Running on Empty?

After 8 years (his last book of poetry being "A Blizzard of One" for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999) Mark Strand has come out with a new collection of poetry - his eleventh: "Man and Camel" - (Knopf - 2006). Here are some reviews:


"Our skills are limited, our power / to imagine enfeebled." That's Mark Strand in his newest volume of poetry, Man and Camel, and, at least as far as his own work is concerned, it's hard to argue. The poverty of imagination on display would almost seem parodic if there were any indication that Strand had a sense of humor. "

-----------------------------------------------------------------Noah Berlatsky


"This eleventh collection by Mark Strand is a toast to life’s transience and abiding beauty. ... As always with Mark Strand, the discovery of meaning in the sound of language itself is an act of faith that enlightens us and carries us beyond the bounds of the rational."

------------------------------------------------------------------Borzoi Reader


"...Strand allows this new book to show all the signs of pruning and purging. The sieve of art descends into the well of intimate contemplation and retrieves 23 closely reasoned poems remarkably consistent in the character of the Baffled Seer persisting in the double terror (or is it joy?) of all Strand's expression: evanescence of the longed-for Other, desolate wonder of the self."

-------------------------------------------------------------------Richard Howard

An excerpt:



Man and Camel

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
“You ruined it. You ruined it forever.”



Black Sea

One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long,
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear . . .
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here?



Mother and Son

The son enters the mother’s room
and stands by the bed where the mother lies.
The son believes that she wants to tell him
what he longs to hear—that he is her boy,
always her boy. The son leans down to kiss
the mother’s lips, but her lips are cold.
The burial of feelings has begun. The son
touches the mother’s hands one last time,
then turns and sees the moon’s full face.
An ashen light falls across the floor.
If the moon could speak, what would it say?
If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.


My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.



--------------------------------------------------------------
from- "Man and Camel" - by Mark Strand - 2006
Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Blog Squatters, Birthdays & Other Matters

I

Yesterday evening as I posted the entry that you presently see under Sunday October, 22, denoting that I would be taking a break from blogging, a “Blog Squatter” proceeded to post their announcements as comments under three separate posts. Now I don’t mind doing a little PR for somebody if they let me know about it, but an ad hoc comment which is simply an advertisement and doesn’t even feign interest in the post at hand is pretty low in my book.

Well needless to say, this infuriated me. And I said to hell with this hiatus. Nobody is going to hijack this blog. Whatever this reader thinks about it, it has my stamp on it and it is something I developed on my own without anybody else’s input. I realized that I cared enough about its existence that I deleted the offensive comments and made some editorial decisions regarding its content. This ain’t over by a long shot.



II

Yet another birthday is upon me and as a result it has me reflecting on this year’s yield and consequently I am reevaluating what I have accomplished with my blog. First, I must say that this blog has exceeded my expectations. Going into this, I hadn’t expected any readership. I did not anticipate that it would take off at all. After all, this blog grew out of the need to collect my thoughts on poetics and figurative art. By doing so I realized how much my tastes ran parallel in both domains.

Art had always been there for me. Growing up, I could always immerse myself in a composition in whatever medium. Painting and drawing were always second nature to me. Poetry has been a recent development. But here too I have already surpassed expectations. I started writing in 2001; started publishing in 2002 and have published over 35 poems in 23 journals & anthologies. Considering the turn-around time for most journals, I consider these figures to be quite good (at least by my standards).

What has eluded me so far mainly due to the fact that I have sent out a grand total of 2 MS. and have yet to enter a contest is publication of a chapbook. Perhaps, however, it is time to either put up or shut up. Book publication has not been a priority for me. I did not want to publish just for the sake of publishing. I wanted to be published when I had amassed enough material that I though worthy enough. I believe I have enough poems of worth to warrant a chapbook. And so I have started to entertain the thought.



III

Lastly, I am thankful that this community of poets (many of them are on my blogroll) has accepted me “tel comme je suis”. They have linked to me in greater number than I had ever thought possible without my intercession. But more importantly they have commented on what I have tried to communicate here in this on-line journal. Grazie a tutti!

