poetry leaves its sleeves rolled down

Basil Bunting's poem below follows up on Oscar Wilde's assertion that "All art is quite useless". But where Wilde would decree that that was the glory and significance of art--that humans have a need for beauty and harmony in order to engage the sense that would other would be limited to the drudgery of foraging and merely getting by--Bunting plants us smack in the middle of a rant by corporate head for whom profit is the end all and be all. Bunting's little survey of the others in the room outlines their hobbies as well as their useful , real world skills, with the emphasis being toward those paper shuffling tasks that can bring a pay check. 

The one being addressed, the poet, Bunting himself we imagine, is seen as having no marketable abilities, nothing that can benefit an employer, nothing that can make a dollar in the marketplace. Poetry is confusing, nasty, incoherent, a self indulgence, and the poet who takes himself or herself seriously is an unfinished citizen, barely human to any niche-ready degree. Bunting's satire is full of the harrumphing wind-baggism of the Babbits of the world who, again in Wilde's phrasing, "know the cost of everything and the value of nothing".

What The Chairman Told Tom
by Basil Bunting
Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons. 

It's not work. You dont sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap. 

Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus. 

But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you? -
you've got a nerve. 

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds? 

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme. 

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant. 

They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do? 

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet. 

They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot. 

Mr Hines says so, and he's a shcoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work. 

David Lehman's New Barbaric Yawp

David Lehman gets a tip of this writer's hat if I wore a hat. Poet, critic, biographer and an editor who has done more good work in bringing the problematic pleasures to a wider audience than anyone I can think of. Among the things I respect about is his refusal, as an erstwhile popularizer of art the public steadfastly resists (and one who's poets resist being corrupted by something as defiling as popularity) for refusing to write consumer -friendly verse.

His work is not the work of a Billy Collins, who composes one masterful bit of middle brow irony after another. Lehman rather likes the idea of using words as if they were things, malleable and ready to be shaped in mode and manner that makes the interested reader do a little bit of their own work. He gets respect for not dumbing down the poetry he writes, or the poets he presents in the anthologies he brings to the world annually.

David Lehman’s poem “November 18”, from his collection Evening Sun, was the subject of a dispute among some fellow poetry readers, half of whom liked the poet’s disjointed connections, and others who thought the poem was dated because of a seeming lack of unity and the use of dead American artisan’s names. The conversation became rather steamy. All the same, the poem is hardly dated.

Because it mentions people, places and things that are equated with the '50's? An arbitrary habit of thinking, I think. Lehman essentially creates a medley of voices, different streams of language that melt into one another, and with he balances the texture of associations the references bring; this is very much in the modernist mode, especially as practiced by The New York School, who, through the work of O'Hara and Ron Padgett, made a city poetry from an everyday language of the noise of the city, it's billboards, magazine stands, grand hotels, loud radios, and sports extravaganzas.

November 18 By David Lehman
It's Johnny Mercer's birthdayfrom Natchez to Mobilein the cool cool cool of the eveningvery cool with Barbara Leesinging Marian McPartland playingthe greatest revenge songs of all timehooray and hallelujahyou had it comin' to yaand a bottle of RodenbachAlexander red ale from Belgiumwith cherries and "Tangerine" inthe background in Double Indemnityhe had a feel for the lingo, "Jeepers Creepers"as Bing Crosby sang it on my birthdayin 1956 I just played it three straight timesand an all-American sense of humor what doesJonah say in the belly of the whale he says manwe better accentuate the positive that's ithappy birthday and thanks for the cheerI hope you didn't mind my bending your ear

It is a particularly American sound that Lehman lays claim to here, starting with Whitman's barbaric yawp, coming up through William Carlos Williams, and finding itself resting next to other high art forms that found much to use, exploit and find glory in from popular culture. It had been mentioned that Langston Hughes did this sort of thing” infinitely better”, but that’s an assertion meant to distract. Hughes never did anything remotely like what Lehman succeeds in doing here, I'm afraid. He sought a blues cadence, a gospel resonance, and a voice based on an idealized African American idiom, but what his brilliance is a separate set of accomplishments. They are simpatico on a number of points, but to weigh over the other on the merits of a fictitious objective standard is spurious. The terrains are different -- Hughes rural and black, Lehman white and urban -- and the motivations behind the experiments vary dramatically. Lehman is an inspired heir to the mood and tact of the New York poets, and what he is able to do he does cogently, with humor and a love of making language behave in ways that are poetic for the sheer ingenuity that cogent barbarism can bring.

