Henry's many many books of old-fashioned POETRY

Have been working on my books, lately. The prices have (unfortunately) gone way up here, because I've added ISBNs, & they will soon be part of a distribution service. Real books. So hopefully they will become more readily available, and at a more reasonable price, from regular booksellers. Will be working on "e-book" versions too - when a good conversion process comes along for poetry. At present, the software doesn't seem to handle complicated line-breaks etc. very well - but I suppose this will change pretty soon.

Since the Harriet website put me on "moderation" (for feuding w/Franz Wright), I haven't been in the mood to contribute there : probably a good thing. I was overdoing it... & these days they seem to be in a race toward generic meaningless blog-yammer, anyway. But I could be biased. (& maybe Franz is Wright, after all.) You step away from your own yammer-yammer briefly, and everything sounds a little different.

Poetry is not Facebook with lines, folks. But I am a face (a forehead) with lines...

Ol' Possum & me & Edmund Burke & Franz Wright &...

Just discovered that my 2nd marriage (in 1992) took place on TS Eliot's birthday.

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Went down into the depths of the library stacks today (basement level B) to retrieve a copy of Edmund Burke's essay on the Beautiful & the Sublime. Discovered that the book I was looking for was slightly mis-catalogued (turned out to be a collection of essays on Milton, including a brief excerpt from Burke). But I thought perhaps I had written down the wrong catalog # (PR instead of PN), so I hiked over to the PNs. There by chance I found a book by a scholar named Ziolkowsky, on modern fictional representations of Jesus. I took it up to my work desk. I logged onto Digital Emunction (the group blog to which I've become addicted & attached myself leech-wise), where there was an animated discussion about Franz Wright & his poem in this week's New Yorker, which I had read a few days earlier. I took another look at the poem... & suddenly it struck me that Wright had (intentionally or no) written an allegorical poem, in which Wm Burroughs figured as Christ (here's the poem). An interesting day, for a librarian. Advent season.

I like this poem by Franz Wright, in the New Yorker. American hobo-sound. The boy can play the dobro. (Queer amid the full-page luxury ads.)

Franz Wright cuts an old-fashioned figure, out of Greek tragedy or Old Testament. Shuffles around in mourning rags, hefting the stigmata of his father's blessing/curse. Adds a memorious, para-literary dimension to the febrile atmosphere. A keynote, or a gateway - between the popular and the true, the distinctive and the en-masse. (a bit like "Henry" out of Berryman. huh?)

I guess the most authentic and irrevocable poetry is that which had to be written : the writer pushed by something more than ambition, curiosity or boredom. Rather, by need. Stevens' "poverty".

The poem is a resolution. A record of more-than-intellectual engagement.

I liked the Franz Wright poem included in the recent Poets & Writers feature. Wish I could have written it. (In fact I was tempted to think he had borrowed a certain vocabulary & rhythm from one of my poems! But that's very unlikely.)

This despite the fact that I was on the receiving end of one of his unpleasant email attacks. (The funny thing was I had the impression he thought I was someone else. I am someone else.)

So we pass through 2 decades of "postmodern" poetry (see JL's continuing reflections). & then comes along Franz Wright, carrying around some of the traditional charismatic baggage of the poet-figure (lost son of famous lost poet, confessional survivor, with psychic limp) we were supposed to have left behind. A sort of diminished echo effect of the "traditional office".

Yet maybe diminished is not the right word. His poems are quite effective; you can hear that same sound of rueful emotional directness, the strong feeling and simplicity (I identify this with the midwest) in some of his father's poetry.

Listened to Franz Wright interviewed on NPR this morning ("The Connection"). Enjoyed the poems he read very much. Synthesizes "wit" or pithy statement, with something like his father's "deep image" - the patient, sensitive evocation of an image of nature suffused with feeling. I like the way such images sort of hover, half-autonomously, within the flow of the poem's discourse. This was one of the things which initially attracted me to Mandelstam, too. I think this effect goes way, way back, linked both to the riddle and the folk song.

Was struck by his comments in response to a caller, in which Wright underlined how important to him were values of clarity and accessibility. Said something like, if his poem didn't seem accessible to just about any reader in the world, then he felt there was probably something wrong with it. What a contrast to the claims for "post-avant" experiment vs. mainstream, etc.

Jonathan Mayhew writes:

But we are all vehement! Henry Gould and Jean Hooligan as much as Jonathan Mayhem. It's called passion! If elegance could be measured it wouldn't be elegant any longer. If poetry were written in "normal" language it wouldn't be poetry at all. All this reminds me of some books my Grandpa had by Robert Hillyer, a guy who used to write a column for the Saturday Review or Saturday Evening Post. He would quote a poem by Cummings or Williams or Auden and sneer at it. Modern poetry was crap. Half the time he was right, but that just shows bad poetry will always be more plentiful than good. The poetry he advocated was worse than crap. That's why the badness of Houlihan's own poetry matters in this debate.

But JM, I'm not against vehemence per se; only struck by it in this context. Houlihan's biting comments seem to stir not engagement but defensive vituperation. & no, the fact that Hillyer advocated crap poems does not justify quoting Houlihan's poems to deny her critical acumen. Houlihan does not present her poems as alternative models within her essays. The one poem (that I found, anyway) which she offered as exemplary, by Franz Wright, was pretty good, though I thought the final line spoiled it (snow like "millions of bees" : seems facile, a kind of well-worn flourish).

I agree that her criticism is satirical & negative, and does not really offer a "way forward" in terms of a new or exemplary poetics. But I find her closet-cleaning a breath of fresh air.