Keeping it dumb in black and white

"...democracies are fundamentally anti-artistic. "

A door without a frame is not unlike a question without a desire to know.

That's what I heard , just walking by the patio , a man and women geeked out on wine and Sherman cigarettes discussing whether free elections are hindrance or a boon to the artist. They seemed to think that the contenders for power appealed to the primordial fear of a hypothetical Mass Man in order to foment their unspoken desire to consolidate their resources; only the black and white world need apply. But , in truth, it is  ;ess that democracies are anti-artistic than they are resistant to the notion that aesthetic concerns and artistic expression are reserved for a cultivated elite.

Democracy rejects this sublimated priesthood on principle, and opens the arena, the galleries so that more who wish to do so may engage in the intuitive/artistic process and keep the activity alive in ways that are new and precisely relevant to the time--this is the only way that the past has any use at all, as it informs the present day activity, and allows itself to be molded to new sets of experiences. Art is about opening up perspectives, not closing them down, and that is the democratic spirit at its best. 

Otherwise, the past is a rigored religion, and history is an excuse for brutal, death wish nostalgia.

Tucked out

The times have changed to the degree that women who wear revealing clothing are no longer offended when you make note of what they're revealing. Everything is permitted , it sometimes seems, and the surfeit of goods and the lack of time for concomitant indulgence renders all those options invisible. Our choices become more than a distraction, they become a hindrance, and how you judge whether a day was a success or not was how well you resisted, no, ignored the allure of what used to drive you crazy with yearning.

MUSIC FOR CASH REGISTERS

I could sing all night
if the lights never changed
and if the radio played this song
again and again,
it’s a riff that rubs me
the right way in traffic
it’s a chorus making downtown
a party of long ribbons
and faired tap shoes,
the motor purrs and growls
with each keyboard grunt
and grunting guitar,
this car just rocks
when there’s no one I have to
return it to.

This is the curse of
owning things
that merely own you in exchange,

Cars, toasters, hand guns and
and magazines hug your
face with a deep kiss of need,

What I receive is nameless
and elusive, some music, some smoke,
dry ice vapors and a wallet that
floats away,
that’s how light it’s gotten,

Money is air, invisible but potent,

I owe money I’ve never seen
to people I’ve never met,

Like you, shuffling your debit cards
and saying prayers that don’t seem
to soar as high as interest rates
or blood pressure,
you should be dancing
for all the coin we owe,

This moment , right now,
on the street that vibrates
with orders on how to drive
when to cross and what to smoke
the thirty yards from the public entrance,
the world can stop and we perk our ears to
listen to an imagined needle scratching
the surface of percussive vinyl,

The bass line and the grunts of soul singers
are all the advice we need; they called decades ago
when we started to toss our cash out from
Wall Street Windows,

They advised

Do the jerk, baby,
Do the jerk now!M

A sonnet I wrote

I thought this effort   was a decent attempt at the loose-fitting sonnet form, as practiced by Ted Berrigan and featured in Gerald Stern’s engagingly gangly book American Sonnets. The distinction between these efforts and the Elizabethan sonnets one parses in college courses is that the “loose-fitting” form (my phrase) is an attempt to bring the particularly American instinct to confess and promote one’s idealized personality in free verse, ala Whitman and Charles Olson , with the limits a more formal structure. The results satisfy nearly no one but those who appreciate perversions of form, with the hope something new emerges. Sometimes something does. I was hoping for comments on this slight effort:

Sonnet 16  

A sign of the cross and a sign on the door or just sign

yourself out if it’s a weekend pass you’re dealing with, 

sign yourself up for a moment in the sun when youhave your tax refund check in hand, give us some cash for 

the diversions that approach the distraction level

of morons who get their exercise reading the labels 

on records as they go ‘round and ‘round on the

phonograph, signs of life in a living room, your parents 

house and sofa, I am hiding behind a chair before the light

switch is flipped and a panic like business plans that come 

undone where you signed a dotted line that ends up

being a perforations around your wrists, like you see

on butcher’s charts, you know, under the sign that reads

NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT, DON’T ASK.