I would also like to thank those of you who have sent me e-mails to the effect that I should continue blogging. Many pointed out that my blog was listed on their blogrolls and that they enjoyed my slant on things. But one e-mail in particular caught my attention as it directed me to something which had escaped me. This e-mail directed my attention to the fact that my poetry at The Arabesques Review is among the most popular receiving over 800 hits and counting. Furthermore, the poem “No.249 on the S.S. Saturnia” is highlighted in the “What’s in This Current Issue” blurb.

I am to say the least very happy about this. It means that my poetry is reaching readers that I never thought it would. It means to me that it is registering with the reader. Then I realized that that is the kind of success that I had wanted all along. It hadn’t been about the books or the critical acclaim. It had always been about the poem and the reader. So that whatever, I get coming to me after this is only icing on the cake. And yes, I really mean that!

You'll Find Me Down the Road a Piece

"Glass Teat" Meets Pavement

Big Ben is Watching

What's Up?

Justin Evans'
"Gathering up the Scattered Leaves"
is out from FootHills Publishing!

Because We Are Not Taken Seriously

by Stephen Dunn

Some night I wish they'd knock,
on my door, the government men,
looking for the poem of simple truths
recited and whispered among the people.
And when all I give them is silence
and my children are exiled
to the mountains, my wife forced
to renounce me in public,
I'll be the American poet
whose loneliness, finally, is relevant,
whose slightest movement
ripples cross-country.


And when the revolution frees me,
its leaders wanting me to become
"Poet of the Revolution," I'll refuse
and keep a list of their terrible reprisals
and all the dark things I love
which they will abolish.
With the ghost of Mandelstamon
one shoulder, Lorca on the other,
I 'll write the next poem, the one
that will ask only to be believed
once it's in the air, singing.

----------------------------------------
from: New & Selected Poems 1974-1994 - by Stephen Dunn -
Published by W.W. Norton, 1994 - 10110. ISBN.0-393-03618-9,

Homer and his Guide

William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

1874 - Oil on canvas

82 1/4 x 56 1/4 inches (209 x 143 cm)

MOVIE QUOTES & QUOTABLES FOR A $1000

A) - Which character in “Casablanca” actually said: " Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By.' " ?

1-Rick Blaine
2-Victor Laszlo
3-Guillermo Ugarte
4-Ilsa Lund
5-Capt. Louis Renault


B) - In “The Godfather”. to whom is Don Corleone speaking when he says, “I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse. Now, you just go outside and enjoy yourself, and uh, forget about all this nonsense. I want you, I want you to leave it all to me.” ?

1-Michael Corleone
2-Pete Clemenza
3-Johnny Fontane
4-Moe Green
5-Tom Hagen


C) - From “Raging Bull” – Who is this addressed to: “You know what that means? No matter how big I get, no matter who I fight, no matter what I do, I ain't never gonna fight Joe Louis.” ?

1-Vickie Thailer
2-Tommy Como
3-Joey LaMotta
4-Salvy Batts
5-Irma


D) - In “Citizen Kane”, Charles Foster Kane answers, “Yes. "Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war." in reply to whom?

1-Jedediah Leland
2-Mr. Bernstein
3-Mary Kane
4-Mr. Rawlston
5-Susan Alexander Kane


E) - From the movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams’, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – Who is Big Daddy addressing when he says the following: “Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?...There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity...You can smell it. It smells like death.” ?

1-Maggie
2-Big Mama
3-Gooper
4-Mae
5-Brick


F) – From “2001: A Space Odyssey” , who is the speaker of the following, “Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?” ?


1-Hal 9000
2-Dr. Charles Hunter
3-Dr. Jack Kimball
4-Dr. Victor Kaminsky
5-Dr. Frank Poole


G) – “Ben Hur” has Charlton Heston speaking these lines, “Their flesh...carries Rome's mark...the deed was not Messala's. I knew him, well, before the cruelty of Rome spread in his blood. Rome destroyed Messala as surely as Rome has destroyed my family.” to whom?

1-Quintus Arrius
2-Tiberius Caesar
3-Drusus
4-Pontius Pilate
5-Sheik Ilderim


H) – Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” utters “...All right, I promise, for Christ's sake, I promise never to take out Elaine Robinson...Let's not talk about it. Let's not talk at all.” to which character?

