Now the new binary is quietude & negativity, per Kasey & Josh.
This I suppose is an elaboration of Ron's basic position.
There is a "way things are" which is a socio-political system, and which is not "the way things should be". This is the given, the self-evident, the axiom, with which the poet aligns him or herself BEFORE making poetry. Then the poetry evolves as illustration. & there are neat clubs to join.
On this blog I've been voicing a critique, from various angles, of what I call "oppositional poetics", since January 3, 2003. I'm glad to hear it's now become a collegial dialog.
7.07.2003
7.05.2003
A quote from R.A. York's The Poem As Utterance, a study of 19th & 20th cent. European poetry from the vantage of "pragmatics" - a branch of contemporary linguistics (Methuen, 1986). Speaking of the usefulness of same, he writes:
"it might lead to a soundly based classification of utterances, as, for example, between those which aim primarily to alter the world and those that aim primarily to effect a communion in appreciating or comprehending the world." (pp. 8-9)
Here we have another version of what Mandelstam called the future of poetic research : delving into the impulse of the text.
Look closely at this divide : doth it not faintly resemble the avant/quiet picture box?
O my peeps, there's something deep here. Vita activa, vita contemplativa. "Mary hath chosen the better part."
The Third Way reconciles both halves of this dumb-dumb rain.
"it might lead to a soundly based classification of utterances, as, for example, between those which aim primarily to alter the world and those that aim primarily to effect a communion in appreciating or comprehending the world." (pp. 8-9)
Here we have another version of what Mandelstam called the future of poetic research : delving into the impulse of the text.
Look closely at this divide : doth it not faintly resemble the avant/quiet picture box?
O my peeps, there's something deep here. Vita activa, vita contemplativa. "Mary hath chosen the better part."
The Third Way reconciles both halves of this dumb-dumb rain.
7.03.2003
Poetry does not take sides. Poets may, but poetry doesn't.
The politics of style is one of the most boring traits exhibited by human herd-instinct.
There IS a third way, and a fourth way, and a fifth way. . .
Sonnet 124
If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered,
As subject to time's love or to time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
No it was builded far from accident,
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.
The politics of style is one of the most boring traits exhibited by human herd-instinct.
There IS a third way, and a fourth way, and a fifth way. . .
Sonnet 124
If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered,
As subject to time's love or to time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
No it was builded far from accident,
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.
Kasey weighs in on the Silliman/Lowell/Quietude debate.
Kasey, if I'm understanding correctly, accepts the "quiet/avant" formula. Style is political; the avant/quiet split is an effect of very different cultural goals (laureate charisma vs. active dissent) and therefore, real, and therefore, indeed "there is no third way" (the "elliptics" taken to be the typical & futile attempt at combining incompatibles).
If this sounds confusing, it's not Kasey's fault, please go to Kasey's site.
It seems to me that what we have here is an example of a thought which is very prevalent in "avant" spheres. There is a Manichean split between the establishment (political, artistic, social etc) and the activist dissenting margin (political, artistic, social etc). Poetry is a subset of this split. The implications of this ideological approach to poetics are probably quite extensive, y'know. I can't get into it right now.
Happy 4th ever'body. My Grandma Florence Gould would have been 103 tomorrow.
Kasey, if I'm understanding correctly, accepts the "quiet/avant" formula. Style is political; the avant/quiet split is an effect of very different cultural goals (laureate charisma vs. active dissent) and therefore, real, and therefore, indeed "there is no third way" (the "elliptics" taken to be the typical & futile attempt at combining incompatibles).
If this sounds confusing, it's not Kasey's fault, please go to Kasey's site.
It seems to me that what we have here is an example of a thought which is very prevalent in "avant" spheres. There is a Manichean split between the establishment (political, artistic, social etc) and the activist dissenting margin (political, artistic, social etc). Poetry is a subset of this split. The implications of this ideological approach to poetics are probably quite extensive, y'know. I can't get into it right now.
Happy 4th ever'body. My Grandma Florence Gould would have been 103 tomorrow.
More Ron watch. What does the two-world theory of "Quietude vs. Avant" provide? I mean, how do we interpret this interpretation of US literary history?
This divide between Quietude (used to be called "mainstream") and Avant - like an old scar that keeps itching - a nagging sprite that Ron can't quite exorcise. He writes that Lowell recognized the value of "avant" poetry and tried to change accordingly; that Lowell idolized Hart Crane because Crane also sought a "third way" between traditional Anglocentric poetics and American experiment"; that the "Ellipticals" are the latest refugees from a defunct tradition; but that "Hank Lazer demonstrates. . . there is no third way."
These claims seem to be part of a project to legitimize "Avant" poetry as a major, mainstream literary phenomenon (by distinguishing it sharply from its traditionalist "other"). But what are "major phenomena"? & how are such phenomena acknowledged and measured these days? A poetics does not become major simply by revisionist history which dismisses what's gone before. A new poetry wins a wide critical & popular audience - the only measure of "major" status I know of - by means of its creative allegiances, not merely by its dismissals.
Ron's binary seems designed to reject even the possibility of a synthesis between traditional "mainstream" Anglophone poetics (say, stemming from the odes & lyrics of 19th-cent. Romanticism, the epistles and satires of 18th-cent. poetry, and the rich language & paradoxical texture of Baroque & Elizabethan poetry) and a meaningful contemporary American idiom. This is the nagging ghost (yes, the ghost of Crane - and Eliot as well) which for some reason he finds it imperative to exorcise.
This nagging ghost, ironically, also stands for the "major status" (as I define it above) which has eluded Avant poetry itself. As always, we witness the avant-garde trip over its "dead" fathers and stumble along. . .
This divide between Quietude (used to be called "mainstream") and Avant - like an old scar that keeps itching - a nagging sprite that Ron can't quite exorcise. He writes that Lowell recognized the value of "avant" poetry and tried to change accordingly; that Lowell idolized Hart Crane because Crane also sought a "third way" between traditional Anglocentric poetics and American experiment"; that the "Ellipticals" are the latest refugees from a defunct tradition; but that "Hank Lazer demonstrates. . . there is no third way."
These claims seem to be part of a project to legitimize "Avant" poetry as a major, mainstream literary phenomenon (by distinguishing it sharply from its traditionalist "other"). But what are "major phenomena"? & how are such phenomena acknowledged and measured these days? A poetics does not become major simply by revisionist history which dismisses what's gone before. A new poetry wins a wide critical & popular audience - the only measure of "major" status I know of - by means of its creative allegiances, not merely by its dismissals.