Interesting, and as often happens on the forums, the first response to the poem brought something else in the poem to think about other than how well it works as an amateurs attempt at  more structured verse. A poster with the moniker Th Paine asked How many people will understand what you mean when you refer to record labels spinning around on a phonograph?

Good question. Who would have thought that LP's would be something that reveals your generation? I remember years ago talking to a young man , twenty years younger than I at least, about various matters. When it came time to say goodbye, I said "I'll see you on the flip side". He looked puzzled as we shook hands as asked me what I meant by "flip side". In an instant I realized that he was too young to remember long playing albums, vinyl, and briefly explained that before Cd's records had two sides, side A and side B, and that the phrase meant the other side of the record. It was no big deal , of course, but it was informative that I was now old enough that some of the cultural references I'd been using for decades were now potentially incomprehensible to younger adults.

FALLING ON DEAF EARS

 I  like loud and distorted guitar, old school, in the form of jamming power trios, those guitar-bass-drums shootouts where the downbeats started at debated counts and the length of improvised middle section was undetermined and unpredictable. Improvisation, riffing, vamping, monochromatic chord mongering, the center portions of this species of spontaneous noise took it's stylistic cue from several generations of black American blues geniuses and took their clear, elegantly expressed formulations of anger, pain , dread and joy and tweaked the pentatonic elements to a narrowed strain of white male rage, performed at volume levels beyond endurance levels , with the nimble, simple, eloquent rhythms and solo configurations of guitar , harmonica, banjo being replaced with a waves of distorted notes bent to their furthermost pitch of emotional credibility.

It was perfect for the smoky ballrooms I went to in the late '60s, where the likes of Cream, Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore and Mountain belched, groaned and assaulted a beleaguered audience of addled brains with their instrumental abuse; on some nights the commotion and clamor reminded you more of a demolition derby instead of a unique engagement with a fleeting muse. The impact was more important than configuration. There was joy when, in Detroit where I lived, I came upon the MC5 and the Stooges. The 5 were every car Detroit had manufactured being tossed off the top of the Penobscot, the tallest building in town; they had a speed and power only the fury of an accumulating gravity could provide, and half the fun of watching these guys batter, abuse and flail their instruments while the wiggled and wrenched themselves in hip-thrusting deliriums was the expectation of their metaphorical car crashing, smashing into the hard, metal strewn concrete below. The Stooges were, on the other hand, the guitar that was tossed off with a violent fling at a bad rehearsal and left on, still plugged into the amp, humming and crackling the whole night; Ron Ashton's guitar work was perfect, imperfect, with a wood-chipper rhythm, a perfect three and two-chord background for Iggy Pop, who's psycho-sexual explorations into the outer areas of teenage impatience would make you think of a zombies severed arm. It still twitches across the blood, the hand is still making grasping motions for your neck, you realize that even death cannot stop this force that requires your attention.

Reading Bei Dao

Bei Dao is an especially fine poet , and I thought it would be a relief to read some work from a contemporary Chinese poet who better brings together a modern diction with the tradition of image clarity found in traditional Chinese verse. Pound's translations are so loose in their relation to the original tongue and intent that many specialists consider them to be not translations at all but wholly original poems instead. This perspective makes the poems a bit more approachable, and presents us with the idea that Pound's misreading of Chinese aesthetic led him, all the same, to develop his notions of a twentieth century poetry where the image prevails over sentiment and empty rhetoric. Bei Dao, of course, has the sure-footedness I don't think Pound ever achieved in this area. While Pound was busy mimicking an old old style (or what he took to be what an older style would sound like) ,Bei Dao neatly builds surely, delicately, all things in balance, indeed, not an idea but in the thing.

Branch roads appear and disappear
in the hands of trees.
Where did the fawns go?
Only cemeteries could assuage
this desolation, like tiny cities.