1-Elaine Robinson
2-Mrs. Braddock
3-Mrs. Robinson
4-Desk Clerk
5-Mr. Robinson


I) – Jem, the narrator’s brother in “To Kill a Mockingbird” is describing Boo Radley as follows: “Well, judgin' from his tracks, he's about six and a half feet tall. He eats raw squirrels and all the cats he can catch. There's a long, jagged scar that runs all the way across his face. His teeth are yella and rotten. His eyes are popped. And he drools most of the time.” to whom?

1-Charles Baker 'Dill' Harris
2-Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch
3-Atticus Finch
4-Calpurnia
5-Sheriff Heck Tate

J) – Last but not least who is Marlon Brando speaking to in "On the Waterfront" when he says, “You don't understand. I could'a had class. I could'a been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.” ?

1-Father Barry
2-Johnny Friendly
3-Charley
4-Timothy 'Kayo' Dugan
5-Rhetorical



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ans. A) 4 B) 3 C) 3 D) 2 E) 5 F) 1 G) 4 H) 3 I) 1 J) 3


If you scored a 0 - And your name isn’t Paris Hilton or George Bush – What’s your excuse?

If you scored a 1 or 2 - I’ll assume that you were born after 1980 and think that movies in black and white are what they are referring to when they use the expression “Film Noire”

If you scored a 3 or 4 – I know somebody that’s related to a guy that shook Roger Ebert’s hand. Maybe he could give you some pointers.

If you scored a 5 or 6 –“ Why you look-a so sad? It’s-a not so bad. It’s-a nice-a place! Ah, shaddap a you face!” – Sorry for some reason I was channeling Joe Dolce.

If you scored a 7 or 8 – Look at the bright side: at least you don’t have to get pointers from that guy who shook Roger Ebert’s hand and never washed it.

If you scored a 9 or a 10 – You probably deserve a Movie Trivia Prize – But I ain’t givin’ you one.

ERIN ELIZABETH SMITH

Pilgrims

I.

I wanted to come home,
it just took too long to find the right plane.
Two years of eating grapes meant for wine,
wondering where the skin goes
when the flesh is juiced and fermented.

Maybe I would have thought of us
less if France had been more than cheese
and yardstick bread, more than yellow countryside
like Illinois when the corn is tall.


II.

I forgot how days pass in New York –
stubborn mist shaking its mane on the highway,
snow that siestas in the sky for days.
His green towel, folded and hung
on the bathroom door, smelling so much like him.


III.

First it was Vezélay. Clutching the skirt

of Mary Magdalene, who told me of her years

of desert shelter – the crows, the sand,

the sucking cactus. There were no angels

that delivered her to Christ’s oyster bar.

Just a jackrabbit she tore open with her hands,

blood she drank religiously.

Then Santiago de Compostela, where the hermit
found James under a transept of star,
his marrow drained, hair cleaned from skull. He waits
in stone sombrero, a staff cocked
in his left hand, a closed text in his right.
They think it’s the Bible, he winks,
and that these are my bones.

Finally, Ravenna, blackcaps warbling
on the telephone poles. Just south
of the pinewoods strangled by heather,
dog-rose, I ordered wedding soup.
I was finished with leaving,
with Europe
with the thousand stone churches
that starved their towns.


IV.

Somehow this would make more sense
if there were myrrh or bdellium involved.
Because then he would laugh, open
his palms that clench and unclench at his thigh,
smile at the plastic snow globe
I bought in the Turin airport.

I look at him, but he's watching the planes
lift like storks from the sandbar willows.
Didn’t you hear, he says when I ask
how Michigan has been. Christ came back
as a bamboo shark last week.
And the Devils brought home the Cup.


----------------------------------------------------
* From - Boxcar Poetry Review - September 2006

Erin Elizabeth Smith is a PhD candidate at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi where she serves as editor-in-chief of Stirring and founder of Sundress Publications. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Crab Orchard, West Branch, Willow Springs, Natural Bridge, Gulf Stream, Good Foot, Slipstream, Bellingham Review, and Reed Magazine among others.