Ron's binary seems designed to reject even the possibility of a synthesis between traditional "mainstream" Anglophone poetics (say, stemming from the odes & lyrics of 19th-cent. Romanticism, the epistles and satires of 18th-cent. poetry, and the rich language & paradoxical texture of Baroque & Elizabethan poetry) and a meaningful contemporary American idiom. This is the nagging ghost (yes, the ghost of Crane - and Eliot as well) which for some reason he finds it imperative to exorcise.
This nagging ghost, ironically, also stands for the "major status" (as I define it above) which has eluded Avant poetry itself. As always, we witness the avant-garde trip over its "dead" fathers and stumble along. . .
7.02.2003
"Cal" Lowell was probably NOT related to Silent Cal.
On Second Thought, he probably was.
THAT would mean I'M very distantly related to Robert Lowell, since I'm a distant relative of Silent Cal.
We're probably MORE closely related via those old Bostonian whacko families, actually.
Stay with us here for the latest genealogical news on the post-avant scene. "The Blogging of America is Blogging."
On Second Thought, he probably was.
THAT would mean I'M very distantly related to Robert Lowell, since I'm a distant relative of Silent Cal.
We're probably MORE closely related via those old Bostonian whacko families, actually.
Stay with us here for the latest genealogical news on the post-avant scene. "The Blogging of America is Blogging."
Wonder what a Calvin Coolidge blog would sound like.
"The blog of America is blogging."
Grandpa Gould wrote him a letter once in the 1920s informing him we were related. Never heard back. Typical Gould. I mean Silent Cal.
Grandpa was Captain of Battery B in WW I. Fired the last shot of the war, he said. He had the brass casing around the apartment. I heard later that a lot of artillerymen did that - waited a few minutes after Armistice, then shot off one more, just for the memory.
He pulled out one of my loose teeth once. He said, "come over here, Henry, I just want to have a look." Then yanked it right out, & sat there grinning at me with his big front teeth. O, Grandpa. (He was good at that sort of thing, being an avid fisherman.)
He was City Assessor for Minneapolis for over 30 years. (Probably had to do a lot of fishing around there, too.)
When I interviewed him for my 6th-grade history paper on WW I, he showed me his prayer-book full of shrapnel. His tent had taken a direct hit while he was visiting the latrine.
"The blog of America is blogging."
Grandpa Gould wrote him a letter once in the 1920s informing him we were related. Never heard back. Typical Gould. I mean Silent Cal.
Grandpa was Captain of Battery B in WW I. Fired the last shot of the war, he said. He had the brass casing around the apartment. I heard later that a lot of artillerymen did that - waited a few minutes after Armistice, then shot off one more, just for the memory.
He pulled out one of my loose teeth once. He said, "come over here, Henry, I just want to have a look." Then yanked it right out, & sat there grinning at me with his big front teeth. O, Grandpa. (He was good at that sort of thing, being an avid fisherman.)
He was City Assessor for Minneapolis for over 30 years. (Probably had to do a lot of fishing around there, too.)
When I interviewed him for my 6th-grade history paper on WW I, he showed me his prayer-book full of shrapnel. His tent had taken a direct hit while he was visiting the latrine.
Brian Henry (courtesy of Jordan) writes, "See the recent aestheticization of Paul Celan."
But every frame around Celan - whatever the coloring, political, critical, sentimental, or aesthetical - is just that, limited & imperfect. Don't pride yourself on "your" Celan. (This goes for any good art.)
Celan was "aestheticized" from the beginning - with his first shocking appearance before the general public (Todesfuge). The fact that this poem turns "aestheticization" inside-out nevertheless implicates it in the socializing processes of same. I suppose his whole latter career could be read as an "un-writing" of the socially-aestheticized Todesfuge.
But every frame around Celan - whatever the coloring, political, critical, sentimental, or aesthetical - is just that, limited & imperfect. Don't pride yourself on "your" Celan. (This goes for any good art.)
Celan was "aestheticized" from the beginning - with his first shocking appearance before the general public (Todesfuge). The fact that this poem turns "aestheticization" inside-out nevertheless implicates it in the socializing processes of same. I suppose his whole latter career could be read as an "un-writing" of the socially-aestheticized Todesfuge.
Silliman watch : Robert Lowell playing the bogeyman role reserved by previous generations of Brit- & Yurrup-bashers for TS Eliot.
The School of Carpitude will soon have a new canon-fortress as formidable as any, if this Pope of Carpitude has his way.
The School of Carpitude will soon have a new canon-fortress as formidable as any, if this Pope of Carpitude has his way.
7.01.2003
Today is the 80th birthday of John Tagliabue. His New & Selected Poems is available from the National Poetry Foundation.
6.29.2003
6.27.2003
This just in : cowpoke Kent Johnson , ol' pal of legendary Jack Spandrift, applies once more for re-entry to Buffalo Poetics List. Application denied.
History : in every American's 3rd left rib there is a tiny crystal Buffalo named Tony. Don't try to pet him : he's ornery, he's contrary.
History : in every American's 3rd left rib there is a tiny crystal Buffalo named Tony. Don't try to pet him : he's ornery, he's contrary.
What is history but Faust writ large & messy?
A play about the man who sold his eternal soul for today's Mammon Power & Glory. It takes a lot of guile & insolence & devil-may-care to be a tool of Hell's minions.
What is history but the manifestation of the Man of Sin, the Antichrist - a moral reality, essentially - on the plane of historical time? The conclusion of Paradise Lost dramatizes this reality.
Of course, that's the negative side of the story. On the positive we have the patience of the saints and the redemption of the earth & de Day ob Jubilee.
A play about the man who sold his eternal soul for today's Mammon Power & Glory. It takes a lot of guile & insolence & devil-may-care to be a tool of Hell's minions.
What is history but the manifestation of the Man of Sin, the Antichrist - a moral reality, essentially - on the plane of historical time? The conclusion of Paradise Lost dramatizes this reality.
Of course, that's the negative side of the story. On the positive we have the patience of the saints and the redemption of the earth & de Day ob Jubilee.
Investigativeness in Stubborn Grew:
you could argue it's not there.
the poem relates quite a lot of local history. it moves from "lyric I" notations at the beginning, to a third-person fiction about "Henry & Bluejay", to a mock-epic disintegration of Poundian poetics (the latter half of the book narrating an epic journey over the space of about 10 blocks in Providence as taking place in the mind of the narrator at a coffee shop in Fox Point).
