like a Balinese cock-fight

FRISCO CROSSROAD

Poets’ business, like a ring

round a Bali cock-fight –

goodbye to all that.

Shake your kaleidoscope thing,

ping your kalimba – your bricolage

a grubby grab-bag

(seven pounds of brag

& rage, mixed up with garbage).

Meanwhile that flesh-tone bridge

(crossing my Mississippi

song-&-dance) will be

morphing some spider’s double-edge

Venn diagram – a stick figure

at hobo train junction

where sunny Everyman

remembers split Coatlicue.

Rumors of an impasse, whispered

through a chain-link fence.

Barbed lozenge of insistence

scarring Rome, Jerusalem... the word

made fishy (west of Galilee,

east of Athens, Georgia)

as a picnic smorgasbord

laid out beneath barren oak tree.

That smell gets into everything.

Like something baked

a week in a canal – like

messy string theories, untangling

                  *

a knotty plot of pots & pans, banging

the human family

to kingdom come (really?)

from seedy tribes to Nero’s hanging

gardens.  Shady Rome, where every

cosmic veil is torn –

& a black rock is borne

upon recalcitrant shoulders of slavery

into the center of a black hole’s

starry honeycomb.

What ass bears the whole

sum?  What shoe of prophet’s mule?

Maybe an offshoot of Coatlicue

wearing a flimsy linen

Joseph-coat.  A woman,

patient Pietà... La Pia, Psyche...

Ariadne or Arachne, raveling

path P... that rugged,

ragged Francine – plugged

at Frisco crossroad – traveling

freight.  Sometimes you meet a person

heavier than time & space.

Rough wind carves well-faces

lined with laughter, hope... pain...

She steps forth from black stone –

stirring bears in her arms,

palming clay amid storms

of adamant love (makar-maid, shown).

10.4.17

I died 45 years ago

In about an hour's time I turn 65 years old (May 29th).  Hard to believe.  But I'm relatively OK with getting old... I guess.  In part perhaps because I died 45 years ago.  I was mantled with some kind of mysterious psychic death and rebirth, which I've been trying to come to terms with ever since (in my life, my writing).  Uncanny, unheimlich.  Personal un-hinge, you could say.

Ever since (O youth!), at least some fraction of me has been on a spiritual mission - really a stumbling, on-&-off effort to express & explain what happened (as far as I can see).

When you have died 45 years before you turn 65, there are psychological ramifications.  When I was 4 years old I was hospitalized in an iron lung for about a month, with a severe case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (French polio).  I was immobilized up to my neck.  As a result, I've put a premium on breathing, and also perhaps endured a subliminal sense of paralysis.  & maybe something of this early childhood experience carried over into the later crisis and its aftermath.

I've been a poet for all of those 45 years (and longer).  A longtime member of the Dead Poets Society, I guess.  But my membership has been accompanied by few of the standard benefits.  Somehow I write my poems on a different map from that of the mainstream literary traffic highways.  I have trouble connecting there.   The poems exist & flourish, but on a different planet.

I don't blame the world, or the poetry gatekeepers, etc.  I really believe it all stems from the fact that I died 45 years ago.  I'm engaged in a soul-struggle of some kind.  My poems try to straddle a double dimension, & hence are at cross purposes with the purely literary or the purely political or the purely anything.

Yet I try to maintain the integrity of the poem as sufficient creation, as work of art pure & simple.  I believe in that, because I feel it - every time I experience a work of art myself.

Somehow the soul-struggle, the crisis of faith, has to come to expression - yet without succumbing to the desire for an intellectual resolution (a tendentious, rather than free, expression).

This is starting to sound very pretentious.  I'm like the unprofitable servant in the parable (I forget which one) - stuck between two paths (spiritual & worldly).  Neither here nor there.

That's how it is.  I've written a lot of poetry since 45 years ago - & it seems to be whiling away the years in an ineffectual limbo of disregard.  Not needed by anyone.  I can't explain it.  But that might change.

