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(!!!)
2.19.2009
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
