one knows you're a dog on the Internet."

Exactly, and I suppose that's the appeal of forums and blogs; one is at liberty to represent themselves as having some competence and insight on a subject. One might even convince readers, or some of them at least, that one has professional expertise;one might even have something interesting to say. I don't know if the words that following are interesting beyond coffeehouse chatter--I think the points are sound enough--but here they are. Judge them as you will, and call me a jerk if you think I'm a deluded dealer in obvious asides.-tb
______________________________​_____________


He was typing furiously to get a response to me before I shut off the computer, and sure enough, after refreshing the computer monitor, there was his nic name on a new post, attempting a counter argument in a protracted discussion (or competing rants, if you will) about the uses and role of art and poetry in this world. He wrote “ART used to create a response in LIFE. “

It's the other way around, replied, and continued; Art is a response TO life, a creative way for us to find new ways of experiencing what otherwise an incoherent flux of activity that only bullied us about with out any of us having the vaguest idea of how to better our lot. Life, as sheer process and force of nature, cannot be swayed by pure acts of will or bold imagination; art, besides leaving civilization with personal expressions of who we are and how we felt while we were alive, is also a engagement of our senses and skills that empower us to solve problems, to maintain a sense of humor, faith in something greater than our lone human selves, and provide with a means to live better lives. Art is a means for us to bring our imagination to bear on this planet, to create something for our selves that make this existence bearable, and at times joyous.

One discussion I had recently was interesting in that the person I was spoke with insisted that technique was over rated and that “…form is immaterial... so long as it creates the desired effect”. I scratched my chin and offered that one can usually have an effect of any sort only if the form is effective in getting across the intangible things you want your poems to address. One may effuse and rhapsodize all they want, but beyond a certain readership already inclined toward sentimental barbarity (the breathless pursuit of trite expression and banal conclusion, a defense mechanism, I believe, that shields the nervous from thinking bolder, or at least clearer about the larger implications of their actions in a world beyond themselves), the larger readership, small though it may be, will gain nothing, remember nothing from odd lines that exclaim obvious annoyances and joys. War is bad. Love hurts. Babies area cute. Mean people suck.

Millions of poems written by thousands of furious scribblers don’t get much further than these belated realizations, and it is understandable while yet millions more walk away from poems that are uniformly unmemorable, with hardly a quotable line or pithy adage to be drawn from them. This is all very sad because what comes forth in these untidy ossifications are notions that are revelatory and previously unrevealed to the writers themselves but which otherwise rest on the bottom of the fish tank like so much glass seashells.

Form matters because it means that one has learned their lessons about writing—poetry, though expressive of the soul’s yearnings and all, is writing, remember, subject to rules of clarity, precision, diction. One may do what one wants to do with language only after the lessons are learned, which is to say internalized. Form does matter, as in grammar, language skill, syntax, et al. A writer is more or less required to know the mechanics of writing and something about poetry before their efforts reach the level of art of any consideration. One cannot break the rules unless one knows the rules. The poet ought to desire the effect, but the insistence that a work have the "desired effect" is a slippery bit of business. Individual readers will bring their own experience to bear when they read and interpret the work; a bit of themselves will color how they recognize the particular ideas and instances the poet writes of. The poets' task, better said, is to write their material in a way that it elicits a response in the first place. For the most part, the dimensions of response are none of the writers' business.

Poetry... without effect... is meaningless babble.


Too broad a statement, covering as it does too many centuries of poetry, ideas about poetry, cultures in which poetry is written, et al. "Effect" is another slippery word; what one doesn't personally respond to may well be and probably is someone else’s' core moral truth. There is also the reasonable possibility that the reader finding something foul in a style of writing is unaware of the standards and requirements the style needs. What isn’t understood straight away is often condemned out of hand, without inspection, and it’s not unlike many to be willful in their refusing to learn something about writing aesthetics they didn’t know before. This fact doesn’t lessen the quality of the complainer’s preferred bards, periods and dictions; indeed, some of the poets might be embarrassed at the use of their name for cultural intolerance. Still others, like Eliot or Pound, would join a chorus of condemnation in short order, as long as the controversy involved further vilification of Jews.

That said, let us conclude that no one reading this the Ideal Reader, earnestly reading literature without preconceptions as to an art’s need to bolster unchanging certainties, and that we do the best we do to understand how something works on its own terms. It’s the cliché we hear from time to time, the search for similarities among ourselves rather than the concentration on obvious differences. We can reject the similarities if we like, but it helps to have a humane preference as to what one leans toward in the service of creating a life worth living rather than merely wallowing in the bitter juice of sour grapes

My adversary changes the subject, a dig at the universities and their secular relativism: At worst it is pseudo-intellectual drivel indented to impress Academic pundits. Take that!! Have at you!!!

