poetry makes you punchy

I recall a frustrating  "conversation" with contributor to an online poetry forum who was, to put it nicely, determined beyond all sane measure to say naive and empty headed things about poets and their poems. His resilience was the only thing that was remarkable in this intensely retrograde chat, as  no matter how severely he was corrected, ridiculed,  verbally stomped, even caught and prove to be a plagiarizer, he just came up with more inane platitudes and thefts from other writers. He wouldn't admit when he was incorrect or mistaken ,he stuck to his guns, and something in me rather enjoyed t his man's willingness to be a gadfly for every tired trope and generality he through into the conversation . You know the sort, the little man with the steroid ego who for reasons only God or Homeland Security understand has a habit of internalizing every truism, cliché and new age adage they come across, creating a moldy stew of babble they might think they can get loose women with. It's crazy making. Lately he's said this:

To be a Poet, you must be a Dreamer, for Poetry is the product of our hopes and aspirations.

To be a poet, it helps if one stops making Absolute Statements about what a poet must be or what one thinks is required for a poem to be valid. Above remarks like that make you sorry that anyone spoke highly of Universal Literacy. All a poet needs is a talent for the craft, an interesting way wit the language, and an openness to let the poem they're writing assume a form that is not strained, or made to conform to some specious and dubious requisites ; poetry made to do so is often turgid, vapid, bombastic, myopic and finally gutless when it comes to delivering the goods that the results of good poetic art should, that sound of surprise, the unexpected perception, that inexpressible feeling caught in terms of the unforgettable. It helps as well if one who desires to write good poet not address themselves as Poets, with a capital "P", lest they mistake themselves for priests, seers, mystics, oracles and all other manor of shaman whose existence is of use only to comic book writers or fakes and layabouts who find the personage a handy way to circulate their malarkey for yet another go around. It's my belief that artists, while engaging their muse and expressing the rush of inspiration through their art, do indeed bring together  unlike things that make for a heady  set of discussions among readers and critics as they try to unpack what is beneath the surface, but it's also my thinking that such artists, and poets in particular, are as clueless as to what the subtler elements of their work means when considered together, or even how they found     their into the work to begin with.  I rather favor the idea that interpretive criticism, the sort of digression that brings art from it's theoretical justification and makes it relevant to otherwise  undiscloseable experience.

There came a question during one of those distracting and always fun bull sessions about matters a particular klatch has a passing knowledge of as to whether contemporary poets are more interested in the eccentricities of the page appearance rather conveying a discernible message. A wide open topic, choice for PBS talk radio shows where a host tosses out one broad thesis after another, letting the dogs sniff it out and tear it apart. Among my group, the wear and tear on the intellect was a minor concern; this wasn't lifting weights. The gentleman who posed the question wasn't a reader of poetry, at least not for pleasure; it was a field he perused so he can gather examples of lexical sin against an enemy he's constructed. Some folks just can't have enough straw men in their lives. Good writing is what I needed to be engaged, I said at last, but the problem was really in the expansion of what "good writing" is. It's not a template applicable in all circumstances, without change. There are infinite variations on a common ground.

There are 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 more because the writing is just plain awful, being either willfully obscure to disguise a lack of any 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 Avant Gard has completely overtaken the conversation.

Good poets , I assume, should in some way be interested in the language they muster up to convey the usually ephemeral essence of their muse; it's the art's stock and trade. 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 to an unattractive absolute, 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-sequiturs , fragments, cliches, 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 Gard, 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's grant money to be had, and will continue in their own destruction of forest land.

It's useful for the poet to remember that what he's experienced and how he brings order, sense, and irony to their stories is better grounds for poetic inspiration than "hopes and aspirations" , quaint and gutless talking points that, truth be told, a reissuing of the lamest and most vulgarity retrofitted cliches. You feel, at times , that the low standard the beginning bard aspires to reach is a matter of law. A surfeit of mediocrity and third rate thinking about the state of the art and and the fuzzy-lens blather that passes for an aesthetic philosophy in it's regard can make you paranoid , if just a little. Too much abstraction might make you assume the universe has switched alphabets on you, while a drought of more challenging work creates a sense that powers behind the scenes have organized their resources to keep the collective intellect on low boil.