The Poem You Asked For

by Larry Levis

My poem would eat nothing.
I tried giving it water
but it said no,

worrying me.
Day after day,
I held it up to the light,

turning it over,
but it only pressed its lips
more tightly together.

It grew sullen, like a toad
through with being teased.
I offered it money,

my clothes, my car with a full tank.
But the poem stared at the floor.
Finally I cupped it in

my hands, and carried it gently
out into the soft air, into the
evening traffic, wondering how

to end things between us.
For now it had begun breathing,
putting on more and

more hard rings of flesh.
And the poem demanded the food,
it drank up all the water,

beat me and took my money,
tore the faded clothes
off my back,

said Shit,
and walked slowly away,
slicking its hair down.

Said it was going
over to your place.


-------------------------------------
"Wrecking Crew", by Larry Levis - 1972 - University of Pittsburgh Press

VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW : Volume VIII, Number 1 - Fall/Winter 2006-2007

What do Mark Conway, Frannie Lindsay, Jared Carter, Beth Simon, Jeff Knorr, Sarah Brownsberger, E.G. Burrows , Helen Ruggieri, Richard O'Connell, Heidi Czerwiec, Thomas Reynolds, Elizabeth Kirschner, Jason Huskey, Jeanine DeRusha, Nick Bruno, Carol Hamilton, Scott Welvaert, Jordan Sanderson, Rane Arroyo, Taylor Graham, J.D. Schraffenberger and Lynn Strongin have in common? They all appear in the current issue of VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW. Editor Edward Byrne has once again assembled a group of poets who know how to "fine-etch" a poem (So what am I doing in such illustrious company you may ask?). Witness featured poet: Mark Conway's, "HAVING GONE TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH" -

The Romans had a way
of talking to the dead: bring them
----- a bowl of blood.
But the blood
must be warm, which means
it must be yours.

Holding the long-
desired face between numb
hands that can’t feel shit
is difficult for some to take—others

find the whole scene over-
done. May I ask
what you would do,
given the chance?


Or Jared Carter's, "PROPHET TOWNSHIP":


The coffin would be kept in the parlor
for three days and nights. The watchers
took turns. After the funeral, neighbors
helped carry the box up to the attic
or set it out in one of the back rooms
so it would stay cold but not freeze.
Before the men tacked down the lid,
they filled it up the rest of the way
with rock salt. This was a custom
learned from their grandparents—
how to make it through till spring,
how to handle hardship on their own.


Or Perhaps Richard O'Connell's, "VOLADORES":


Spiral on spiral they undulate down
In aerial daring in the desert at dawn
Until the sun sets with the deified dead,
Celebrating the delirious death of all fear:
Sky diving, free falling, space walking delight,
The umbilical lethal dive into life.


-----------------------------------------------------
Add to this fine collection of poetry, book reviews by -- D.A. Jeremy Telman, Barbara Crooker, Roger Sedarat, Mike White, Lynn Strongin and Edward Byrne and essays entitled "Elizabeth Bishop's Poetic Voice: Reconciling Influences" by Laura Ebberson & "Marianne Boruch and the Art of Surprise" by Claire Keyes and you have an issue well worth the price of admission.

Gerald Stern

My Sister’s Funeral


Since there was no mother for the peach tree we did it
all alone, which made the two of us closer
though closeness brought its loneliness, and it would
have been better I think sometimes to be sterile
from the start just to avoid the pain
which in my life this far has lasted seventy
years for I am in love with a skeleton
on whose small bones a dress hung for a while,
on whose small skull a bit of curly hair
was strung, and what is dust I still don’t know
since there was no mother to turn to then and ask
what else was she wearing, did she have on shoes,
and were the two trees from Georgia, and was it
true somebody said the other peach
should have died instead of her; and I could
imagine the nose going first though forty years later
the trees were still there and not as big as you’d think;
and it was my cousin Red with the flabby lips
who said it, he had red eyes, a red monstrosity,
a flabby body, half the house was filled with
male cousins, they were born in rooms a
short distance from the rats, I can’t remember
which ones had the accents nor what his
Hebrew name was, nor his English.