I'm not really worried.  There are larger issues in life.  And it shall come to pass... that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons & your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions... (Joel 2:28)

old poet geezer

Hyper-formalism & the Long Henry Poem

I made a simple creative decision about 4 years ago.  I knew I was about to embark on yet another long serial poem (I've written about 9 of them).  I decided that the individual parts (the separate poems) within the whole thing should be, if possible, more free-standing.

In part, I wanted to make my writing more accessible.  I wanted more magazines to accept my poems for publication (always a real struggle for me).  In order for that to happen, these smaller parts would have to be more autonomous, complete in themselves.  They would need separate titles, not just "Lanthanum bk. 12 no. 28" & the like.

The titles were the easy part.  My plan has only been partially successful.  But partial is better than nothing.  I've landed a few pellets of the new poem (Ravenna Diagram) in various magazines : Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Journal of Poetics Research, West Branch, Notre Dame Review, Truck, Battersea Review...

This is a step forward for me.  I've probably written more poems, and published less, than any poet in America.

Part of the problem is, I'm not consistent.  I make resolutions & then go the other way.  I resolved a year ago not to post so many poems on this blog, & then I did the opposite.

Not only that - I also alienate potential & previous friends and publishers.  Things go awry.  I've come to the conclusion that there are various subtle patterns shaping these frustrating encounters.  Real books only emerge because they were meant to be.  Or because your deepest affinities have finally borne fruit - by grace, by miracle, you meet the small publisher who's been waiting all this time for you.  Kismet.

My waxing voluble here is due to the fact that I'm unwinding.  I'm celebrating the successful finish of book 9, Ravenna Diagram.  & I'm nearing the halfway point of this hyper-formal poem.  It presently stands, or sits, at about 510 pp.

I know where I'm going (as in the old Isle of Mull film).  The poem has a plan for me.  Sort of a sand mandala, shaping itself up with little voodoo flicks of sandy fingertips.  An hourglass in the form of canoe.

It's a Leaves of Grass kind of mumble-saunter.  It's a mummer's walk around a golden labyrinth - a traditional Crane Dance, performed by a blind man (mesmerized).

That's why the blog has proved so seductive & essential.  It's both immediate and chronological; it walks with me on my planetary seasonal rounds.

The poem is a stone fallen from heaven; no one will judge it.  Osip Mandelstam.

I'm trying to exemplify & prove the truth of this statement.  Of course, there is a social cost involved.  If you try to go around the distinguished cultural authorization channels, you will, most assuredly, be branded an outcast, an interloper.

Someone has probably written a treatise on the mutual co-dependence of High Society and Literature (maybe at the New Yorker?  or Paris Review?  Kenyon?  Harvard?).

On the other hand... please understand... I harbor no animus toward Society.  I am, simply, a poet caught in the net of hyper-formalism.

& what, you may ask, is hyper-formalism?

Hyper-formalism is the emergence of a form out of the necessary logic of a theme.  The theme, you could say, is the fate of the poem - & its fate determines its form.

Fate is, naturally, a dramatic force : a force for drama.  & poetry is the mimesis, the dramatization, of fate.  So poetry has discovered its vocation, finally - it's a mumbling medium for the human theatre.

& what if the fate of the poem - its theme - is to be a kind of local, allegorical embodiment of (universal, elemental) truth?  The poem veers toward prophecy... the poet veers toward seer... toward manifest Logos...

A stone fallen from heaven.  You begin perhaps to comprehend & forgive the orientation toward immediacy, toward "unsponsored" speech.

I've devoted most of my life to these verbal snares, these long-walk dream songs.  It's been a joy & a challenge.  I'm stepping blindfolded around a maze on the floor of Chartres cathedral.  Ariadne is the thread.  The Earth lies underneath.

Queequeg was covered with tattoos

The slow fuse of indignation burns in the joints of an old man, keeping him warm.