The thinking comes after the poem, for the reading to resonate with. Our fine poet here performs his art beautifully, the presentation of the perception.Here are other poems he's written,scaled back to a sparkling essence of perception,
translated by Eliot Weinberger :

June

Wind at the ear says June
June a blacklist I slipped
in time

note this way to say goodbye
the sighs within these words

note these annotations:
unending plastic flowers
on the dead left bank
the cement square extending
from writing to

now
I run from writing
as dawn is hammered out
a flag covers the sea

and loudspeakers loyal to the sea's
deep bass say June

___________________________________

Teacher's Manual

A school still in session
irritable restless but exercising restraint
I sleep beside it
my breath just reaching the next
lesson in the textbook: how to fly

when the arrogance of strangers
sends down March snow
a tree takes root in the sky
a pen to paper breaks the siege
the river declines the bridge invites

the moon takes the bait
turning the familiar corner
of the stairs, pollen and viruses
damage my lungs damage
an alarm clock

to be let out of school is a revolution
kids jump over the railings of light
and turn to the underground
other parents and I
watch the stars rise

Sketches drawn with a broken hand

Striking images alluding to opaque , disquieting personal episodes used to be the thing I insisted a poem be, a constantly streaming series of broken bits rendered in sufficiently harsh terms that seemed to want to perpetuate a pain. I am lucky to have had a series of professors and poets who suggested, even required me to read far beyond my reading preferences; I would have small poetry collection had I not broadened my horizon. It is unreasonable to demand that poets write with the same depressed acuity as Sylvia Plath, and I think equally irrational for poets to attempt the mimic her singularly downcast genius.

Leslie McGrath's poem , "The Mouth of the Mind", nonetheless treads the excessively forged confessional path in order to offer up a scenario that recalls Mark Strand's "The Dreadful Has Already Happened". Strand, whom I don't care a great deal for as a poet, does however have a lyric ability where a musical of how to start a phrase, what to make of it in mid turn, and where to finish up, and his poem is a masterpiece in how to convey wordless woes and worries without sacrificing flow. McGrath , odd to say, is no Mark Strand (at his best); her emphasis , blunt and less willing to provide a reader with a verbal ease to segue between the clashing elements of her nightmare, seems to reduce the ratio of what can be understood on an intuited level and make her awful recollections into garish totems , a bric a brac of crummy self image. Strand's poems features the poet leaving the baroque verbal garnishments in the spice cabinet for a change and crafting instead a scenario of  fluid strangeness, creating the most effective surreal effect;  a narrative line that seems that it ought to resolve itself but which only deepens ever so slightly in its contradictions the more one re-reads to see if they've missed something vital. It's meaning is undecidable, but the presentation is compelling.

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh   

when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them   

out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.   

It was about that time I gave up.

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips

are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered   

around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search   

I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.

This is something of a silent film, significant family members and friends involved in a ritual that is required for reasons that are with held. Every small thing finds negation, each gesture of warmth and security is undermined by sullen looks and currents of anxiety; what we're made aware of, though, is that through the  temperamental extremes there lies those short moments of peace, serenity, the lack of the nagging noise that converts the banality of the world into storm warnings and shots over the bow. The sadder bit of it all is this calm that requires the most effort to arrive at.

Bear in mind that I enjoy a surrealistic, non-sequitor style; even with that, though, a certain playfulness is expected, a particular joy in presenting the world and memory of it in alternative versions of What Happened is required, if only to prevent the odd bits of phrase making from becoming a humorless shelf of unfocused melancholy. Her imagery is heavy handed and lacks a memorable phrase or unusual. The segues from baby bunny rabbits, alive or dead, dinner tables, stray bullets on a counter salads full of wasted money are not especially convincing that this was anything worth writing a poem about; it seems more an unrefined extract from a dream journal that is intended for a therapist or an astrologer than it is for a readership who are interested in how the language might again escape the truism that everything worth saying or expressing in verse has already been said. McGrath's crabby, snippy, self satisfied anguish does not express the inexpressible in terms of the forgettable. It is, though, a confirmation that writing a good poem is not something just anyone can do. 