You're writing about a particular KIND of academic poetry, I wrote back, and went off on another riff; this is suspect, and here condemn hundreds of poets and their work without a fair reading. It's hard work, I know, trying to keep abreast of what's available, what's being written, and a lot of it is bad, stale, calcified on the page, but a good amount of it is daring and fresh, contains verve, engages ideas and the real world at the same time, and otherwise performs what has always been the principle mission of the poet, to find new ways of experiencing the world, and inspiring new ways of living within it in a larger sense of community.

Poetry, at core, is about ideas and intellectual concepts as much as it is about feelings, and far less about sentiment. Without the kind of rigor these "intellectual" poets bring to bear on their work, there'd be nothing but a dull gallery of old and brittle styles for us to choose from, a juke box full of scratchy records, rhymes of old dead men that we ceaselessly imitate without a wit about why these old lyrics were written in the first place. I would say these old tunes were first written to bring some NEW IDEAS to our consciousness, some new perceptions to fire our sense of a larger and more interesting life. This is something we can’t afford to stop doing. At best it elevates the spirit or creates deep emotional response. Life, I believe, is something whose final, "fixed" meaning is unknowable, and is, really, something we bring "meaning" to by dint of our actions.What we have done, said, written will speak for us when we aren't able to rant, cajole, seduce and wave our arms as we attempt to persuade others that we're a benefit to the race. This, of course, makes life neither inherently good nor bad, though we do have it in our power to agree on acceptable, workable, flexible definitions of what constitutes the "good life" and what actions make for the ill. Life, though, is more than just "mankind". It is EVERYTHING, and we are just here visiting. The quality of the visit, though, is entirely within our grasps.

He didn’t answer and I was tired, and it was then I noticed the neighbor’s television was on, and loud. David Letterman was barking his quips about Regis Philbin, his voice muffled as it filtered through my radiator. It was time to shut things down and go to sleep.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Escape from New Criticism

Someone I know posed the question "what else is there?" in response to a past diatribe I posted here , "No More Poems About Poetry". I replied, in a hurry, I admit, that
not everything spoken of in poetry need be funneled through a filter that refers to poetry .Poetry is meant to produce an experience through a heightened language that should,all the same,be plausible as speech.The reader should be brought inside the poet's discourse and convinced the experience was real,honest.Dependence on self awareness of form for ironic effect is,I think,a form of cheating.true,there are brilliant poets and poems about poetry.my gripe resides with the abuse of the ploy,which is pervasive and dulling. 

The point of writing poetry and of reading poetry was to see to what extent language can be extended to include those perceptions and fleeting rushes of emotion and sensation that might otherwise elude our capacity to express; it is a way of knowing ourselves in a world of others. If poetry as subject matter needed to be an issue within a poem, a problematic quirk that needed to be contended with in the expression, I had always thought it should be in the struggle for a narrator to get beyond their own contingencies and possibly experience something that was not formed on them since before birth, Stopping the discussion with poetry as the subject with little effort to poke through the veil, or faith that this can even be done, is to allow oneself to remain chained to the cave wall.



No one and nothing escapes the history of the form which born them, but what's interesting in literature, poetry in particular, are the results from those daring to dream beyond their confines in what they write . Even if the matter concludes that no one gets out of here alive, so to speak, it remains that a consequence none the less that one , writer and reader, are made a little larger, are made a little braver for the experience of realizing lies beyond the mere sensation of what our skin receives. The reflexive thing, the pondering the very form one uses to create their tales, the structuralist take down of all narrative, poetry, play or novel, being the mere result of economic determinism, is something that charged a generation or two of poets toward some inspired work , but what it has turned into, I'm afraid, is something of a wallow; it lets the poet coast on the easy excuse that there really isn't anything outside the box after all and that we might as all stay home, watch porn or baseball and discuss the impossibility of sensing anything beyond the walls. 


Even if it were true that poetry is implicitly connected to all other poems and poets, something I wouldn't dispute beyond a certain point, I find it ridiculous for poets to carpet bomb their poems with untoward, unprompted and needless mentions of other poets, of the form poetry itself, or that the writer is a poet in the company of other poets; while we may treat the whole issue of poems about poetry as an issue that is hopelessly meta, there remains a need, I think, for the poet to artfully tamp down his intellectual preferences and give his attention to what is job number one, of coming out of the clouds and presenting us with a perception that is unclouded by the overnight bags of history.

