More often than not I defend the "well made" poem if said poem has some things going for it , like a solid construction, an ability focus imagery in a fresh and sparing way that gets across experience and a sense of the irresolution of one conflicting responses to situations written about, either past or current, in an execution that takes one by surprise, leaves you breathless, if only for a second. Like it or not, those poems, scorned by large sections of the post-avant gard who write more "difficult" work ( a worthy endeavor provided the writer has a command of the diffuse material they are trying to deal with, uh, diffusely), are themselves not easy to write; one may speak of technique all they wish, but there is an innate sense, I believe, of knowing how start, what to build with and, most importantly , when too quit, lest one kill a good idea for a poem with the lack of confidence overwriting suggests. Billy Collins has come in for his share of jabs and jibes because of the middlebrow accessibility of his work, he is a poet who has a certain mastery of the everyman voice who writes poetry "for the rest of us" ; his is a poetry is a body of work that forces the reader to think about the world they're already familiar with in new ways.

His is the world of the banal, the small, the incidental, the vocabulary of twitches and tics , but this remains a realm that needs to be written about. Collins is the man to equal the challenge in inspiring a reader to interrogate routines and schedules that guide their journeys from desk to mailbox and back again. Billy Collins, in fact, is the perfect "gateway poet"; when I worked at an independent bookstore for some years in San Diego, several customers over several years expressed a desire to read something more daring, challenging, "edgier" than what the former U.S. Poet Laureate was offering. I navigated them to Thomas Lux, comparable to Collins for clarity and readability, but darker, more ironic, a poet who explores the unintended results of one's best efforts to assert their will on the world.

There are those "well made poems" , however, that strive to hit all the marks that only make you feel that someone is trying too hard for the lead role in play they're not suited for; they dance too fast, they sing too loud, they deliver the monologue without suggesting that they're talking to another person."For D" by Roseanna Warren reads like it were a dull long poem that had been work shopped down to a dull short one; the striking language is all that's left, and there is nothing between the odd phrasings to make this prissy string of worry beads intrigue you. The poem is a dieter who has lost weight too quickly who finds that absence of flab doesn't mean one will find a prince or princess emerging from the flab and stretch marks.

This is one of those poems where you read each line expecting something to happen at the end of each line, and nothing does. It's a fussy poem, full of odd and unnatural words placed in positions where attention becomes focused on the odd sounds the words make rather than the meaning they may suggest or the unresolved feelings being sussed through. Euphony is fine, everyone enjoys rich words and intriguing slang, but there is an expectation that the person writing the poem should have his or her feet on the ground and have a diction roughly like ours (slightly heightened, of course, since this is poetry after all).

The plane whumps down through rainclouds, streaks
of creamy light through cumulus, and, below,
a ruffled scattering, a mattress' innards ripped—

No one talks like this, and no one should be writing poems with this word choices this precious. Whumps is a word suggesting body surfing as a lone man or woman braves the water and rides the momentum of waves coming to crash on a burly shore line, and it also sounds like the sound a drunk uncle might make against a newborn baby's bare stomach; Warren wants to suggest a plane's bumpy passage through some "creamy" clouds , but she makes us think of desert instead of a slow unnerving as she nears her destination. "Innards" is the kind of word one actually speaks, but ironically, in an affected voice to soften the use of a dated colloquialism. The image of seeing a slashed mattress on the landing approach could have been a dramatic one, a choice foreshadowing, but "innards" undermines that.

For the rest, the poem is over arranged, and it occurs to you finally that this reads like someone preparing their responses and  constructing a constipated poetics in advance of the facts; Tilda Swinton's ruthless character in Michael Clayton comes to mind, a nervous corporate crook rehearsing her prepared statements in the mirror with different tones of voice, eye movements, and differing tilts of the head. Her character, like this poem, ends badly.

Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm - NYTimes.com

Should our literary canon come with "trigger warnings", advisories to students suffering from afflictions psychological and otherwise that the material covered in an English class's course reading might cause them pain, anxiety and suffering because of the way the authors dealt with such brutish issues of rape, suicide, racism, misogyny, ie, every fucked thing you could think of? Ought we protect those young people considered damaged or too impressionable from the poetic form of truth-telling that literature provides and dares us, by its existence, to discuss and make sense  of ? A recent article in the New York Times report a movement among some groups, teachers, administrators and students among them, to provide such warning labels: Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm - NYTimes.co

The essential point of studying liberal arts and humanities while in college, I believed , was to develop and strengthen one's capacity for critical thinking ; a salient facet of critical discernment is supposed to be the capacity for interrogating those ideas and hard facts of existence and to imagine, that is to say, create a life where truth , justice and fair play can exist. The least of the benefits would be to empower the individual student  with those mental powers to raise above what has impeded them, harmed them, blocked them in some way and enable them to make   better choices, smarter choices, in the kind of life they want to lead in the larger world. Those better decisions would, in turn, benefit the community as a whole,  in all matters, in large and small ways, in a cumulative manner, over time. That, of course , is the ideal. But we see here that there is a rise in the sort of nannyism that seeks, in large measure, of making sure that victims of terrible things--rape, robbery, disease, financial ruin, economic injustice--remain victims and that they remain protected..

 The point of reading tragedies, comedies, plays with cruel , ironic endings is for the readers, whom, we assume, are generally smarter by several points more than would be protectors might otherwise grant them, to face up to the  fact that human beings never rise above the station of  being human and , however rigorous their moral codes, religious beliefs, no matter how rock solid their ethical constructs and principles  be, we are merely people with instincts, urges, itches that cannot be scratched and with instincts to dominate, conquer, hurt. Literature , in this case, is an imaginative way of letting the young adults that there is more in store in the real world than socially constructed Ideals that are perfect in their arguments and imperfect in their implementation. College is the place for young adults to challenge their assumptions with new facts about how humans really behave; protecting the great lot of students who've been convinced they  have been harmed beyond repair and must be warned when course readings might deal with some aspect of existence that has caused them pain, great and small, mental and physical, we harm them even further.