Hughes was quite a different case. the poem can't make up its mind as to whether it wants to be urban jazz or rural blues. The poem is about, among other things, the thriving, buzzing, and churning diversity of noise and music and tempos that one finds spread out across the American landscape, and what happens is a nice medley of musical emulations. If you've driven across country with the radio on all the way, you'll have an idea what the poem manages, the layering of music, voices, references all on top of one another, some fading to the background, others picking up as you near the transmitters, everyone in competition to be heard on the limited bandwidth. Charles Ives once hired two brass bands to march into the center of a town square from different directions, both playing entirely different pieces of music, just so he could sit there and find out what it all sounded like. You pick up this curious, adventurous, experimental verve in his brilliant music. Lehman is in much the same American Grain.



Have you been there? Now, Natchez to Mobile certainly gives us a slice, but few would say that it's a particularly urban slice. Yes, I've been there, and as I've said prior the poem is about creating a feeling of the vastness of America; part of the way you create that feeling is with place names, time-honored and effective. One has the feeling of pointing at a map, seeing an odd sounding name that has native-sounding exotica, and telling your traveling companion "let’s go there." It's texture, and it adds this pieces city/country/city layout. The poem I argue is not outdated because it deals with the '50s (a straw man argument you create for me - and by the way, I wish there were more historical poetry), it is outdated in style and tone. Hardly outdated, I think, since lyricism in any guise that effectively makes a reader forgo reason and engage emotionally, more "felt" associations from what the language highlights cannot be said to be antiquated; it is always timeless. This poem is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who cares to read it with open ears. The language school you reference is petering out - Ashbery and Graham, the two best-known poets to emerge from the school, no longer associate themselves with it - Ashbery always (wisely) kept a careful distance from the label.

Well, I didn't reference the Language Poets in reference to this poem , because it adheres to the New York School of Poets, a group of poets known for their friendships and alliances with painters during the late fifties and early sixties, a food decade and a half prior to the emergence of the Language Poets. John Ashbery is not a language poet, as he believes, however obscure and private may be, that there is a core personality at the center of his poems, a diffuse "I" perhaps, but an "I" none the less. The Language Poets, many of whom are cursed with theoretical baggage they've borrowed from Marxist criticism and French structuralist linguistics, deny the capacity of language to accurately present the world through an egocentric notion of "the author". Some of this work and theory is interesting and brilliant, but Ashbery isn't in their company. He's an aesthete and has produced a brilliant body of work in his lifetime. Not for the last ten years, perhaps, but his strong work is plentiful. Jorie Graham, I find just abstract and dull and unable to write an interesting line or image. There is perhaps some hope for it in a handful of figures, some of which you've noted in a previous post. You left out there the individual who I think holds the most promise - Lyn Hejinian. Last point - The point on the contrast between Hughes and Lehman is that both have the similarity in wanting to use an idea spoken cadence and musical phrasing of a sort in their writing, areas where they are simpatico in the abstract. What each poet has produced, practically, as writing, is vastly different, in style, range, notions of place. All one need do is read them side by side and become aware that each are doing different things, and that a qualitative comparison is tenuous. Better you match Lehman against O'Hara or Kerouac, two poets who are stylistically coherent with Lehman for the purpose of critical contrast. The Langston Hughes option is merely strained, and requires too much fancy footwork to make an argument stick even loosely. The fact remains that Hughes and Lehman are miles and miles apart in their approaches toward what one might call common goals; theirs are different methods to similar, but not identical ends. Belaboring similarities or the lack of them as a way of attempting to hoist one over the other simply accentuates the meaningless of the comparison in an attempt to discover which poet has more merit. Both got to what where they wanted to go, accomplished what they wanted to accomplish in decisively different ways.