The real work of poets is to bring their skill as writers to work through the contradictions, u-turns, diversions and unexpected changes they experience while on their way to achieve their ideal circumstances. The poet desiring to write better verse should ignore advice from poetasters and instead improve their writing. There are no short cuts to becoming the poet readers will continue to read, although that doesn't stop those who know this, myself included, from trying to slide up the banister to greatness. It's a lesson again and again; when the giddiness of the experimentation goes away , one confronts the work with the knowledge that one has written below one's abilities , which leaves only two choices; rewrite or toss the effort out and start over. Poetry is process.

Genius in a hurry

Jack Kerouac had a native genius for language that I think was, tragically, obscured by the writer's urge to embrace experience in a hurry. In a hurry he was, influenced by both the elusive notion of Zen to be in the moment (or better, be the moment) and the zipping virtuosity of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell's jazz improvisations. 

Up tempo, crazy fast, instant configurations of genius adding up to a pulsing , nerve rattling kind of genius, these elements inspired Kerouac, but even at these speeds his heroes, both musicians, writers and even Zen masters, were required to take their time and learn the dictates of their disciplines; Parker's or Coltrane's or James' fluidity and near perfection of instant creation are the result of endless hours of practice and learning to go beyond one's habit of relying on easy conclusions, tired tropes or fussy, pretentious, hyperventilated phrase making and considering the sound, the effect, the expressiveness of the words their putting together. 

One learns, hopefully, to be elegant, poetic and original with alacrity. Jack Kerouac could indeed be moving and genuinely beautiful in what he wrote, but these moments are exceptions--there is such a need in virtually all his work to make experience more vivid, more real with overwriting that

Unspooled

 I thought Jackson Brown and Jane Fonda were insufferable when they trotted their famous selves in the service of anti nuke and antiwar causes, but the on going meltdowns of Lindsay Lohan,  Spears, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards among many in the unblinking public eye at least made one realize that Brown, Fonda enlisted themselves in crusades that at least sought justice; whether one agreed or disagreed with their positions was a different matter, because when one overcame their automatic resentment of their celebrity, the merits of their positions were what had to be debated, not their fame. With Lohan, one greets her fame and her actions with bemusement and comes away stupefied by the attention she warrants. She is, shall we say, a pen without ink.What I find despairing is that we seem to  be developing a species of D-List celebrities who aren't merely famous for being famous, but rather are famous for being consistent screw ups, malcontents, kooks , assholes and creeps. We seem to be producing them faster and more bountifully than we ever have. Or it could be that with the advance of media-focused technology and twenty four hour news and gossip venues, those minor celebs who normally would have been forgotten while they got other jobs and otherwise remain obscure now have a second act in the limelight. This says little for the quality of mass audience that seems happy to consume the skankiest details. Lohan, though, will suffer the ironic fate of being merely famous as a result of her antics, fuck ups and spotlight-seeking partying. As with Spears, she can no longer make the specious claim that she's an artist, an actress, someone who makes a living creating entertainments for an audience willing to pay for the privilege. She is a Professional Celebrity, a loathsome distinction. Might we be seeing the emergence of a female Danny Bonaducci? I hope not, 'though there's a reality TV show producer chomping at the bit at the prospect of having Lindsay Lohan drag her increasingly trivial self through a succession of whiny episodes. 

SHORT ORDER

Little Denny kept sliding off the lunch counter stool. The waitress poured his mom another cup of coffee. The waitress laughed, a snorting giggle.

“That’s cute” she said, turning to look at Mom, a young woman in her mid twenties who’d been peering at a magazine as she poked her food. She dropped her sandwich to her plate and grabbed Denny’s arm.
Her voice was an irritated hiss. “Shit” she said, “he’s doing this on purpose, the little weasely rat—“
AS“OwwwwwwwwwwwwWWWWWWW” yelled Denny when she yanked him upright on the stool, forcing into an impossible posture. His face met the edge of the counter half way, where he could see a history of dried and chipped gum wads gum that marked the trim like mountain ranges on molded globes. The hamburger Mom ordered for him sat on its plate in front of him, a mountain of meat and sesame seed buns.
“Now eat” his mother demanded. Her long finger that had been leafing through the magazine pointed to the plate, looking crooked, shaking, with a long, twisting fingernail curling toward the charred patty as if to drop something from a claw. Denny cringed again.

