4.23.2009
4.22.2009
Progress in Schooling
Ron Silliman, in his post of today, elaborates further on his taxonomy of the American poetry scene. He sets out all the schools & types & movements & mini-movements of the School of Innovation (my term), & reiterates his notion that the School of Quietude is that vast unexplored region of traditionalist poetry "which tries so very hard to be the unmarked case", the school which will not name itself.
Among other rhetorical questions, he asks, about that space of Quietude : "Not only could such a poet-critic map this space, they could answer some important questions, such as why become the poetry without a name? Why is it so important not to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of poetry?"
It's interesting in this context that he also explains the term "post-avant" - which is his umbrella term for all the innovative branches - as having evolved out of the prior term "avant-garde", which is now obsolete, since said a-g has existed for so long now and become so important that one would have to use the term "avant-garde tradition", to describe it - which is an oxymoron. So "post-avant" is more accurate.
So if the "avant-garde" brand has faded into the past, and "Quietude" is the school that will not name itself, then the "post-avant" poetries dominate a middle space, between two kinds of invisibility...
But to get back to his two questions, above - it seems to me they are related. His "Quietude" covers a vast & varied field of poets and poetry, but perhaps their common characteristic, which defines them as an entity of some sort, is a rejection of the ideology and modus operandi of the School of Innovation. We could describe this praxis in a nutshell as an application, in the field of artistic activity, of the ideology of social-industrial-technological-political Progress - progressive change as an unmixed good. Progressive change requires unremitting, urgent innovations and applications, along with the new names for these entities and activities. Thus in the realm of poetry, a new rhetorical technique will be heralded as a qualitative advance, and a motive for the birth of a whole new poetic "school". Progressive innovation also demands its complement - ie., "the old" : the remainder, the trace, the detritus, the disjecta membra, the waste, the excess... all that stuff which had to be thrown out in order to bring in the new.
Ron's "school without a name" - if it existed - would refuse to name itself, simply because it would not partake in the mythology of mass-industrial innovation in art. If something is not "new", it doesn't need a brand name : it is simply poetry. This relates to Ron's 2nd question, because by the same token, the supposed "quietude" poets would simply not recognize all the various fleets & sub-fleets of the school of Innovation as anything important enough to warrant mention. They might certainly focus on specific poets who have been labeled one way or another : but the branding process itself would be seen as both unimportant and extraneous to the work of finding value in the poetry itself.
Among other rhetorical questions, he asks, about that space of Quietude : "Not only could such a poet-critic map this space, they could answer some important questions, such as why become the poetry without a name? Why is it so important not to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of poetry?"
It's interesting in this context that he also explains the term "post-avant" - which is his umbrella term for all the innovative branches - as having evolved out of the prior term "avant-garde", which is now obsolete, since said a-g has existed for so long now and become so important that one would have to use the term "avant-garde tradition", to describe it - which is an oxymoron. So "post-avant" is more accurate.
So if the "avant-garde" brand has faded into the past, and "Quietude" is the school that will not name itself, then the "post-avant" poetries dominate a middle space, between two kinds of invisibility...
But to get back to his two questions, above - it seems to me they are related. His "Quietude" covers a vast & varied field of poets and poetry, but perhaps their common characteristic, which defines them as an entity of some sort, is a rejection of the ideology and modus operandi of the School of Innovation. We could describe this praxis in a nutshell as an application, in the field of artistic activity, of the ideology of social-industrial-technological-political Progress - progressive change as an unmixed good. Progressive change requires unremitting, urgent innovations and applications, along with the new names for these entities and activities. Thus in the realm of poetry, a new rhetorical technique will be heralded as a qualitative advance, and a motive for the birth of a whole new poetic "school". Progressive innovation also demands its complement - ie., "the old" : the remainder, the trace, the detritus, the disjecta membra, the waste, the excess... all that stuff which had to be thrown out in order to bring in the new.
Ron's "school without a name" - if it existed - would refuse to name itself, simply because it would not partake in the mythology of mass-industrial innovation in art. If something is not "new", it doesn't need a brand name : it is simply poetry. This relates to Ron's 2nd question, because by the same token, the supposed "quietude" poets would simply not recognize all the various fleets & sub-fleets of the school of Innovation as anything important enough to warrant mention. They might certainly focus on specific poets who have been labeled one way or another : but the branding process itself would be seen as both unimportant and extraneous to the work of finding value in the poetry itself.
4.18.2009
Ars est celare artem
Mark Wallace & Michael Theune are starting to plan an event or conference devoted to the issues of hybrid, avant-garde, poetry style wars, etc. Might be interesting - like the battle of Saratoga.
Two related thoughts on this occur to me :
1) maybe all the brouhaha during the last century over experiment & innovation in poetry should be understood as an epiphenomenon : I mean as an off-shoot of the general zeitgeist of modernization, industrialization. In other words, not so much driven by something within the sphere of poets & poetry-making per se - but a force acting on art from outside. I realize this idea is neither new nor subtle. But it has implications when we think about "what is poetry" in itself (if you agree there is such a thing). I believe there is such a thing. I believe poetry is older & more consistent than changes within poetry. This is not to deny the value & necessity of stylistic & technical change. It is rather to frame their place within something more basic & central.
2) maybe all the fetishizing & obsession with technique (and technical gizmo-tweaking - as in conceptual, flarf, investigative, Language, post-avant, neo-formal, etc etc) - maybe all this para-poetic bubbly activity should be characterized as a logical sub-category of IMITATION. & nothing more than imitation.
Imitation is essentially preliminary to the actual art-process. By foregrounding the incessant & supposedly highly-serious important hugger-mugger over Techtweakish Innovation, poets (& poet-kibitzers) are putting the cart before the horse, turning the inside out. The Innovator will say : why not? The poet, however, might ask a simpler question : why? The cynic in me will suggest that all the group-formation blitzkrieg around technical gizmatics is simply a method to give mediocre & half-formed poets a leg up in that world where lies their main interest : the world of the world, the world of glamour, the world of buzz.
The true ethic is this : poets should front only their finished work. Ars est celare artem.
Two related thoughts on this occur to me :
1) maybe all the brouhaha during the last century over experiment & innovation in poetry should be understood as an epiphenomenon : I mean as an off-shoot of the general zeitgeist of modernization, industrialization. In other words, not so much driven by something within the sphere of poets & poetry-making per se - but a force acting on art from outside. I realize this idea is neither new nor subtle. But it has implications when we think about "what is poetry" in itself (if you agree there is such a thing). I believe there is such a thing. I believe poetry is older & more consistent than changes within poetry. This is not to deny the value & necessity of stylistic & technical change. It is rather to frame their place within something more basic & central.
2) maybe all the fetishizing & obsession with technique (and technical gizmo-tweaking - as in conceptual, flarf, investigative, Language, post-avant, neo-formal, etc etc) - maybe all this para-poetic bubbly activity should be characterized as a logical sub-category of IMITATION. & nothing more than imitation.
Imitation is essentially preliminary to the actual art-process. By foregrounding the incessant & supposedly highly-serious important hugger-mugger over Techtweakish Innovation, poets (& poet-kibitzers) are putting the cart before the horse, turning the inside out. The Innovator will say : why not? The poet, however, might ask a simpler question : why? The cynic in me will suggest that all the group-formation blitzkrieg around technical gizmatics is simply a method to give mediocre & half-formed poets a leg up in that world where lies their main interest : the world of the world, the world of glamour, the world of buzz.
The true ethic is this : poets should front only their finished work. Ars est celare artem.
4.16.2009
Having fine ol' time reading & trying to follow & make sense of Geoffrey Hill's magisterial criticism (Collected Essays); his arguments go along like by-ways in a morris dance, or some kind of a-symmetrical old cathedral building... can't even try to summarize or paraphrase at this point. Last essay in the book speaks of the "eros" of poetry - but more as a kind of pain of desire, which fulfills itself in "alienated majesty" (tag from Emerson) - alienated from its own historical ground... yet speaking to it. He's against the clever & influential rounding-up of poetry in service of Important Social Crusades (mentioning in this regard, Eliot's culture-criticism, Raymond Williams)... but he also leans against poetry as complacent frippery (late Auden)... calls upon Charles Williams, Gillian Rose, Austin Farrer, other British thinkers & poets, toward an understanding of poetry on its own proper ground, so to speak (actually I'm not speaking so precisely here at all). Duns Scotus, especially GM Hopkins : Aristotle's idea that our generalizations can never be equated with "individual" particulars (Hopkins & "inscape", Scotus' haeccitas) : & this has something to do with poetry's own individuation & integrity... but there is always this moral & historical contextualization (that is, Original Sin : the inevitable evil, the central standing-in-need of grace & redemption) which shades all writings & poetry - the ground-bass of suffering, guilt, mortality which shatters art's (de-humanized) "autonomy"... close here to Celan.
But I started puzzling over what he meant exactly by "eros" (& its mockeries - mentions something about magazine verse & "awkward mating dances")... thought about the fact that most of my own poetry over the last few centuries seems to revolve around or be addressed to someone... (Mandelstam : "the soul is feminine, & loves trifles") -
& Hill mentioned Joyce, which triggered thoughts about the impact of reading Ulysses (& some of the criticism around it) - this sense of creative joy in the image of a particular place, soaked in the moist & alba-atmosphere of some kind of feminine awareness, another mind, another sensibility... somewhat in Pound too, & the "troubadour spirit" leading Dante (in his view, anyway)... Mandelstam : poetry is the "call of the fife"... (Montale, also, a big presence in Hill's poetry...)
not sure exactly what I'm getting at, except maybe the idea of art-making & poetry-making as a form of erotic activity transposed to spirit & sensibility... so busy with its own processes & originality (haeccitas - Hopkins' idea) that it can never be enlisted or reduced to anything... only allowed to flourish, to be what it is....
But I started puzzling over what he meant exactly by "eros" (& its mockeries - mentions something about magazine verse & "awkward mating dances")... thought about the fact that most of my own poetry over the last few centuries seems to revolve around or be addressed to someone... (Mandelstam : "the soul is feminine, & loves trifles") -
& Hill mentioned Joyce, which triggered thoughts about the impact of reading Ulysses (& some of the criticism around it) - this sense of creative joy in the image of a particular place, soaked in the moist & alba-atmosphere of some kind of feminine awareness, another mind, another sensibility... somewhat in Pound too, & the "troubadour spirit" leading Dante (in his view, anyway)... Mandelstam : poetry is the "call of the fife"... (Montale, also, a big presence in Hill's poetry...)
not sure exactly what I'm getting at, except maybe the idea of art-making & poetry-making as a form of erotic activity transposed to spirit & sensibility... so busy with its own processes & originality (haeccitas - Hopkins' idea) that it can never be enlisted or reduced to anything... only allowed to flourish, to be what it is....
4.15.2009
Got myself a copy of Ralph Maud's "counter-biography", Charles Olson at the Harbor (critical of Tom Clark's previous bio). Looking forward to this. Heard about it in Kenneth Warren's magazine, House Organ.
*
Continuing with G. Hill's essays. Two of them, toward the end, basically take-downs of TS Eliot. Eliot gets no respect from nobody, nowhow, these days. Sometimes the animus on Hill's part seems a little heavy-handed. He puts too much weight, seems to me, on offhand comments Eliot made to a reporter at some verse theater festival in Scotland (part of his evidence for asserting steep decline in quality of Eliot's later poetry).
But right now, Hill's powerful attention & intellect carries a lot of weight with me... just seems pretty obviously to be shaping his British canon - & shoving Eliot down a notch. Maybe he's right. Pointed toward a book by Eliot contemporary Charles Williams (English poetic mind, c. 1932), which sounds pretty good, based on the bits quoted.
*
Continuing with G. Hill's essays. Two of them, toward the end, basically take-downs of TS Eliot. Eliot gets no respect from nobody, nowhow, these days. Sometimes the animus on Hill's part seems a little heavy-handed. He puts too much weight, seems to me, on offhand comments Eliot made to a reporter at some verse theater festival in Scotland (part of his evidence for asserting steep decline in quality of Eliot's later poetry).
But right now, Hill's powerful attention & intellect carries a lot of weight with me... just seems pretty obviously to be shaping his British canon - & shoving Eliot down a notch. Maybe he's right. Pointed toward a book by Eliot contemporary Charles Williams (English poetic mind, c. 1932), which sounds pretty good, based on the bits quoted.
4.14.2009
Reading fine work by Geoffrey Hill (in Collected Essays) on Emerson, Whitman, GM Hopkins.