Another, better poet ought to be mentioned before this aspect of the conversation goes anywhere useful. What Lehman does in the spirit of Whitman, and there is traceable stylistics in this and other poems he's written. Loose-limbed, ready to take a barbarism and make it poetic in spite of its vulgar intent, colliding impulses, drives, ego, instincts, pleasure zones. The poem has the senses reeling, on the kind of overload that Whitman neared and reached in the few truly amazing works he composed. This a poem about spreading oneself over the map, to assume the personality and vibration of all that makes up the world one is surrounded by; it is an impulsive bit of lyric acceleration of the spirit that strives to know things in a hurry, to understand the life and style of the obscure corners of America in a manic flurry of celebration that life itself is vital and finite and cannot be curtailed or compromised by form or structure. One can argue if they wish with the irrationality of this idea, with the informing subtext that drives the glancing mentions and riffs drawn from the music of place names and advertising coinages, but this is a universal spirit none the less and well worth expressing because it is a poem, ultimately, of witness. Whitman claimed he contained multitudes, Lehman's smaller set of provisions asserts that he is multitudes.

This is a fine, concise and swift waxing on the fury and rapidly changing shape of our National Self Image. Everything here comes together in one gasping, groaning, singing, chanting, snare drum rattling orgasm that says everything in this life, the only thing we can be certain, is needed and wonderful and full of lessons we've barely the time to learn. It's a textured and rushing chorus that says that all we hear is music, and all music is beautiful if our ears are open enough to allow the notes to hit the heart and revive the memory of all the things that make life worth living, which might be songs of love, lyrics of love, choruses about love found, lost or broken, but it is these thoughts that however perfect or malformed our notions of affection, belonging, attraction, love finally have come to be, it is the final idea that it is love in any way that makes life worth living, and that it's the lack of love that kills it. Lehman chooses to remember and to love and live in the sunshine of the moments that pass and will never be again. There is music in every crowded line, there is music in every broken rhythm, and there is music in every car alarm and train whistle and a blast of radio static. There is music everywhere. do believe that music exists in ways we've yet to discover, but I’m speaking of Lehman's intent with the poem, not my personal and unbending view of the world. Poetry can be written in many ways, in my many styles, with many different criteria for successful work; it's a versatile medium, yes? Criticism needs to also be as flexible in how work is read, in order to make a coherent statement about them. I am not hard-and-fast in any regard about how I want poems to work, just as long as they are successful in their uniqueness and provide a sense of the predicaments they might be addressing. My critical practice is pragmatic and my ears are wide open to the sorts of sounds a manipulated rhetoric can make. The validity of any idea is in how it works, to crib an idea from William James. I can like the idea that "music is everywhere" - but I cannot live it and so cannot truly hold on to it as a valid tenet in my own critical approach.

I believe that a good critic ought to be willing to suspend their disbelief ala Coleridge and expose themselves to some forms they might not otherwise be prepared to have a truck with. As an argument for the musicality of November 18, you essentially claim that everything is musical. Sorry, I made no such claim. Rather, I was talking about the operating psychology I sensed in the poem, a Cage /O'Hara/Mingus/Ives stream of ideas that finds tonalities, timbres, pitches, and harmonies in city and country, and what I further described was that there is beauty in the clashing, contrasting sounds; composer, improviser and poet can find the music in it all and place it on paper, and can further exclaim their work into the air as a celebration of the amazing forms available in the 20th century.

The same amazement, as typified by the poem, is no less contagious for many readers in the early part of the 21st century. In any case, my remarks were poem/poet/styles specific, and I've already made clear that although I think this is a naive way for one to approach the practicalities of life as we must live it, it remains a successful tact to lure the lush and lyric from our ambiguous language. The claims for what is, after all, a very modest piece, might seem hyperbolic and grandiose.

So be it, guilty. I'll accept sounding momentarily grandiose and perhaps hyperbolic; under the overstated is the truth about Lehman's poem, which is that it's good, successful, and works in its neatly modest way. It's that odd layering of references, one on top the other, like shards of per of varying colors, shapes, and grades of translucence, that gives me the Aha! sensation, something accidental in its arrangement but stunning in how the plain and inane is made into a configuration that stops you, makes you turn your head and requires you process what's been seen/written.I think Lehman himself would blush as the poet deliberately eschews that high prophetic voice of poets like Whitman and Ginsberg. My guess is that Lehman would appreciate the fact that I picked up on the poets who've influenced him and continue to motivate his best work. I thought it was about Johnny Mercer - more a tip of the hat than anything else - a brief acknowledgment of a musician who "had a feel for the lingo,” and who was therefore simpatico with the poet. Mercer is the starting point, but the poem moves on, along the roads, through the towns, the meals, the intriguing place names. Lehman addresses Mercer's lyrical, vagabond spirit. In doing so, the poem, like travel itself, moves from where it starts and becomes about something much larger, and harder to define. The final definition is impossible, more than likely, but what we have is the realization of one of my favorite clichés, it's about the journey, not the destination.