----------------------------------------------------
"My Sister’s Funeral" is reprinted from Everything is Burning ( 2005) - by Gerald Stern - published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

August Macke (1887-1914)

Arbolen Untrigal

El Rhin Cerca de Hersel

Pescadores en el Rhin

Autoretrato con Sombrero

Pet Peeves

People who argue that making poetry more accessible vitiates the art form while simultaneously decrying the state of modern poetry vis a vis its audience.

If there is no true inherent system in poetics to judge whether poetry is "good" or "bad" or just plain "ugly"; then why is everyone so upset at David Lehman's choices - whether or not they smack of cronyism.

Notes - Re: Can Poetry be Judged by Objective Criteria?

John Hollander writes in Rhyme’s Reason: “Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design. But the blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of the literal or non-poetic material –…which is why most verse is not poetry.” Certainly certain conditions must be met for verse (whether "formal" or "free") to be defined as poetry. It cannot be enough to simply put words in an array for them to be considered poetry.

If there is a set of criteria/elements (diction, syntax, line & half-meaning, trope & thought, rhetoric & speech, rhythm & combination etc...) which is necessary to define poetry as such, might there not be a similar guideline to determine whether that poetry is “good” or “bad”. Poetry (like all art) should resonate with the reader/consumer. It should as Robert Frost put it,"… begin with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words."

Thus, it should move the reader – take them on a journey to some form of enlightenment (all the while entertaining them). If a poem does not engage us or (at its completion) has us saying- “So what?”, it has failed us. Does this make the poem “non-viable” or “bad”? Perhaps for us, as reader, but maybe not for others. If it works for more readers than it doesn’t for others; does that make it a good poem? That it is functional for at least one reader - may be a necessary condition for “viable” poetry; but not a sufficient one in my estimation for “good” poetry.




If for a moment we might imagine a circle as representing a poetic mindset, might it not be logical to assume that two circles might intersect when it comes to poetic aesthetics. Perhaps two like-minded individuals ( from the same school of poetic thought?) might be more likely to enjoy certain aspects of a poem. The overlap of these two circles might be greater than that of two readers from different aesthetics. However, by the very definition of poetry even two diverse poetic viewpoints must intersect at some point. There are certain expectations (however basic) on the part of the reader - vis a vis the pome, that must be met. Therefore, a “skillful” poem might then be one that readers from as many varied perspectives as possible can most agree upon as having some intrinsic value. Inevitably, is this not what makes a poem as viable today as somewhere down the road?

Perfectly Clear!

As a young man, Collins himself bought the idea that poetry should be obscure.

"I wrote poems I hoped no one could understand," he said. "If they did there would be no point in writing poetry. We still have to get over our mild hangover from that kind of modernism." ...

The poet talks about the "etiquette" of poetry, which calls on poets to be clear and comprehensible. In return, he imagines, they might actually attract readers.

"It took me a long time to figure out how to do that," he said. "It took me a long time to take the risk to be clear. People throw the word `risk' around in art. Usually it's applied to highly experimental work.

"The real risk in poetry these days is to be clear. If you're clear, if poetry follows a certain etiquette and uses standard punctuation, you're now exposed.

"You have nowhere to hide."


----------------------------------------------------------------------Billy Collins

-------------------------------------------------------
* source: The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Canadian Content

Allyson Clay




















(Heft) Subversive Intent - 2003





















Enormous Changes: Each Wild Idea (Fountain Series) - 2005





















Chapter 1: Each Wild Idea (Garden Series) - 2005

----------------------------------------------------------
Source: http://www.leokamengallery.com/artists/clayAllyson/clayAllyson.html

*Allyson Clay received her M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She has recently exhibited her work in Vancouver, Toronto, and Washington D.C.,

**Her work also appears in the new edition of Drunken Boat

Shenandoah - Vol. 56. No. 2 - Fall 2006

Sampler: a poem by - John Savoie


Sweet Blues

Nose on breastbone, pursed lips
blow heat into her heart,
slide back and forth humming
her harmonica, the lithe
tongue searching all her stops,
high and low, musical
spit, the blues exploding
and earth shudders, the river
thrown off course, spilling
its banks where a barefoot man
knelt long ago to scoop
and squeeze and shape that clay
into the ripe image of
her magnificence, and sang,
oh yes he sang, sweet blues
down by the muddy water.