From the essay on Hopkins (p. 518) :
"Among the numerous consequences of the era of so-called 'protest art' is the irrational embarrassment of the current reaction against the theme of protest, or of political writings in general. Whatever the excesses and affectations of the 1960s and 70s may have done to harm the cause of poetry, there is nonetheless a real connection between it and politics : as real now, if we could disclose its true stratum or vein, as in the Tudor court poetry of Skelton, Surrey & Wyatt or in the political sonnets of Milton or in the relation between Wordsworth's 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads and his tract On the Convention of Cintra, or between Whitman's editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and other papers, and Leaves of Grass...
"Civil polity - let us make the claim - is poetry's natural habitat..."
Civil polity is poetry's natural habitat. Curious rhyme there with the likes of Dale Smith or Kent Johnson (& obviously many others). But G. Hill strongly opposes "the divine common" (Whitman) with "the mean, flat average" (Whitman, too). The commerce of literature & po-biz, the power of the Big Cliche, is opposed to true "glory" (in Hill's parlance, both divine & human).
(Did you know he has a poem for/about Jimi Hendrix?)
From the essay on Hopkins (p. 518) :
"Among the numerous consequences of the era of so-called 'protest art' is the irrational embarrassment of the current reaction against the theme of protest, or of political writings in general. Whatever the excesses and affectations of the 1960s and 70s may have done to harm the cause of poetry, there is nonetheless a real connection between it and politics : as real now, if we could disclose its true stratum or vein, as in the Tudor court poetry of Skelton, Surrey & Wyatt or in the political sonnets of Milton or in the relation between Wordsworth's 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads and his tract On the Convention of Cintra, or between Whitman's editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and other papers, and Leaves of Grass...
"Civil polity - let us make the claim - is poetry's natural habitat..."
Civil polity is poetry's natural habitat. Curious rhyme there with the likes of Dale Smith or Kent Johnson (& obviously many others). But G. Hill strongly opposes "the divine common" (Whitman) with "the mean, flat average" (Whitman, too). The commerce of literature & po-biz, the power of the Big Cliche, is opposed to true "glory" (in Hill's parlance, both divine & human).
(Did you know he has a poem for/about Jimi Hendrix?)
4.13.2009
4.11.2009
4.10.2009
Took Good Friday off. Did my taxes (2 states, 4 hrs - the old way, with pencil). Then sat in little backyard (sun already gone) & read Geoffrey Hill, Collected Essays.
Hill is really the Mountain of poetry in English; the normative, the bringing-it-all-back-home. Hard to follow sometimes, because for him there is a stretch of about 4-500 yrs (1550-2009) of English poetry & prose, which is all one mountain range (are there mountains in England? There are Welsh Hills) to contemplate, take in, evaluate. Serious dark bitter honey. Stringent, accurate, humorous, conscientious... Kind of a deep player, ranging over vast areas of the already-studied, finding new unlooked-for furrows & grooves... in the Book of Everlasting.
I'd like to meet him someday. & write something corrective to the picayune snipes & miss-the-target-by-a-long-shots magazine blab (or maybe I just haven't noticed the more attentive readers).
Hill is really the Mountain of poetry in English; the normative, the bringing-it-all-back-home. Hard to follow sometimes, because for him there is a stretch of about 4-500 yrs (1550-2009) of English poetry & prose, which is all one mountain range (are there mountains in England? There are Welsh Hills) to contemplate, take in, evaluate. Serious dark bitter honey. Stringent, accurate, humorous, conscientious... Kind of a deep player, ranging over vast areas of the already-studied, finding new unlooked-for furrows & grooves... in the Book of Everlasting.
I'd like to meet him someday. & write something corrective to the picayune snipes & miss-the-target-by-a-long-shots magazine blab (or maybe I just haven't noticed the more attentive readers).
4.09.2009
The scrambled oeuvre of Henry Gould
Play, play,
it's time to play!
Play all day,
that's what I say!
Your work is done,
come out in the sun -
play, play, play!
If you count this poem I composed at age 4 (in 1956), preserved by my father in pencil on a key tab, I have been writing poetry for over 50 years. Actually, there was a hiatus of about 10 years there, when I played at various other things. I started up again in jr. high school, with the encouragement of good teachers, good books, and fellow student literati. I kept writing through high school, influenced by ee cummings, Rimbaud, the NY School poets... & when I got to college (here at ol' Brown) I really took off : within a year I had won 3 literary awards. I was on my way.
Then I had my strange encounter with Shakespeare & the Bible... dropped out of school, dropped (partially) out of poetry... traveled around, was at various times a missionary of one, music bum, organic gardener, food coop manager, community organizer. Discovered the life & poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Began to read modern long poems (Pound, Williams, Olson...). Got married, became a father. My last job outside the library (I was scraping the bottom) was as a "professional resume writer". I made what seemed to be a conscious, principled decision to step back from community activism so as to concentrate on my writing. I became a door guard in the Rockefeller Library, at my alma mater. That was in 1984. Have been doing that (concentrating on my writing), mostly, ever since.
Aside from a prize from the Pawtucket (RI) Arts Council (annual poetry contest), those college awards I garnered back in 1971 are just about the last "official" recognition, as poet, I've received from the outside world. I've had much friendly acknowledgement & support from some other poets (Edwin Honig, John Tagliabue, Stuart Blazer, Karen Donovan, Lissa Wolsak, Tom Epstein, Elena Shvarts, & many internet pals, in particular). I'm proud of the fact that I've had 3 poems published on the op-ed page of the local newspaper, the Providence Journal (including my elegy for Joseph Brodsky). I've edited a little mag (Nedge) and an anthology for Edwin Honig (Glass of Green Tea - with Honig), & Honig's collected poems (Time & Again). I helped organize the Poetry Mission, which sponsored a number of readings & events back in the 90s. I've spent (& perhaps largely wasted... though not all a waste, by any means) a lot of time & hot air on internet poetry chat lists & blogs.
& that's my back story. (I'm probably forgetting several important things.) What about the poetry?
As far as style, the major influences are : NY School; John Berryman; the magnetic, harmonic, elusive imagery of Osip Mandelstam; Hart Crane, as filtered through Mandelstam (I saw a kinship there); the long poems of Pound, Olson & Williams, with Crane as my pivot & counterpoint; & other Russian poets.
I've written many long poems, oscillating between the stylistic poles of Paterson & The Bridge. I've written some very short, gnomic poems (mostly back in the '80s) which I still like. & I've written a lot in between, sometimes in particular short forms (sestinas, odes, one glose, pantoums, one nocturne...).
As far as subject-matter, themes, I would say there are 3 basic chords : love/nostalgia; history; metaphysics/religion.
The threads of Byzantium & early Rhode Island history run through it, and are sometimes intertwined. Why? I see Byzantium as filtered through Mandelstam & Russian poetry. I think of it as the place where the Jewish understanding of God & the Greek understanding of Man & the Roman sense of government grew together. Theologians like Maximus the Confessor articulated an intellectual balance between the human & the divine - between the incomparable & mysterious historical earthquake which was Jesus, and the philosophical comprehension of experience.
I see the work of Roger Williams as both a parallel & a counterweight to Byzantium. By recognizing that divine "Providence" works mysteriously through all mankind, Williams was able to assert the separation of the "two tables" of the Mosaic law, the civil & the sacred, and sanction the freedom of the individual conscience to seek its own way to the Way. Behind Williams' equilibrium, and the new kind of State he founded upon it, lies the whole law-ful civilization of the West : going back to the Middle Ages, to Rome & Byzantium, & finally to Athens & Jerusalem.
My sense of poetry is that it is a kind of song-language, slightly alien & differing from normal everyday discourse, or prose; and this difference, for me, registers the gap between the worldly & the visionary, the secular & the spiritual, the world of habit & convention, and the world of consciousness & creation. The motor driving the whole thing goes back to the charismatic faith-experiences I underwent in the early 70s (sketched out elsewhere). After these experiences I can only understand life, the universe, and consciousness as fundamentally alive, vital, conscious, personal, spiritual. The cornerstone of the entire edifice (if such it is) rests in one notion : the constant awareness that the human person is an image, seeking to be a likeness, of the divine Person(s). Call it Jung's or Chas. Olson's "Self", if you will - though for me that doesn't quite capture it, precisely because my sense of God is orthodox & Trinitarian : ie. we don't comprehend the full nature of God without including the whole record of divine intervention, sacrifice & fulfillment in the people of God, & in person & acts of Jesus.
For the person interested primarily in poetry, I realize this is a lot of heavy-duty religion piled on top. Can someone even be a free artist, a free thinker, & carry around all this (perhaps mythological) baggage? I guess that's not up to me to decide. Poetry itself - mine included - cannot be "doctrinal" : it springs, like music, from sources more primitive, primordial, universal, maybe inarticulate. The impulse toward song & beauty runs back deep into the unconscious - to the other side of the mirror, the far side of the moon.
A lot of my poetry is available, but it gets little attention. I think people generally don't know what to make of an artist who falls outside the official zones of recognition & promotion. It's not as though I've kept my distance, or kept aloof - I've had my share of rejection slips etc. & I will keep trying to break in in various ways, because I'm the eldest son of a successful man, I come from a hard-working middle-class background, & I want to be able to feel that my 30-odd years devoted to poetry haven't been completely in vain. But that's not up to me, either. There's a kind of special fate attached to a culture's poetry : & only if the Muse actually spent the night, will there be any lasting trace.
it's time to play!
Play all day,
that's what I say!
Your work is done,
come out in the sun -
play, play, play!
If you count this poem I composed at age 4 (in 1956), preserved by my father in pencil on a key tab, I have been writing poetry for over 50 years. Actually, there was a hiatus of about 10 years there, when I played at various other things. I started up again in jr. high school, with the encouragement of good teachers, good books, and fellow student literati. I kept writing through high school, influenced by ee cummings, Rimbaud, the NY School poets... & when I got to college (here at ol' Brown) I really took off : within a year I had won 3 literary awards. I was on my way.
Then I had my strange encounter with Shakespeare & the Bible... dropped out of school, dropped (partially) out of poetry... traveled around, was at various times a missionary of one, music bum, organic gardener, food coop manager, community organizer. Discovered the life & poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Began to read modern long poems (Pound, Williams, Olson...). Got married, became a father. My last job outside the library (I was scraping the bottom) was as a "professional resume writer". I made what seemed to be a conscious, principled decision to step back from community activism so as to concentrate on my writing. I became a door guard in the Rockefeller Library, at my alma mater. That was in 1984. Have been doing that (concentrating on my writing), mostly, ever since.
Aside from a prize from the Pawtucket (RI) Arts Council (annual poetry contest), those college awards I garnered back in 1971 are just about the last "official" recognition, as poet, I've received from the outside world. I've had much friendly acknowledgement & support from some other poets (Edwin Honig, John Tagliabue, Stuart Blazer, Karen Donovan, Lissa Wolsak, Tom Epstein, Elena Shvarts, & many internet pals, in particular). I'm proud of the fact that I've had 3 poems published on the op-ed page of the local newspaper, the Providence Journal (including my elegy for Joseph Brodsky). I've edited a little mag (Nedge) and an anthology for Edwin Honig (Glass of Green Tea - with Honig), & Honig's collected poems (Time & Again). I helped organize the Poetry Mission, which sponsored a number of readings & events back in the 90s. I've spent (& perhaps largely wasted... though not all a waste, by any means) a lot of time & hot air on internet poetry chat lists & blogs.
& that's my back story. (I'm probably forgetting several important things.) What about the poetry?
As far as style, the major influences are : NY School; John Berryman; the magnetic, harmonic, elusive imagery of Osip Mandelstam; Hart Crane, as filtered through Mandelstam (I saw a kinship there); the long poems of Pound, Olson & Williams, with Crane as my pivot & counterpoint; & other Russian poets.
I've written many long poems, oscillating between the stylistic poles of Paterson & The Bridge. I've written some very short, gnomic poems (mostly back in the '80s) which I still like. & I've written a lot in between, sometimes in particular short forms (sestinas, odes, one glose, pantoums, one nocturne...).
As far as subject-matter, themes, I would say there are 3 basic chords : love/nostalgia; history; metaphysics/religion.
The threads of Byzantium & early Rhode Island history run through it, and are sometimes intertwined. Why? I see Byzantium as filtered through Mandelstam & Russian poetry. I think of it as the place where the Jewish understanding of God & the Greek understanding of Man & the Roman sense of government grew together. Theologians like Maximus the Confessor articulated an intellectual balance between the human & the divine - between the incomparable & mysterious historical earthquake which was Jesus, and the philosophical comprehension of experience.
