Friday, May 18, 2012

Myth as theory


Myths, as well anyone can describe them, are working elements of our personal and social psychology, and whose elements are "modernized"-- better to say updated -- as a matter of course. Declaring a goal to make them relevant to the slippery degree of modernist convention sounds is an insight best suited for a Sunday book review. Jung and Campbell are ahead on that score, and Eliade certainly stresses the relevance of mythic iconography strongly enough: current gasbag extraordinaire Harold Bloom advances the case for mythic narrative ,-- borrowed in part from Northrop Frye (my guess anyway) -- in the guise of literature, constructs the psychic architecture that composes our interior life, individually and as member of a greater set of links: the stuff helps us think ourselves, personalities with an unsettled and unfastened need for a center aware of its adventures in a what comes to be , finally, an unpredictable universe.

Bloom argues, somberly, that Shakespeare is the fount from which mythic forms find a contemporary set of metaphors that in turn became the basis for our modern notion of dramatic conflict, and argues that Freud's genius lies not in his scientific discoveries, but for the creation of another complex of metaphors that rival Shakespeare's for dealing with the mind's nuanced and  curious  assimilation of experience, the anxiety of influence in action, as process, and not an intellectually determined goal to navigate toward.

The point is that modernization of myth is something that is that is already being done, a continuous activity as long as there are people on this planet...


An associate was recently doing his best to demean and diminish the status of literary critics at recent pot lock I happened upon. He pointed me towards a computer monitor and told me the address of his book blog. His most recent post was basically the same rant he was delivering at the party I quote him thus:

Academics determine what is taught, but they do not determine what is "literary". Literary, like language, is determined by use.
Use by critics among others, I think, not the general readership alone. Books can have an extraordinary appeal to a vast public, and it is among the critics tasks to study what the basis of the appeal might be, and then to make distinctions among the elements, to give or detract value to specific works, their genre, and techniques. A concept of "literature", a kind of writing that does the reader a tangible good with a malleable knowledge that can be applied to one's life with good effect, is a creation of a university system where critics had to justify the systematic study of poetry, fiction and drama. The literary criteria have since trickled down to the larger, popular discussions among the public, not the other way around.

Academics hardly try to eliminate works from the ranks of literature: more often than not, the aim is to bring works into the fold, though no one, whatever degrees they do or do not hold, will ever be convinced that the mass and popular use of Danielle Steele will confer upon her literary qualities that will have her stock rise amongst academics, critics, what have you. This is an activity that comes from a critical discourse that makes such a conversation possible beyond a popularity contest. It’s not that the best criticism claims to create the things that makes writing ascend to greatness, but only that it gives those things names that make them comprehensible to a larger, curious audience. But the terms are not locked, not fixed: literature changes given the changes in the world its writers confront, and so the terms of discussion change to, lagging, perhaps, a bit behind the curve. It's less that descriptions of literature fail, but instead are forever incomplete.


Literature, by whatever definition we use, is a body of writing intended to deal with more complex story telling in order to produce a response that can be articulated in a way that's as nuanced as the primary work, the factors that make for the "literary" we expect cannot be reducible to a single , intangible supposition. Use is a valuable defining factor, but the use of literature varies wildly reader-to-reader, group-to-group, culture-to-culture, and what it is within the work that is resonates loudly as the extraordinary center that furnishes ultimate worth, varies wildly too; there are things that instigate this use, and they aren't one determinant, but several, I suspect.  A goal of criticism, ultimately, is not to create the terms that define greatness, but to examine and understand what's already there, and to devise a useful, flexible framework for discussion. Ultimately, the interest in useful criticism is in how and why a body of work succeeds or fails in their operation, not establishing conditions that would exist before a book is written.




Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Language of Joy

Speaking of times in twangs of alien regions
Which share memories of months and distant smells of dust
and oil rising from the black asphalt hours before the rains
came.

California is the vat of raw alloys where grand children
Meet each other in jobs that make no sense and compare notes
Over black, tasteless coffee about what it was their grand
Parents were saying, something in code that firmed up their back
Bone and brought mists to their eyes.