It's late.  Not sure why I'm here.  We're having a Minnesota mini-blizzard.  I did some late-night shoveling, then took a walk through the new snow, round the old haunts.  East River Road - past Granddad's, Grandma's brick house.  He built it (grain-elevator engineer) 90 years ago.  My mother & uncle & aunts grew up in that house.  We used to visit for dinner almost every Sunday.  (I live in an apartment around the block from there now.)

The snow is falling soundlessly.

Whence cometh the indignation?  Is it envy?  Frustration?

Well... let's see.  I've been bloggin' here recently about what seems like a kind of atomic oscillation, an inherent duality : passion/detachment, poet/listener, reason/intuition, poet/reader, poet/audience...

Which reminds me that a few days ago I was nattering on about another duality : poet/bard.

Which seems to chime (imperfectly) with the fault line that's troubling me now.

I'm indignant with, I'm troubled by, the institutional pattern of poetry in America.

How do we (as a social what-not) decide what writing, what poetry, is central, necessary?

We are such a massive, rich, diverse & powerful country.  The nocturnal titanic beams of energy from the power-plants are blinding.

There is a kind of establishment prestige which seems to settle like a natural force, like snow, like rain, upon those gifted workers in the artistic fields who find a way to establish their credentials.

It doesn't matter with us how abrasive, shocking, & subversive your art-work is : sooner or later you will be crowned with platinum awards & ecstatic acclamations.  You will arrive.  This is democracy.  This is ***AMERICA***.

The glamour spreads from Lincoln Center & Kennedy Center through all the ivy-clad academic domains & the newspapers, unto the magazines, the radio stations, the local reading groups, the bookstores, libraries... You are the successful author; you are the beloved.

Isn't it great?  It is great.  So what's my problem?  (I haven't written anything, maybe?)

My problem is that America is stultified by its own success.  The laurels showered on our favorite writers are like flaming iron tongs, dropped on the martyrs from moronic Nero's box.

Our literary culture rewards its writers with a kind of recognition resembling the daily specials board over the deli counter.  It will be different tomorrow : maybe meatballs.

& the poets try so hard.  Our top critics review every new book (from a careful selection of new & established authors) with an eye to immediate value for money down.  The hyperbole comes naturally; everybody's hungry, after all.  They're all brilliant.  If they weren't, they wouldn't be writing for the major publications, believe me.

But my problem goes deeper.  It goes back to this odd schizophrenic duality.... poet/bard? Emotion/detachment?

I walk down to the Mississippi in the dark night of the snow.  Poetry is not about poems.  Poetry is about the dark night of the snow.  Queequeg was covered with tattoos; each one was painful to apply. Time & history turn the artist into her own fresco.  The crux of things is a matter of life or death - of spiritual values, not literary reifications.

Yet the poet must struggle toward an integral wholeness - a good end, a finished work.

Hence for Mandelstam (for one example) the appeal of the Redemption.  Hence for Dante the adoration of the high-school flame (a resolution of all things).

The Promised Land must be a kind of vanishing point, where life & art coalesce in equilibrium.  Some romantic kind of classicism, maybe.

I'm going down into the depths, beyond these reifications of the national machine.  That's the Mississippi down there.  Very cold tonight.

Henry Bard is coming to your town

There's something in the air... aside from the global authoritarian regressive New Brutalism in the political wind.  The last few weeks have seen an odd configuration of events linking folk/pop music and poetry.  The Nobel Prize for "the bard" Bob Dylan, the death of Leonard Cohen, and now the publication of early poems of Johnny Cash... the scholar Christopher Ricks' and others' identification of Dylan with archaic oral-poetic-bardic performance in ancient Greece and elsewhere...

These phenomena - coinciding with the sudden intensification of the political/cultural crisis of the West - got me thinking about the concept of the bard, of bardic poetry, and in a personal sense, about my own situation as poet.