I see the work of Roger Williams as both a parallel & a counterweight to Byzantium. By recognizing that divine "Providence" works mysteriously through all mankind, Williams was able to assert the separation of the "two tables" of the Mosaic law, the civil & the sacred, and sanction the freedom of the individual conscience to seek its own way to the Way. Behind Williams' equilibrium, and the new kind of State he founded upon it, lies the whole law-ful civilization of the West : going back to the Middle Ages, to Rome & Byzantium, & finally to Athens & Jerusalem.
My sense of poetry is that it is a kind of song-language, slightly alien & differing from normal everyday discourse, or prose; and this difference, for me, registers the gap between the worldly & the visionary, the secular & the spiritual, the world of habit & convention, and the world of consciousness & creation. The motor driving the whole thing goes back to the charismatic faith-experiences I underwent in the early 70s (sketched out elsewhere). After these experiences I can only understand life, the universe, and consciousness as fundamentally alive, vital, conscious, personal, spiritual. The cornerstone of the entire edifice (if such it is) rests in one notion : the constant awareness that the human person is an image, seeking to be a likeness, of the divine Person(s). Call it Jung's or Chas. Olson's "Self", if you will - though for me that doesn't quite capture it, precisely because my sense of God is orthodox & Trinitarian : ie. we don't comprehend the full nature of God without including the whole record of divine intervention, sacrifice & fulfillment in the people of God, & in person & acts of Jesus.
For the person interested primarily in poetry, I realize this is a lot of heavy-duty religion piled on top. Can someone even be a free artist, a free thinker, & carry around all this (perhaps mythological) baggage? I guess that's not up to me to decide. Poetry itself - mine included - cannot be "doctrinal" : it springs, like music, from sources more primitive, primordial, universal, maybe inarticulate. The impulse toward song & beauty runs back deep into the unconscious - to the other side of the mirror, the far side of the moon.
A lot of my poetry is available, but it gets little attention. I think people generally don't know what to make of an artist who falls outside the official zones of recognition & promotion. It's not as though I've kept my distance, or kept aloof - I've had my share of rejection slips etc. & I will keep trying to break in in various ways, because I'm the eldest son of a successful man, I come from a hard-working middle-class background, & I want to be able to feel that my 30-odd years devoted to poetry haven't been completely in vain. But that's not up to me, either. There's a kind of special fate attached to a culture's poetry : & only if the Muse actually spent the night, will there be any lasting trace.
Buried under work; unable to blog much; unable to think straight; very frustrating!
Constant battle with discouragement.
What am I trying to do there, with Lanthanum and Lanthanum Road?
With LR I'm trying to branch out, write in looser, more discursive way. More clearly or obviously connected with the world outside Henry-world. But hoping it will converge with Lanthanum itself (which is more my old style of singalong quatrain-hopping). The honey & the honeycomb, hopefully.
It's just getting going, don't know if it will make it or last. Stumbling along lately - much trouble focusing, finding some clarity & confidence, making sense.
Constant battle with discouragement.
What am I trying to do there, with Lanthanum and Lanthanum Road?
With LR I'm trying to branch out, write in looser, more discursive way. More clearly or obviously connected with the world outside Henry-world. But hoping it will converge with Lanthanum itself (which is more my old style of singalong quatrain-hopping). The honey & the honeycomb, hopefully.
It's just getting going, don't know if it will make it or last. Stumbling along lately - much trouble focusing, finding some clarity & confidence, making sense.
4.07.2009
4.05.2009
Lanthanum, already. Took me by surprise (I don't know why. Have been doing this for 20 yrs). The sap is running. (Pine-sap, in this case.)
New feature on these blogs : if you click on the poem-titles of either Lanthanum or Lanthanum Road, they link to each other. This is what I had in mind (the poems are complementary).
New feature on these blogs : if you click on the poem-titles of either Lanthanum or Lanthanum Road, they link to each other. This is what I had in mind (the poems are complementary).
4.04.2009
4.02.2009
3.28.2009
Happy Spring.... I wonder if people remember Go Little Sparrow? The music is still there, to enjoy... it's rough & ready, hit or miss...
3.27.2009
Sent this comment to Harriet blog :
"...The anxious aura around poetry. But I don't think it's only a matter of feeling intimidated by "not understanding". If people can read & understand all kinds of prose books, they can understand poetry.
Poetry does not fit neatly into substantial "book" form. The reader cannot relax into the comfy alternate prose world. The "packaging" is thin. The difference between prose & poetry is this dramatic IMMEDIACY - the same sense of vague threat or discomfort you may feel from sitting too close to the stage at live theater. Is it "real" or is it "fiction"? Is it art, or is it this person in my face, so to speak, talking straight at me?
Poets in person have been Sacred Monsters, surrounded by this aura of unpredictable immediacy, since the days of Dylan Thomas & before (say, back to the Hebrew prophets, & Plato...). Popular poets sometimes get around this by assuming a kind of camouflage (familiar example : Robert Frost, in his complete Old Yankee outfit). You never know about poets. They are longhairs. They may be lunatics.
Accept the perennial reality of the Sacred Monster, folks. Learn to live with poetry's essential strangeness. The straw man of "difficult" Modernism is not the problem. The dream of domesticating poetry, of measuring its "popularity" like other forms of art & entertainment, will never come true. It died with the Fireside Poets, smoking their pipes under the iron rooftops of Victorian Scientific Progress. It died with the Restoration Wits, jingling along with their metrical cribs of Rationalism. It's always dying off, shedding its skin. Dionysius is always lurking in the woods nearby."
"...The anxious aura around poetry. But I don't think it's only a matter of feeling intimidated by "not understanding". If people can read & understand all kinds of prose books, they can understand poetry.
Poetry does not fit neatly into substantial "book" form. The reader cannot relax into the comfy alternate prose world. The "packaging" is thin. The difference between prose & poetry is this dramatic IMMEDIACY - the same sense of vague threat or discomfort you may feel from sitting too close to the stage at live theater. Is it "real" or is it "fiction"? Is it art, or is it this person in my face, so to speak, talking straight at me?
Poets in person have been Sacred Monsters, surrounded by this aura of unpredictable immediacy, since the days of Dylan Thomas & before (say, back to the Hebrew prophets, & Plato...). Popular poets sometimes get around this by assuming a kind of camouflage (familiar example : Robert Frost, in his complete Old Yankee outfit). You never know about poets. They are longhairs. They may be lunatics.
Accept the perennial reality of the Sacred Monster, folks. Learn to live with poetry's essential strangeness. The straw man of "difficult" Modernism is not the problem. The dream of domesticating poetry, of measuring its "popularity" like other forms of art & entertainment, will never come true. It died with the Fireside Poets, smoking their pipes under the iron rooftops of Victorian Scientific Progress. It died with the Restoration Wits, jingling along with their metrical cribs of Rationalism. It's always dying off, shedding its skin. Dionysius is always lurking in the woods nearby."
3.26.2009
3.24.2009
Swamped with work lately, etc. Hence lack of bloggismo.
Today finished G. Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook. Hope to have something to say about it in a review. Strongly affecting. & I found it fascinating.
& not by any means because of all the "local references". That's just an extra. But Gudding "ploughs his (alternating) verses" with a prosody made up of back-&-forth road trips from Providence RI to Normal IL (he writes the poem while driving, using his very special fountain pens); the turning-points of these repeated journeys are at a gas station 3 blocks down Hope St. from my house.
Today finished RI Notebook, 1:15. pm 3/24/09. (Was one of 2 witnesses at GG wedding, of which he writes. Also, once upon a time, noticed child's artwork in chalk on sidewalk near home; wrote poem about it; sent poem to Gudding 4 yrs later, not knowing artwork had been drawn & signed by his daughter Clio...) Tonight 3/24 go with Sarah to see lawyer, to sign my/our first Will & Testament.
Today finished G. Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook. Hope to have something to say about it in a review. Strongly affecting. & I found it fascinating.
& not by any means because of all the "local references". That's just an extra. But Gudding "ploughs his (alternating) verses" with a prosody made up of back-&-forth road trips from Providence RI to Normal IL (he writes the poem while driving, using his very special fountain pens); the turning-points of these repeated journeys are at a gas station 3 blocks down Hope St. from my house.
Today finished RI Notebook, 1:15. pm 3/24/09. (Was one of 2 witnesses at GG wedding, of which he writes. Also, once upon a time, noticed child's artwork in chalk on sidewalk near home; wrote poem about it; sent poem to Gudding 4 yrs later, not knowing artwork had been drawn & signed by his daughter Clio...) Tonight 3/24 go with Sarah to see lawyer, to sign my/our first Will & Testament.
3.23.2009
3.21.2009
3.17.2009
3.15.2009
3.12.2009
3.11.2009
3.10.2009
THE BARD & ME : A SHAKESPEARE COMEDY
(The (re)discovery of a pretty convincing portrait of William Shakespeare has reminded me of my long-ago psychic encounter with the Bard. It's a long story. My apologies to those who've heard it before.)
In the fall of 1972 I was a junior at Brown University, majoring in the new discipline of "Semiotics" (which meant, for me, taking poetry-writing seminars). I had come to Brown in 1970 on the strength (I believe) of a college application essay which was actually a long poem, inspired by the New York School poets, especially (Rhode Island native) Ted Berrigan. (I was not new to poetry : had been writing it since junior high.) During my first two years there I was very prolific, really blooming as a "NY School" ephebe. I won the two poetry awards which were to be won on campus.
But by the fall of '72, I was losing confidence & peace of mind; became depressed & withdrawn. I had broken off two love relationships in quick succession, & was feeling ashamed & guilty. Poetic effusions were not coming so easily (I was reading more). Then in early December, my cousin of the same age, Juliet, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. This left me badly shaken & sad.
Around then, I began reading Shakespeare's Sonnets for the first time. From my viewpoint over 30 years later, I can't help but think my response to these poems had something to do with my very melancholy state of mind.
The Sonnets struck me in a very powerful, uncanny way, such as I have never known before or since. I felt that Shakespeare, in person, was addressing me - speaking to me alone, in person.
This experience triggered a few days of lightheaded euphoria & wonder. Yet in the midst of it, I was clearly aware of its irrationality. I was not one for ghosts & spirits. It disturbed me so much that within the next few weeks, I decided to renounce poetry altogether. An occult connection with the ghost of Shakespeare was not going to help me emerge from my depression. I changed my major to History, and worked very hard through the spring semester to do well in that new direction. I thought I might take after my father, and become a lawyer, instead of a poet.
Over the following summer, I worked on a ranch in Wyoming with my younger brother Jim, haybaling mostly. It was hard work, & I felt invigorated & confident heading back to Brown in the fall. (In the evenings, on the ranch, I had read the Revised Version of the Bible, straight through - and this had perhaps an even deeper (though not exactly "occult") impact on me than did the Sonnets.) Indeed, I was so confident, I thought to myself - "What the heck, I'll take another look at the Sonnets. No harm in that."
This was the beginning of what exploded into an intense, manic mental breakdown. It was in the late afternoon or evening that I began re-reading the Sonnets. Slowly, inexorably, the sensation returned : Shakespeare was talking to me. This time the feeling was stronger than it had been the first time. I thought the ghost of Shakespeare was in the room. I moved into an overwhelming state of excitement & self-confidence - a kind of mania. I didn't sleep over the course of the next 3-4 days. Soon, I started writing long, rhymed poems about episodes in American history. I started a series of poems on the 50 states. I saw myself as becoming the American Shakespeare, with the blessing of the Bard himself. I distributed my new poems to friends & faculty (in particular, poet & scholar Edwin Honig). I was on cloud nine.
Then, after a day or so, my manic "fury" began its downward spin. I began to doubt myself, my sanity - but most of all my spiritual state. I had been baptized & brought up Episcopalian, but felt no strong Christian leanings until that summer in Wyoming, & reading through the Bible. Some words from Ecclesiastes seemed aimed like arrows directly at me : "And I saw that youth, the second one, he who is to come after : and he was lord over all the people : and yet this too is vanity, and a striving after wind." Suddenly the notion struck me that this Shakespeare ghost was actually a demonic spirit, from the depths - tempting me onto a path of worldly vainglory, and eventual soul-loss & damnation...