Who else ?

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In line with his discussion of Edgar Guest under way in his current column in Slate, Robert Pinsky asked the question about who  we think among  currently popular poets might suffer a similar diminishment in estimation  , say, forty years from now. It would be a long list, but some things have to gotten to first off, pronto.

There remains a respectful silence on the matter of quality, but I think in a few years readers of poetry will gain enough spine and admit that the poems of the late and truly tragic Mattie Stepaneck were spectacularly wretched. I well understand a dying young man's desire to remain optimistic and strong and courageous and to show all this is some painfully earnest poems of faith, sunshine, flowers, spiriituality and such, but Stepaneck's fatal malaise made him immune to criticism.

The media, with its instincts for human interest stories that can be exploited indefinitely, turned the boy into a poster child for All Our Lost Innocence, and made it possible for the woefully amateurish and sub-literate cracker barrelisms of his poems to be published and become best sellers.

 There was stony silence as to how dreadful the work was; no one said a thing. You bit your tongue and didn't argue the idea that Stepaneck's popularity would fade soon after he passed away. No one wanted to be accused of saying mean things about the poems of a young boy dying from a fatal condition.

 Still, someone with no dog in the fight , with no emotional ties to the increasingly distant recollection of Stepaneck and the context of his verse, will come across his collected poems and become numb with incomprehension as to why anyone, anyone at all thought that such a specimen of slithering sentimentalism qualified as something worth publishing.  The future critics of poetry will regard poetry fans of this day, as we regard poetry readers of Edgar Guest, as rubes for making the relentlessly mundane a highlight of our aesthetic experience.

Edgar Guest and Marianne Moore: the task of the modernist poet

There's a smart,concise essay by Robert Pinsky contrasting the styles of poets Edgar Guest and Marianne Moore  in the current edition of Slate online. It is of value because he more or less isolates the reasons why no reads Guest these days, the poet who was once the most famous poet in America, and why the formerly obscure Moore continues to gain readers the many decades since her first publication.

Edgar Guest was not an incompetent writer, of course, but that does make him a good one. As with the faded phenomenon of Rod McKuen in the Sixties, Guest's singular ability was to take on a persona that reduced a great heap of cracker barrel wisdom, cliché and hick town wisdom into an attractive speaker who would seem to come along an endless string of life's events just after they happened and reveal the moral that only required a clear sighted commoner to brush the trail dust from.

By the time McKuen emerged during the Sixties a perhaps more poet archetype had filtered through mass culture and, abetted with the then current notion that rock-lyrics-were-poetry-- was able to take the idea of Poet as Tragically Solitary Romantic Hero and reduce it to appealingly two dimensional depiction of a Man Too Sensitive for Life's Many cruelties who was consigning himself to travels far and away, usually on boats , usually arriving at coastal cities in deepest mist to choruses of foghorns and sea gull cries. His universe , with all it's references to anonymous and genderless others in the form of the familiar sounding  yet effectively distancing pronoun "you", was solipsism with the worst social implication; although others in McKuen's imagined travels and romances are indeed present, although they have names and histories unique to them if one chose to investigate the sources of McKuen's muse, it is only McKuen's emotional state that matters. The essence of Hemingway's code --live by your own rules, do not impose your pains, wound and heartbreaks on to others , and seek experiences that are vital and apt to increase your appreciation of the Life You Have--is boiled down to a shriveled, grayish root . Where Hemingway's thinking was that one had to be prepared for others to follow their own consul as well and and summarily at conclusions and actions that are likely contrary to one's internalized philosophy, McKuen's premise is merely a set up for failure; the man's poetry leaves you with a feeling of unearned fatalism and acting out. This is a middle aged man writing as a sensitive teenager  who desires experiences his body has yet to know.  McKuen equates defeatism with the poetic spirit; Hemingway, in a manner of speaking, tried to show us how to take a punch and then get back into whatever game it is we've decided to take part in.This was perfect material for the teen ager who wanted to graduate from Bob Dylan records. The irony is that it is the lyrics of a songwriter that have survived the decades better than the generically defined page poetry of either Guest or McKuen.