We are too many years past the expiration dates of our lives
To think of parachutes when it's autumn by the Pacific Ocean
In a city whose best boasts are sand gun boats, warm air and
Cool breezes turns into a generation of rasping sighs in lawn
Chairs nursing drinks under tourist’s umbrellas in the neighbor
Hoods we moved into three decades earlier in expectation of
Making a mark on a locale of fronds that was as unknown as
Anything we wanted to do with our lives.

It's about gloom and rain and love of defeated weather that
Is a tempest we brave going out the doors of our homes.

It's about being sorry for the rich for being so pathetically
Well off when integrity is the only thing on the menu.

In coffee houses in motels near county fairgrounds, dealing
With degrees of English and slants of the camera's eye.
It’s about the loneliness of standing in the same place
Long enough to see prodigal sons and daughters come home
With news of the war, a sinking feeling that gun boats
Are not enough.

Wondering what in the universe makes sense when you're
Bored beyond despair and philosophy is now a cable channel
Broadcasting into the clouds until everyone returns from
The beach, from the water of laughter from rivulets that
Comes in many streams, the language of joy.


Saturday, May 12, 2012

I saw the original Paul Butterfield Blues Band in Detroit, 1966 or 67 at a no age limit folk and blues club called the Chessmate in Detroit Michigan, and this was an event that changed my life forever. I bought my first harmonica soon afterward and have been playing ever since. Detroit is a fantastic town for Black music, with lots of soul, blues, jazz and rock and roll, and the exposure to these kinds of music at an early age influenced my harmonica playing. I listened to saxophone players like Coltrane and Sonny Stitt and Coleman Hawkins, I listened to guitarists like Johnny Winter, Clapton, John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell, I listened to harmonica players like Butterfield, Musselwhite, James Cotton, Sonny Boy Williams, Norton Buffalo, but mostly I just played all the time, all the time, with bands, played to records, played alone, all the time. I played until my lips bled, literally. My parents thought I was eccentrc . I didn't care. I play everyday.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IhcFYXVNmJY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


I played even at my worst drinking; i have been sober now nearly t wenty five years. I am now trying to figure out the way I play so i can do some instruction videos. I play entirely by ear and really have no idea how to convey my style to others. I would love to read or hear someone describe what is I do. I thank all of you for listening to me and your kind words. he only harmonica players I studied closely and made a concentrated attempt to sound like, ie copy, are Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite. Butterfield and Musselwhite were the first guys to introduce me to blues harmonica playing and elements of their respective styles remain in my own style 46 years later. What really helped me, though, was just listening to virtually anything I could get my hands on; in my case it was an ongoing obsession with guitar players. In fact, I picked up harmonica because I couldn;t learn how to play fast like Alvin Lee or Johnny Winter fast enough--I was just all thumbs and no patience. But it was with the harmonica that I found a voice, my voice, and it was with the harmonica that I found myself being able to duplicate riffs and effects from harmonica players and from a good number of guitarists and, especially, many, many jazz musicians, like Coltrane, Bird, Coleman Hawkins. This is not to say that I sound anything like the jazz musicians I just mentioned--their techniques and their vocabulary are certainly more sophisticated than what I currently have--but the point is that giving these guys hard, concentrated listens influenced my sense of phrasing, gave me ideas and notions as to how to skip around during an improvisation and not merely rattle off scales, how to be precise in executing my ideas, in how and where to bend, to slur, to insert chord textures, trills, triplets, octaves. I do tell others who are learning their craft to listen to as much music as they possibly can and to learn as many different styles as possible, to learn riffs from blues, country, swing, classical and to mix them all up, and to practice, practice, practice and after that, practice some more. And more after that. I place maximum emphasis on  practice and playing in live situations because for me this is the most effective means of sloughing the most copy-cat aspects of your influences and moves you toward your own style.Having never had a lesson, having never learned music theory, having never learned to read nor write music,  how I learned was by an obsessive preoccupation with listening closely to harmonica players, rock guitarists and jazz improvisors by the score and woodshedding for hours for decades on end. It's always been a one day at a time thing.  Everyday in every way I get just a little bit better. On good days I even myself when I say it.