I couldn't sleep. I rushed around campus, desperately retrieving the poems I had just passed around. I went to Prof. Honig's house, & his wife, with a quizzical look, let me in; I shuffled through the papers in his study, without success. She told me he was meeting a friend up in Boston. I went directly to the bus station & headed to Cambridge; there, on a hunch, I went to the Grolier Bookshop. The red-haired manager told me Edwin would be arriving shortly. I sat down to wait; when Edwin arrived with another Brown prof, I accosted him - demanded he return my poems. & when he said it would have to wait, I grew agitated, tried to explain the urgency of the situation - eventually broke down in tears... Honig, that very kind man, took me to a Cambridge health clinic. He & his colleague had their dinner there, in the cafeteria, with me : & eventually I calmed down enough to make my way back to Brown.
Back in my dorm, I was still in a manic state. A new paranoid element entered in. I began to worry that Harry, a friend of mine, a fellow-poet & Brown student, might steal my poems - & turn himself into some kind of worldly Poet-Dictator. My thoughts had no rational brake : what I thought would most certainly come to pass. I fell into despair; it seemed the Devil had already fooled & overcome me. I was not to be this glorious American Literatus : instead I was merely an accessory to the coming crime.
The old Faust-story washed over my imagination. At this point, I knelt beside my bed, and began to pray. I begged God to save me, to relieve this mental and moral torment. I remember this very clearly : there was a bedside clock. It was near midnight. And at the very stroke of midnight, there was a knock at the door.
I jumped up, trembling all over. I thought the Devil was at the door, to fetch me. Shouting out, "this is the bravest thing I've ever done!", I cracked open the door.
It was not the Devil. It was Arnold Weinstein, Brown English professor, who happened also to be the resident dorm advisor. I heaved a great sigh, full of gratitude & relief. He invited me down to his rooms, introduced me to his family, calmed me down... The next day, the college advised me to go home for a week, rest, & get a psychiatric evaluation before coming back. My parents happened to be coming East to visit my mother's old college friend - Alexandra Weinstein (no relation); so I went back home with them.
However, the battle was not over. The paranoid, apocalyptic fixed idea - that my friend Harry would steal my poems, use them for evil purposes of world domination - was planted deep. I rested up at home; I met with a psychiatrist, & put him at ease. (I showed him some of the poems I had recently written, including a long one about the duel between Hamilton & Burr. He told me he wasn't much of a poetry reader, & that he might be a little biased, since he was a direct descendant of Aaron Burr.) Meanwhile, I went and bought a pistol. I had figured out a test. If, when I got back to Brown, I discovered that Harry had broken into my room & taken my manuscripts, I would do away with both him & myself...
The night before I was to go back, I was down in my parents' basement (where I was staying) with my younger brother Mike; sitting together on the bed, I told him the entire story, including my plan. By the time I was finished, we were both trembling. (All my life I have been ashamed of the fact that I laid the burden of that knowledge on my little brother.)
As I was going to sleep that night, I seemed to regress into a more childlike state. In the midst of my fevered imagination, I was afraid of what was coming. I didn't want to hurt anyone; I didn't want to die. I started crying quietly. My kind father came down the stairs; he rested his hand on my forehead, told me everything would be all right. I went to sleep. The next morning, just as I was waking up, I heard a voice, not my own - seemingly emerging from my chest. The voice was saying the Lord's Prayer.
When I got back to my dorm room at Brown, no one had broken in. I threw the pistol in the Seekonk River, where I suppose it remains to this day. I tried to start up with school again, and lasted about a month. The strange & charismatic experiences I had undergone were too overpowering for me to continue. My holy-fool/Jesus-freak wandering times were about to begin. I threw my record collection and most of my belongings in a dumpster. I worked a couple weeks as a cook in a local Pancake House to earn a little money. Then I took my guitar & set out on the road.
3.09.2009
Surprised to learn over the weekend (from local paper) that the John Hay Library, across the street from my place of work, houses (in a secure vault) Walt Whitman's personal copy of Leaves of Grass. (& that's a bust of Dante, outside the building, on the left.)
Seems lately I'm travelin' along with my own daily leaf-grass kind of thing (Lanthanum). Or maybe more like tree rings. Lanthanum gradually extending as a calendar-line through cyberspace.
Seems lately I'm travelin' along with my own daily leaf-grass kind of thing (Lanthanum). Or maybe more like tree rings. Lanthanum gradually extending as a calendar-line through cyberspace.
3.08.2009
3.06.2009
3.05.2009
Excerpt from an old essay ("Journey to Hoboken") first published in Witz, 12 yrs ago. A report on a Russian-American poetry conference I attended, in Hoboken NJ. (I've reprinted the whole thing over at Essays + Reviews)
"Craft and personality (passion) have always been rivals,
variables. Now toss in another variable--history. Enlightened
America protects the Individual proper (properly tied), to the
"detriment" of State and Religion. Russia experiences the
reverse. In America, the Individual, so glorified, becomes
commodified; in Russia, the Individual, so abased, becomes a cog.
The old East/West yeast. . .
Modernism, experiment, avant-garde. . . these in the West mean
subsuming the Individual to Craft, for the sake of utopia.
Postmodernism, in the West, is only blurredly differentiated from
the above, a reaction. Modernism, avant-garde, etc., in Russia
mean the same thing: subsuming the Individual. Now refer back to
paragraph #1 (history). So postmodernism means. . . something
very different, in Russia. It strongly opposes modernism and the
avant-garde from beforehand. It means the tradition of the
human, the primordial, the transcendent--a utopia beyond
"utopia"--and beyond the reach of power, force, and will. Only
miracle and grace achieve utopia. This is the Russian
perspective.
Everything is reducible to Futurism vs. Acmeism. Miracle and
grace have aesthetic implications.
* * *
Still--who or what is this mysterious Person, this Personality,
this Personalism? Are we to fall back into the blasted
ego-poetries of the seventies, into the nightmare of pale baby
Shakespeares, the filigree of greed and self-promotion? (Have we
even awakened yet?)
Once, in the nineteenth century, there was a Russian thinker
named Chaadev, a bold explorer, akin perhaps to Emerson. He
journeyed into the West, but then returned, called back to his
homeland by a sense of duty; bringing with him, like an unwelcome
prophet, a Western lesson--the gospel of moral freedom.
What is this moral freedom? A word, a phrase-capsule, for a
concept of the basic dignity of the human spirit--resting on the
human being's capacity to dedicate herself or himself--out of love
and piety (in its full uncanniness) and daring--to something
better, something beyond self, some One, some Other, some others.
The vanishing point where "moral" and "freedom" fuse.
Part of the artistic and identity crisis of the West has been the
fracture of the Person: the demand, the pull from both Right and
Left on behalf of either autarkic or subliminal--either nostalgic
or futuristic--concepts of justice and the good. Like mirror
images, Right and Left command our allegiance with the full force
of both rhetoric and experience.
Yet perhaps--perhaps by some strange grace, it is Russia--that
great animal, that evil empire, beyond the pale of enlightened
democracies and the full birthright of humanism--impoverished
Russia, suffering Russia, Potemkin Russia--that will return the
gift of Chaadev's moral freedom to the West. Mandelstam wrote
that in such times as these (speaking of his pyramidal, "Assyrian
age"), Man must become the hardest thing in existence, harder
than diamond. The free, loving gift-of-self is the essence of
art and the limit of artistry: but it is another step to
recognize it everywhere as an ontological fundament of reality.
Mandelstam again (trans. Robert Tracy):
It's not Rome the city that lives through the centuries
But man's place in the universal scheme.
This is the voice one hears in the strange, ceremonious finality
of Russian recitation; it is an echo, the curve of a shell, the
arch of a wave, a ghost dance, washing up in Hoboken."
"Craft and personality (passion) have always been rivals,
variables. Now toss in another variable--history. Enlightened
America protects the Individual proper (properly tied), to the
"detriment" of State and Religion. Russia experiences the
reverse. In America, the Individual, so glorified, becomes
commodified; in Russia, the Individual, so abased, becomes a cog.
The old East/West yeast. . .
Modernism, experiment, avant-garde. . . these in the West mean
subsuming the Individual to Craft, for the sake of utopia.
Postmodernism, in the West, is only blurredly differentiated from
the above, a reaction. Modernism, avant-garde, etc., in Russia
mean the same thing: subsuming the Individual. Now refer back to
paragraph #1 (history). So postmodernism means. . . something
very different, in Russia. It strongly opposes modernism and the
avant-garde from beforehand. It means the tradition of the
human, the primordial, the transcendent--a utopia beyond
"utopia"--and beyond the reach of power, force, and will. Only
miracle and grace achieve utopia. This is the Russian
perspective.
Everything is reducible to Futurism vs. Acmeism. Miracle and
grace have aesthetic implications.
* * *
Still--who or what is this mysterious Person, this Personality,
this Personalism? Are we to fall back into the blasted
ego-poetries of the seventies, into the nightmare of pale baby
Shakespeares, the filigree of greed and self-promotion? (Have we
even awakened yet?)
Once, in the nineteenth century, there was a Russian thinker
named Chaadev, a bold explorer, akin perhaps to Emerson. He
journeyed into the West, but then returned, called back to his
homeland by a sense of duty; bringing with him, like an unwelcome
prophet, a Western lesson--the gospel of moral freedom.
What is this moral freedom? A word, a phrase-capsule, for a
concept of the basic dignity of the human spirit--resting on the
human being's capacity to dedicate herself or himself--out of love
and piety (in its full uncanniness) and daring--to something
better, something beyond self, some One, some Other, some others.
The vanishing point where "moral" and "freedom" fuse.
Part of the artistic and identity crisis of the West has been the
fracture of the Person: the demand, the pull from both Right and
Left on behalf of either autarkic or subliminal--either nostalgic
or futuristic--concepts of justice and the good. Like mirror
images, Right and Left command our allegiance with the full force
of both rhetoric and experience.
Yet perhaps--perhaps by some strange grace, it is Russia--that
great animal, that evil empire, beyond the pale of enlightened
democracies and the full birthright of humanism--impoverished
Russia, suffering Russia, Potemkin Russia--that will return the
gift of Chaadev's moral freedom to the West. Mandelstam wrote
that in such times as these (speaking of his pyramidal, "Assyrian
age"), Man must become the hardest thing in existence, harder
than diamond. The free, loving gift-of-self is the essence of
art and the limit of artistry: but it is another step to
recognize it everywhere as an ontological fundament of reality.
Mandelstam again (trans. Robert Tracy):
It's not Rome the city that lives through the centuries
But man's place in the universal scheme.
This is the voice one hears in the strange, ceremonious finality
of Russian recitation; it is an echo, the curve of a shell, the
arch of a wave, a ghost dance, washing up in Hoboken."
3.04.2009
Starting to read Gabriel Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook.
It's not easy driving a car nonstop across half the USA by yourself. I've done it a few times; even with one other person, it gets very wearisome about halfway across Pennsylvania (if you leave from Minneapolis), and you just about fall asleep in Connecticut. Imagine writing a long poem while doing that...
The longest such drive I took was in the summer of 1971. I was driving my grandfather's hand-me-down, an enormous old silver Buick. I drove from Mpls to Alabama to see a girlfriend, whom I had tried to break up with, & then changed my mind. Was hoping to set things right. But I hadn't been able to reach her on the phone. Finally, when I called her home from a pay phone outside a truck stop deep in Alabama (she was living with her mother on the southern end of that state), somebody there told me she wasn't home. She had gone to Texas to visit her brother.
I was about out of money & time. I went back to Minneapolis, nonstop. That's a long drive.
Think I'm going to enjoy this book...
It's not easy driving a car nonstop across half the USA by yourself. I've done it a few times; even with one other person, it gets very wearisome about halfway across Pennsylvania (if you leave from Minneapolis), and you just about fall asleep in Connecticut. Imagine writing a long poem while doing that...
The longest such drive I took was in the summer of 1971. I was driving my grandfather's hand-me-down, an enormous old silver Buick. I drove from Mpls to Alabama to see a girlfriend, whom I had tried to break up with, & then changed my mind. Was hoping to set things right. But I hadn't been able to reach her on the phone. Finally, when I called her home from a pay phone outside a truck stop deep in Alabama (she was living with her mother on the southern end of that state), somebody there told me she wasn't home. She had gone to Texas to visit her brother.
I was about out of money & time. I went back to Minneapolis, nonstop. That's a long drive.
Think I'm going to enjoy this book...
3.03.2009
Latest Lanthanum.
I'm Play-doughing my own micro-idiolect here... a risky thing.
Easy to pooh-pooh, if you're a poo-poo-er.
Plenty to find fault. Few to enjoy. Fewer to understand. That's the risk. Fewest to care a whit.
I/you have to struggle with/against the incoherent, incomprehensible sing-song.