“Eat” she said again “eat and quit fucking around.” Her voice was a hoarse bark.

The waitress, whose smile shrank to a chastised ‘o’ from its cheeky glory, turned to her tasks , minding her own business. She pulled half empty ketchup bottles from a shelf under the counter as Denny reached over the chasm between he and the counter and grabbed the hamburger from the plate. It was the size of a football in both his hands. Squeezing it tight, he raised it to his mouth and then turned his eyes to Mom in order to see if she could see him doing exactly what he was told, a mature boy of 4 and a half!

Mom was sipping her coffee, the sandwich on the plate with two bites out of it, staring at the waitress who was pouring the remains of the ketchup bottles into a single vessel, so to waste not a drop. 

Denny squeezed the burger so tight that the patty slid from between the buns and hit the floor with a wet slap that sounded like a kiss heard in rowdy cartoons. The phone rang, and when the waitress reached over to grab the line, her arm swept into the bottles and knocked them to the floor. The bottles shattered into a hundred red, bloodless shards. Startled, Mom spilled her coffee.

Little Denny fell off the stool.

It comes down to whether you appreciate the conflations Ashbery artfully manages as he penetrates the psychic membrane between Steven's Supreme Fiction, that perfect of Ideal Types and their arrangements, with the material sphere that won't follow expectation, nor take direction. I happen to think that much of the interstices he investigates are results of artful wandering; Ashbery is a flâneur of his musings, and the Proustian inspection provides their idiosyncratic, insular joys. Had I thought Ashbery overrated and a bore, I'd have turned my back on critical praise of him and left him cold; I have a habit of keeping my consul regarding reading preferences, as I'm sure all of us do. But continue to read him I do, over several decades.  

Not a rebel, not a polemicist, hardly a rabble -rouser who makes speeches and writes incendiary essays against injustice, Ashbery is an aesthete, a daydreaming  intelligence of infinite patience exploring the spaces between what consciousness sees, the language it develops to register and comprehend experience, and the restlessness of memory stirred and released into streaming associations. Ashbery's are hard to “get” in the sense that one understands a note to get milk at the store or a cop's command to keep one's hand above their head, in plain sight. Ashbery's poems have everything the eye can put a shape to in plain sight, clouded, however, by thoughts, the cloud bank of memory. He wrestles with the still-engaging problems of Aristotle's metaphysics, that the things in the world are only the expression of an Idea of that thing, which exists before manifestation. It's a slippery metaphysics, a guarantor of headaches, but Ashbery wears the difficulty loosely; he pokes, prods, wonders, defers judgment, and is enthralled by the process of his wondering. 

Reaching a conclusion for him seems to mean that he is done writing, and no poet wants to think that they've used up their vocabulary. One might think that the mtvU audience might be more attracted to arch romantic and decidedly urban poet Frank O'Hara, whose emphatic musings and extrapolations had equal parts rage and incontestable joy which gave a smile or a snarl to his frequent spells of didactic erudition. He was in love with popular culture, with advertising, movies, the movies, he had an appreciation of modern art, he loved jazz and ballads, and he loved being a City Poet. He was more the walker than Ashbery, I suppose, or at least he wrote more about the going to and coming from of his strolls. Unlike Ashbery, O'Hara loved being an obvious tourist in his environment, and didn't want for a minute for his poetry to leave the streets, cafés, and galleries where he treads. Ashbery is more the stroller who gets lost in his associations triggered by what he beheld. Ever more the aesthete than his fellow New York Poets, he was interested in things a little more metaphysical, that being that the reality that exists in the interrelations being the act of perception and the thoughts that are linked to it, which branch off from the perception and link again with another set of ideas, themselves connected to material things observed and remembered. O'Hara was immediate, like the city he loved, while Ashbery allowed his senses the authority to enlarge his perception, to explore the simultaneity of sight and introspection. In a strange way, Ashbery is the more sensual of the two, willing to examine that even the sacrifice of immediate coherence. I’m not a fan of difficulty for being difficult, but I do think it's unreasonable to expect poets to be always unambiguous or easily grasped.