A poem

Part of me thinks the best part of this poem is the portion I didn't write, the epigraph by John Ashbery from an essay of his about avant-gard art.  We seem to have  collective wish to have the art of our understanding flirt, skirt and play footsie with grave and fatal matters, to ponder the eternal beyond, to take the reader/viewer/listener on a vicarious trip to the edge of whatever rim of existence and extinction our imaginations can conjure and set within us some sense of the urgent need for us to live fully, purposefully, creatively. We want our art to be dangerous, in other words, and force to understand what life is after we garner a strong, vibrant sense of what it is not. Ashbery, though, takes a another stance and dares the Wildean notion that Art has no use other than entertainment; presented wth with nothing but abstruse guesswork and blank slates in response to the Big Question, we busy ourselves with our designs and find ourselves by what we now recognize as religion, philosophy, busy systems of supposition to distract from the groaning emptiness threatening to appear should the props collapse in mid sentence. Not to have fun is to face the crushing truth that all  is likely without purpose or any sort of intelligent predestination, but we can't consider that a sure bet.

____________________________________________

Another Side of Long Distance Calls

"...religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing. We would all believe in God if we knew he He existed, but would this be much fun?..."
-- John Ashbery

Somewhere along the line
something was said
that made
an awful lot of sense.
an utterance so
stable in verb and stance
that my head jerked up
as if on a string
moved about
by a cruel master.
The guy who said
was smiles
for miles his white
teeth could blind.

William had his glass at the tip
of his lip
as though a toast
were to emerge from
his studied gestures,
he repeated
his wisdom,

"Jesus lives in a house on
the moon
and he can't go outside
because there is no air..."

The table spun just then,
three fast fandangos,
and in the swirl
three thousand or so years of
thinking came undone like
badly sewn stitches across
the seams of thin, historical clothing,
every fig leaf has fallen
from our shoulders and
waistline,

Philosophy and faith
are seen finally
for what they are
through the bottom of
the bar glass,

a little man in a corner
holding a wet paint brush.

I used to have the idea that being vague and indistinct in your writing was the best way to achieve poetic effect and labored, or rather scribbled a good ten years with that thinking as my working principle. Clarity be damned, it was all about striking images and bizarre juxtapositions of styles, images, concepts that were the important factors in making writing achieve what was truly inexpressible in everyday language. The conceit, as you may guess, was the confidence that I had transcended the ordinary arrangements our lingua franca imposed on us and that I had , by romantic right and personal inclination, was provoking a conversation about earthly affairs in terms only God could create; the more complex approach to the common place was too much for mere linear progression--heaping leaps of faith aplenty were required of the reader, who would, ideally, "complete" the poem with the missing details of their own lives. It was the poet's version of Method Acting, raw and unpolished responses to intricate and emotional situations .

Contriving Issues

Michael Ryan admires Emily Dickens, it appears, but there’s nothing in his poem“My Young Mother” that comes near the compressed internalization the Amherst mistress created with her jump-cut, cat-footed leaps between ideas. Dickens, for sure, was a writer one stayed with, labored over, argued with in terms of the uncompromising nature of the style, and then and only then grasped her cadences and the burrowing revelations they contained; one was rewarded as well with a stinging wit that was properly lacerating once it was released from it’s coded sheath.

There are, to say the least, considerable rewards for the close inspection of her unusual diction and convoluted construction. Ryan fares much less trying to write with a suggestion of her style—it’s the subject for emulation that is the least likely to produce interesting results—and where Dickens had the skill to keep one guessing, unsure, strung along as to what her point would be or what it was that might be revealed (the peculiar joy of Dickens is the teasing, the delayed gratification), Ryan’s poem confesses his meanings and intents readily. There is no suspense in the game here, nothing that casts a different light on memories that are clear but clouded somehow with intervening events. There is, instead, a mannered and stiff rendering of a childhood memory I can’t help but think unfolds from Ryan with too much detail,

What she couldn't give me

she gave me those long nights

she sat up with me feverish

and sweating in my sleep

when I had no idea whatsoever

what she had to do to suffer

the pain her body dealt her

to assuage the pain in mine.