If it's going to mean anything, in this world of poor mutes.
But nobody plays the guitar like me.
I'm Play-doughing my own micro-idiolect here... a risky thing.
Easy to pooh-pooh, if you're a poo-poo-er.
Plenty to find fault. Few to enjoy. Fewer to understand. That's the risk. Fewest to care a whit.
I/you have to struggle with/against the incoherent, incomprehensible sing-song.
If it's going to mean anything, in this world of poor mutes.
But nobody plays the guitar like me.
3.02.2009
3.01.2009
2.28.2009
2.27.2009
Lately have been dwelling (in a very inconclusive way) on the relation between poetry & the poet-as-person. Actually this started a week or so ago, I think, with an odd sort of "involuntary memory" of Proust. Proust just popped into my mind, out of nowhere. & then a few days later I was having this slight memory, which seems to recur every few years, of being absorbed in reading French poets (Rimbaud, Baudelaire) in high school. Sitting on this kind of outdoor porch, barefoot, with a paperback & a french dictionary. & then have been thinking more lately about an old manuscript of mine (currently under consideration by a publisher), which combines prose & poetry - a memoir-fiction & the poems that came out of it.
Anyway, what am I rambling on about here? Vague thoughts lately about the public figure or dramatic impression that a poet makes in today's culture(s). The "public career", the image, the impression. Exactly how poets emerge (so variously) into public view. & what all this has to do with the poetry itself.
Forever, it seems, I've behaved as a kind of purist - trying to avoid any "extra-literary" manipulation of public taste. No po-biz for me. No chumming up with potential supporters among more-established poets. No cliques. No careerism. "Pure" in that I see all that as diluting - corrupting, even - any honest, disinterested appreciation of the work itself.
I still feel that way. But I'm starting to think there is a kind of gray area between the poet & the work - which is the dramatic figure the poet cuts in society. Basically, this involves the relation between the poems and the author's presentation of personal experience (autobiography, identity). This is not necessarily solitary or narcissistic, if the presentation of that experience has a moral-historical dimension - a critical dimension.
Anyway, I'm wondering how much culture demands not only poems, but poets. Poets whose articulation and transmission of their individual history - their own sense of their historical situation and context - is felt as necessary by culture at large.
Not sure if this makes any sense. In a way it's a sort of chicken-&-egg dilemma. There's no public interest, if the poems are not forcefully magnetic in their own right. But perhaps the dramatization of the poet's experience - the poet's self-dramatization - is a necessary part of that magnetism. (Geoffrey Freidin's interesting book on Mandelstam, A Coat of Many Colors, dwells on this issue of the "charismatic" element in Russian poetry.) If culture is one big drama - if all the world's a stage, & history is a play ("Everyman") - then perhaps culture demands (on some semi-conscious level?) the poet as representative figure.
I suppose Emerson had something to say about that. & Walt was listening. (& Robert Frost - look at the carefully-designed folksy figure he cut in the world!)
My wondering has to do with what all that has to do with poetry-making itself? & where do I fit into all that? (Here's "Henry", folks - trying to dig himself out of 100 yrs of Impersonality!!)
There has been the insistent playing around with autobiography as a kind of iconic literary re-enactment - the Berrymanish "Henry" chronicles; Stubborn Grew as a version of Rabelais... But thinking of my (unpublished) memoir-poetry mix - I'm wondering whether somehow the autobiographical offers the (potential) public a (potential) entrance into my poetry : a way to finally apprehend its existence - to enjoy it for what it actually is (in its own proper context & milieu)...
(It's definitely a comedy, all right. Call it Wishful Thinking, or something like that.)
Heck, what a huge kermuffle this issue has been over the last 100 yrs. The modernist demand for objectivity, impersonality - the sense that the making of a work of art is unfinished or illegitimate if it doesn't transcend the personal. There are libraries full of books on artistic subjectivity, identity, personality, impersonality...
Anyway, what am I rambling on about here? Vague thoughts lately about the public figure or dramatic impression that a poet makes in today's culture(s). The "public career", the image, the impression. Exactly how poets emerge (so variously) into public view. & what all this has to do with the poetry itself.
Forever, it seems, I've behaved as a kind of purist - trying to avoid any "extra-literary" manipulation of public taste. No po-biz for me. No chumming up with potential supporters among more-established poets. No cliques. No careerism. "Pure" in that I see all that as diluting - corrupting, even - any honest, disinterested appreciation of the work itself.
I still feel that way. But I'm starting to think there is a kind of gray area between the poet & the work - which is the dramatic figure the poet cuts in society. Basically, this involves the relation between the poems and the author's presentation of personal experience (autobiography, identity). This is not necessarily solitary or narcissistic, if the presentation of that experience has a moral-historical dimension - a critical dimension.
Anyway, I'm wondering how much culture demands not only poems, but poets. Poets whose articulation and transmission of their individual history - their own sense of their historical situation and context - is felt as necessary by culture at large.
Not sure if this makes any sense. In a way it's a sort of chicken-&-egg dilemma. There's no public interest, if the poems are not forcefully magnetic in their own right. But perhaps the dramatization of the poet's experience - the poet's self-dramatization - is a necessary part of that magnetism. (Geoffrey Freidin's interesting book on Mandelstam, A Coat of Many Colors, dwells on this issue of the "charismatic" element in Russian poetry.) If culture is one big drama - if all the world's a stage, & history is a play ("Everyman") - then perhaps culture demands (on some semi-conscious level?) the poet as representative figure.
I suppose Emerson had something to say about that. & Walt was listening. (& Robert Frost - look at the carefully-designed folksy figure he cut in the world!)
My wondering has to do with what all that has to do with poetry-making itself? & where do I fit into all that? (Here's "Henry", folks - trying to dig himself out of 100 yrs of Impersonality!!)
There has been the insistent playing around with autobiography as a kind of iconic literary re-enactment - the Berrymanish "Henry" chronicles; Stubborn Grew as a version of Rabelais... But thinking of my (unpublished) memoir-poetry mix - I'm wondering whether somehow the autobiographical offers the (potential) public a (potential) entrance into my poetry : a way to finally apprehend its existence - to enjoy it for what it actually is (in its own proper context & milieu)...
(It's definitely a comedy, all right. Call it Wishful Thinking, or something like that.)
Heck, what a huge kermuffle this issue has been over the last 100 yrs. The modernist demand for objectivity, impersonality - the sense that the making of a work of art is unfinished or illegitimate if it doesn't transcend the personal. There are libraries full of books on artistic subjectivity, identity, personality, impersonality...
2.26.2009
2.25.2009
2.24.2009
2.23.2009
David Orr on "greatness" in poetry.
Orr regularly comes up with interesting insights. But don't we already know what greatness in poetry involves? Where's the mystery, here?
The in-house poetry scene is like a 24/7 Academy Awards show, everybody wondering who's on top, who (if anybody) is any good this year.
But literary force & greatness do not depend on the scene, the status quo, current opinion. Greatness shifts all the markers.
Orr glances toward this, but not very decisively. & surprisingly he quotes Samuel Johnson, equating greatness with "exquisiteness in its kind" - which seems pretty limited as a defining characteristic.
As I see it, the great poets command a kind of cultural-artistic force field, a magnetic power - which intrudes upon and fuses with the history of their people in toto. With them, biography becomes fate. Suddenly events are no longer ruled by chance, but are transformed into a drama (of mind, art, originality). Reality is personalized through the medium of the work.
This may sound Romantic. It's not. It applies in every era. Poetry doesn't depend on philosophy or criticism; the poet's critical faculties (along with the imaginative) are fully deployed in the creative process, making possible an artistic microcosm, within which everything is filtered & shaded by the poet's vision. As Nicholas Cusanus wrote, with regard to the creative human personality : "The world giulianizes in you, Giuliano."
It seems to me there are 3 characteristics, displayed by the great poet, which determine this unusual situation :
1) A powerful, synthetic intellect, able to grasp wide spheres of life & discourse, and translate them into a new, unique order.
2) A strong will, determined to engage with the world, with its most difficult practical, moral & theoretical cruxes, riddles, problems. A dramatically-engaged personality.
3) An original, masterful combination of artistic talent and sensibility.
Such people don't come along every day.
p.s. but let me be clear : I'm not a believer in Supermen, Ubermensch (literary or otherwise). I'm pretty much with TS Eliot on Tradition (& Individual Talent). A poet becomes great through a sense of allegiance & service to a larger, older world (of art, of history). "The greatest among you shall be your servant."
Orr regularly comes up with interesting insights. But don't we already know what greatness in poetry involves? Where's the mystery, here?
The in-house poetry scene is like a 24/7 Academy Awards show, everybody wondering who's on top, who (if anybody) is any good this year.
But literary force & greatness do not depend on the scene, the status quo, current opinion. Greatness shifts all the markers.
Orr glances toward this, but not very decisively. & surprisingly he quotes Samuel Johnson, equating greatness with "exquisiteness in its kind" - which seems pretty limited as a defining characteristic.
As I see it, the great poets command a kind of cultural-artistic force field, a magnetic power - which intrudes upon and fuses with the history of their people in toto. With them, biography becomes fate. Suddenly events are no longer ruled by chance, but are transformed into a drama (of mind, art, originality). Reality is personalized through the medium of the work.
This may sound Romantic. It's not. It applies in every era. Poetry doesn't depend on philosophy or criticism; the poet's critical faculties (along with the imaginative) are fully deployed in the creative process, making possible an artistic microcosm, within which everything is filtered & shaded by the poet's vision. As Nicholas Cusanus wrote, with regard to the creative human personality : "The world giulianizes in you, Giuliano."
It seems to me there are 3 characteristics, displayed by the great poet, which determine this unusual situation :
1) A powerful, synthetic intellect, able to grasp wide spheres of life & discourse, and translate them into a new, unique order.
2) A strong will, determined to engage with the world, with its most difficult practical, moral & theoretical cruxes, riddles, problems. A dramatically-engaged personality.
3) An original, masterful combination of artistic talent and sensibility.
Such people don't come along every day.
p.s. but let me be clear : I'm not a believer in Supermen, Ubermensch (literary or otherwise). I'm pretty much with TS Eliot on Tradition (& Individual Talent). A poet becomes great through a sense of allegiance & service to a larger, older world (of art, of history). "The greatest among you shall be your servant."
2.20.2009
You get older, you just want to simplify... (when you're not trying to escape). I'm thinking about the "less is more" theory of poetry.
The person standing in front of other people, offering a kind of song... & yet even simpler, more stripped-down. Sometimes "through clenched teeth" (as Montale, I think, put it).
A spoken song, a kind of modulated speaking-chant. It's only words. It's not "an experiment". It's not high-falutin' bells & whistles. It's not "conceptual". It's not a "movement". It's not a speech, it's not a play (though it can be like a soliloquy). It's not a comedy routine. It's not a joke.
Everything is concentrated in the flow of speech, the diction, the statement, the image.
All this seems wonderfully figured in Mandelstam's comparison of poetry to a modest, unremarkable gray pebble - which contains, hidden within, a "terrifying density".
I used to think by this he meant all the baroque architecture of allusion and echoing of past poets & poems, the dense subtlety. That may have been part of it. But I think he was also trying simply to characterize the medium of poetry in general : how (unlike more complex media, like music, painting, architecture) poetry rests on this razor-thin, almost-insensible impression of verbal sound/meaning. Poetry inhabits that very thin ledge between the material (of art) & the intellectual (of thought).
The person standing in front of other people, offering a kind of song... & yet even simpler, more stripped-down. Sometimes "through clenched teeth" (as Montale, I think, put it).
A spoken song, a kind of modulated speaking-chant. It's only words. It's not "an experiment". It's not high-falutin' bells & whistles. It's not "conceptual". It's not a "movement". It's not a speech, it's not a play (though it can be like a soliloquy). It's not a comedy routine. It's not a joke.
Everything is concentrated in the flow of speech, the diction, the statement, the image.
All this seems wonderfully figured in Mandelstam's comparison of poetry to a modest, unremarkable gray pebble - which contains, hidden within, a "terrifying density".
I used to think by this he meant all the baroque architecture of allusion and echoing of past poets & poems, the dense subtlety. That may have been part of it. But I think he was also trying simply to characterize the medium of poetry in general : how (unlike more complex media, like music, painting, architecture) poetry rests on this razor-thin, almost-insensible impression of verbal sound/meaning. Poetry inhabits that very thin ledge between the material (of art) & the intellectual (of thought).
2.19.2009
Something new in Lanthanum. I wonder if anybody will get it...
