Why is Jim Behrle badmouthing Kent Johnson so much? I don't get it. I looked at Kent's Abu Graibh piece. It's standard political satire, it does what satire's supposed to do: it gets you down into the ugliness & makes you squirm. The last paragraph simply zeroes in on its probable readership (poets) & makes them identify/empathize/squirm too. He emailed me to ask what I thought of it, & I said the weakness of it is it seems aimed narrowly at the in-house poet audience, & that it should include more "emails" from all walks of life.

Behrle's take-off on Kent's last paragraph doesn't rise to the level of political satire, it just makes fun of somebody by harping on their supposed weaknesses.

Now I suppose the Behrle campaign will be mounted against me. I don't know all the "history" gossip or rumor behind Behrle's animus toward Kent, it's none of my business. As I recall, & my memory can be fuzzy, he's mad at me because he didn't like the way I was talking back to David Hess some time years ago (& he didn't like me calling him "Jimby", which I don't call him any more). But that's all water under the bridge. I'm blocked for some reason from his comment box (at his blog), so I won't be able to respond, when the torrent comes. I really don't care anymore about all this piss-ant poet "biz".

Everyone should lay off the badmouthing & recognize they have personality disorders which are not cured by aggression & petty sniping. That includes me, that includes you, Behrle.

[p.s. I see Kent has responded to the Behrle piece over at the Hotel today. Whenever I go to "Hotel Point" I think of some big windy light-filled drafty comfortable mostly vacant old hotel on some point in Lake Michigan. & then I think of the hotel in the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge.]

We note the perfect discord of line #8. ("He'll teach them to sing out what we hold dear.") This line, despite its iambic-pentameter basis, is a metrical disaster.

There, I've simplified the syntax now, it's better. The poem pivots on lines 7-9. I think it's OK... The opening octet focuses on the (only half-believed) "logic" of supposedly "winning over" the torture victims (making them sing in unison). The sextet discounts all that, replacing it with the more basic goal of squeezing out useful information. The final couplet underlines the greater folly, the more egregious illogic, of the whole process.

This idea of making prisoners "sing" is sort of a Hieronymous-Boschian parody of the "attunement", the spiritual "octave", alluded to in previous poems (posted here over the last few weeks & months).

"Torture Logic" should maybe be titled "Tortured Language". Too much of a leap to the sextet ("Be that as may be..."). This is hard to do smoothly. The sonnet doesn't really work without awareness of Frost's model. But maybe that's OK. (Closet readers will note the almost-circular logic of the end-rhymes, etc.)

I wonder who reads my blog (I know you do). Feel as if I've gone off on my own track now, no longer have much affinity with the other poetry bloggers, nor do I sense they do with me.

another slight revision to sonnet posted previously.

where except in blogland could you do something like this? (I read Jonathan's reading of Frost's sonnet first.) In German poetry it's called widerruf, or widderruf - a parody or drastic recasting of another poem. (Celan is my context here.)

(To squeal is to sing, and the torturer (like Eve, in a way...) is teaching them to sing.)

TORTURE LOGIC


 
 
He will insist, and can almost believe
that if these surly, scrawny, naked men
absorb the special lessons they receive
their time together in the holding pen
(the soakings, burnings, beatings, and the rest –
the stench, shame, hunger, sleeplessness and fear)
will not have been in vain, as some have guessed.
He’ll teach them to sing out what we hold dear.
Be that as may be, he is in their face:
whoever they are, whatever game they play
he’ll screw loose information, leave no trace.
As for the stubborn... always another day!
We don’t know yet who’s causing us such grief
but causing pain will surely bring relief.

Have been reading much about Netherlandish art lately. Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden. Startled by how closely the images from Abu Graibh prison, with their grinning, leering guards and piles of naked prisoners, resemble pictures by Bosch and Bruegel (see The Mockery of Christ, for example).

A decision was made (at high levels, it seems) that the circumstances of the war on terror justify dehumanization of the enemy, the abrogation of human rights. Now it's beginning to have unforeseen consequences.

Rev. Jo-Ann Drake made this comment in her sermon this morning:

the actions at the Abu Graibh prison have appalled everyone, with their flouting of basic respect for human diginity; and they are indeed appalling. But last year's photos of Saddam having his tongue & throat inspected - the humiliation of the dictator-prisoner which made the world laugh - from Pres. Bush on down - these images, & the world's response to them, were also appalling, for the same reason.