Remarkable article on art & Alzheimer's in Sunday NY Times.

[not sure if this link will work - if you get to the NY Times page, you can find the article by doing a search in past 7 days under "art alzheimer's"]

*** p.s. see Allen on this if you haven't already

Robert Archambeau tracks the futuristic world of Po-Sonar GPS Locomotion Engineering.

Looks like I'll be driving down to the Big Easy on Fri. I've been in touch with some Episcopal church relief people down there since Katrina.

Going to spend a week or so getting a building repaired/cleaned up, to house other volunteers in New Orleans. Should be an adventure - maybe I'll come back with some pictures.

In the lonely

the anti-poet plays anti-pop

I see you, I hear you

This I like.


*


The new issue of Poetry arrived yesterday, always some kind of education.

The poetry in it, some of it quite sharp & talented. Makes me feel like a slowpoke yokel. The feeling, reading it, of an oscillation - between bright devotion to brilliant language & inventive, clever thought, on one hand, and then, on the other hand, an impression of spoiled green suburban rich kids & preppies, showing off their pseudo-experience, pseudo-profundity, pseudo-sophistication.

Poems on meditative themes : bats. wildflowers. so serious, so careful, so polished. "Life, friends, is boring."

Mr. Bones, you juss jealous maybe.

Kind of skimmed the essay by Mary Karr, on being a poet/neo-Catholic, may read it later. But I really liked the Milosz poem she quotes at the end.

Jack Birss, retired Cornell prof., must be one of the 1 or 2 people on earth to whom, upon meeting for the first time, I have actually said "I'm a poet."

(Sad to say, but strictly speaking, he is no longer with us "on earth".)

Jack Kimball notes amazing fact of new publication of some poems by Samuel Greenberg, very obscure New York poet, who died in 1917, at age 23, of TB, and whose work influenced Hart Crane (Crane actually stole some of his lines in the poem "Emblems of Conduct").

I have a copy of an early edition of Greenberg's poems. Once, back in the 70s, I was walking down Hope St (here in Prov.), wearing a pair of paint-spattered jeans (I had just been painting my apartment). An elderly gent, in passing, suddenly said : "A painter, I presume?" I said, "well, no, I'm a poet." He asked, "Who's your favorite poet?" Just for fun, I said "Samuel Greenberg." The fellow did a double-take. He turned out to be another Jack - Jack Birss, retired Cornell(?) english prof, rare book collector, Hart Crane aficionado (I noticed years later that he had donated a small privately-printed vol. of a couple of Crane's letters to the Brown library.) Birss knew all about Samuel Greenberg. We were both struck by the coincidence.

I guess my previous post by two tends toward a sense of the poet as some kind of Suprematist/Genius/Original. But let's not over-emphasize all that (nothing new there). What I'd like to express, instead, with this notion of anomaly or originality, is the sense of, for lack of a better phrase,

some irreducible subjectivity : like the blind spot we can't see through. & art & originality emerge from that subjective area of experience, & of necessity come out original & different - because they do indeed flow from that anomaly, that uncertainty situation, that never-before-known because never before realized or existent... shadowy region, Amazon jungle, unknown...

place of creativity & poems - of chasms & leaps -

& a GPS grid simply cannot place this particular but essential aspect of the whole deal.

Russian Bells on Mars; Cockadoodle Two

In order to improve on the Silliman Bi-Focal Theory of Contemporary Poetry, Robert Archambeau looks to an essay by David Kellogg.

Based on Robert's summary, however, I can't see how this is any improvement. The structure of the grid is the same, although Kellogg has added a dimension.

Poetry is assumed to be this product which flows out of culture in measurable quantities. You can establish fixed criteria for assigning individual pieces of the product to a grid : ie., "tradition" and "innovation" are already known & defined, "self" and "community" are items you can abstract without too much difficulty from any particular portion of the GNPP (Gross National Poetry Product). Voila : your poet is assigned a critical niche in the Standard Schema.

But what if the patterns of formative imitation which poets utilize are exactly the same - whether you're in either of the so-called camps? Innovators are imitating their 20th-century models; traditionalists are doing likewise. Both are claiming the mantle of tradition (the traditions of new & old, respectively). Add a further twist : what if the innovators claim to be new by going back to older models (epics, Native American songs, collective poetics, performance art, etc.) in order to be "new"? What if the models of the so-called traditionalists (rhymed iambic couplets, say) are of more recent provenance than those of the innovators (say, free-verse anaphoric lines)?

The fact of the matter is that originality is not informed by the artist's attitude toward stylistic change. In other words, there is no "new" model for imitation : every model - by virtue of being a model - is already traditional. Who is more traditional today than the poets who imitate the 20th-century avant garde?

[p.s. this statement needs refinement. Let me say this : actually, the original, inventive poet will pay very close attention to stylistic developments and what they might mean. But what makes for originality is not their capacity for consistency - ie. the consistent allegiance to whatever is considered the trend of the moment. Original poetry is invariably anomalous : it is original precisely because the poet does not "follow" any particular trend. Thus critical schemas which emphasize such trends, based on abstract invariables such as Kellogg proposes, inevitably distort the un-paraphrasable, empirically-complex literary reality.]

The issue of "self" & "community" is perhaps even more vexed, but I'm not going to get into that here.

I object to the abstract, generic quality of the grid approach to criticism. It's lazy thinking : pigeonholing, card filing. The uniqueness of interesting poetry swallows up every proposed schema : the talent of the great & gifted poet takes a certain essential aspect of poetry - its capacity for obliterating and transcending our habitual mental & philosophical categories - and multiplies it exponentially. Individual poets are always contradicting so-called trends & traditions : & then the new supposed traditions are established in their wake, by their imitators; & then, running a distant third, the critics come along with their cute little diagrams.