I'm setting my face like flint and writing everything possible against the messages in this month's Poetry Magazine... from one end of cute & flavorful lyrics (they are pretty good, actually, for the most part) to the other end of stylish anti-manifestos... What the heck, they've rejected my poems 3 times in the last 6 months - my poems, which are pure plumbline(!!!)
I'm setting my face like flint and writing everything possible against the messages in this month's Poetry Magazine... from one end of cute & flavorful lyrics (they are pretty good, actually, for the most part) to the other end of stylish anti-manifestos... What the heck, they've rejected my poems 3 times in the last 6 months - my poems, which are pure plumbline(!!!)
Curious thing... I just discovered (reading a bio in this month's Poetry magazine) that Elena Shvarts, whom I've been out of touch with for a while, has a new book out from Bloodaxe Books, in England. The title is Birdsong on the Seabed. & it makes me wonder : is she taking the title from this poem, which she addressed to me (it was originally published in Russian, in a book of hers in St. Petersburg - this is my own, probably-inaccurate translation) :
To the Poet Henry Gould in the City of Providence
At your time's perihelion
the bird-clock sings.
Strange hours on the wall - as
if Keats devised their workings.
When, over there, an owl
hoots, representing midnight,
here a raven drops a crust
beside my windowpane.
I myself am on the wane -
needle-thin, grown accurate,
wheezing over cheap tea in winter
sunlight, a pudgy nightingale.
He, in deep dark, without hope
- poet left alone with his icon,
still-ineffable loving brother -
offers his Promised Land…
Over the ocean, two birds feed
halfway - and where they salute,
fallen rooted to the sea-floor,
a pearl aches - ripening
under the hard bark of the waves.
*
I will have to get ahold of that book, & find out! p.s. the "bird-clock" she refers to is an Audubon Society singing clock (with different bird-calls for the hours), which I sent over to her, & which she seemed to enjoy. (I had to keep sending her battery replacements. & a new clock, after her apartment fire.)
*
p.s. next day : I WAS WRONG. Wishful thinking. Got ahold of the book. Title comes from an earlier poem by ES.
To the Poet Henry Gould in the City of Providence
At your time's perihelion
the bird-clock sings.
Strange hours on the wall - as
if Keats devised their workings.
When, over there, an owl
hoots, representing midnight,
here a raven drops a crust
beside my windowpane.
I myself am on the wane -
needle-thin, grown accurate,
wheezing over cheap tea in winter
sunlight, a pudgy nightingale.
He, in deep dark, without hope
- poet left alone with his icon,
still-ineffable loving brother -
offers his Promised Land…
Over the ocean, two birds feed
halfway - and where they salute,
fallen rooted to the sea-floor,
a pearl aches - ripening
under the hard bark of the waves.
*
I will have to get ahold of that book, & find out! p.s. the "bird-clock" she refers to is an Audubon Society singing clock (with different bird-calls for the hours), which I sent over to her, & which she seemed to enjoy. (I had to keep sending her battery replacements. & a new clock, after her apartment fire.)
*
p.s. next day : I WAS WRONG. Wishful thinking. Got ahold of the book. Title comes from an earlier poem by ES.
Michael Theune has joined the Plumbline School. He's the real deal, as critics go : does his homework.
2.18.2009
Good article by Louis Menand about Donald Barthelme in New Yorker this week. But in the interest of the biographical profile Menand sort of skims the literary-historical issues. He's genial that way : the calm relativist explainer, the generalist table-talker. About "the idea of aesthetics" (as something fundamentally conceptual, & optional) rather than simply aesthetics.
According to Menand, as long as there were standards, there was still a distinction between art & non-art, art & commerce. So-called high art could absorb low art, & vice versa - & there were interesting crossovers. But with Warhol & many others, gradually there were no more standards, no more distinctions. Whatever passed for art, was art. Menand, diplomatically, seems to offer no judicial opinion here.
Modernism occupies sort of a snowbound peak, between Victorian Popularity (Tennyson, Kipling, Longfellow) and Postmodern Popularity. Rejecting the former, defeated by the latter. But the elitism of Modernism was based on an idea of the aesthetic in which the commercial has been refined away (read, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud). The aesthetic impulse is, rather, something so universal & basic (a Kantian category) that it requires no PR, no middleman. Eliot's notion of the "permanent" captures this perfectly. Indeed, Kant captures this perfectly (Critique of Judgement) in the idea that our aesthetic judgement is instinctive. We are drawn to the beautiful naturally. It's not a question of the intellect or the will. Hence the ease with which mediocre art succeeds - it wins people over with a mere (but clever) gesture toward the beautiful.
Taste = informed, educated instinct.
Modernism set itself up for this defeat. In the process of self-purification, it became its own idol (endless Borgesian mirrors of self-reflexive processes). It lost touch with its roots in unrefined experience.
The problem with the postmodern rejection of this distinction (between beautiful & ugly, original and imitation, real & ersatz) is that it denies both the instinct for the beautiful, and the critical-creative process by which art flows from it (the beautiful), & crystallizes it (in new forms, art works).
So, in a sense, neither modernism nor postmodernism was fully successful. Stevens : "the imperfect is our Paradise".
According to Menand, as long as there were standards, there was still a distinction between art & non-art, art & commerce. So-called high art could absorb low art, & vice versa - & there were interesting crossovers. But with Warhol & many others, gradually there were no more standards, no more distinctions. Whatever passed for art, was art. Menand, diplomatically, seems to offer no judicial opinion here.
Modernism occupies sort of a snowbound peak, between Victorian Popularity (Tennyson, Kipling, Longfellow) and Postmodern Popularity. Rejecting the former, defeated by the latter. But the elitism of Modernism was based on an idea of the aesthetic in which the commercial has been refined away (read, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud). The aesthetic impulse is, rather, something so universal & basic (a Kantian category) that it requires no PR, no middleman. Eliot's notion of the "permanent" captures this perfectly. Indeed, Kant captures this perfectly (Critique of Judgement) in the idea that our aesthetic judgement is instinctive. We are drawn to the beautiful naturally. It's not a question of the intellect or the will. Hence the ease with which mediocre art succeeds - it wins people over with a mere (but clever) gesture toward the beautiful.
Taste = informed, educated instinct.
Modernism set itself up for this defeat. In the process of self-purification, it became its own idol (endless Borgesian mirrors of self-reflexive processes). It lost touch with its roots in unrefined experience.
The problem with the postmodern rejection of this distinction (between beautiful & ugly, original and imitation, real & ersatz) is that it denies both the instinct for the beautiful, and the critical-creative process by which art flows from it (the beautiful), & crystallizes it (in new forms, art works).
So, in a sense, neither modernism nor postmodernism was fully successful. Stevens : "the imperfect is our Paradise".
plum lines (early poem, ca. 1970)
A SUCCESSFUL EGG HUNT
keep reminding me
that the weather needs no weathermen
and cats have no masters: they
don't need wisdom either.
tell me again:
the inside of a plum is warm-blooded
and constantly melting.
I have received your messages of love -
as they leave your lips
they dissolve my skies.
2.17.2009
2.15.2009
2.13.2009
Mikhail Aizenberg - I really like this poet. I think what he says about poetry is so thoughtful & deep, & mostly rings true. It gives one pause, & that's as it should be. & I like his poems too.
A few new random memories over at Random Henry (quiet here at work today). All the real poets are at AWP, so I might as well reminisce.
2.12.2009
2.11.2009
The Plumbline School is a-growin'.
I changed the wording in the header from a "fellowship" to a "convocation". I like the word fellowship, but I can see how it might have (unintended) sexist connotations. In other words, I hope some poets of the fair sex will be joining us soon.
I changed the wording in the header from a "fellowship" to a "convocation". I like the word fellowship, but I can see how it might have (unintended) sexist connotations. In other words, I hope some poets of the fair sex will be joining us soon.
2.10.2009
2.09.2009
2.07.2009
2.06.2009
Poet Joseph Duemer, longtime long-distance interlocutor, has joined The Plumbline School, as a contributing member. & he actually owns a plumbline. I'm thrilled!
I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Want to join the Plumbline School, for real? Want to be a BeeP? Sign up here.
Further investigation proves I was mistaken about Charles Olson's notion of the "middle voice". This has less to do with a level of diction or manner, than with a mode of grammar, drawn from Greek originally, in which the verb is between active and passive, & the subject of the sentence is also its object. There are several fascinating google links on this topic. And there may be a tangential relation between Olson's notion & what I've been trying to get at with this notion of "middling" (both ideas are looking for a center of balance).
But the first axiom of The Plumbline School might be -
Poetry = a Happy Medium.
But the first axiom of The Plumbline School might be -
Poetry = a Happy Medium.
Let's see then... what's a good po-biz moniker-brand for what I've been blagging about today? The school of understated, middling, normative, transparent, direct, inclusive, comprehensive, objective...
- how about the Plumbline School... !!!???
Bards o'th' Plumbline. The BPs. The BeePs.
Who wants to be a BeeP with me?
Here's an early (primordial) BeeP work.
- how about the Plumbline School... !!!???
Bards o'th' Plumbline. The BPs. The BeePs.
Who wants to be a BeeP with me?
Here's an early (primordial) BeeP work.
In 1864, during the grinding horror of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse battles, Lincoln was reading Macbeth. He quoted these lines to one of his aides :
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."
I ran into this last night (reading an old book by Bruce Catton - A Stillness at Appomatox - which I'd randomly pulled down).
Fleeting thought, then : now there is a benchmark for a "school of poetry"!
How so? Actually, it goes back to something Chas. Olson once wrote, about "the middle voice". Imagine a club of poets who strenuously seek & study this middling manner. An antidote to mannerism, that. An antidote to extremes - of wheezing bloat, of anemic shallow nerviness....
This is actually a recurrent theme in my decades-long bloggology.
A middling, modest, understated manner. An unassuming, midwestern manner. What's its value? Limpid clarity, simplicity, pointed directness, efficiency... all these writerly effects put to the service of objectivity, capaciousness. An inclusive poetry of wide range, able to glom onto all kinds and levels of phenomena & discourse.
Objective in the sense of disinterested, as I mentioned yesterday : that is, capable of presenting a scene, without hectoring the reader about it one way or another. Letting the reader gradually enter the poet's trap. Because there is an understated or unspoken argument - but you have to discover it yourself. It can be ambivalent, ambiguous, duplex, many-sided. As such, it achieves its realization : a free-standing work of art, a poem.
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."
I ran into this last night (reading an old book by Bruce Catton - A Stillness at Appomatox - which I'd randomly pulled down).
Fleeting thought, then : now there is a benchmark for a "school of poetry"!
How so? Actually, it goes back to something Chas. Olson once wrote, about "the middle voice". Imagine a club of poets who strenuously seek & study this middling manner. An antidote to mannerism, that. An antidote to extremes - of wheezing bloat, of anemic shallow nerviness....
This is actually a recurrent theme in my decades-long bloggology.
A middling, modest, understated manner. An unassuming, midwestern manner. What's its value? Limpid clarity, simplicity, pointed directness, efficiency... all these writerly effects put to the service of objectivity, capaciousness. An inclusive poetry of wide range, able to glom onto all kinds and levels of phenomena & discourse.
Objective in the sense of disinterested, as I mentioned yesterday : that is, capable of presenting a scene, without hectoring the reader about it one way or another. Letting the reader gradually enter the poet's trap. Because there is an understated or unspoken argument - but you have to discover it yourself. It can be ambivalent, ambiguous, duplex, many-sided. As such, it achieves its realization : a free-standing work of art, a poem.
Feisty Johnny L is out there battin' flies, again. The acid test of labelling, Brand names vs. careful scrutiny. The limits of poetry-cliques, pigeonholes, & PR.
I'm with him, to a degree. But nobody listens to me, anyway. The polemics are about street cred. Poets as urban sharps, Baudelairean, Marlovian, nervy, antsy. What would F. O'Hara say????? Zipped up in leather jackets, emitting japes & quips. Very Modern. Very New San Fran Yorky. What's so funny!!!???? Schoolyard gravel. Who's the coolest now???? All them sons of bounty jumpers.
I like the idea of "slow poetry", too, because it seems an antidote to some of the caffeindish fakery. But not for the reasons Dale Smith argues for it. The communitarian sky is falling!!! Baraka, Olson, Dorn - at some deep level, these blokes are humorless. Faint mustard glow of the fanatic in the eye. Dorn's sarcasm is sour. School of Ez, I guess.