But the "investigative" or reportorial is wrapped in layers of the "literary" and shaped by a geometry of person-as-microcosm, stumbling & falling (from Wm Blackstone, the 1st settler, to Henry; from Christmas to Good Friday).
Layers of literary, like "Shakespeare's Head" (the building in Prov. where the history begins - but also Shakespeare's microcosmic globe, thematized in the 2nd chapter's trip to London - "I think he will carry this island home in his pocket & give it to his son for an apple"). Or like the Orpheus myth & Dante's Inferno retold through a NW Coast Indian journey-to-the-dead tale ("Bluejay"). Or the fact that the 2nd half of Stubborn is bracketed by parodies of Pound & Joyce respectively (in the Pound section, American & RI history are viewed through the lens of Ignatius Donnelly - populist politician, Shakespeare cryptographer, Atlantis theorist - Pound-Donnelly's "Atlantis" tying back into another literary frame for the poem's overall style, Hart Crane).
But few in the "post-avant" community seem interested in my literary strategies, or a perspective on history which colors it with fiction and local context, rather than with irony-via-juxtaposition, the prevalent collage technique. This technique is what I parodied in the Ig. Donnelly section of Stubborn - historico-political snippets & fragments, framed through the bifocals of a populist Shakespeare/Atlantis crackpot, set into rhymed quatrains.
you could argue it's not there.
the poem relates quite a lot of local history. it moves from "lyric I" notations at the beginning, to a third-person fiction about "Henry & Bluejay", to a mock-epic disintegration of Poundian poetics (the latter half of the book narrating an epic journey over the space of about 10 blocks in Providence as taking place in the mind of the narrator at a coffee shop in Fox Point).
But the "investigative" or reportorial is wrapped in layers of the "literary" and shaped by a geometry of person-as-microcosm, stumbling & falling (from Wm Blackstone, the 1st settler, to Henry; from Christmas to Good Friday).
Layers of literary, like "Shakespeare's Head" (the building in Prov. where the history begins - but also Shakespeare's microcosmic globe, thematized in the 2nd chapter's trip to London - "I think he will carry this island home in his pocket & give it to his son for an apple"). Or like the Orpheus myth & Dante's Inferno retold through a NW Coast Indian journey-to-the-dead tale ("Bluejay"). Or the fact that the 2nd half of Stubborn is bracketed by parodies of Pound & Joyce respectively (in the Pound section, American & RI history are viewed through the lens of Ignatius Donnelly - populist politician, Shakespeare cryptographer, Atlantis theorist - Pound-Donnelly's "Atlantis" tying back into another literary frame for the poem's overall style, Hart Crane).
But few in the "post-avant" community seem interested in my literary strategies, or a perspective on history which colors it with fiction and local context, rather than with irony-via-juxtaposition, the prevalent collage technique. This technique is what I parodied in the Ig. Donnelly section of Stubborn - historico-political snippets & fragments, framed through the bifocals of a populist Shakespeare/Atlantis crackpot, set into rhymed quatrains.
"Investigative poetics" is attractive because one wants poets to take on, and be granted, the mantle of the histor : to step beyond personal narrative and begin to interpret and give meaning to social reality. Artifacts and documents glow with impersonal mana. Ezra Pound, Susan Howe, many others excavate the archives (or steal from current news bulletins) for sudden brightnesses of recovered actuality.
One of the dangers (Scylla, or Charibdis?) lurking in the detective-collagiste method is that while juggling the dry bones of others' reports, the poet may enervate their own capacity for direct description, original narration, reportage per se. I guess this is one reason why travel poetry and epic multicultural odysseys will never go out of style.
Another complication is that ordinary journalistic neutrality, objective reportage, is about as distant from poetry as any writing can be. Maybe this is one reason a postmodern rhizomatic "poetics of relation" seems appealing. Journalistic objectivity is reinforced by traditions in praxis which try in good faith to leave the work of interpretation strictly in the hands of the reader (after fulfilling the "who what why where when"). A poem on the other hand is from the outset an interpretation. But if the poet, with a comparable vow of idealistic good faith, can follow the path of rhizomatic errancy & self-dissorbtion into otherness, the result will be a new postmodern multivalent "objectivity" (or I should say "non-Subjectivity").
One can say, without getting Derridean about it, that history and texts are symbiotic, intertwined, because so much of human social and historical activity ("agency") is about acting out ideological conceptions, which had their origin in texts and verbal-rhetorical formulations. This is another reason for the appeal of "investigative poetics" : if the poet can just juggle & juxtapose the Poundian "nuggets" in the most exacting way, the reward for the reader will be a historico-literary epiphany : the poet will have succeeded in pre-digesting history itself and offering this golden gruel like a mother hen to the whole brood or tribe. Herein lies the mana of investigative-poetic bricolage.
One of the dangers (Scylla, or Charibdis?) lurking in the detective-collagiste method is that while juggling the dry bones of others' reports, the poet may enervate their own capacity for direct description, original narration, reportage per se. I guess this is one reason why travel poetry and epic multicultural odysseys will never go out of style.
Another complication is that ordinary journalistic neutrality, objective reportage, is about as distant from poetry as any writing can be. Maybe this is one reason a postmodern rhizomatic "poetics of relation" seems appealing. Journalistic objectivity is reinforced by traditions in praxis which try in good faith to leave the work of interpretation strictly in the hands of the reader (after fulfilling the "who what why where when"). A poem on the other hand is from the outset an interpretation. But if the poet, with a comparable vow of idealistic good faith, can follow the path of rhizomatic errancy & self-dissorbtion into otherness, the result will be a new postmodern multivalent "objectivity" (or I should say "non-Subjectivity").
One can say, without getting Derridean about it, that history and texts are symbiotic, intertwined, because so much of human social and historical activity ("agency") is about acting out ideological conceptions, which had their origin in texts and verbal-rhetorical formulations. This is another reason for the appeal of "investigative poetics" : if the poet can just juggle & juxtapose the Poundian "nuggets" in the most exacting way, the reward for the reader will be a historico-literary epiphany : the poet will have succeeded in pre-digesting history itself and offering this golden gruel like a mother hen to the whole brood or tribe. Herein lies the mana of investigative-poetic bricolage.
Back to Josh Corey's remarks on "poetics of relation" etc.
Glissant's ideas, as summarized by K. Prevallet, have been in the air generally for quite a some time, no? - the notion of errancy as a path into connection & otherness, the de-centered openness to marginalized voices and perspectives, the emphasis on the "rhizomatic" as opposed to the "rooted", the centralized, the hegemonic. . .