Most important, perhaps , is what comes in the alleged aftershock of having read the works of Twain, Sade, Sartre, Faulkner, Toni Morrison, William Burroughs, et al, the discussion of what  it was just read by a room full of students, each with their visceral response becoming articulate and formed, edited, honed, modified,sharpened through discussion and debate with the readership community that has experienced the same set of  potentially traumatizing fictional happenstance as way not just gauging the human psyche's propensity for provoking unexpected and problem-making actions, but in listening and learning as well from the experience of others around them. The point is to engage the world beyond the cocoon of home and institutions. We need to be able to be able to think about ourselves in the world imaginative writers draw their inspiration from.  Without the kind of engagement critical thinking empowers us with, we are bigger fools, dolts, layabouts and drooling buffoons than we already are.

INNOCENCE IS NOT A CHOICE

Innocence, it seems, is a nice way of saying ignorance, which would imply that the gaining of wisdom is a hard process, full of rude awakenings, startling revelations, melodramatic shifts in cosmology as one continually learns that the neat scenario one had while younger , with their neat and simple relationships predicated on convenient cause and effect, is grossly inadequate.

God gave us senses so we may learn from our experience and cobble together as we go along, a practical philosophy of everyday life. Wisdom, if you like. It seems that one is likely to realize that they are a victim whether they like it or not, and that the blissful sleep of ignorance of one's state of being exploited and abused is illusory at best.  I think  stupidity is a choice people make  because it is the closest they will get to absolution for the results of their choices, and ignorance, likewise, often enough seems a willful defense mechanism that relieves one of their obligation to use their senses to grow and work within the world as an active, creative agent. This is the crucial issue for Blake, to believe in a God will intercede and make everything okay with a kiss and a feather or a promise of endless bounty on the other side of this life, or that one is here with the senses a Creator gave him or her, with a brain that can process and organize experience into a framework, narrative perhaps, the keeps the world that is both fluid and coherent.

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." --Wallace Stevens

The belief in a fiction, I assume, is that one believes less in the fiction's generic outline of the relationships between personality and the delicate details of the atmosphere , and more that the fiction works as a means that enables individual and collective imaginations to commit themselves creatively to what other wise would raw, unknowable data. We are the author of our own book, so to speak, we are all writers of a particular fiction that enthralls us, and the key to a belief in an operative narrative form is to realize that we can change, alter and modify the fiction as needed. Not that it's an easy thing to toss off, as an after thought. But we make our narratives from the things we do , and this reminds me of the oft-quoted line from Vico, paraphrased here: Only that which man makes can man know.

JF GOES SOUR MASH

Social media is the focus point of where our collective anxieties gather and express themselves in status updates and links and selfies and photos of cats gutting old shoes ; it's an easy thing to damn , it's a  bitch to withdraw from. Jonathon Franzen is having  it no easier than the rest of us with Facebook, Twitter, what have you. And it gives him another chance to become Premature Curmudgeon, the fellow who views the world as little else than a bothersome set of feet in hob nailed boots trampling on is front lawn. His rantings in his book Smarter than You Think highlights his dim view  of the literature possible in  140 characters,The article goes on at length to make an obvious point that should only take a paragraph or two to explain, that nearly every communication technology  has had harsh critics who concocted various scenarios of the end of all that is decent and civil. It does not, though, offer up credible suggestions as to how Twitter, in itself, has improved anything; the evidence , anecdotal perhaps, it that it has allowed more people to indulge in their worst behaviors. The social sphere, such as it is, has become a more crowded, more vulgar, ruder place for the introduction of cell phones and texting. Franzen, hardly one of my favorite writers--he is an incessant worry wart who's prose is elongated neuroses with pretensions to elegance--but on this matter he and other critics happen to be right.

 The comedian Louis CK by referring to a credible, recent past, before cell phones and instant messaging when civilized people learned to how to be alone--millions of us managed to make our way through the day being, at various times, alone with our thoughts, sans distractions. We may not have liked the alone time, but there was a sense of being able to talk to people directly when you needed to, using social skills that reflected a social personality, or lack of it.We are now pulverized by the fear of being alone for even a few minutes--we have to check our status updates, we have to make some kind of noise that others can hear, we have to rattle the proverbial tin cup agains the bars of our our own under  interior prisons. The point is that you were able to handily shift from a silent, interior existence to one that was fully engaged in the public eye without worrying if you're going to cause a car wreck in the transition. 

The pathetic fact of our urban existence is that none of us can escape the sense that the real world has been turned into a  voice mail --talking to people is frustrating because everyone is on the phone and we must wait our turn and , when our turn arrives at last, we rush our sentences, we compress our points, we speak in semi literate half thoughts    because we sense the dread phone will ring again and cut off the conversation before anything useful, either socially or psychically, gets said at all. 

 True, true, the technology isn't going away and that it is a matter of getting used to a new way for the culture to communicate its collective expression, sublime, middle brow or moronic, but that is not a good thing and yes, future devices , codes and technology will , in effect, make these protests seem shrill and silly. That does not undermine the criticism, though; the coarsening of how we treat one another continues. It seems to me that what we do is what any person would do who is too lazy to fix a whole in their living room wall--after awhile you get used to it  being there and after awhile longer to convince yourself it was an ethical, aesthetical, philosophical choice you made. It's a mind fuck , is what it is. It's merely settling for a degraded quality of life.