I'm with him, to a degree. But nobody listens to me, anyway. The polemics are about street cred. Poets as urban sharps, Baudelairean, Marlovian, nervy, antsy. What would F. O'Hara say????? Zipped up in leather jackets, emitting japes & quips. Very Modern. Very New San Fran Yorky. What's so funny!!!???? Schoolyard gravel. Who's the coolest now???? All them sons of bounty jumpers.
I like the idea of "slow poetry", too, because it seems an antidote to some of the caffeindish fakery. But not for the reasons Dale Smith argues for it. The communitarian sky is falling!!! Baraka, Olson, Dorn - at some deep level, these blokes are humorless. Faint mustard glow of the fanatic in the eye. Dorn's sarcasm is sour. School of Ez, I guess.
2.05.2009
CREDO
The world has always been full of random verbal noise. However, starting about a century ago, the volume seems to have steadily increased.
A poem, on the other hand, is surrounded by a kind of silence, like a town just after a very heavy snowfall. This is because a poem is a kind of distillation - the precipitation or extraction of an essence (from within the noise).
The judges & critics of poetry should be on the lookout for these distillations. They are the actual poetic record or canon (recognized or not) of their times.
I think a poem is an act of balance, equilibrium - a conjunction of opposites. Both. Unique and common; original and final; personal and universal; individual and representative. It is both sui generis and an example of a class, a period. It is new and old. It is experimental and traditional.
We laugh and deprecate anthologies, canons. But they are part of the critical and self-critical labors of the culture from which they emerge. The point is to form your own true canon out of all these efforts - and in spite of them.
A poem, as an act of equilibrium, is also a display of a positive kind of disinterestedness. In this sense, a poem should show, not tell; imagine, not lecture. If it is going to lecture - and some poems must - it should provide authentic poetic evidence (in terms of both style and exempla) for its arguments. A poem should reveal something - and let the readers exert themselves (to draw their own conclusions).
The world has always been full of random verbal noise. However, starting about a century ago, the volume seems to have steadily increased.
A poem, on the other hand, is surrounded by a kind of silence, like a town just after a very heavy snowfall. This is because a poem is a kind of distillation - the precipitation or extraction of an essence (from within the noise).
The judges & critics of poetry should be on the lookout for these distillations. They are the actual poetic record or canon (recognized or not) of their times.
I think a poem is an act of balance, equilibrium - a conjunction of opposites. Both. Unique and common; original and final; personal and universal; individual and representative. It is both sui generis and an example of a class, a period. It is new and old. It is experimental and traditional.
We laugh and deprecate anthologies, canons. But they are part of the critical and self-critical labors of the culture from which they emerge. The point is to form your own true canon out of all these efforts - and in spite of them.
A poem, as an act of equilibrium, is also a display of a positive kind of disinterestedness. In this sense, a poem should show, not tell; imagine, not lecture. If it is going to lecture - and some poems must - it should provide authentic poetic evidence (in terms of both style and exempla) for its arguments. A poem should reveal something - and let the readers exert themselves (to draw their own conclusions).
I suppose my previous post could be seen as utterly insane hubris.
Au contraire. I would suggest that one of the central, if unspoken, raisons d'etre for literary cliques & groupings & movements is to provide a security blanket against the Grand Tradition, the Only Real Club : Poetry-At-Large. Poetry simple. Poetry per se.
Then again, I'd be too cynical (& simplistic) if I thought this was the only motivation. Sometimes poets gather together in order to resist some way of writing which has worn out, lost its usefulness or vitality.
But maybe what has grown stale in our own day are some modern/postmodern tendencies themselves. I'm thinking of some of the more purist & extreme manifestations - those which reject not only traditional modes or styles, but basic grammar and syntax, basic rhetorical means, literary history itself. They want to re-invent the wheel solely by means of their own jargon and polemical-ideological armature.
I know I'm batting a straw man here, to some extent. But the magazines & blogs are full of idioms or styles which seems basically a-historical. & one of the theoretical (or subconscious, maybe) justifications for this state of affairs is the notion that old = bad, traditional = irrelevant, new = good, assertion is better than deference, ignorance is OK as long as it's got flair...
The group I want to belong to would not only express an affinity for that aforementioned pantheon of literary greats (& others), but also devote itself to a comprehensive scrutiny of, & a loving involvement with, the long & complex history of poetry itself. There is a perennial "need for roots".
Au contraire. I would suggest that one of the central, if unspoken, raisons d'etre for literary cliques & groupings & movements is to provide a security blanket against the Grand Tradition, the Only Real Club : Poetry-At-Large. Poetry simple. Poetry per se.
Then again, I'd be too cynical (& simplistic) if I thought this was the only motivation. Sometimes poets gather together in order to resist some way of writing which has worn out, lost its usefulness or vitality.
But maybe what has grown stale in our own day are some modern/postmodern tendencies themselves. I'm thinking of some of the more purist & extreme manifestations - those which reject not only traditional modes or styles, but basic grammar and syntax, basic rhetorical means, literary history itself. They want to re-invent the wheel solely by means of their own jargon and polemical-ideological armature.
I know I'm batting a straw man here, to some extent. But the magazines & blogs are full of idioms or styles which seems basically a-historical. & one of the theoretical (or subconscious, maybe) justifications for this state of affairs is the notion that old = bad, traditional = irrelevant, new = good, assertion is better than deference, ignorance is OK as long as it's got flair...
The group I want to belong to would not only express an affinity for that aforementioned pantheon of literary greats (& others), but also devote itself to a comprehensive scrutiny of, & a loving involvement with, the long & complex history of poetry itself. There is a perennial "need for roots".
... but what club would have me, anyway? I want to be in the group with Donne, & Marvell, & Mandelstam, & Akhmatova, & Dante, & the Psalmist, & Celan, & Dickinson, & Whitman, & Melville, & Shakespeare, & Chaucer, & Langland... I want to drink some mead-grog with them (& Johnny Keats, of course) in the afterlife, at the clubhouse...
That's my affinity group. Why don't you join mine?
That's my affinity group. Why don't you join mine?
Some second thoughts on poetry groups (see post of yesterday) :
I wrote previously that, with regard to groups, "the historical record is not promising". Yet without the shared interest, the mutual support, of associations of poets, like the "dolce stil nuova" circle around Dante, it's hard to imagine how a full realization of individual talent (for ex. in Dante's case) would have happened. The same goes for Shakespeare's emergence out of the milieu of London verse drama. There are counter-examples (what "school" nurtured Emily Dickinson?) - but these may be more rare. Even Whitman emerged out of groundwork laid by Emerson & Transcendentalism.
Obviously the history shows a variable range of phenomena with regard to group movements. No two have been exactly the same. There are also, I suppose, these concentric rings of influence and affinity - say the smaller, distinct collectives and associations within the general scene of so-called experimental/avant-garde poetry. Maybe somebody has written an anatomy of these groups (American Poetry Wax Museum?).
I don't know, at the moment, if there exists a poetry scene or group into which I would fit or feel comfortable (or they with me). There was an interesting op-ed piece in the local paper today (Providence Journal), by David Brussat, a frequent contributor on local (& international) architectural and preservation issues. Brussat displays a visceral scorn for architectural modernism in all its expressions - sees it as a threat to classicism, beauty in general, and the local historical architecture in Rhode Island. His polemics can sometimes seem narrow-minded and tiresome - any building that shows modern or postmodern tendencies or pizazz comes in for heaps of criticism. But I was struck by his feature this morning, on an Egyptian architect of traditional, "classical" bent, who had just won a prestigious award. (I don't have the paper handy at the moment - will look up the architect's name.) The architect apparently synthesizes Western, Eastern, & Islamic traditions in an effective way.
What struck me about Brussat's argument was its conservative, "Burkean" character. Traditional architecture is based on natural canons of form and local, vernacular styles. 20th-cent. modernism/postmodernism, on the other hand, is a deracinated, revolutionary, pedantically academic & rationalist imposition of ugly, dehumanized, arrogant and impractical theories.
It occurred to me that my off-&-on polemics on behalf of a "world tradition" in poetry (see the AIEE! Poetry jag & many other comments here) take a somewhat similar stance toward the "avant-garde" movements in poetry. Does this put me in the same box with the 90s New Formalists, and the New Criterion crowd? I don't think so. When I look back at my "trajectory" over the last 20 years, it seems to me I am precisely a "liminal" figure (internal emigre!). It's kind of like an MC Escher drawing : if you look at my work from one direction, it's in the modernist, experimental vein : if you look at it from another direction, it's conservative and traditionalist.
So where's my "group"? Nobody's asking me to join.
I wrote previously that, with regard to groups, "the historical record is not promising". Yet without the shared interest, the mutual support, of associations of poets, like the "dolce stil nuova" circle around Dante, it's hard to imagine how a full realization of individual talent (for ex. in Dante's case) would have happened. The same goes for Shakespeare's emergence out of the milieu of London verse drama. There are counter-examples (what "school" nurtured Emily Dickinson?) - but these may be more rare. Even Whitman emerged out of groundwork laid by Emerson & Transcendentalism.
Obviously the history shows a variable range of phenomena with regard to group movements. No two have been exactly the same. There are also, I suppose, these concentric rings of influence and affinity - say the smaller, distinct collectives and associations within the general scene of so-called experimental/avant-garde poetry. Maybe somebody has written an anatomy of these groups (American Poetry Wax Museum?).
I don't know, at the moment, if there exists a poetry scene or group into which I would fit or feel comfortable (or they with me). There was an interesting op-ed piece in the local paper today (Providence Journal), by David Brussat, a frequent contributor on local (& international) architectural and preservation issues. Brussat displays a visceral scorn for architectural modernism in all its expressions - sees it as a threat to classicism, beauty in general, and the local historical architecture in Rhode Island. His polemics can sometimes seem narrow-minded and tiresome - any building that shows modern or postmodern tendencies or pizazz comes in for heaps of criticism. But I was struck by his feature this morning, on an Egyptian architect of traditional, "classical" bent, who had just won a prestigious award. (I don't have the paper handy at the moment - will look up the architect's name.) The architect apparently synthesizes Western, Eastern, & Islamic traditions in an effective way.
What struck me about Brussat's argument was its conservative, "Burkean" character. Traditional architecture is based on natural canons of form and local, vernacular styles. 20th-cent. modernism/postmodernism, on the other hand, is a deracinated, revolutionary, pedantically academic & rationalist imposition of ugly, dehumanized, arrogant and impractical theories.
It occurred to me that my off-&-on polemics on behalf of a "world tradition" in poetry (see the AIEE! Poetry jag & many other comments here) take a somewhat similar stance toward the "avant-garde" movements in poetry. Does this put me in the same box with the 90s New Formalists, and the New Criterion crowd? I don't think so. When I look back at my "trajectory" over the last 20 years, it seems to me I am precisely a "liminal" figure (internal emigre!). It's kind of like an MC Escher drawing : if you look at my work from one direction, it's in the modernist, experimental vein : if you look at it from another direction, it's conservative and traditionalist.
So where's my "group"? Nobody's asking me to join.
2.04.2009
Some pretty good polemical battles shaping up over at Dale Smith's habitat, what with John Latta parallelogramming & Kent Johnson slamming, & the objects of their vitriol holding fire for the moment...
Latta has an powr'ful sharp hawk's eye, & barbed tongue, and steady historical empiricism (let's look at the actual poem-stuff, folks), & very often it all hangs together quite effectively. I find the stentorian venting of A. Baraka & some of the quoted Dorn (& can see how it appeals to Kent & Dale) not to be such great poetry, however...
But that's not the main issue here, I guess. The poems & the macho-honcho neo-Pound/Olsonian attitude are imperfect, but what's under contention is the nature of poetry, poetic style itself, & the concomitant stance/role of the poet these days.
We are living in the after-years of an effervescent wave of 80s-90s savvy neo-formalism, as Latta points out. The epic-prophetic poetry of social conscience & public speech has always scraped against the grain of this mode.
The Language Poets had a certain political attitude, combined with a poetic style dedicated to a multiplex effacement : 1) the effacement of the logic of syntax and argument (individual words and paratactic/isolated sentences do not add up to a "statement" of any kind); 2) the effacement of the personal, of a poetry of individual testimony; 3) the effacement of the concept of world-tradition in poetry (this went the way of the other 2 effacements, like the baby with the bathwater). The academic poet-stylist-scholars who took up their methods merely instaurated & extended the "elliptical" formalism of this postmodern moment.
But these & like criticisms have been made by me & others many, many, many times before over the last 10 years. The problem of "groupuscules", the explicit definition of shared goals & methods, seems like one of the thorniest dang hornets' nests in US poetry. I keep thinking this morning that this whole thing needs to be looked at from a new angle. But what that angle is yet I'm not sure.