In fact it seems pretty obvious that experimental poetics of many flavors have invested themselves in the general postmodern trend of these concepts, no?
Maybe the hinge factor here is the "relation" between this cluster of ideas on the on hand, and the idea of the poet as reporter and investigator and documentarian, on the other. There is something interesting here which connects the notion of repertorial independence & objectivity with the sidelining of the poet's own self-presentation & ego; an appealing idea, but booby-trapped - since "objectivity" invests the narrator-histor with simply a transmogrified Authority, the centrality of the scriptor having simply shed one skin & donned another.
Poetry, objectivity, Ouroboros. . .
more later maybe.
Glissant's ideas, as summarized by K. Prevallet, have been in the air generally for quite a some time, no? - the notion of errancy as a path into connection & otherness, the de-centered openness to marginalized voices and perspectives, the emphasis on the "rhizomatic" as opposed to the "rooted", the centralized, the hegemonic. . .
In fact it seems pretty obvious that experimental poetics of many flavors have invested themselves in the general postmodern trend of these concepts, no?
Maybe the hinge factor here is the "relation" between this cluster of ideas on the on hand, and the idea of the poet as reporter and investigator and documentarian, on the other. There is something interesting here which connects the notion of repertorial independence & objectivity with the sidelining of the poet's own self-presentation & ego; an appealing idea, but booby-trapped - since "objectivity" invests the narrator-histor with simply a transmogrified Authority, the centrality of the scriptor having simply shed one skin & donned another.
Poetry, objectivity, Ouroboros. . .
more later maybe.
6.26.2003
Josh Corey made an excellent comeback to my flippid comments on "poetics of relation". I just haven't had time to think about it since.
"Investigative poetics" - fascinating dimension. Something deeply satisfying in the dream of combining roles of poet and historian/investigator. Pound's & Olson's & Dorn's charge.
A poet could spend a lifetime creating a style that combines these contrasting elements & impulses in a new way.
"Investigative poetics" - fascinating dimension. Something deeply satisfying in the dream of combining roles of poet and historian/investigator. Pound's & Olson's & Dorn's charge.
A poet could spend a lifetime creating a style that combines these contrasting elements & impulses in a new way.
6.24.2003
Fluid dynamics. Courtesy of NY Times science section today, interesting article.
Leonardo da Vinci started it. he seems to be lurking everywhere these days, or is it just me. reading Leo Steinberg's wonderful book, Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper. I think he missed one thing, though (while perceptively noting a million others). Leonardo not only caught duration & "sfumato" of multiple meanings in a gesture (in his "Last Supper") - but he also "preserved the unities", saved the appearances. It is an instant of time captured, rather than only a blurred spread of implications. It's both. That is, Christ's right hand, recoiling from the dish : it's not simply both or either recoiling from the dish and reaching for the eucharistic cup. It's rendered at the exact moment after his saying "one of you will betray me - he whose hand is in the dish with mine" - from which both Christ & Judas recoil - and also after he has just said "take, eat, this is my body, this is my blood of the new covenant", etc. His hand is still recoiling from the first statement; his left hand is moving toward the bread; his right hand will soon follow toward the wine. The disciples are responding, each in his own fashion, to both statements. The simultaneiity of this moment is memorialized, in a sense, as Steinberg notes, in 1 Cor. 11:23 : "the Lord Jesus the same night he was betrayed took bread and said, 'Take, eat : this is my body'" - which perhaps was Leonardo's pivotal reference.
But look at Peter, Judas & John. Some mysteries there that Steinberg doesn't deal with, & I'm not going to talk about now anyway. Much more to this painting than "meets the eye" of cursory attention.
Fluid dynamics. There's a lot of water in Minnesota : 10,000 lakes, Lake Superior, Mississippi. I'm doing 2nd chapter of my novel, tentatively titled On River Road (that will probably change).
Leonardo da Vinci started it. he seems to be lurking everywhere these days, or is it just me. reading Leo Steinberg's wonderful book, Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper. I think he missed one thing, though (while perceptively noting a million others). Leonardo not only caught duration & "sfumato" of multiple meanings in a gesture (in his "Last Supper") - but he also "preserved the unities", saved the appearances. It is an instant of time captured, rather than only a blurred spread of implications. It's both. That is, Christ's right hand, recoiling from the dish : it's not simply both or either recoiling from the dish and reaching for the eucharistic cup. It's rendered at the exact moment after his saying "one of you will betray me - he whose hand is in the dish with mine" - from which both Christ & Judas recoil - and also after he has just said "take, eat, this is my body, this is my blood of the new covenant", etc. His hand is still recoiling from the first statement; his left hand is moving toward the bread; his right hand will soon follow toward the wine. The disciples are responding, each in his own fashion, to both statements. The simultaneiity of this moment is memorialized, in a sense, as Steinberg notes, in 1 Cor. 11:23 : "the Lord Jesus the same night he was betrayed took bread and said, 'Take, eat : this is my body'" - which perhaps was Leonardo's pivotal reference.
But look at Peter, Judas & John. Some mysteries there that Steinberg doesn't deal with, & I'm not going to talk about now anyway. Much more to this painting than "meets the eye" of cursory attention.
Fluid dynamics. There's a lot of water in Minnesota : 10,000 lakes, Lake Superior, Mississippi. I'm doing 2nd chapter of my novel, tentatively titled On River Road (that will probably change).
6.20.2003
Josh Corey on "relational poetics". I haven't read the Fence issue, but I ask this :
Isn't this a time-honored crutch for good old bad writing : to turn "social relevance" into a theme or a technique or an ideal ??? It's a "branding" method.
The "others" are always subjective in a fallible way. "We" are relevant & "social" in an original, critical way.
But I guess I should read what he's talking about. This is starting to sound like I'm carping !!!
Isn't this a time-honored crutch for good old bad writing : to turn "social relevance" into a theme or a technique or an ideal ??? It's a "branding" method.
The "others" are always subjective in a fallible way. "We" are relevant & "social" in an original, critical way.
But I guess I should read what he's talking about. This is starting to sound like I'm carping !!!
then of course there's the flip side, the problems for sense & sensibility & living created by T*H*O*U*G*H*T*S. . .
TS Eliot's turn of the screw (Metaphysical poetry exhibited fusion of thought & feeling, everything downhill from there).
Comes back to the fact that poetry is as Mandelstam put it
NIGHTINGALE FEVER
thought/feeling/action/word/deed - compacted into small feather-winged container
flying NOW
TS Eliot's turn of the screw (Metaphysical poetry exhibited fusion of thought & feeling, everything downhill from there).