The writing is too fussed-over, the particulars too polished, the narrative constructed in such a way that one knows that there is a punch line coming by the usual literary routes. Ryan continues an argument he seems to have been having with his mother over the years and finds himself in the grasp of a swooning revelation that a handy device has landed at his feet to aid him in bringing a coherent (if game footed) line to his leftover recollection. He senses his mother resents her requirement to remain with her sick child but remains so through an instilled sense of obligation and duty, instincts she likewise resents.

That was a noble privacy—

her mothering as a practice of patience—

how deeply it must have stretched her

to watch me all night with her nerves

crying for rest while my fever

spiked under the washcloths 

she passed between my forehead

and her dishpan filled with ice.

Ryan attempts a feint her with the last stanza, doing as Dickens does by at first seeming to address a subject in a way that suggests a praising tone, and then, against expectation, turn to the other extreme, although in Dickens case, the “other extreme” wasn’t extreme in the writing, but rather swiftly, deftly, ingeniously offered. The effect was of someone changing their mind about someone or something, but credibly so, with some evidence visible from the argument the speaker had advanced in their initial praise of the subject. Ryan’s attempt to address a darker side of what he’s set up in the previous stanza, the conspicuously moldy conceit of the Sainted Mother, is ham-handed at best, and bizarre.

That was a noble privacy,but even then there was so muchunsayable between us, and why this was now looks soludicrous in its old costume of shamethat I wish not that she had justsaid it but that I hadn't beenso furious she couldn't.

We find now that he resents his mother because she was putting her child before her own needs and desires and that she did so without protest, but that the child Michael was sensitive enough, aware enough at the time that she was disguising her true feelings, was, in a sense, being false with him and now he has the lingering simmer of resentment that she couldn’t speak to him , mother to child. There are those folks in various twelve-step programs who “get stuck at the fourth step”, the writing of a fearless and searching moral inventory of themselves where one’s foul deeds, resentments, traumas and what have you are written out with brutal honesty, the goal being that one may face their demons (to risk a cliché) and work through those matters that impede their progress.

The goal is progress, to move on and make a life for oneself that’s worth living, not to assign blame to those who are beset you with life-hobbling “issues”. But there are those many who continue to dig for bones in the backyard and continue to contrive new odious scenarios from scant fragments; it basically turns these people’s lives into conspiracy theories where forces have aligned to make one’s life a punishment. Ryan sounds like he’s stuck on some matters that he would have been better ridding himself of once and for all; the point of an inventory is for an enterprise to rid itself of goods that cannot be sold if it is to remain a going concern. Exaggeration oftentimes benefits a poem that is often the point of engaging in this peculiar form, but Ryan doesn't make me want to suspend my disbelief or to dissociate my sensibilities precisely because the thinly constructed and blatantly contrived nature of the punchline, which was the supposedly stultifying effects of his mother's care for him. The poem is whining, really, the sort of who can't help but feel ennobled by their self-diagnosed dysfunction. It's an easy way to give your life a narrative arc, an original source, from which a limitless flow of causes and effects can be writ, most pat and phony. “My Young Mother” seems to be an example of someone inventing evidence that he’d been done a foul deed; the result is an awkward and ludicrously reasoned poem. Some things can only be written off when all is done, and as someone who manages bookstores, ridding oneself finally of what cannot be made good use is a relief. The tone of Ryan's poem is weepy and woe-is-me, and my experience in the programs I alluded to in my initial post has presented me with those for whom their issues, whether alcoholism, drug addiction, codependency or child abuse, is a form of identity politics. There is a power in the brand, as it gives one a world view and provides a license for one to rummage through their past and invent further originating sources of their dismaying existence. It might well be that Ryan intended anaha! in all this, that something is revealed, but what I take to be an unsettled issue keeps him on the fence in the form of the equivocating language he selects. It remains in dysfunction; if the matter here was settled, Ryan would have the instinct to offer up a portrait of a "fully-formed man" that would have resulted from his struggles. But he doesn't, and the poem ends only with the feeling that this is a man who can become weepy because he chooses to be so.