Guest, it should be remarked, made a living cleverly rearranging, rephrasing, re- branding what it was his audience already believed in; there was nothing of surprise in his work, but rather a steady path toward a conspicuous set of resolutions. He was, in practice, a propagandist for the Way Things Ought to Be, a softly reactionary set of ideas that were not, in his writings, revealed as remarkable realizations as the result of following a string of contrary ideas to their metaphorical commonality, not a perception that is caught in composition and shared, indeed, his ideas are not even personal statements of any faith-based belief; they were, flat out, something akin to marching orders, talking points, instructions to a readership to take comfort in their reticence to challenge conventional wisdom , to resist straying from the compound, to be suspicious of education and nuance. Comic and technically skilled as Edgar Guest's pieces might have been his poems were by and large the disguised dictates of what Nietzsche referred to as "slave morality".

In essence, Guest is instructing his audience not to budge and to instead on a collective memory of a past that never quite existed, certainly not in the static , perfected, perfect balanced paradigm where a man,his family, his neighbors and the world about all of them existed in a common sense, "natural" harmony. He does this to nearly toxic degree with his homily "Home" , where the corniest of cornball American dialects informs the presumably willing readership a set of conditions , drawn from the baldest and least convincing of  stereotypes about rural life, that are required for a house for a house to gain the legitimizing and ennobling essence of being a "home". Pain, suffering , catastrophe are suggested as those things that make you part of an Order of Things that cannot be dismantled; new ideas, new technologies, new kinds of neighbors from different ethnic groups are not just suspect, they are wrong to be. Guest's hackneyed verse, filtered a meticulously contrived speech of common man wisdom, was contemptuous of modern ways, of being seemingly cut off at the root from a past that was, until then, continuous , coherent and seamless, generation to generation. There is something to be argued for  learning lessons through our own history as a people, but Guest turns into gummed up rhymes seeking easy places to land to launch a sinister agenda of mediocrity:

Ye've got t' sing an' dance fer years, ye've got t' romp an' play,
An' learn t' love the things ye have by usin' 'em each day;
Even the roses 'round the porch must blossom year by year
Afore they 'come a part o' ye, suggestin' someone dear
Who used t' love 'em long ago, an' trained 'em jes t' run
The way they do, so's they would get the early mornin' sun;
Ye've got t' love each brick an' stone from cellar up t' dome:
It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home.

Simply, Guest discouraged the impressionistic view of the world, detested the subjective, was annoyed to great extent at those poets who decided that their responsibility was not to their audience's need for walled-off security but rather to their own sensibilities as they sought to gauge the interaction of their personalities with the flux and flow of a world outside themselves, entirely separate from their wishes. Moore rather brilliantly had the quality of actual thought in her poems, and the best poems, such as her most famous "Poetry" or this poem "Silence", read as skillfully, artfully distilled notions, half thoughts, material items, memories that are tracked as they culminate into an eventual perception. Something other than what the writer wanted to see or say is revealed; the recollection of her father's speech about the virtues of short visits contrasted against his final offer of "make my house your inn" bring us neatly to Moore's terse knockout punch:" Inns are not a residences".

 In the brief span she brings together a father's personality where he was at a remove from those he ought to be close to, that he would preface his desire to have little to with others with the flattering comparison with great poets and their stoic virtues, that he would open up his house to his daughter merely as a place to stay temporarily, not as a home. There is quite a bit here, voiced in simple language, linked implication, not rhetorical gestures. Where readers had read Guest, quickly understood what he had to offer and soon enough boxed up his volumes as attitudes in American culture began to change, Moore and others of her like remain the ones we can re-read and discuss without embarrassment .The best poems remain relevant, and it might be said here that a truly modernist work remains modern long, long after it first finds the light of day.