 Not every dense piece of writing is worthy by default, of course, and the burden falls on the individual talent. Ashbery's writing, for me, has sufficient allure, resonance and tangible bits of the recognizable world he sees to make the effort to maneuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work. Poetry is the written form where ambiguity of meaning and multiplicity of possible readings thrives more than others, and the tradition is not a parsimonious use of language, but rather a deliberate expansion of what words pieced can do, what meanings they can evoke, and what sensations they're able to create. Prose is the form that is, by default, is required to have the discourse it carries be clear and has precise as possible. Poetry and poets are interesting because they are not addressing their experiences or their ideas as linear matters subject to the usual linguistic cause and effect; poetry is interesting because it's a form that gives the inclined writer to interrogate their perceptions in unexpected ways. The poetic styles and approaches and aesthetics one may use vary widely in relative degrees of clarity, difficulty, and tone, but the unifying element is that poetry isn't prose, and serves a purpose besides the mere message delivering that is, at heart, the basic function of competent prose composition.

Getting old with Lolita

It's odd to imagine that Vladimir Nabokov's novel of sexual obsession Lolita is over fifty years old this, and it's a little more unnerving to realize that I am the approximate age of that tale's cringe-causing protagonist, Hubert Humbert, that sad, grey character who wooed the twelve year old title figure with such a beautiful and odiously applied poetry. David Gates waxed elegant in an old Newsweek essay on the Lolita effect in American Life five decades after it’s publication, and sure enough on finds in his views that the gamy combination of arousal and repugnance remain the novel’s notable effect; Nabokov, never one to have faith in human motive rising above the blinkered self-seeking, enjoyed having his characters go through their obsessed paces, almost as if they were subjects in a behavioral modification experiment, and I’ve little doubt that he wanted the audience to squirm a little as well, much as Hitchcock would have done with his films. The readership and the film audience are made to feel like voyeurs, and the artfulness of both the novelist and the film maker is creating narratives one can’t turn from easily, unnerving though they may be. Re-reading it, I feel Humbert's physical aches and pains and even some measure of his longings for the touch of a women's skin against mine--I remain a romantic sensualist when all my protesting about the course of the world are said and done with--and yet there is a horror, trepidation in a minor key as Humbert's fanciful seduction of the girl proceeds. I remember reading this in my early twenties thinking it erotic and wonderfully alive with what it made my young soul yearn for, but thirty seven years hence the same novel is a little unnerving. I have lived long enough to have experienced a bit of the adult obsession that our author put to page in 1955, and it's not nostalgia or another manner of euphoric recall. Lolita is Nabokov's peculiar masterpiece that indicts us along with Humbert in the foul pursuit of young Lolita's virtue.

The novel endures because Humbert's interior-designed arousal has not been mitigated by the art of the writing nor a change over time about what is allowable between the sexes. The novel is a joy to read for the rare genius of Nabokov's writing, and the grime-crusted salaciousness of Humbert's game is still revolting. This is the novel's great achievement, a comedy that indicts the reader as being likewise culpable in the seduction of a seeming innocent. I think it's more a matter that Lolita has aged well because the subject of a middle aged man's infatuation with a very young girl continues to give us the creeps fifty years since publication, and that Nabokov's writing remains musical, full of light, and wonderfully seductive in it's conveying of sensation.Nabokov was not an optimist in thinking that his characters would rise above their instincts and desires and do something selfless and noble, and with Lolita he hands us a masterpiece that is ageless because it retains the capacity to corrupt the reader and leave them feeling less certain in their moral stance for the pleasure they've just taken from the author's artful description of gamy undertakings.

The tension is purposeful, I think, to the end that Nabokov's comic pessimism was directed not to instruct a moral lesson, but rather to show that our personalities are problematic things in that we acknowledge what is wrong and what is bad for us and yet pursue our worst inclinations with sweetly rationalized zeal. We are entranced with Humbert's poetics as he waxes about the authority of his senses , and it is there we find ourselves seduced, willingly surrendered to beauty created to describe what is morally unsettling. This is Nabokov saying "Gotcha"!