Even those poets who seem so middlebrow, mediocre, unable to escape the cliches and paradigms of their period styles - say, Longfellow, considered from the usual 20th-century perspective - if looked at closely and carefully, suddenly begin to reveal their inimitable qualities, their uniqueness. & then it's time for "reconsideration" : critics, prepare your outlines!!!!

some new guitar stumblings

More drafty drafts. I hope it lasts.

1

 
The dogwood leaves, suspended in the rain.
Clumps of drooping flesh-tones - treeflesh
(muted green, vermilion, purple, rust).
I'm whispering toward you again.

                        
                  *

 
In the silence of his study, Lazarus
Posthumous leans close to the windowpane.
The glass harbors a cool gray sheen
from autumn sky (a harbor's emptiness).

 
His body is the dogwood's double.  And
the window only grows more destitute as
winter draws nigh - cold, dark.  It is
the entrance to a tunnel.  Its command

 
a stark inscription : Here Descend.

 
2

 
The last bumblebee totters unevenly
through backyard jungle grass.
The little garden is a tangled mess
of dried-up stalks, vines, leaves

 
where sodden rags of an absent-minded
hurricane (the last of the cloud outriders)
spit their loads again, soaking the weirs
to the flood-brim.  The storm never intended

 
to hurt anyone - the storm never intended
anything at all.  And now the bumblebee 
has vanished into his green and tiny
Amazon.  Only starlings chortle overhead,

 
settling in crappy treetops, ratcheting
their raspy, cackling complaints, then
moving on.  The homesteaders gone too -
summer's yodelers, warblers, who sing

 
themselves a cozy territory (comfortable,
responsive, mild).  Lazarus faces cold.
The mellow season's growing old
and gray.  Wind coils through the stubble.

 
3

 
The rainsoaked ground, the windswept sky, heaven
and earth exact their retributions.  The grass
withers with a whisper across vast prairies
of catastrophe.  Yet what has not begun

 
is yet to begin - even tonight, maybe.
The gift for which you did not dare to ask,
the phone call in the night (from Alaska,
say - Saskatchewan), the whorl of a stormy-

 
tender fingerprint.  The human trace
a network penetrating to the roots
of time, space... where love waits
in a threadbare lair (for your embrace).

 
4

 
There once was a man, whose bones
were never found, collected in a lead-
lined box, a box that was lost when the dead
man's grave was exhumed : Blackstone,

 
William Blackstone.  Whose bones in a box
were dug up for a shopping center
(the first American shopping center)
and lost somewhere (bones among rocks).

 
And Lazarus Posthumous found them;
found them in the dead of winter, in a cave,
in a mirror, in his mind.  When you have
a lead box full of whitened bones, Sachem -

 
a whited sepulchre, O Chief - you have
November coming in a costly casket,
autumn encapsulated, life's biscuit
in a basket - ocean in a wave (goodby).

A new mini-essay : Book Vs. Talk. Pigeonholers take note.

I have a lot of trouble telling the difference between Professionals & Careerists in this picture. Most of the hype is generated by professional careerists, whether they have MFA-type academic jobs or not.

Both need very much to get published, because they've been writing very hard for many years. Best of luck to them, I say. A lovely tree awaits your sees n' saws.

What this tells you about the quality of their poetry is not much, one way or the other.

Kind of similar situation with the SoQ/Post-Avant descriptor. Basically, it gives acquisitive collectors a handy cubbyhole for their collections, and loud trumpeteers a special key to punch on their polemic-horns.

I'd hate to give the soggy impression or do the saggy impression of some neo-bowtie stuffed shirt pseudo-critic. Hey, no way. It ain't me. Please you gotta believe me!!!

What I meaneth to suggesteth, ladies & goons, is that :

1. despite the fact that good art always transcends simple categories & critical abstractions & nostrums & such : even if & as it hews most faithfully to the generic requirements of certain traditional forms;

2. and despite the fact that our unprofessional off-the-cuff impressionistic personal insights & comments are of far greater practical & humane & spiritual value, generally, & usually, than systematic critical werke, generally;

3. nevertheless, there is a place for calling things by their right names, according to an open & explicit set of premises & postulates, designed by the professional critic, to establish differentiae of judgement : because such creative critical labor has its own proper sphere & center of gravity; & because, paradoxically, establishing such differentiae can help us to see, sometimes, how individual works & artists are part of larger ongoing communal projects & traditions.

Thus indie-crit, as I useta call it, is one way to comprehend (through one critic's sense of taste within a partially-perceived scale of universal aesthetic & ethical values) the equality & kinship of something we sense as the Beautiful - across vast variations of style & cultural background.

very interesting article on poet/conservative thinker Peter Viereck in this week's New Yorker.

*

Mark Scroggins on the old-style divide. One aim of the mini-essays I've been writing is to underline the difference between opinion (personal likes/dislikes, lacking any apparent principle of judgement) and criticism (in which ethical & aesthetic principles are somewhat clarified).

A new essay-effort : Art & Ethos

"We were as Danes in Denmark all day long."

In the twists & turns of the argument of Whittling, Whistling, I'm actually trying (among other things) to make room in the "theory" for modes of didactic, satiric poetry. Discursiveness, direct address. It may not seem that way... I may not have been very clear.

The idea is that these particular forms of poetry (along with all the other forms & modes) reflect the theatricality of poetry in general. I'm saying poetry & poets are inherently dramatic (hence the emphasis on those attributes noted by Aristophanes). That's why I call poetic language itself the main character, the protagonist : an exaggeration, meant to underline how the medium shapes the message.