I really like Graham Foust's brief essay-excerpt on a Wallace Stevens poem in Fascicle. This way of reading seems to me to be what it's all about. Rewarding exploration.

Back to my cave now.

Bloggone to Mars

I've decided to take a break from the blog for a while. I can't say this is the end of HG Poetics, since I did that once already, & then changed my mind after a few weeks.

Blogging is so fun & easy. That's part of the problem for me. It's a complex of writing & work-work, which develops sort of a mundane pattern. But blogging seems to be inhibiting me from the tougher changes I need to make, in order to make any progress in writing. The fascination of the medium is making it difficult for me to focus in other ways.

I apologize for this self-centered recital. That's part of my blogging too, I guess.

I'd like to thank all the beautiful people, fellow poet-bloggers & readers & friends. I'll be listening, trying to avoid comment boxes.

Adios, amigos.

AB goeth to Salem, C...

ol' Henry Thunder Winnebago, doin his Jubilee Guitar Doodle Infinity. try with headphones or speakers. bye now

old poem from Way Stations (again):

Ocean State


 
Here the waters gather along the shore.
They meet the land breathing in foam,
and roll the sleepy pebbles and shells
back into long sand waves as before.

 
Our moon, casting her antique spells.
A motionless iris in the whale’s eye
of the sea, her unspeakable name
sinks to the bottom of lonely wells.

 
Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.
And she lifts, with one nocturnal sigh,
the heaving swells in a silver comb.

I'll be out of town til Tuesday the 16th - & probably away from computer.

Here are some wonderful, sophisticated, clever jokes I made up myself, to keep you company while I'm away:

What did the dog say when he saw the tree? Bark.

What did the horse say when they called her a cow? Neigh.

I forget the others.

Catherine Drinker Bowen recounts the story Edward Coke told at the ceremony of his investiture as judge in 1606. From the conclusion:

"The young man... accepted the judgeship. But he told no one, and, pretending that he was about to leave the country, invited his friends to a farewell banquet. 'It is true,' he told the assembled company, 'that I purpose, as I must, to take leave of you all and to be a stranger to my dearest friends and nearest allies. Thus must I depart from you and yet continue amongst you. For I am appointed to be a judge, and in the seat of Justice I must forget the remembrance of your former friendships and acquaintance. In the person of a judge, with respect to keep my conscience clear, I must with equity and uprightness administer justice unto you all.'
'And this,' finished Coke, looking out upon his own dear friends and kinsfolk assembled in Norfolk's venerable Castle of Blancheflower, 'this is my cause also! For by the love and favor of my gracious master, King James, I am, sine precatione, vel precatio... - without price or request - freely called unto this great office and sent to be a judge amongst my kinsfolk and familiar friends, even in the bosom of my native country. I must therefore, as the young Roman did, take leave of all former acquaintance, and do that which is just unto all estates and degrees, without partiality.'"

["If justice in her equal course were stopped - Coke went on, pointing his moral - it was the poor who would be drowned and overwhelmed, 'whilst great and wealthy men, like hills and mountains, build their stations sure. Justice withheld, only the poorer sort are those who smart.'"]

- The Lion and the Throne, pp. 247-248

*

The artist is devoted to the Art as such, the good poet is devoted to the Word as such, just as the good judge is devoted to the Law and the Law alone. (Note the process of estrangement/duty/reconcilement illustrated here.)

You heard it here first : the literary health of a culture depends on the fierce struggle of the best to get itself born - to disentangle itself from the surrounding Pretense & Bluffery-Puffery : the swamp-fog of the petty, the ephemeral, the mediocre, the ersatz, the cheap.

This struggle in part depends on the kind of literary democracy (secret ballot of time) I've been talking about. Art needs the freedom to be itself, not part of somebody's program, career, stand-up caterwaul, or buddy-system.

literary democracy. little poems speaking up for themselves, making their way on their own merits. the secret ballot.

the fascicles in Emily's cupboard.

Melville, Whitman, doing their thing, & to hell with the hucksters, the flash, professional gossip-mongers, moneygrubbers, slackers & hangers-on, dilettantes, hacks.

now there's community for you!

somebody could make some money designing a Poet Group-Therapy Self-Help Support Networking Mutual-Admiration-Society Automatic Massage & Pigeonholer Multiple-Market-Resource-Branding Containment Facility. There are a lot of groups out there already ready already to sign up for the fun-filled silly-slide into the theme-park-cum-gated-community of choice.

Somebody makes a fine handpainted walnut woodpecker door-knocker.

It's not fine because Narcissism-Affinity Group 2005 suffers it to be so.

It is what it is.

I won a few little contests at the very start of my jaunt with poerrtry, & they were very important to me. Encouragement.

all the high school literary contests

"The Rose Low Rome Prize For Poetry", 1971 (Brown U.)

"The Charles Philbrick Memorial Prize" (same)

"Academy of American Poets something something Hon. Mention" (that's me : Hiz Hon. Men. Henry Gould)

(all judged via anonymous submissions.)

A lot of discussion about poetry contests in blogworld (these are indeed the dog days).

Ron & Jonathan (unless J. was being tongue-in-cheek) appear not to comprehend the interrelations, the basic "mosaic" (as Paul Anka(!) put it on the radio interview ye'day) between the notions of the contest, anonymity/fairness, and literature as a discrete, distinct, somewhat free-standing entity.

There's a certain amount of trust involved, obviously. With that, there's some excitement in connecting seasoned poets with a first impression of new, "unspoken-for" poetry. Letting the work speak for itself.

Letting the work speak for itself : this is a very basic element of critical disinterestedness & objectivity. I think it's essential to the whole game.

I mean, what are we making art for, fellas & gals? To impress our friends & win flattery points? Begad.

We make art out of our own disinterested apprehension of disinterested Beauty, in all its mysterio-magnanimous variety.

Poetry has its inherent rigorous scales of aesthetic value. These themselves are what guide poets (& good contest judges), not communities of interest & all that political baloney.

The group-glutenized ego-trips can all go fry. They are irrelevant to what it's about. They are dead air from birth. They are the substance of a puffball o'nada.

But in the new doggy-dog world of tribal mini-compounds, this notion of art which transcends "administration" and "community" seems to be hard to grasp for some "folks". What say, "folks"? (God, I'm sick of that word. It's so... faux-folksy. Unless used by real folks.)

The Hotel may be closing? J'espere que ce n'est pas vrai - mais je comprenais.

Two Martians Jam on the Porch of the Spaceship

back to when I must have lost that book in a field somewhere.

August flowers, going dry & spindly. crickets & cicadas.

evening sneaks up, unnoticed, on the late afternoon.

but I want to go back to when neither I nor War & Peace (over in the hammock, there) were done with yet.

You were a work-in-progress. she, a story you had just begun to read.

longing & suspense.

unfinished life, inchoate experiment - finished by the written word.

the book is both lock & key.

everyone is too literalist, serious, ponderous, explicit, competitive.

art is not sports. we run too fast & slow for sports - the umpires get befuddled.

I want to go back to my reading habits of, say, age 14-18.

I want to shuffle off the coils of anxiety & trouble, toil & stress. back to when reading & daydreaming were one.

art is not sports, but it's sort of a game - how to express things... pleasing, penetrating...

what I write is not me; furthermore, it's only an approximation. (see Nicholas of Cusa on that)

an equilibrium (the inner Law) lies behind good literature. implicit rightness. le mot juste.

a portion of sanity & civilization. salted with spiritual rigor (the steep).

don't jade your appetite with excess. don't tyrannize your own climate.

don't harp on what you like, because then I won't like it. Just leave the book lying around : maybe I'll pick it up.