The lay of the Zoomba

Art is art because it's an expressive mission in constant flux, which means that the definitions are of what a lyric or a poem happen to be are slippery suckers indeed. Fact is, though ,is that Poe was a mediocre poet , an arch romantic rhymester given to obsessive surface effects because, I believe, he realized the vacuity of his content. One never responds emotionally to Poe's cadences; rather we appreciate them for their scansion, which is a distinction as banal as his best rhyming work. For all the talk of poems and lyrics being arbitrary distinctions at best, one needs to admit that the aesthetic of poetry has changed dramatically since the days of yore; reciting rhymed verse is more likely to seem affected and goonishly cute than stirring; there is always the genius who will rhyme brilliantly and with emotional power , but said poets are rare things. The upshot is that rhymes sound stilted, mannered, over thought to the contemporary ear. Recited sans music, one is greeted with the feeling of a peg legged man pacing a creaky wood floor. As awful as so much free poetry can be, the poets do not, by default, sound ridiculous reading their work. Theirs is a different kind of banality altogether, starting with the waste of their parent's money to send them to a writing program.


All the same, the criteria of what makes for credible poems has evolved along with the style in which poems have written; although one may take from the past and revolutionize it to some degree, it's a new set of idioms that make up the current sensibility. Dylan and others may also be the inheritors of what Poe, Crane and still others have done, but they do so in the practice in another art, related to but distinct from poetry, which is songwriting. Dylan is a songwriter, not a poet. Some would point out that Dylan did produce a book of poetry, "Tarantula", a surreal stretch of William Burroughs insomnia that suggested, yes, but had little in the way of poetic achievement, He was merely typing madly, as Capote said of Kerouac. Leonard Cohen, of course, is the logical example of someone who can both be a published poet, novelist and songwriter and achieve remarkable success in each of those forms. One does need to remind the earnest that Cohen the songwriter was not working as Cohen the poet who, in turn, was not operating under the mistaken diversion of writing a novel while thinking he was in a rehearsal for Sid Caesar  beatnik sketch, 




The lyrics to Leonard Cohen's song "Sisters of Mercy", written as lyrics , remain lyrics. In that case, Mr.Cohen is a lyricist, a songwriter. As the author of the haunting poetry sequence "Flowers for Hitler", he is a poet. He is a poet and a songwriter, and we appreciate what he does in either in both fields by related, but finely distinct standards. Poetry, written for the page, in a tone closer to vernacular speech, has greater range and may make use of more literary devices and is, as a result, capable of greater depth of feeling , allusion, association. Given the skill of the page poet, the poems have a life , a musicality when they are read aloud. Song lyrics, no matter how "poetic" they sound (or indeed, how actually brilliant they may be) , are confined to the contours of the melody they accompany. Cohen songs, Costello Songs, Dylan Songs, Mitchell songs, Hendrix songs sound stiff, silly and vaguely pretentious when read aloud, as speech, sans melody. Ours is not an age of great rhymed poetry.

The lay of the Zoomba

Art is art because it's an expressive mission in constant flux, which means that the definitions are of what a lyric or a poem happen to be are slippery suckers indeed. Fact is, though ,is that Poe was a mediocre poet , an arch romantic rhymester given to obsessive surface effects because, I believe, he realized the vacuity of his content. One never responds emotionally to Poe's cadences; rather we appreciate them for their scansion, which is a distinction as banal as his best rhyming work. For all the talk of poems and lyrics being arbitrary distinctions at best, one needs to admit that the aesthetic of poetry has changed dramatically since the days of yore; reciting rhymed verse is more likely to seem affected and goonishly cute than stirring; there is always the genius who will rhyme brilliantly and with emotional power , but said poets are rare things. The upshot is that rhymes sound stilted, mannered, over thought to the contemporary ear. Recited sans music, one is greeted with the feeling of a peg legged man pacing a creaky wood floor. As awful as so much free poetry can be, the poets do not, by default, sound ridiculous reading their work. Theirs is a different kind of banality altogether, starting with the waste of their parent's money to send them to a writing program.