There does seem to be this inherent, inescapable Teapot Battle, in our poetry, between The Serious and The Blithe. How this happens & how it turns into a Battle is a very complex problem.
One factor is the constant ambient drone of mediocre poetry of every school : because facile, superficial verse lacks the depth & the subtlety to synthesize, to combine the serious & the blithe (or comic). So we have these vigorous noisy feather-fights between Queen Berenice & the Neanderthal, neither of whom are actually producing poetry of much consequence.
Another problem is Polemical Absolutism. It's a kind of one-eyed Cyclopean threat. Poetry is basically centered in the eye of the mandala... dialectics, context fade out. Manifestos are written. Soapboxes are erected. Complaints & caterwauls are registered on various websites. But they are raised up on stilts, which are planted in very thin air - since the threads binding poet to fellow poets to audience to tradition to culture at large seem very tenuous, amorphous, accidental. Poetry is taken too seriously or not seriously enough. We do not know where to draw the line (if line is necessary) between poetry as a profession, a vocation, a kind of public office, and poetry as a right & legacy & inner romantic artistic disposition of every ever-lovin' human being in the whole wide world.
Meanwhile we have a frail, tender kind of established path for professional poets, which leads from MFA training to the professional obstacle course - the struggle for publication, awards & recognition, the search for scarce teaching positions & grants... it's sort of like fundraising is to politics : after a while you wonder if you might not be losing touch with the public at large... & all the blogs (like this one) are out there chatting & babbling & reminding you that you are a poor weak worm of a professional academic creative writer, just tryin' to get along...
But I'm probably mulching over a non-problem, here - since the sifting, evaluating role of journals & magazines & poetry presses is still actual & real to some extent. Let's try to get back to what seems to be the main problem at hand. Let's assume we have contemporary poets who have achieved a certain level of skill - who are successful at getting some poems in print, anyway. I mean, let's focus on them. With these people in mind, we ask : is there a meaningful role for collaborative group dynamics, & the formation of explicit aesthetic goals & literary principles? If so, what should be the guiding, general principles of such activity?
I can't really answer these questions right now. I can only throw out a few ideas off the top of my head.
First, it seems to me that if a group were to form, it would have to form on the basis of an understanding that this is a group of individuals. Collaborative poetry - poetry written by more than one person - is a different kettle of fish. Obviously it's a legitimate & I suppose fun thing to do, but I'm more interested in defining the possible characteristrics of a group of poets with shared goals but individual practice.
Second, I think if a group is going to bother to agglomerate itself for some kind of public effect, it needs to take its didactic role seriously. It's not out there for pure self-promotion : rather, the purpose of its shared activity is to disseminate, by teaching, a certain way of understanding what poetry can be. So the goal would be, curiously, not to strive constantly for new & more powerful & more exciting forms of "attention" from others. The goal would be to clarify, with progressively greater accuracy and effectiveness, those specific principles of praxis and style which they value & admire. In other words, the group would be a critical and self-conscious project of literary development.
The historical record for such activities is not very promising. I think of the Florentine circle around Dante & his friends & predecessors - the "dolce stil nuovo" - which itself grew out of the troubadour tradition and Sicilian poetry. Or the Russian Acmeists, who stemmed from the Symbolists by way of Annensky's idiosyncratic difference. What I mean by "not very promising" is that the challenge of writing well is inevitably a process of differentiation and individuation. The principles of the group prove, eventually, to be not stringent enough - to be inadequate and even counter-productive to the poet (like Dante) who has outgrown them. The dangers of every group & group method are : 1) success breeds inertia; and 2) groups become ingrown, solipsistic - they write for each other rather than straining to reach the reader-at-large, Mandelstam's "interlocutor of the future".
Here in the US we seem to have a situation where, first of all, the organs & institutions of the writerly profession, such as it is, militate toward production and publication, rather than group analysis and critical development. Groups, as a consequence, fail to take themselves seriously enough; the investigation and modelling of basic praxis-principles gets muddled with public relations, turf wars, & petty gamesmanship. Groups remain amorphous, and pretty much dismissed & ignored by "successful" published poets. The American cult of the Individual casts suspicion and contempt on group efforts - they are merely "abstractions" and "verbiage". (For the most part, unfortunately, this is only too true.)
Again, it seems to me, if an effort at group-formation appears valid and necessary to certain poets, the essential preliminary effort would have to involve an honest search for truth : a careful, self-critical, patient examination of realistic goals, capabilities, principles, contexts. What seems valid in today's poetry? How do we want to go about trying to write it ourselves? What, if any, are the aesthetic-literary principles that we think undergird our practice? How should we go about defining and conveying these principles to others?
The total answer to all these is problems is, of course, AIEE! Poetry (just kidding).
Latta has an powr'ful sharp hawk's eye, & barbed tongue, and steady historical empiricism (let's look at the actual poem-stuff, folks), & very often it all hangs together quite effectively. I find the stentorian venting of A. Baraka & some of the quoted Dorn (& can see how it appeals to Kent & Dale) not to be such great poetry, however...
But that's not the main issue here, I guess. The poems & the macho-honcho neo-Pound/Olsonian attitude are imperfect, but what's under contention is the nature of poetry, poetic style itself, & the concomitant stance/role of the poet these days.
We are living in the after-years of an effervescent wave of 80s-90s savvy neo-formalism, as Latta points out. The epic-prophetic poetry of social conscience & public speech has always scraped against the grain of this mode.
The Language Poets had a certain political attitude, combined with a poetic style dedicated to a multiplex effacement : 1) the effacement of the logic of syntax and argument (individual words and paratactic/isolated sentences do not add up to a "statement" of any kind); 2) the effacement of the personal, of a poetry of individual testimony; 3) the effacement of the concept of world-tradition in poetry (this went the way of the other 2 effacements, like the baby with the bathwater). The academic poet-stylist-scholars who took up their methods merely instaurated & extended the "elliptical" formalism of this postmodern moment.
But these & like criticisms have been made by me & others many, many, many times before over the last 10 years. The problem of "groupuscules", the explicit definition of shared goals & methods, seems like one of the thorniest dang hornets' nests in US poetry. I keep thinking this morning that this whole thing needs to be looked at from a new angle. But what that angle is yet I'm not sure.
There does seem to be this inherent, inescapable Teapot Battle, in our poetry, between The Serious and The Blithe. How this happens & how it turns into a Battle is a very complex problem.
One factor is the constant ambient drone of mediocre poetry of every school : because facile, superficial verse lacks the depth & the subtlety to synthesize, to combine the serious & the blithe (or comic). So we have these vigorous noisy feather-fights between Queen Berenice & the Neanderthal, neither of whom are actually producing poetry of much consequence.
Another problem is Polemical Absolutism. It's a kind of one-eyed Cyclopean threat. Poetry is basically centered in the eye of the mandala... dialectics, context fade out. Manifestos are written. Soapboxes are erected. Complaints & caterwauls are registered on various websites. But they are raised up on stilts, which are planted in very thin air - since the threads binding poet to fellow poets to audience to tradition to culture at large seem very tenuous, amorphous, accidental. Poetry is taken too seriously or not seriously enough. We do not know where to draw the line (if line is necessary) between poetry as a profession, a vocation, a kind of public office, and poetry as a right & legacy & inner romantic artistic disposition of every ever-lovin' human being in the whole wide world.
Meanwhile we have a frail, tender kind of established path for professional poets, which leads from MFA training to the professional obstacle course - the struggle for publication, awards & recognition, the search for scarce teaching positions & grants... it's sort of like fundraising is to politics : after a while you wonder if you might not be losing touch with the public at large... & all the blogs (like this one) are out there chatting & babbling & reminding you that you are a poor weak worm of a professional academic creative writer, just tryin' to get along...
But I'm probably mulching over a non-problem, here - since the sifting, evaluating role of journals & magazines & poetry presses is still actual & real to some extent. Let's try to get back to what seems to be the main problem at hand. Let's assume we have contemporary poets who have achieved a certain level of skill - who are successful at getting some poems in print, anyway. I mean, let's focus on them. With these people in mind, we ask : is there a meaningful role for collaborative group dynamics, & the formation of explicit aesthetic goals & literary principles? If so, what should be the guiding, general principles of such activity?
I can't really answer these questions right now. I can only throw out a few ideas off the top of my head.
First, it seems to me that if a group were to form, it would have to form on the basis of an understanding that this is a group of individuals. Collaborative poetry - poetry written by more than one person - is a different kettle of fish. Obviously it's a legitimate & I suppose fun thing to do, but I'm more interested in defining the possible characteristrics of a group of poets with shared goals but individual practice.
Second, I think if a group is going to bother to agglomerate itself for some kind of public effect, it needs to take its didactic role seriously. It's not out there for pure self-promotion : rather, the purpose of its shared activity is to disseminate, by teaching, a certain way of understanding what poetry can be. So the goal would be, curiously, not to strive constantly for new & more powerful & more exciting forms of "attention" from others. The goal would be to clarify, with progressively greater accuracy and effectiveness, those specific principles of praxis and style which they value & admire. In other words, the group would be a critical and self-conscious project of literary development.
The historical record for such activities is not very promising. I think of the Florentine circle around Dante & his friends & predecessors - the "dolce stil nuovo" - which itself grew out of the troubadour tradition and Sicilian poetry. Or the Russian Acmeists, who stemmed from the Symbolists by way of Annensky's idiosyncratic difference. What I mean by "not very promising" is that the challenge of writing well is inevitably a process of differentiation and individuation. The principles of the group prove, eventually, to be not stringent enough - to be inadequate and even counter-productive to the poet (like Dante) who has outgrown them. The dangers of every group & group method are : 1) success breeds inertia; and 2) groups become ingrown, solipsistic - they write for each other rather than straining to reach the reader-at-large, Mandelstam's "interlocutor of the future".
Here in the US we seem to have a situation where, first of all, the organs & institutions of the writerly profession, such as it is, militate toward production and publication, rather than group analysis and critical development. Groups, as a consequence, fail to take themselves seriously enough; the investigation and modelling of basic praxis-principles gets muddled with public relations, turf wars, & petty gamesmanship. Groups remain amorphous, and pretty much dismissed & ignored by "successful" published poets. The American cult of the Individual casts suspicion and contempt on group efforts - they are merely "abstractions" and "verbiage". (For the most part, unfortunately, this is only too true.)
Again, it seems to me, if an effort at group-formation appears valid and necessary to certain poets, the essential preliminary effort would have to involve an honest search for truth : a careful, self-critical, patient examination of realistic goals, capabilities, principles, contexts. What seems valid in today's poetry? How do we want to go about trying to write it ourselves? What, if any, are the aesthetic-literary principles that we think undergird our practice? How should we go about defining and conveying these principles to others?
The total answer to all these is problems is, of course, AIEE! Poetry (just kidding).
2.03.2009
As far as finding the "necessary" poetry, the Acmeists - Mandelstam, Akhmatova - often expressed a trust in the people at large to find it & value it. Russia is famous, in fact, for this sense of an "organic" literary culture - the high cultural value placed on literature & poetry.
But it's probably not so simple - certainly not a model easily transposed to these United States...
- if it works out, maybe, again, it's a synthetic process. The ultimate judgement resides both with the poets themselves, and with the people, the ordinary reader, the culture at large. There is some kind of conjunction of opposites between the vocational keepers of the flame, the maintainers of literary standards & taste - & the "common reader".
There is, nowadays, a lot of suspicion & angst on all sides about this particular conjunction of opposites. ("Official verse culture". The semi-Loyal ("post-avant") Opposition. Mass media. "Dumbing-down." MFA Industry. etc. etc. The worries.)
Probably involves "saving" (preserverant) miracles here & there, now & then. (Our Holy Exemplars, Sts. Herman & Emily, for example...)
But it's probably not so simple - certainly not a model easily transposed to these United States...
- if it works out, maybe, again, it's a synthetic process. The ultimate judgement resides both with the poets themselves, and with the people, the ordinary reader, the culture at large. There is some kind of conjunction of opposites between the vocational keepers of the flame, the maintainers of literary standards & taste - & the "common reader".
There is, nowadays, a lot of suspicion & angst on all sides about this particular conjunction of opposites. ("Official verse culture". The semi-Loyal ("post-avant") Opposition. Mass media. "Dumbing-down." MFA Industry. etc. etc. The worries.)
Probably involves "saving" (preserverant) miracles here & there, now & then. (Our Holy Exemplars, Sts. Herman & Emily, for example...)
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