Friday, May 11, 2012

late in this life

late in this life
in the night that surrounds me,
I check my email
and find you speaking
in italicized fonts,
asking me what time it is
and when does
life begin, after the sheets slide to the floor
or is after the
leave blowers heave wind and fumes
to no good purpose?

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

TASTES


The poets I like have to be good writers, first and foremost, no matter what their work looks like on the page. There are many writers whose works are stunning to look at as a kind of typographical art, but reading them winds up being an insufferable experience, unpleasant not so much because the poems are difficult but  because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of  real feeling toward their experience, or, most typically , for exhibiting an inane, unoriginal and cliché choked sensibility that would never have gotten out of a junior college poetry workshop. In either case, the visual look of a poem is a distraction from the mediocrity of the piece being read. Good writing always matters, and there are many, many wonderful poets whose works have an originality achieved through a mastery of language that fortunately leads us away from the nagging dread that a tactless and unschooled savant garde has completely overtaken the conversation. Good poets must be concerned with language, I think, since that is the stock and trade of the art. Language made fresh, reinvigorated, reinvented-- I have no arguments with anyone who earnestly attempts to make language convey experience, ideas, emotion, or even the lack of emotion, in ways and with techniques that keeps poetry and poetic language relevant to the contemporary world, the one that's currently lived in, but there is a tendency for a good many young poets , fresh from writing programs, to repeat the least interesting ideas and execution of their professors and to make their work obsess about language itself, as a subject.The concern, boiled down crudely, is that language is exhausted in its ability to express something fresh from a imperialist/patriarchal/racist/individualist perspective, and the only thing that earnest writers can do is to foreground language as their subject matter and investigate the ways in which proscribed rhetoric has seduced us and made our work only reinforce the machinery that enslaves us.

This kind of stuff appeals to the idealist who hasn't had enough living, not enough bad luck, not enough frustration or joy to really have anything to write about, in large part (an grotesque generalization, I know), and it's easy for someone to eschew the work of absorbing good poetry -- Shakespeare, Stevens, Whitman, Milton, Blake, O'Hara-- or learning something of the craft and instead poise their work in non sequiters , fragments,clichés, sparsely buttressed inanities, framed , usually, in typographical eccentricities that are supposed to make us aware of the horrific truth of language's ability to enslave us to perceptions that serve capitalist and like minded pigs.More often, this sort of meta-poetry, this experimental notion that makes a grinding self-reflexivity the point of the work, reveals laziness and sloth and basic ignorance of the notion of inspiration-- the moment when one's perceptions and one's techniques merge and result in some lines, some honest work that cuts through the static thinking and makes us see the world in way we hadn't before.
I speak, of course, of only a certain kind of avant garde; one I endured in college and have since survived when I found my own voice and began to write what I think is an honest poetry. With any luck, some of these writers will stop insisting on trying to be smarter and more sensitive than their readership and begin to write something that comes to resemble a real poetry that's fresh and alluring for its lack of airs. Others might do us a favor and get real jobs. Others, I think, will continue to be professional poets as long as there  is grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.

THE POETRY OF BOMBS



                                                                            —~---                                                                                                                            —----

What kills me
aren’t the guns
you tote but your thinking
that’s  in the chambers
and clips, the magazines
no one else can read
but still dread on hearing
what they report.

Language created the world
where tools can be made,
and now language lives inside
the spare parts
whose instruction manuals
are a poetry of rage and revenge
translated into an idiom of
technology that surveys the
outcome of another
kind of  Big Bang Theory..

It’s not about being
left alone any longer,
your message, inscribed
in manufacturer’s short hand
on casings spent  faster than
a drunk’s last dollar,

Bullets whistle
the language
of your rights
as they pass though
the skulls of anyone
who happens to be there,
expecting nothing but
the  light to change
and cold meal
warmed later in a microwa
ve.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

“Watching the Telly With Nietzsche” by C.K. Williams. - Slate Magazine

A sad fact is that we are a nations of shut ins, finally, no matter how much our media informs us that we love to go places and see things and get to know the doings of the indigenous in neighborhoods not our own. Perhaps we are, to a large extent, desperate for vacation and the illusion of having enough walking around money to spend some days in a generic hotel room, visiting corporate water parks in all fifty states. Millions  are the sort who just channel surf until the end of the day, from time we get out of bed to the conclusion of all things concerning the twenty four hours that has just ebbed away like so many dust motes floating half seen on a breeze in a darkening twilight.