All the same, the criteria of what makes for credible poems has evolved along with the style in which poems have written; although one may take from the past and revolutionize it to some degree, it's a new set of idioms that make up the current sensibility. Dylan and others may also be the inheritors of what Poe, Crane and still others have done, but they do so in the practice in another art, related to but distinct from poetry, which is songwriting. Dylan is a songwriter, not a poet. Some would point out that Dylan did produce a book of poetry, "Tarantula", a surreal stretch of William Burroughs insomnia that suggested, yes, but had little in the way of poetic achievement, He was merely typing madly, as Capote said of Kerouac. Leonard Cohen, of course, is the logical example of someone who can both be a published poet, novelist and songwriter and achieve remarkable success in each of those forms. One does need to remind the earnest that Cohen the songwriter was not working as Cohen the poet who, in turn, was not operating under the mistaken diversion of writing a novel while thinking he was in a rehearsal for Sid Caesar  beatnik sketch, 



The lyrics to Leonard Cohen's song "Sisters of Mercy", written as lyrics , remain lyrics. In that case, Mr.Cohen is a lyricist, a songwriter. As the author of the haunting poetry sequence "Flowers for Hitler", he is a poet. He is a poet and a songwriter, and we appreciate what he does in either in both fields by related, but finely distinct standards. Poetry, written for the page, in a tone closer to vernacular speech, has greater range and may make use of more literary devices and is, as a result, capable of greater depth of feeling , allusion, association. Given the skill of the page poet, the poems have a life , a musicality when they are read aloud. Song lyrics, no matter how "poetic" they sound (or indeed, how actually brilliant they may be) , are confined to the contours of the melody they accompany. Cohen songs, Costello Songs, Dylan Songs, Mitchell songs, Hendrix songs sound stiff, silly and vaguely pretentious when read aloud, as speech, sans melody. Ours is not an age of great rhymed poetry.

sometimes even the professionals need the rejection slip

 I haven't read a poem as lazily conceived as Mark Strand's "Ever So Many Hundred Years Hence" in years. Honestly, considering Strand's reputation as one of the best lyric poets still trying to make the unremarkable events in life truly memorable, this poem comes off as a middling sham. A poetry workshop would take an axe and a red pencil to it's corrosively cliched form.
A poet as acclaimed as Mark Strand should know better than to offer a paragraph so riddled with the hackneyed, the mundane and the hastily written. "Corridors of fog" would have sufficed by itself, a tangible image rarely encountered in poems, but which is ruined with the goofy adjective "milky". This is precisely the needless word a good workshop teacher would have pointedly crossed out, explaining, I think, that it's better to not over describe a situation for which the simplest, clearest , freshest image offers up the highest yield to the reader for their own associations.

 It turns a line that was okay to begin with into the tritest, laziest presentation, written by a writer who cannot trust his own instinct as to when he his done finessing a line. Worst of all, though, this paragraph is evidence of the worst quality a poet can exhibit, that of being tone deaf. Strand has strived to be a lyric poet during his published life and his work, I'm afraid, have nearly always had the quality of being self conscious aware of their own sensitivity. His language has always sounded borrowed, bound to a convenient template of convenient situations, emotions and perspective.

 This poem just boils it down to a hard, seared piece of drift wood , a dead branch of indistinguishable poesy; he is only a couple of steps removed from a greeting card sentimentality that offers, at best, in most situations, the easily grasped perspective Rod McKuen, an insufferable cartoon of would be wisdom. There might have been something spectacular in a poem that compresses decades of a man's life in only a few lines and winds up with with a plausible reunion with a long lost nephew, but even for an art as promiscuous with premise as poetry this strains credulity. This isn't a poem, it's a country western song, it's an agent's desperate for a movie he'd like to make, it's shaggy dog store sans the dog or the hair.

It is a boneyard of cliche.


Saturday, April 16, 2011

Why Are Republicans So Mean?

There's a latent worship of power , stamina and absurdly skewed masculinity , and the party of Lincoln, so called, more often than not likes to think of themselves as rugged sorts for whom any helping hand from a state agency is sure weakness, moral slack and despicable. Though a good many of them will scorch the earth in their creationist ways and continue to demonize Evolution, the irony rests in the facts that there’s a strong, rancid tendency toward Social Darwinism in their thinking. It’s not that do the Christian thing and be kind to one another, cloth and feed the poor, and in general err on the side of decency, but rather that the strong need to subjugate the poor and powerless and in turn carve up the earth’s resources .

Anyone who hasn’t power or money or status is , by default, a wretch who cannot survive the rigors of living in the real world; they and society would be better off if they died off, disappeared , vanished into the thin, fetid air that surrounds their corporate towers.

I can’t say that all Republicans are bastards—I have anecdotal evidence that a few of them have principles not linked to serving the already rich and powerful—but I’m never shocked when ever the Republicans come into power and proceed to slash funding for helpful federal programs with ease and without a pause in their stride. It’s a determinist imperative, perhaps, a hard wiring of specific genes that cannot be untwined; Republicans cannot help but be hard-throbbing assholes.