Comes back to the fact that poetry is as Mandelstam put it
NIGHTINGALE FEVER
thought/feeling/action/word/deed - compacted into small feather-winged container
flying NOW
My old checkers moves from Buffalo Poetics listwars.
Not the New, but the Now.
The Now is not emerging from the School of Carpitude.
Next I'll take on the NY School gen. 300.
Have the vision & ambition to be midstream.
This is one way to approach it.
Topic for discussion :
is this the choice - either find a way to turn poetry into a game - or be eaten alive by it ?
Deep game needs - the need to isolate the space so you can live in the larger world too; the desire NOT to be Poet 24/7. How this scrapes against or interacts with poetry club culture.
The problem for free thought created by club culture, the culture of poetry as S*E*N*S*A*T*I*O*N*A*L.
I was a poet in high school. I was a writer in junior high. I didn't need or want acceptance - I wanted publication.
Not the New, but the Now.
The Now is not emerging from the School of Carpitude.
Next I'll take on the NY School gen. 300.
Have the vision & ambition to be midstream.
This is one way to approach it.
Topic for discussion :
is this the choice - either find a way to turn poetry into a game - or be eaten alive by it ?
Deep game needs - the need to isolate the space so you can live in the larger world too; the desire NOT to be Poet 24/7. How this scrapes against or interacts with poetry club culture.
The problem for free thought created by club culture, the culture of poetry as S*E*N*S*A*T*I*O*N*A*L.
I was a poet in high school. I was a writer in junior high. I didn't need or want acceptance - I wanted publication.
Yes, I was probably being negative & stentorian the other day.
The crux for me : what constellation of beliefs & attitudes underlies the School of Carpitude?
I think it's a form of belief analogous to religion in Hellenistic times, when you had Christianity & Judaism & Gnosticism & neo-Platonism and so on.
The School of Carpitude (perhaps we could call it an emanation of the "post-avant period" of Language Poetry?) seems a little like Gnosticism & neo-Platonism, except its dual cosmos is "materialist" rather than idealist.
There is a better world over yonder, where spiritual phantoms have been dissipated, nationalism and militarism and imperialism and sexism and capitalism have been demolished, class and social relations have been justified, and life is free, groovy, bohemian & "material" (see Marx).
The polarity between Mainstream & Avant, between Quietude & Carpitude, is an echo effect of this more basic chasm, between Here & Yonder.
Another basic belief of the School of Carpitude is that Modernism was & is truly revolutionary, part of the engine of social revolution, through its enlightened disaffection from bourgeois conditions, leading us to Yonder. (This is reflected, for example, in the Carpitudists special interest in Russian Formalism & the Futurists, in tandem with their disinterest in the role & fate of the Russian Acmeists & their theoretical commitments.)
These basic Carpitude attitudes color their understanding of traditional poetics, of the role of the poet in the public sphere, of the relation between poetry & politics, and of the nature of language in general.
But it seems pretty apparent that the Quietude/Carpitude polarity, this intellectual construct, renders problematic or difficult any poetics which is built on a unitary model of the relations between the poet's role in society, and poetic speech. (In contrast to the supposed gains which might result from a "critical" or revolutionary concept of the role of poetry.)
The crux for me : what constellation of beliefs & attitudes underlies the School of Carpitude?
I think it's a form of belief analogous to religion in Hellenistic times, when you had Christianity & Judaism & Gnosticism & neo-Platonism and so on.
The School of Carpitude (perhaps we could call it an emanation of the "post-avant period" of Language Poetry?) seems a little like Gnosticism & neo-Platonism, except its dual cosmos is "materialist" rather than idealist.
There is a better world over yonder, where spiritual phantoms have been dissipated, nationalism and militarism and imperialism and sexism and capitalism have been demolished, class and social relations have been justified, and life is free, groovy, bohemian & "material" (see Marx).
The polarity between Mainstream & Avant, between Quietude & Carpitude, is an echo effect of this more basic chasm, between Here & Yonder.
Another basic belief of the School of Carpitude is that Modernism was & is truly revolutionary, part of the engine of social revolution, through its enlightened disaffection from bourgeois conditions, leading us to Yonder. (This is reflected, for example, in the Carpitudists special interest in Russian Formalism & the Futurists, in tandem with their disinterest in the role & fate of the Russian Acmeists & their theoretical commitments.)
These basic Carpitude attitudes color their understanding of traditional poetics, of the role of the poet in the public sphere, of the relation between poetry & politics, and of the nature of language in general.
But it seems pretty apparent that the Quietude/Carpitude polarity, this intellectual construct, renders problematic or difficult any poetics which is built on a unitary model of the relations between the poet's role in society, and poetic speech. (In contrast to the supposed gains which might result from a "critical" or revolutionary concept of the role of poetry.)
6.18.2003
Enjoying the commentary from 6 or 7 bloghouses on Quietude Theory. I haven't been able to work out a response, due to work & projects (on a sedate parallel with JK, perhaps, I'm writing a novel beginning with a 12-yr-old named "Henry") & the fact that this topic is hard for me to grasp.
My animus & vitriol toward the Silliman Quietude Theory is due I'm sure in part to the fact that I share some attitudes with the "experimental" crowd. The rumbling spiritual uproar of Poetic Nowness - reflected in microcosm every time we are moved & granted insight by a work of literary art - has a certain anarchic center of gravity which does not coincide automatically with Career in any sense. Career is built on the prudence, hope, practical planning, brainwork and moxie of individuals : Nowness is an uncontrollable communal snowball of literary criticism, response, persuasion, recognition, as well as that thing that happens when in our solitary cenacles[?] we read something really good. And the professionalization/care & feeding/curatorship of Creative Writing in the academy creates a certain incestuous, solipsistic dynamic (or I should say stasis) - somewhat like the patronage system in municipal politics - which sends "Tradition" through a kind of parallax distortion (with the of course proviso that there is plenty of genuine and valuable scholarship & teaching & criticism carried out there by poets who are also teachers, and by scholars who are genuine critics). Reading for school is not the same as reading for fun, as I learned (perhaps in deep mistakenness) back in 3rd grade.
But it would be a mistake to reduce this issue to the "poetry in academia" debate, since, for one thing, both Nowness & the supposed Quietude take place not only in the academy, but also, as Ron points out repeatedly, in the networks of literary Publication & its epiphenomena. &, for another thing, the most interesting aspect of the issue hovers around more strictly lit-crit areas, having to do with the development of modern poetics, the relation of innovation to tradition in art & poetry, the reflection of social reality in literature, etc.