Where Nabokov got his inspiration for his "gotcha", but all the twists and turns in his relationship (or lack of relationship) with his wife Vera is academic in the most anemic sense, since what we continue to have finely diced ambivalence toward is what he finally imagined in the novel Lolita, as alluring fiction. It remains the job of the indexer and the hagiographer to draw the precise and mathematical formulations as to the relations between the author's failings as a human being and the deceitful decorum of his elegant and untrustworthy narratives; for the reader seeking a distraction and an amusement the important matter is the complexity of our response to Lolita's seamless pulling from two directions.

This isn't the only fiction where he's artfully drawn situations and casts whose multiple duplicities all create mischief of varying degrees of transgression in the erstwhile pursuit of a mutating Ideal. Pnin, Pale Fire,Ada, Look at the Harlequins are all wonderful deliberations on bad faith. I am willing to accept that Nabokov was a personal bastard himself to be able to write so richly and so well of so many spoiled, privileged and vainly deluded creatures; his moral lesson , if there was one he presented, was that one ought not assume that there are firms moral lessons or insights to deep seated truths from the exposure to beauty and elegance; beauty is only a condition of our need for pleasure, and in itself does not make the gamier stuff in this life--the lying, the cheating, the ill will and violence we do toward one another-- sympathetic or defensible merely because it happens to be filtered through an attractive lens. Humbert is a man of self-made pathologies and lacks anything of the Tragic Hero, a great man who, despite great deeds and good works, offends the Universe with exclusionist pride.

He is perhaps a Pathetic Figure, someone objectively without redeeming virtues or qualities who willfully and blissfully contrives a habit of thinking to make their pursuit of gratification seamless and undisturbed by an intervening conscious. Tragic Heroes who started out as individuals who have the potential to make the world a better and more just place, but who have a fatal flaw that will ensure their demise. Humbert is all Fatal Flaw, a ruinous example of errant humanity. The novel is an unrelenting study in sheer pathology, made more disturbing by Nabokov's willingness to grace certain thinking with.

A dry well gets all the attention

Books by Fran Lebowitz, Steve Allen, and Shirley Jackson—one of which I didn’t throw away! - Slate Magazine:

Dan Kois has a blog entry in Slate where he sings the light praises of mass market books for their disposability; if a writer you've selected for your beach reading isn't keeping you enthralled, simply toss the offending book and go on to the next. He cites Fran Lebowitz, fabled New York humorist , and her collection of old magazine columns "Metropolitan Life" as example number one in paperbacks that wore out their welcome. I've watched Fran Lebowitz on a variety of talk  shows for near twenty years and thought she was witty and quotable and all that--she was refreshing in that she was genuinely funny and had no new book, movie or movie to plug--but I thought  she was above her pay grade as a writer. She was a joke teller who seemed to have been bullied by well meaning fans and reviewers into thinking that she was in the higher reaches of the American Pantheon of Funny Scribes. "Metropolitan Life", as described here, was a let down, of course, not enough laughs to justify all the words that came between the punchlines.

 I empathize with the columnists plight of having to write a certain number of words against a deadline pressure with the requirement of being literate, funny, easily editable by  pressed upon copy readers, but my sympathies are reserved for those who have by lines appearing two   or three times a week, plus feature stories, when required. Journalism and not literature you say, and fine, but this does fit my definition of a working writer.

 All those phone calls, all those notes, all those Google searches,  all  that research has to be constantly culled , updated, revised , vetted and finally written up in a timely manner, and be readable as well. Lebowitz had a monthly column, however, and though it's understandable that she may be one of these folks who can verbally sling choice bon mots, insults, quips and curses without the onset of migraines but found it difficult to face keyboard and produce, at will, a stream of words as a writer's job requires, she had very long lead times to develop a topic and create an interesting context for her punchlines; her prose need not have been merely a chatty delivery system for jokes of  inconsistent quality. 

Her reputation endures , which is fine, although I wonder if we are now able to refer to authors who no longer publish as being former-writers. "Write" is a verb, which connotes action , and for clarity's sake we would not be harmed by letting readers now what some celebrity authors used to for a living. A former boxer has no shame being referred to as an "ex-fighter". Why shouldn't writers be just as adult about the matter?