Cootie farm

If on a winter's night a traveler...
Italo Calvino
Calvino can be an intriguing fabulist, but there is a limit to how often one can keep  interrogating the very medium<br/>they are writing in before one drops the book and fixes themself a strong drink. Self-reflective art in excessive doses and abusive combinations with other dislocating devices of retired experiments makes you complacent about the value of literary writing itself; what Calvino has going for him is an elegant style that engages you even as he performs the old tricks of revealing what's behind the curtain. For my taste, one should investigate the more recent novels of Paul Auster, especially his New York Trilogy. He essentially manages to have us step back from the linguistic artifice of fiction just enough to makes us aware of just how arbitrary the beginnings, middles and ends of plot outlines are when they are confronted by the irritable unpredictability of  reall events; and yet even with this conceit going for him, he does not lose connection with his stories. These are characters who suffer, laugh, revenge, connive in all their circumstances, quirky and believeable, like we the readers, trying to make sense of situations that defy every template we can attempt to tame them with.

The Lottery by Edward Hirsch

This poem is nothing but lead weight all around; it is a premise strong enough for a short story or a sequence in a longer novel, perhaps by the likes of Russell Banks, who's books are full of sad men at some post-crisis point in their life, recollecting over drinks, lots of drinks, about the intensity of a youth that is invariably squandered in is depressed tales.

Hundreds of us pressed tightly together 

In the south lounge of the Forum 

To watch the lottery on a giant TV screen.

The failure of the poem, perhaps, is that Ed Hirsch isn't a good enough writer of fiction to have plots points segue into revelations of character, the revelation of a world view that has the grit of felt experience.

We were stuck in the heart of the country,

But in Washington, the men in sober suits                         

Stood together on the bright stage

And faced the rolling cameras

For the invocation blessing our country,

Which would be a blessing to the world,

And the roll call of birth dates.

The mood among our motley seemed

Festive and fearful, seething, curious. 

This might as well be a TV Guide synopsis of a movie being broadcast after hours when the house is quiet and each incidental sound due to sagging wood beams or running water are too loud, prohibitive of serenity or self-reflection.

 Banks, not the perfect narrative artist, was convincing in the worlds he chose to bring to book length; his types of tale, with narrators bordering on suicidal depression, are not the things that make for a lyric poem.

The selection: a random sequence 

Of blue capsules mixed in a shoe box

And pulled out of a glass bowl.

September 14^thwas the first date

Pasted onto an enormous white board

With 365 more empty slots.

April 24^th: the lucky second.

Someone muttered, "I'm fucked";  

Someone lit a joint, as at a concert;

And the girl next to me began to sob

For her high-school boyfriend in Cedar Falls

Whose birthday was December 30^th.

History existed only in textbooks, 

But it arrived for us on December 1^st, 1969,

With the Selective Service System.

Those blue plastic capsules opened,

And people drifted away when their days

Were called to call their parents

Or get drunk or pack for Saskatchewan—

Where was it, anyway?—or muse over

The randomness of dying in Vietnam.

.

Might we have lingered longer  after all the birthdays were called off and had some details , in miniature, of how the incredibly lucky and the fairly damned responded to their fates being given a tangible timeline? But the poet is in a hurry, his concentration on a series of tasks he has yet to begin. There is a punch line coming up somewhere, some dated moral disguised, perhaps , as an irony that only know reveals itself now that the narrator has lived long enough to see the finite perspective he forced his experiences to fit into: The randomness of dying in Vietnam.  This is the kind of poem that would get a young poet at an anti war rally in the Sixties totally and completed laid by someone else who heard him or him read ,convinced as they might have been that these were lines that explained the natures of right and wrong and pleasure and denial. Today it sounds inane and dated. It is a last line that sounds like so many other last lines that strike you as having been composed before the rest of the preceding poem; it’s  a suit that was tailored just to accommodate the existence  of fairly spectacular zipper.

This poem is blunted by the fact that Hirsch stops himself from using his prerogative and writing longer; he wants the pathos to be suggested, whispered behind the collective reticence to show emotion.

The poem instead just lays there like a dead wife. There is a species of permanent mourning in Hirsch’s poems , as there is Bank’s novels and short stories; this seems to be an extreme latter day variation  of Hemingway’s idea that a real man should live by a personal  code to which only he is privy to and for which  only he can gauge a fidelity to the finer points  of a Technicolor set  of undisclosed do’s and don’ts. 