Every poet brings a unique perspective to these questions, and they can be quite diverse, obviously. Some will consider poetry to be, essentially, a difficult craft, a genre of writing, which you practice in school and evolve in the context of contemporary literary magazine writing. Others will emphasize the osmosis of literary models and avatars, will pursue the literary history of modernism (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, and all their generations, etc. etc.) for keys to their own efforts, and as windows on the contemporary (this seems to have been my own bent for the last couple decades). Others will be enthusiastically attuned to the subversive youthful essence of poetry, its criticism of sleep & stasis & philistinism emanating from the garrets & clubs of romantic vital revolt (I know this sounds funny, but there it is). Others will use poetry as a kind of political language, a means of expressing a critique or alienation from capitalism, imperialism, mass culture, the middle class, etc.
What troubles me about the Quietude Theory (along with many similar formulas and attitudes emanating from the post-avant set) is that it reifies vast and various ranges of past poetries into a clump of Quietude, Mainstream, Official Verse Culture. It is this act of reification - a reductive conceptualization - which is the founding move creating ANOTHER clump : the post-avant camp itself. Suddenly there is a set of literary progressives, avant-gardists, who consider themselves both different and more enlightened than the mainstream "others". Within their subculture, they wallow in the vaunted minutiae of "neglected" poets, they excoriate the benighted taste AND politics of the "mainstream" : and in this very process they neglect the essential duty of the poet, whether from within the academy or outside it : to direct the poetic language of the present time - at its highest pitch of clarity, originality, complexity, simplicity, variety, social relevance, intellectual acuity, and aesthetic integrity - to the attention of the general public, the ordinary reader, the extraordinary reader : and NOT to abide (full of insolence, hypocrisy, and intellectual disgrace) in the cozy, incestuous, flabby, and musty nests of their own parochial nit-picking snob societies. The tradition of poetry is a perennial high-energy Now extending back to the bards and prophets of ancient Athens & Jerusalem & before, up to the contemporary "pressure of the time"; it will not be bottled & labeled by the reified, self-serving pigeonholes of the "post-avant", or the "Neo"-formalists, or the denizens of MFA snooze groves.
One can never, in an American context, dismiss the abiding presence, the inspired mastery, and the sometimes explosive relevance, of the obscure, the long-neglected, the marginal, the eccentric, the modest, the quiet, the experimental. But the reification which, in the schools of the post-avant, grants an automatic positive aura to some figures & works, and a corresponding negative aura to others, simply on the basis of "mainstreamity" (say, from among many possible examples, Olson & Lowell), is a specious exercise, an intellectual and aesthetic short-circuit, which obscures what actually has been accomplished in our poetry.
My animus & vitriol toward the Silliman Quietude Theory is due I'm sure in part to the fact that I share some attitudes with the "experimental" crowd. The rumbling spiritual uproar of Poetic Nowness - reflected in microcosm every time we are moved & granted insight by a work of literary art - has a certain anarchic center of gravity which does not coincide automatically with Career in any sense. Career is built on the prudence, hope, practical planning, brainwork and moxie of individuals : Nowness is an uncontrollable communal snowball of literary criticism, response, persuasion, recognition, as well as that thing that happens when in our solitary cenacles[?] we read something really good. And the professionalization/care & feeding/curatorship of Creative Writing in the academy creates a certain incestuous, solipsistic dynamic (or I should say stasis) - somewhat like the patronage system in municipal politics - which sends "Tradition" through a kind of parallax distortion (with the of course proviso that there is plenty of genuine and valuable scholarship & teaching & criticism carried out there by poets who are also teachers, and by scholars who are genuine critics). Reading for school is not the same as reading for fun, as I learned (perhaps in deep mistakenness) back in 3rd grade.
But it would be a mistake to reduce this issue to the "poetry in academia" debate, since, for one thing, both Nowness & the supposed Quietude take place not only in the academy, but also, as Ron points out repeatedly, in the networks of literary Publication & its epiphenomena. &, for another thing, the most interesting aspect of the issue hovers around more strictly lit-crit areas, having to do with the development of modern poetics, the relation of innovation to tradition in art & poetry, the reflection of social reality in literature, etc.
Every poet brings a unique perspective to these questions, and they can be quite diverse, obviously. Some will consider poetry to be, essentially, a difficult craft, a genre of writing, which you practice in school and evolve in the context of contemporary literary magazine writing. Others will emphasize the osmosis of literary models and avatars, will pursue the literary history of modernism (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, and all their generations, etc. etc.) for keys to their own efforts, and as windows on the contemporary (this seems to have been my own bent for the last couple decades). Others will be enthusiastically attuned to the subversive youthful essence of poetry, its criticism of sleep & stasis & philistinism emanating from the garrets & clubs of romantic vital revolt (I know this sounds funny, but there it is). Others will use poetry as a kind of political language, a means of expressing a critique or alienation from capitalism, imperialism, mass culture, the middle class, etc.
What troubles me about the Quietude Theory (along with many similar formulas and attitudes emanating from the post-avant set) is that it reifies vast and various ranges of past poetries into a clump of Quietude, Mainstream, Official Verse Culture. It is this act of reification - a reductive conceptualization - which is the founding move creating ANOTHER clump : the post-avant camp itself. Suddenly there is a set of literary progressives, avant-gardists, who consider themselves both different and more enlightened than the mainstream "others". Within their subculture, they wallow in the vaunted minutiae of "neglected" poets, they excoriate the benighted taste AND politics of the "mainstream" : and in this very process they neglect the essential duty of the poet, whether from within the academy or outside it : to direct the poetic language of the present time - at its highest pitch of clarity, originality, complexity, simplicity, variety, social relevance, intellectual acuity, and aesthetic integrity - to the attention of the general public, the ordinary reader, the extraordinary reader : and NOT to abide (full of insolence, hypocrisy, and intellectual disgrace) in the cozy, incestuous, flabby, and musty nests of their own parochial nit-picking snob societies. The tradition of poetry is a perennial high-energy Now extending back to the bards and prophets of ancient Athens & Jerusalem & before, up to the contemporary "pressure of the time"; it will not be bottled & labeled by the reified, self-serving pigeonholes of the "post-avant", or the "Neo"-formalists, or the denizens of MFA snooze groves.