There's a book I keep returning to, by Jeffrey Walker - Bardic Ethos and the American Long Poem (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989).  Walker's thesis, in a nutshell, argues that Whitman established the parameters for an ambitious, bardic-nationalist role for the American poet; that Ezra Pound, WC Williams, Hart Crane, and Charles Olson were foremost (among others) 20th-century inventors of a new bardic poetry in the Whitman mode; and that certain shared assumptions of these poets also forecast the limits and partial failure of that particular enterprise.  Walker's is a very detached, critical, cold-eyed analysis of these poets : he shows complete respect for their ambition and inventive power, while at the same time illustrating the central flaws - going back to Whitman himself - which hobbled their efforts.  These flaws cluster around a kind of spiritual elitism - an assertion of cultural values at odds with mainstream American life, despite their proclaimed allegiance to populist-egalitarian ideals.  Whitman's call for a new American literary (bardic) elite was translated by Pound into political authoritarianism, echoed in WC Williams' and Olson's denigrations of electoral democracy, and Crane's tragic vision of the flower of American culture (emblematized in Emily Dickinson, Isadora Duncan) drowned under a surge of crass philistinism.  In his final chapter, Walker decisively contrasts the alienation of Charles Olson, as would-be cultural exemplar, with the rhetorical and spiritual capacity of Martin Luther King, to express basic American and universal values.

Walker's analysis is very acute & necessary.  Yet the limits of his thesis tend to obscure the actual, contradictory, and in many ways egalitarian and democratic messages and impulses surging through these poets.  Whitman, after all, produced a body of nationalist poetry whose moral center is Abraham Lincoln, and whose strident attacks on the corruptions of the Gilded Age constitute a defense of the American (democratic) Republic.  The legacy of Pound, on the other hand, is much more ambiguous.

But it would take more than a blog post to deal justly with Walker's argument and his valuable readings of these long poems.  And my original impulse in posting today is slightly different.

The constellation of "folk-bardic" events this fall suddenly got me thinking in a new way about my own efforts and failures over the past 30 years.  What, exactly, do we mean by the "bard"?  Is there such a thing?  Is there a difference, now, today, between a bard and a poet?

There's certainly a New-Age stream out there trying to revive "bardism" based on ancient Celtic sources and traditions in conjunction with druids, mysticism, etc.  I suppose this to some extent echoes the Romantic era's enthusiasm for a semi-mystical notion of the the ancient bard (Ossian, Taliesin, etc.).  Also there is a genuine literary interest in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland (and perhaps elsewhere) in the lost cultures and skills of ancient bardic (oral) poetry.  Yeats was a great figure in the renovation of the image of the poet-as-bard, as both visionary and crafty minstrel.

And the stream Walker identifies - the American long poem, from Whitman to Olson, et al. - has certainly evolved as a distinct, iconoclastic dimension of the larger American poetry scene.

It was while surveying (in my preliminary sketchy way) these things that it struck me how much my own path with poetry has veered into the long-poem/bardic stream.  It began in the early 1980s, with a curiosity about Ezra Pound - an interest in the capaciousness of the Cantos - the possibility of broadening my own style, being able to "include history" too (Pound's definition of epic : "a poem including history").

But what I'm puzzling over is how my absorption in this effort over 30 years - and the writing of at least 9 book-length long poems - has kept me marginalized, fairly unknown, unable to make a dent.

The main responsibility for this dilemma, no doubt, can be laid at my own feet : the limitations of my own themes & vision & style, the "professional" mistakes, the unimaginative & distracted (& often comical!)  efforts to break out of obscurity, etc.

But the thought occurs to me that perhaps something else is going on also.  Perhaps we can hypothesize a real distinction between bard and poet.  And maybe the American literary scene - both the culture of prestigious magazines and the fashionable canons of academia - has crystallized, has institutionalized, around poetry/poet, as opposed to bard/epic/life-poem.