Our punk, our genius

Bob Dylan, strictly speaking, is pop. He was pop by the definitions of pop music holding sway in the mid to late Sixties when the word became associated with experimentation, the avant-guard. "Pop" and "Rock" were interchangeable terms. Peter Townsend was the one who coined the term "power pop", in an interview I read in the old Hit Parader music journal,  and used the phrase to describe the Who. It was a term he used to define the Beach Boys, a band he admired quite a bit Definitions of terms change, of course, and with the re-emergence of conspicuously commercial tunes in a post-punk era came a new pop music that was heavy on irony and purely obsessed with its hook value. 

The Beach Boys were an extension of the harmony prone Four Freshmen, a vocal style overlaid upon a Chuck Berry chord progression with lyrics addressing concerns not of the 40s or 50s, surfing and souped cars. The who borrowed the Beach Boys'  vocalese and used it in conjunction with a musical style premised on power chords and snarling teen hooliganism. Dylan, though, was the one who broke from the pack, taking his inspiration from the nominally "pure"  genres contained in the folk music revival.  The good man, though, had something larger to  do rather than adhere to principles; fame was his goal, and fortune;  he walked backward into genius,  into the backwoods with this nasal, grunting vocals and lyrics that blended  an idealized  proletariat idiom with  great heaping doses of  Verlaine and Eliot: he brought literary Modernism to the jukebox. He also understood the dynamics of being a teen ideal. If he couldn't be sexy/dangerous like  Elvis, he could at least be vague, mysterious, "poetic".

The "dignity" and" integrity" that Dylan refused to be marginalized by--ie, made quaint and neutered as a revolutionary force of any definition--were those notions codified by the lefty Folk Revival he eventually abandoned. Their idea of those qualities had little to do with Polonius's greatest platitude--"...to thine own self-be true..." --and everything to do with conformity to a vaguely held consensus.  I would only insist that the means of Dylan following his muse amounts to deftly selected instances of opportunism. Had Dylan been less inspired in his mashing together of his unlike influences, we likely would have regarded him as a pretentious fool trying to beserk himself into genius. Dylan, though, was a genius, and his careerism is mitigated in the music and lyrics that resulted from it. The work is everything. It took rock and roll by surprise. Someone like Dylan from the Sixties wouldn't be considered pop at all. He had singles that found chart positions, he earned gold albums, he toured internationally, gave interviews and signed autographs. He was a pop star, a pop artist, a contradiction that refused to be marginalized by unprofitable consolations such as dignity or integrity. He was going to be famous and get rich; he was a pop star and a punk. Our punk, our genius.

Grumble

 Jill McDonough's poem,  "December 12, 1884: George Cooke", from a series of sonnets she's been writing drawn from actual events in American history,  appeared in Slate's poetry section a few years ago. It did me a great and gracious favor, that of being so recognizably inane that it spared me the purchase of the book.

This reads as if it were a combination of dry facts from a history book blended with a student's marginalia. Scissors, paste and yellow highlighter are all over this assemblage, which indeed seems more assembled than composed. There is a punchline McDonough wants to land on, an example of Fate's anonymous wit, but there is not enough here to make us, meaning me, the reader, care enough to interpret the poem so that it becomes whole and coherent. It would be easy enough to dwell on issues such as how a sensationalist media twists historical fact into personality driven events and fictionalizes the record with romantic constructions in the interest of selling papers, but that would be too much weight to lay upon such a slight and underfed piece of writing. Such speculation would be more than the critic's invention than the author's intent.The mistake was to approach this set of information as a poem, as this is a clear case where an unambiguous prose format would have achieved what resonance McDonough wanted to have us experience; prose seems better suited for such terseness.