One can never, in an American context, dismiss the abiding presence, the inspired mastery, and the sometimes explosive relevance, of the obscure, the long-neglected, the marginal, the eccentric, the modest, the quiet, the experimental. But the reification which, in the schools of the post-avant, grants an automatic positive aura to some figures & works, and a corresponding negative aura to others, simply on the basis of "mainstreamity" (say, from among many possible examples, Olson & Lowell), is a specious exercise, an intellectual and aesthetic short-circuit, which obscures what actually has been accomplished in our poetry.
6.13.2003
Tim's reading me. There's hope for the geezer. Now if Jimby will post a naked photo of me on HIS blog, I might make the "social" grade. Political, that's another thing. I will have to be run over by Ron's Buffalo Dodge 4-w KathunderKalliope for that to happen. Happy B-day, J. There. Social as a cutworm.
So let's, for a moment, underline the inimitable individuality of certain poetic exemplars. Let's shake the tin walls of Carpitude a little. The binaries get biffly when you remember the influence of the King James Bible & Shakespeare & the Romantics on Whitman & Dickinson; or the politically-alert careers of Quietudists Whittier & Wm Vaugn Moody; or the technical brilliance of Longfellow's innovations; or Poe (the anti-Quietudist)'s "traditional" metrics; or say, the career of radical Modernist, Pound disciple, Poe imitator, avatar of the New Critics, and Ashbery model, TS Eliot; or the street politics of Quietudist conscientious objector Robert Lowell; or the unpigeonholeable poetics of his friend Eliz. Bishop; or the bizarre "quietude" of scholar-poet John Berryman (have you read his essays - or his poems - or is he just another running dog of the quiet establishment?), which made it to the cover of Time, or hey, the career of quietudist establishment academic anarchist FBI McCarthy-tailed WW 2 Vet Portuguese translator poet Edwin Honig, etc.and so on. In fact, if the Critic will lift his eyes for only a moment from the venal obsession with Influence, Publication and Politics, or IPPocrisy, he might discover a constellation of actual poets writing actual poetry. . . amazing, isn't it?
Once again, Ron Silliman is elaborating his binary scheme of US poetics history, what might be called the "team schema" of literature, which is actually pretty traditional in its own right, going back to the battles between Establishment & Radical poets of mid-century, and back before that to the Modernists & the Georgians, and back before that to the experimenters (Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins) & the rest of the Victorians. . . where would criticism be without these teams, these Quietudes & these Carpitudes? It makes you wonder whether American culture has actually produced ANY fully-developed poets in the last few generations, since the distinction of a fully-formed artist is to absorb & transcend such cliches & group phenomena. Where would Ron's radical Carpitude poets be without a Quietude to diss? Let's face it, 99% of experimental post-avant carpitude poetry is utterly forgettable mediocre braying (same percentage goes for Quietude ranks). & if that's the case, why the obsession with these camps? What critical value do we have in endlessly underlining the magical divide between Rads & Straights, decade after decade, if 99% of the work in both camps is crap? Aren't we just using dung beetle technology to build two huge a-symmetrical mounds of crap? Upon which Ron will sit (the Carpitude pile, to the left) & dish out his extravagant encomia (O brilliant, Mike Magee! just to cite one recent example [not that I have anything against Magee's parodic riffs on Emily Dickinson. My beef is with Silliman's critical scale of values, which transmutes the clever into the pathbreaking, etc.]. . .)
6.12.2003
Classic oppositional poetics statement by Ange Mlinko over at Ron's blog today.
O Buffalo, O Brown, O little clubhouses everywhere!
Oppositionalism is simply politics. It's motivated by a political desire to feel important, relevant to something larger than oneself, empowered; you could translate these attitudes into ANY professional field of endeavor and apply them seamlessly. Ironically, the us/them divide merely allows "us" to wallow in complacency, to create whole idioms & theoretical systems to support "marginality" at all cost & with all hypocrisy, to disregard many techniques of social poetry simply because they turn the mode & target of address away from the clique itself.
Ange Mlinko plays these themes on a simple oaten flute; Ron Silliman with full orchestra & pipe organ.
But this junk is not even worth talking about. I'm sure it will be turned into blog-hash for days now.
O Buffalo, O Brown, O little clubhouses everywhere!
Oppositionalism is simply politics. It's motivated by a political desire to feel important, relevant to something larger than oneself, empowered; you could translate these attitudes into ANY professional field of endeavor and apply them seamlessly. Ironically, the us/them divide merely allows "us" to wallow in complacency, to create whole idioms & theoretical systems to support "marginality" at all cost & with all hypocrisy, to disregard many techniques of social poetry simply because they turn the mode & target of address away from the clique itself.
Ange Mlinko plays these themes on a simple oaten flute; Ron Silliman with full orchestra & pipe organ.
But this junk is not even worth talking about. I'm sure it will be turned into blog-hash for days now.
6.11.2003
. . . the battle, in art, essentially, being between the imperial and the empyreal:
the contemplative (Mary's better portion) and the active (Martha's):
a spiritual battle in the soul between the whole Creation & partial goods (greed, lust, pride, anger);
("since the coming of John until now the Kingdom of Heaven has come by violence, and violent men take it by force; but it shall not be so among you. Verily I say unto you, the least of those in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John" - Gospel)
the 9 daughters of Mnemosyne (memory) being grandchildren of Zeus;
this is the subtext of July (Julius Caesar to Jubilee).
the contemplative (Mary's better portion) and the active (Martha's):
a spiritual battle in the soul between the whole Creation & partial goods (greed, lust, pride, anger);
("since the coming of John until now the Kingdom of Heaven has come by violence, and violent men take it by force; but it shall not be so among you. Verily I say unto you, the least of those in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John" - Gospel)
the 9 daughters of Mnemosyne (memory) being grandchildren of Zeus;
this is the subtext of July (Julius Caesar to Jubilee).
Here's the text in translation:
All three of my peaks glance upward;
a gentle triocular cupola is crowned;
and in sharp-edged empyreal beams
someone rotates around.
They are like three wells. . . and water
will suddenly swim to the brink of mutiny;
whenever a pail is lowered in, it must be
very carefully, very tenderly.
(I liked the way "empyreal" puns on "imperial", since this is, in a sense - if I'm right about the Streltsy theory - a meditation on the Moscow/Petersburg relationship : Petersburg the imperial western outpost, Moscow the mother-city, the home of the old religion : all of this enCAPsulated in the microcosm of the poet's trinitarian scalp. It fits well with the employment of the word "mutiny" in the 2nd stanza; also with Shvarts' famous tendency to mingle the spiritual/personal/erotic : the last stanza is somewhat "Greek" (Orthodox) in its Sapphic-erotic & concise undertones.)