Maybe - in different ways - both magazine culture and the collegiate order of the "program era" are inimical to certain aspects of "bardism", such as :

a) the bardic investment in large, ongoing, serial, epic, ambitious "life poems" - difficult to excerpt for magazine consumption.

b) the bardic willingness to fuse the poetic, the literary, the rhetorical and the performative.  The aim of the bardic poem is not simply to be a beautiful, self-sufficient, autonomous aesthetic object (such as all MFA programs and strictly "poetic" careers are designed to produce).  A bardic poem, as Walker points out, has suasory (persuasive) designs on its audience : it aims to "spiritually revolutionize" both individual reader and culture at large.  This is not a goal easily taught or pursued in the college classroom.

c) and (related to (b) : the populist, "folk" dimension of bardism - its desire to speak "of, by, and for" the people.  Its openness to unfashionable notions of "national unity", "national purpose", "national history", "national ethos", "national culture" - and a willingness to offer dramatic-performative representations of same (the long poem in its epic-heroic mode).  Clearly, any poet who aspires to such a bardic enterprise would have to address the American audience as a contrarian, a dialectician, a prophet - standing up to debunk the jingoism, racism, and chauvinism of crude "America First" ideology.

I've really just begun to think through these notions.  Beyond Walker's bardic Pleiade, many other poets are worth studying for a bardic counter-view : H.D., Vachel Lindsay, Jay Wright, Lorine Neidecker, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Sandburg, John Berryman, Lissa Wolsak, and the ghost of WB Yeats...

But this is a whole new way - for me, at least - of thinking about American poetry : that there might be an objective cultural distinction to be made between "poet" and "bard"... and that the contributions of all these figures does not define the effort of the long poem, but only serves as instigation toward what might be achieved in future.  It's a path to be cleared...

Meanwhile my own neglected massive poetical-aesthetical-historical-spiritual works are out there, visible in the swamps of blogland, in the dark corners of Amazon books.  & I realize I need to change and revitalize my own practice, to get out there and read & perform & strum the old harp.

Mr. Bard steps out

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : polemics (label : subject/polemics).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many others) : carpitude, cheese poetics, community, ideology, satire, social role...

I have a strong competitive streak, which I try to moderate by losing at everything.

So let's think for a minute about poetry in its aspect as a kind of effort contributed, along with other kinds of work, toward making civilization.

I imagine sort of a double-edged phenomenon : on the one hand, an aesthetic experience; on the other, a kind of contribution toward understanding.

The poet is a sort of companion presence, offering persuasive summations or interpretations of what everyone is experiencing.

& in order to do that, the poet has to negotiate between poetry and everything else, between poetry and not-poetry.

So there is an internal world of pure poetry, pure artistic experience, and then there is poetry as it acts (verbally, interpretively) on reality.

It's not easy to find that productive boundary-state, between poetry & not-poetry, between the world of poets & poetry-lovers, and the ordinary world, the larger world.

It seems to involve a special dramatic gift : of engagement, of empathy, of expression.

Sometimes it seems there are so many forces, both within & outside the "poetry world", which militate against finding that boundary-state.

The insatiable hunger for words & verbalizing & books - this mania itself can isolate us from the ordinary world of not-poetry. The glut & the over-saturation & the jadedness & finally the tastelessness of it all.

The obsession with poetry as a career, or as a playing field for literary politics, or as an arena for over-subtle internal critiques : these tend to obscure its aspect as a vocation in the midst of all the other civilization-making activities.

It seems to me, today anyway, that precisely how a poet, or a generation of poets, negotiates this paradoxical boundary area, is a key factor in determining the choices which undergird a literary style.

Is America about to REPEAT, on a Gigantic (& perhaps Farcical?) scale, the "cleaning up", the smoothing out, the "correcting", of Elizabethan/Metaphysical poetics, by the Augustans of the Restoration period?

This could be very. . .

or is an empowered (comic-book) FLARF going to take it to the enemy? Or become the enemy? Go for it, Kasey. Be there, Kent!