'm thinking of Ernest Hemingway, who's masterly avoidance of qualifiers still provides a powerful kick, particularly his short story collection In Our Time.The collection is a masterpiece of what wasn't said. The italicized sketches between the longer stories are what McDonough should pay attention to, as they show how only a few facts conveyed in a paucity of words can still pull at your heart the way she wanted with "George Cooke" .

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two poems by Mark Conway

 "Vertigo" ,Mark Conway's poem published in Slate in 2005, has the definite problem of a poet who tries so hard to avoid cliche that he mistakes clown-shoed phrasing for original style. The poem reads like a man who keeps trying to say something important or intimate but is stymied ,stalled or otherwise silenced by memory lapse, fear, or head injury. The opening stanza, composed of unassigned similes and indefinite articles like "antidote", "fear" or "refined",lacks even the dignity of grandiose throat clearing; it's an open field of nagging doubt . This is the kind of
speech habit I would walk away from, and it's a writing habit that would cause me to not seek out any other poems by Mark Conway.It does not improve as the poem progresses to other stanzas, since Conway seemingly abhors clear language and chooses instead to give us the most awkward syntax he can contrive:

Wanting it, teetering
on the edge,
between falling
and crawling, back taut
against the arc
of the almost-fallen object,
backwards against
the need just
to get it
over, the wind
forced against your nostrils
as breath
One can well understand the desire to express everyday things in interesting phrases, but this is not phrasing at all, just clubfooted diction. Whatever it is he wants to talk about is deferred until the last possible moment, in an unmistakable effort to create tension and provide the poem with
momentum, but this all seems so arty, and yet there is no art. The problem, it seems, is that Conway tried to make every instance in this poem
a twisting road that was full of surprises. Simpler
sentences would help this mass of knots perfectly well, with the fancier diction cut way, way back.The payday of this poem for me is the first genuinely bad line of poetry from a Pinsky selection for the summer:

This is what fathers do
I say in the empty
tunnel of my body(!!!!!!)

(Exclamation points are mine).

The Empty Tunnel of My Body. I just want to say that phrase over and over, up and down the street, yelling it through a bullhorn. It has that acid-casualty odor that comes from old Strawberry Alarm Clock albums, or happens to the name of one of the local lunatics who shows up at open readings and whom everyone is too scared of to tell him that he's done way over his five minutes.


Another of his poems,"The First Body" ,argues that we love this life because we have craving,a fatal attraction for the afterlife where there is no labor, no exhaustion, no gravity at all. He wonders, in tight, ridiculously compressed and conditional sentences, about the struggle creatures have in order to survive in real terms.

In the morning, bowed
under blue rain, geese beat
their heavy way back
to the city-state
of mud. Rising, the wings groan,
trying to fly away
from the body.

Winter
was hard, the cold broke
weak and strong, together. Stay
and watch the robins scream
over scattered barley.

This is not a Peaceable Kingdom or a green world, but a series of struggles, striving and hard-nosed facts that are about the privations of
biological life. At first read, this makes you think of what a nature poem written by the gloomiest
Schopenhauerian a cruel world can yield. The
facts of nature are described in terms not of grace or transcendence but of pain, discomfort, death,
the slow and inevitable progress of cyclical existence.

May and the great trees rage,
white sap burned up
into leaves. Turn
and beneath the branches see
the actual air
moving, hesitant, green.
This is when the soul knows
it has a body,
by wanting
to leave it.

Trees rage, white sap makes leaves burn, the air turns hard. Images of things slowing down, of an ice age approaching.

Winter
was hard, the cold broke
weak and strong, together. Stay
and watch the robins scream
over scattered barley.

And still the suffering of living flora and fauna does not stop, and very soon we get this labored point,especially if we've been fortunate enough to have read and discussed Eliot's "The Wasteland" with an accompanying volume of Fraser's "Golden Bough" as a secondary source. There comes a time in many a poet's career where they feel they must attempt their own discourse on the cyclical nature of life, comparing geese in their "city states of mud" with a humanity that is mired in place, dreaming of great deeds and meanings while getting exactly nowhere. What delusional fools we mortals be. But again, this is a theme writ beyond redemption, and there remains a question about what Conway thought he could ad to the endlessly iterated subject.