--------------------------------------

John Savoie won two Hopwood Awards for his poetry at the University of Michigan. His poems have appeared in Poetry, JAMA and The Evansville Review, and he teaches at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

Poems in Vitro - Vol. 1, No. 7

This poem has been removed.

Apropos

A SHIPWRECKED PERSON
----------------------------(James Tate )


When I woke from my afternoon nap, I wanted
to hold onto my dream, but in a matter of seconds
it had drifted away like a fine mist. Nothing
remained; oh, perhaps a green corner of cloth
pinched between my fingers, signifying what?
Everything about the house seemed alien to me.
The scissors yawned. The plants glowed. The
mirror was full of pain and stories that made no
sense to me. I moved like a ghost through the rooms.
Stacks of books with secret formulas and ancient
hieroglyphic predictions. And lamps, like stern
remonstrances. The silverware is surely more
guilty than I. The doorknobs don’t even believe
in tomorrow. The green cloth is burning-up. I
toss it into the freezer with a sigh of relief.

-----------------------------------------------------

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he is the author of Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004); Memoir of the Hawk (2002); Shroud of the Gnome (1998); Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1995), which won the National Book Award; Selected Poems (1991), which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the William Carlos Williams Award; Distance from Loved Ones (1990); Reckoner (1986); Constant Defender (1983); Riven Doggeries (1979); Viper Jazz (1976); Absences(1972); Hints to Pilgrims (1971); The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970); and The Lost Pilot (1967), selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets... He is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
------------------------------------------------------------------(Source Wikipedia)

Shelter From The Storm

My Thoughts And Prayers Go Out To The Dawson College Shooting Victims & Their Families .

You be the Judge!

I don't know about you but I've got several poems in my Poetry in Vitro file that I know are ready for my desktop recycle bin and binary oblivion. (Sort of like that piece of bacon that's all crooked and deformed - under the perfect stack of maple-smoked bacon.) But I just don't have the heart to put them out of their rhetorical misery. The majority of them were written early on (which for this poet means about five years ago). I'm a late bloomer - you got a problem with that! I like to think that my poetry has grown by leaps and bounds...Ignorance is bliss and all that.

So your assigment should you choose to accept it is to read the poetry (torture I'm sure) and determine if it is salvageable or not. This post will self-destruct in 24 hours or not! As always should your position be compromised I will deny any knowledge of your existence. Good luck!


Judgement has been rendered - thanks!

9/11

Louise Bogan

Poet Laureate : 1945-1946


Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,--

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

---------------------------------------------

from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)

Aaron Schmidt

@ 2004

Collin's Take

Collin Kelley has something interesting to add to the "Barr" debate. Check it out!

Raising the Barr… Again

It seems that whenever I read an article on the state of poetry today the author inevitably dwells on the negative. They fixate on how poetry today is suffering from le grand malaise of apathy on the part of the reading public. I have yet to read a treatise on what is working well in today’s poetic scene and what is worthy in today’s state of poetry. Is all poetry truly tired and stagnant? Are all poets becoming more and more alike, surviving vicariously in a symbiotic, albeit poetically incestuous relationship with other poets? Have poets truly and completely lost the interest to even write for a general public? Would this purported public even care if they did? I have no answers to these questions.

What I do know is that I write for myself. I do not write & publish to acquire tenure; to impress my poet mentor; make my bones in an MFA program; receive fellowships, grants, and other subsidies or to garner poetry prizes that I can stick into my poetic hat. I agree that I am totally narcissistic when it comes to my poetry, but I also care a great deal about craft and I envy the MFA student that can devote so many hours in a day to poetics. I would like to be so steeped in poetics that I might see elements of poetry in every objectification that I encountered on a daily basis.

And yes in response to Barr’s point that almost all poets end up teaching, I too have worn the hat of teacher. But I have never defined myself as such. It was merely a means to an end. (Not that it left a discernible bad aftertaste in my mouth. Actually, I rather enjoyed it!) But I have never defined myself by that which engaged me in a remunerative activity. My educational background is in Sociology (M.A.) but I do not consider myself sociologist either. I refuse to let my social roles confine and pigeon-hole me. And so too, when it comes to my role as poet - (which is admittedly rather a small role in the grand scheme of it all), I refuse to be stereotyped.