I will stick with the stutter - too old to change.

Coffeeshop, on break, reading John Irwin Mystery to a Solution, on differential mirroring of opposites in chess (Borges strategy of mirroring Poe detective stories). The room cleared out, only two customers left, facing each other, reading, making notes, not looking at each other: Henry & CD Wright. (As I type this my department supervisor says with a chuckle to her supervisor, "I know I'm just a pawn in the chess game.")

THEY FLEE FROM ME THAT ONCE DIDST SCAN MY BLOG. . .

so, I'll have a BLOG POLL QUIZ CONTEST TOO.

Answer the following to the best of your ability, then call your pet in from outside and fill his/her pet bowl with it HAUTE CLAMANS:

1. George W. Bush is a:
a) President
b) form of raft
c) a type of fishing fly

2. My Favorite Blogger is:
a) me
b) you
c) the other one

3. If I had a Choice, I Would Order:
a) caviar
b) hot dog
c) none of the above (vegetarian)

4. To Me, Sex Is:
a) a dialogue of the deaf
b) better than cheese
c) both of the above (vegetarian)

5. Poetry Is:
a) better than cheese
b) the same as cheese
c) deeply intertwined with cheese at all levels
d) different from cheese
e) like cheese, sorta
f) a mode of cheese "language"
g) dissonant, yet, somewhat cheesy
h) political in the same way as cheese
i) more/less important than cheese
j) cheese, the last time I checked. shine, shine, shine!!

When you have completed this quiz, place your pencil on your desk at 90 degree angle from this quiz, and lay your head on the desk, and sleep, sleep. You have done well, good and faithful servant.

Stubborn Grew (2000) is situated - thematically, stylistically - in between, or in the midst of, The Bridge, Cantos, Paterson, Maximus, Ulysses/Finnegans Wake, Moby Dick, Maximus, "A". & draws them to its own end. But the supposed avant-garde has shown no interest. Jim Behrle writes, Poetry is : ignoring Henry Gould. The builders builded better than they knew.

Little example of partisan expression : the avant-garde "challenges", or "critiques"; but if you criticize the avant-garde, you are "bashing".

All the business about professionalization-academicization-commercialization-subculturalization-politicization-depoliticization is something else, a side issue that obscures the substantial. To keep such things at arm's length can be liberating for the spirit, but in itself doesn't guarantee the visitation of the Muse. As Montale wrote, in "Stile e tradizione" : "Tradition is continued not by those who want to, but by those who can."

America, in its profound impenetrable wisdom, has said this to the poet:

"If you succeed, you have failed.
But if you fail, you have not succeeded."

But the circuitry of literary prestige - both official & carpitudinous - is designed & managed by & for those who have not yet heard it.

Battle of the Books, part 2:

HENRY'S OFFICIAL HISTORY OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

There was Official Verse Culture.
There was Oppositional-Negativity Verse Culture.

And there was me, going through my long long poems like a freight train in the distance.

A few people waved to me as I went by (Kent, Lissa . .).

The End

(p.s. there were a few other poets, too, I guess)

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.

Ron's the Pope of the School of Carpitude. Always griping, always canonizing.

Draw a large circle of 132" diameter. Call it "X", or "Fame & Influence". Place all poets published by standard presses, receptors of standard awards, etc. in this circle. On the perimeter of this circle draw a small circle, "Y", called "Sub-Fame & Opposition". Place all poets not published by standard presses, not recipients of standard awards, etc. in this circle.

Place yourself in the center of circle "Y". As loud as possible, begin grousing about circle "X". Create a Heroic Historical Narrative of circle "Y", which endows its poets with Moral & Political Authority & General Romantic Sexiness & Youthful Radical Originality & Cool Tattoos & the Elixir of Eternal Youth & Alternative Canonicity & Total Post-Avant-Garde Credentials. Turn Circle "X" into the Foil or Shadow of Circle "Y", allowing the latter to Shine with all the more Brilliance in the eyes of your Alternative Post-Avant Oppositional Morally Superior Aesthetically Savvy Subculture. Hubba hubba.