An annoying habit of contemporary poets is the catchy ending, the sudden left turn to another idea that catches you by surprise, the last minute set of grace notes that are to bring previous stanzas which might have seemed like dissociated taxonomies into a sudden sharpness. The hope is a virtuoso turn of phrase that handsomely threads a number of beads together, and which is intended to leave us breathless. Or exasperated , if the trick doesn't work, which it doesn't here:

This is how we came to
love this life—
by wanting
the next.

This has all the makings of a young man intent on making a big statement and comes up with only

some meaning-giving statement. Here it stops being poetry and becomes naught but rhetoric, unconvincing and unfelt, conveniently all inclusive and "big" in its generality that a reader is virtually instructed to nod their head in a passive pose.

Big statements sink poems, especially poems that are situated in the junkyard of exhausted tropes. Conway the poet was less interested in waxing something profound about the ferocity with which nature and its creatures cling to life than he was in depicting the cyclical notion of life as being closer to a Beckettesque diorama of monotonous inevitability.

"I can't go on, I go on...". Life , nature, and all, are predictable, harsh and drudging things we go through against our will until death, where our reward isn't heaven or insight or superior forms of knowledge but instead just an escape from an unstamped existence to a permanent , dreamless sleep. This is what I think Conway tried to do, and he has not fully appreciated the "anxiety of influence" cast by the looming shadow of Eliot, who's genius none of us can compete with, not on his terms.Conway ought to have stepped back from his best thinking on this one and allowed the images to speak for themselves, something he could have done with a substantial rethinking and rewrite of the piece.

Beautiful and Useless

Beautiful & Pointless: a Guide to Modern Poetry
By David Orr
David Orr is a smart writer and poet who has taken on the task to add yet another apology regarding poetry and its under the radar status with most readers, yet another attempt to make the craft less off-putting to a larger audience. It is an enjoyable book , with some pleasantly worded suggestions to poet and reader that they two groups need to  meet somewhere in the middle of this battle over who is failing who in the relationship and simply share a cup of coffee. But the joining of poet and readership is not something that can be accomplished by easy suggestions ; as usual, I adhere to the pragmatist dictum that the value of any theory is in how it works, which means, to paraphrase, the allure of any poem, in any style, of any theory, of any agenda composed in English, resides mostly with the talent of the individual poet. We get into matters about how well the poet has absorbed and assimilated their readings, ie, "made them his/her own", how broadly they've outgrown their influences and progressed toward their own version of originality and genius, of course.

At the end of the day and long into the night and the following morning, what draws a reader to a poet again after a first reading was the quality of the stanzas, the line breaks, the stylization of the verbs and the spare placement of the adjectives, the use of imagery that seemed both unique and yet plausible, the use of metaphor that is delivered smoothly, invisibly, musically.

It is, I think, less a matter on whether a poet opts for simpler diction and terse couplets in regimented rhyme schemes, or a shambling flow that winds through so many associative canyon highways before coming to something resembling a poetic effect; poets are not unlike jazz improvisers of the language, which is to say that how ever they choose to address a problem they've assigned themselves, it comes down to if the writer has developed as style that has an elegance that adheres to and extends the dictates of their chosen form, if the poems in question have their activity placed in the world the poet is nominally apart of, and if this is accomplished with the least amount of pretentious self-awareness.

This is to say that what makes a poem an attractive item to return to again and to ruminate about depends on the skill the poet can forget the prevailing nonsense that "poems are always read in the context of other poems" and get on with their task of fathoming more interesting mysteries, oddities, paradoxes and alluvial epiphanies the experience of being alive, breathing and seeing brings us. There is nothing wrong with living in your head, per se, but even poets need to stop watching the dust gather on the furniture and go for a walk, a drive, a movie, a date. The modernist agenda still applies, to forge a style that meets the challenge of increasingly pervasive and insurmountable corporate speak.