"circumference" (ED via Shkspr's Head)
All three of my peaks glance upward;
a gentle triocular cupola is crowned;
and in sharp-edged empyreal beams
someone rotates around.
They are like three wells. . . and water
will suddenly swim to the brink of mutiny;
whenever a pail is lowered in, it must be
very carefully, very tenderly.
(I liked the way "empyreal" puns on "imperial", since this is, in a sense - if I'm right about the Streltsy theory - a meditation on the Moscow/Petersburg relationship : Petersburg the imperial western outpost, Moscow the mother-city, the home of the old religion : all of this enCAPsulated in the microcosm of the poet's trinitarian scalp. It fits well with the employment of the word "mutiny" in the 2nd stanza; also with Shvarts' famous tendency to mingle the spiritual/personal/erotic : the last stanza is somewhat "Greek" (Orthodox) in its Sapphic-erotic & concise undertones.)
"circumference" (ED via Shkspr's Head)
audblog audio postMy amateur translation, published in Nedge #4 (translation issue). When I was working on this I was reading a biography of Peter the Great. The image of "someone rotates around" brought to mind the mutiny of the Streltsy, Muscovite elite soldiers who rebelled against Peter in favor of his sister, and who were executed by hanging outside her (home confinement) bay windows. I learned later that the "three peaks" referred to the three swirls, or widow's peaks (rather unusual) in ES's own hair - which she relates to contemplative Trinitarian "eyes" in the top of her head, a cupola (Byzantine architecture, curve of eyes & eyebrows very prominent in Mandelstam's oeuvre). cf. earlier blog notes on circumference, microcosm, "Shakespeare's Head".
audblog audio postUntitled octet by Elena Shvarts (her name means "shining black" in Grk-Ger-Rus-Indo : insignia of her native city, the yellow-black eagle flag, the white nights), read very amateurishly by c'est moi. 1994, from her book "Birdsongs from the Golden Sea"(?) published by Pushkin House in 1995.
Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 23rd, Shakespeare's birthday, just 100 years after Pushkin's birth (April 23 is also St. George's Day, St. George being the traditional patron saint of both Russia and England). The first language he learned to read & write was English, though Russian was the spoken language. This background casts a curious light on his last novel in Russian, Invitation to a Beheading, a surreal tale about an artist-figure imprisoned in a fake totalitarian world which employs a hermetic token language, allowing no deviations, by means of which each person already "understands" what is being said, even before the "words" are spoken.
Nabokov's fiction often displays or plays up themes of alien intrusion or the clashing of disjunctive worlds.
There was a period, during the 60s, when my mother was slightly obsessed with Nabokov. She named a favorite campsite in the north woods (the north woods of Minnesota - of birch trees & pine, much like Siberia) "Mnemosyne Point", using one of the novelist's key words. The obsession spread to me; the last short story I wrote in high school was a Nabokovian pastiche of school memories & word games.
My absorption with Mandelstam was probably an echo of that earlier experience. The elegiac "ring" I attempted to close in the poem in memory of Joseph Brodsky (see hgpoetics archives for 1.9.03) - the ring of elegies beginning with Auden's for Yeats, echoed by Brodsky's for Eliot - was actually a revision of an earlier poem in which I recounted my adolescent effort to "become" Nabokov. The 3rd part of that poem - about the boy and the moth - fuses the two: it's based on a Brodsky poem on the same subject, which in turn was drawn from a Nabokov short story.
I haven't been blogging much lately because I'm trying to work on a novel - & reading Nabokov again. I feel sometimes like a character in some Nabokov parody of American life - or a smudged mirror-image of that Russian, who carried around an alien infusion of English since childhood. In the "post-avant" world of subcultural poetics, sometimes I feel like the protagonist (Cincinnatus) in Invitation to a Beheading.
The "plot", you may recall, of Stubborn Grew, is triggered by a search for a lost black cat named Pushkin, & leads to a "CATabasis", or journey to the underworld - the underworld of American "POEtics".
Nabokov's fiction often displays or plays up themes of alien intrusion or the clashing of disjunctive worlds.
There was a period, during the 60s, when my mother was slightly obsessed with Nabokov. She named a favorite campsite in the north woods (the north woods of Minnesota - of birch trees & pine, much like Siberia) "Mnemosyne Point", using one of the novelist's key words. The obsession spread to me; the last short story I wrote in high school was a Nabokovian pastiche of school memories & word games.
My absorption with Mandelstam was probably an echo of that earlier experience. The elegiac "ring" I attempted to close in the poem in memory of Joseph Brodsky (see hgpoetics archives for 1.9.03) - the ring of elegies beginning with Auden's for Yeats, echoed by Brodsky's for Eliot - was actually a revision of an earlier poem in which I recounted my adolescent effort to "become" Nabokov. The 3rd part of that poem - about the boy and the moth - fuses the two: it's based on a Brodsky poem on the same subject, which in turn was drawn from a Nabokov short story.
I haven't been blogging much lately because I'm trying to work on a novel - & reading Nabokov again. I feel sometimes like a character in some Nabokov parody of American life - or a smudged mirror-image of that Russian, who carried around an alien infusion of English since childhood. In the "post-avant" world of subcultural poetics, sometimes I feel like the protagonist (Cincinnatus) in Invitation to a Beheading.
The "plot", you may recall, of Stubborn Grew, is triggered by a search for a lost black cat named Pushkin, & leads to a "CATabasis", or journey to the underworld - the underworld of American "POEtics".
6.09.2003
I am a prairie dog. Early poem written by young prairie dog:
POEM
Why are the plains like memory,
and the sea like a daydream
where the sun breaks in pieces
of old musicals, blind summers?
The farmhouse far from the ocean
carries my death on waves of wheat,
and bears a heavy childhood too,
bearing a heavy child, my fields -
where we look away to
when the tools are put down
and our hands are free.
When the head leans on the doorpost
and the arms are folded, almost waiting,
the mind could become a river flowing south
and shaking with that human sound.
POEM
Why are the plains like memory,
and the sea like a daydream
where the sun breaks in pieces
of old musicals, blind summers?
The farmhouse far from the ocean
carries my death on waves of wheat,
and bears a heavy childhood too,
bearing a heavy child, my fields -
where we look away to
when the tools are put down
and our hands are free.
When the head leans on the doorpost
and the arms are folded, almost waiting,
the mind could become a river flowing south
and shaking with that human sound.
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