O grinding binaries of Carpitude!

Fluttering about Flaublog. Reminds me of little lame Pantaloon-man's query/comment about whether there is something substantial in the connection between the work & the life in considering poetry - whether poets "teach" by exemplary life, not only in their works (at least I think that was what JK was pondering at the time).

Steve "owes me $15" Evans is right that the sociability of blogging tends against the solitude needed for some kinds of thinking & writing. Didn't "Shirley Bean" leave off blogging for just that reason? ON T'OTHER HAND, blogging cain't be rudduced to critical expository pose.

Seems to me more like a curious wallow in the realities of office downtime communication, an interstice which allows for expanded creative acting-up or self-presentation. Thus the pleasant VARIETY of blahgpo acts. Which to my thinkin' circles around again to JK's question. Jordan, by the way, sounds almost Sillimanesque in his defense of blogging as political (see "tense/unheeded" comments of yesterday). But is poetry political? Damn straight - so's the Pope.

I tend to agree that the poetry & the poet are inseparable. This doesn't mean we have to delve with vulgar curiosity into the biographical mulch. I think all I'm saying is that the "public informality" of blogging reinforces the presence of poet In Persona qua poet. Words are darn pow'rful, as my Uncle Ned used to say on the porch. Many authors have a curiously impersonal approach to writing - even poets. For them literature is a form of channeling - the results vary depending on talent & scruples. Blogging in an interesting way combines power (of language) & informality (diaries, letters, conversation). In that combination lies the odd feeling of personal presence & immediacy which blogging provides.

I realize I'm rambling. I think whut I'ma tryin to say is that deep down I have a hunch that poetry is NOT channeling - either of accepted power-hegemonic social discourses (cultural or subcultural), or of exemplary classic models. & why not ?? because deep down the person & the word are indistinguishable. The vocation of the writer transmutes or fuses person & word. The poet stands with her or his word to the end of time & none other's - the rest is echo chamber, channeling, feedback, follow the signs please. & the informal immediacy of blogging perhaps reinforces that impression. It gets back to what I was theorizing way back in Jan or Feb about poetry versus prose as illustrated by poetic NOWNESS vs prose MIMESIS.

Either that, or blogging is just another kind of ego tripping. That too. Shorter Wanted Posters Wanted, Shorty.

Jordan. . . I guess it's not the dream part that bothers me, it's the Dismantle. As I contemplate the dust storm of poetry list & blog political talk, I see mostly sterile, self-righteous, ignorant condemnations, by people who don't recognize or understand the values that sustain our own culture. It's a closed spiral of capitalism, globalism, militarism, Americanism, according to them : and they themselves are the flip side of the Rush Limbaugh US-right-or-wrong spouters. Both apply a utopian perfectionism in order to sit in judgement - one says America is always right, the other America is always wrong. It's a kind of rigid thinking. Unable to comprehend that politics is the art of the possible, and that we have to also look at societies laterally, comparatively, not just from a vertical superior position.

I'm part of a study group at my church. We're looking at Papal encyclicals on social life over the last 100 yrs or so. There are several consistent principles or themes over time, centering around the inherent dignity of the human being. Some of the economic principles struck me : such as the idea that labor & capital need each other, and need to find common ground; also the idea that the right to own property is a basic right & a social good, though it is a right that is qualified by the common good and by the responsibilities of stewardship. These are deep & pervasive global ideas, which the superficial anti-capitalist conspiracy mentality cannot understand.

Most of the so-called conscientious protest I read on the poetry sites strikes me as mental ignorance & complacency. It's a kind of glorying in marginality, and the irony is that those who spend their hours & years in fussy ressentiment, rather than doing something useful for themselves or their world, are the most parochial types of all.