Sharpen That Pencil

You wonder about all this leisure time many of Robert Pinsky’s poets seem to have in their daily lives. Based on the profusion of poems we are offered that hover around the subject of poetry or consider the turmoil and troubles of someone who’s assigned themselves the odious job of being the conscious of the race, you would think many of them don’t have jobs they have to go to, work they have to do for a paycheck. These are not homeless bohemians scraping by on recycling money. Someone pays them a salary for some kind of work that's performed, tasks rarely mentioned or hinted at. Do they teach the writing of poetry? Why wouldn't be surprised if that were the case? What would be interesting , I think, would be a series of poems where there no one was captured in the act of being poetic, contemplating ambiguity, choking on big thoughts, constructing small, straining epiphanies.

A poet’s task is to regard such things, sure enough, but we have a tendency, a trend, a permanent crease across the fabric of our poetry community that can’t stop regarding itself as something isolated from the rest of the community. Many poets are willing to keep themselves separate from the hoi polloi and rusticated rubes who are mere lowly readers.

"When I Think About the Time the Man Asked Me To Stop Fidgeting With My Pencil"

By Christopher Cunningham doesn’t concern itself with poetry and the poet’s sorry burden directly, but it contains the clichés one would toss into a diorama one would build to illustrate the context you’d expect to find a writer in, a café, a pencil in a fidgeting hand, the speaker, by association, worrying the lines of a poem or lost in strophes he might yet write to fictionalize his experience.

And fictionalize he does, in the form of someone who is presented in a manner that typecasts him as an interruption, a bother. Oy!, the agony of being a poet subjected to folks not interested in who or what he is; the bounder even attacks the means , the symbol of the craft , the essential tool of every scribe hunched over a tattered notebook ;

Will you stop that.

Will you put your pencil

down, and stop touching it, stop moving

it, moving and shaking and twisting

it. Will you stop. Stop.

Our poet ponders, frets, imagines the day this intruder goes through with his disorder, and bothers with a thought about his welfare, perhaps, but mostly feels threatened, his territory infringed upon. Sympathy goes out the window, the muscles tense, the jaw line clenches, and then the resolve comes to him, at last, to stick up for his right to twist and spin a pencil in a public place:

But on that day, stubborn

with surprise, undismayed by the jaw

of his fervor, I said, No.

He stared, fastened by wonder

and agitation, his fingers moving, nervous digits

tying and untying themselves, fretting

at some insoluble knot,

but I said, No. I said, Don't Look.

Just don't look, I said.

Papa Hemingway couldn’t have toughed out the situation any grander or terser, Bukowski couldn’t have been more –go- fuck- yourself .

None could have been more smug. Like the rest of the lazy scribblers who write these inane confessions and , Cunningham’s narrator wallows in his own reaction and attempts to make us co-sign his knee jerk thinking; instead of closely observing the man or empathizing with the poetic techniques one assumes he has at the ready, positing an insight or an opinion made visceral with an observed detail, Cunningham rather imagines the man elsewhere in the day, being strange, quirky, alien, a threat bring fear and bewilderment to small children. Strawman arguments are familiar among pundits and back porch pontificators, but a poet is supposed to use a language that gets to a truth that is overlooked or undreamed of. "When I Think About the Time the Man Asked Me To Stop Fidgeting With My Pencil" is another pathetic example of the kind of poetry that is little more than a writer scratching his privates in a public place.  I'm positive that this poem is meant as self -recrimination, but that isn't enough to get it off the hook , or to make it a good poem. It reinforces the self-absorption--this would fit very well into the many volumes of poems where the authors are caught in narcissistic feedback loops where their awareness of their obsession of their own responses and reactions to situations only sustains the activity. It is not art because the subject does not achieve an independence from the creator's intents or motivations--there is not the sense that appears in the best writing when the subject and it's (his) the world it resides in assumes a character distinct from the artist. This poem is about the narrator's comfort zone being invaded, and ends with the slightest suggestion that the narrator feels bad about his response. That is generous of him, but we're still stuck in this man's emotional backyard, listening to him recite his tales of woe about how awful he feels for not mowing the lawn or taking out the trash.