This where millions of us have our discussions of things going on, things that have happened, the political low down, the double crosses,the trends and the fads that make us stupider and less likely to call bullshit when bullshit is served. This is , perhaps ,a rich source for monologues among discontents who are on their  way out the door to the Big Room, and it has been explored to wonderful results in the work of Beckett--he had the genius to verbalize the death rattle in which the significant parts of a man's life is reduced to a repetitive , percussive stammer that never articulates as a memory truly forged.

C.K .Williams , though,in the grouchy poem linked to in the post title, merely seems in a hurry to deliver caustic comment on everything his gaze glazes over; everything is a target, nothing is sacred, nothing is revealed but a crank with a remote control and a room full of books. I imagine the cliched image of someone in a study full of books , piles of them, and and unsorted papers, unfinished writing assignments. The windows all have the shades drawn, save a tear or too that allows a thin beam to play intensely on a picture of an insane German philosopher who could never quite make himself understood.

Friday, May 4, 2012

"Variations (for Three Old Saws)" by Stephen Yenser - Slate Magazine

"Variations (for Three Old Saws)" by Stephen Yenser - Slate Magazine:



Poetry makes nothing happen, of course, but that this the point of it all, to have a medium that is the verbal concentration of the human mind struggling along in the world outside an individual's innate sense of exclusivity. Stumbling, bumbling, jaw dropping in amazement or reacting in horrified disgust, poetry in the modern sense isn't a means of argument, the vehicle for proving yourself right about how existence should be arranged and what those results would be. 

Poetry undermines the permanent hubris that is humanity's great curse and introduces again to the grain of the cement that meets us when we fall.  

It makes nothing happens--planes still fall from the sky, celebrities commit suicide, genocide rages everywhere, babies are born with or without soft music playing--but it does stake the sting from the Sucker Punch of Irony we meet when we turn the corner while looking other direction.

Poems about poetry making nothing happen, though, are nothing to be proud of; clever poems about being clever and concluding, outright or by implication , that one's verbal brilliance is inevitable, instinctual, an unstoppable music we make in-spite of group consensus or occasion, is the lamest, shallowest of vanities. It is, so this poem subtly implies, the condition of being human. No. It is the condition of having a bankrupt imagination.

If there are no ideas in things you can find, don't write.

_________________

"All poems are about poetry," or so the claim goes, but that has never been a convincing line of defense. In that sense, poetry is always about poetry the way all writing is about writing, in that a writer cannot advance the form unless he actively works against the standards and practices--even the theory of practice--that came before him. This view is deconstructionist, an old hat evasion that use to sufficed when a critic didn't want to discuss author intention nor technique. But poetry is a writing above all else and writing in general has the purpose of communicating something that regular discursive writing cannot--to take in the world and describe experiences in, whatever that happens to be. I think that we have a good many poets who would rather preen on the page than write something memorable. 

Thursday, May 3, 2012

The ticket is punched and you're leaving, goodbye


The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there were an expiration date on grief.Yes, one moves on with their life and tries to have new experiences and adventures, but poets, like anyone else, get older, and the longer view on their life and relations comes to the for. Poetry will tend to cease being the bright and chatty record of one's impulses, leavened with fast wit and snappy references, and will become more meditative, slower, a more considered rumination on those who've are gone yet whose presence remains felt and which influences the tone and direction of the living. It's hardly a matter of getting mileage from a tragedy as it is a species of thinking-out-loud. We speak ourselves into being with others around us to confirm our life in the physical world as well to confront the inescapable knowledge of our end, and poets are the ones writing their testaments that they were here once and that they lived and mattered in a world that is soon enough over run with another generation impatient to destroy or ignore what was here only scant years before so they may erect their premature monuments to themselves and their cuteness.We survived our foolishness and quick readings, a poet writes, we lived here and mattered to a community of friends and enemies in ways that no novel or epic production can capture, and we wish you the same luck, the chance to live long enough in this world you seek to fashion after your own image so you may write about your regrets, your failures, the things you didn't get around to doing.