Nature vs. Nurture & Poetic Careerism

There has been a longstanding point of contention among social scientists as to which variable: (nature or nurture) is more instrumental in determining the behavior and personality of the individual. What truly makes us who we are? Is the poet born or socially molded and socialized into one? Is the predisposition to develop into a poet based on our genetic or social makeup?

Barr clearly indicates that he feels that nature is the determinant factor in the poet’s evolution. Craft can be learned via MFA programs but we already come to these programs as writers. If anything these programs seem to mold the student in the likeness of the program’s mentor. Ergo; his assuredness that the next poetic Messiah will probably not be an MFA student. Whereas this lends an infinitesimally slight optimism to my personal history as poet, I cannot wholeheartedly accept this premise without any corroboration.

Nonetheless, I do agree that,” The creation of art is not a matter of fellowship. Writing a poem is a fiercely independent act. It is the furthest thing from mentors, residencies, and tenure.” The need to write does not (at least in my case) ever arise during a social event. It is a “sullen craft” that I ply alone. The words & elements of the “poem in vitro”, ebulliently bob to the surface of the conscious mindset when the need arises. And, yes, the urge to write is often something that I must assuage. Having said this I might, however, add that revision & critique is perhaps better suited to “fellowship”.

Write What You Know

I have always contended that any attempt at writing from another POV completely alien to one’s cognitive mindset is necessarily tinged by the subjective. We cannot help but imprint on all that we create the unique stamp of our subjectivity. To quote Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Our socio-cultural perspective precludes any true objectivity. As a social scientist conducting social research the quicker that we come to grips with this reality the more accurate our studies become.

Writing poetry appears to be no different. When Barr indicates that we must live broadly to write boldly I have a tendency to agree with him. As he posits: “…the poem one might get from a poet strolling past a construction site versus the poem one might get from the poet who is pouring concrete” will inevitably differ. Certainly the latter poet can bring more to the poetic table that the former. But where I disagree with Barr is in the extent that one must go to, to attain ”material” conducive to stimulate the creative juices. Writing about something or an event that is out of the ordinary in our reader’s life experience is simple enough. Writing about the commonplace in some profound way which deeply resonates with our reader is the more difficult of the two tasks. And it is precisely this incisiveness which demarcates the good poet from the exceptional one.

Great Poets & Great Audiences

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences too,” Barr quotes Whitman. But Whitman himself, self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855, as it had not garnered the critical acclaim that he had envisaged. Another of his contemporaries Emily Dickinson never even had an audience in her lifetime, let alone a great audience.

To reach a greater audience the poet perforce must be more accessible. Yet when a poet becomes accessible such as a Billy Collins or Ted Kooser, they are usually written off by academics & critics alike. Become a “popular poet” and you are disparaged by your peers. Write for your peers and the critics alike and you are considered too high-brow and inaccessible by a greater audience. There’s the catch-22.

Furthermore, in order to even attain any modicum of success in the Po-Biz you must be published in reputable literary magazines which are inevitably edited by individuals that more than likely have attended some form of writing program & thus will have probably acquired a preference for poetry with a more academic bent. It appears to be a cycle that cannot be easily broken.

In conclusion, Barr’s recommendation that, “Groundbreaking new art comes when artists make a changed assumption about their relationship to their audience, talk to their readers in a new way, and assume they will understand.”, is not likely to be realized if the poet is too busy writing for an audience that will inevitably publish and/or acclaim them. The poet is no position to change their relationship with this audience when their poetic success is contingent on the very group that decides whether they will achieve notoriety or remain in obscurity.

The Drone of Modern Poetry – Deuxieme Partie

(An Outline of “ American Poetry in the New Century “ by John Barr .)

Part I – The Problem with Modern Poetry

• Modern poetry does not capture the way things are
• Reality outgrows the art form: the art form is no longer equal to the reality around it.
• Poetry is missing from everyday society & public dialogue in our: classrooms; bookstores; mainstream media
• A general interested public is poetry’s foremost need
• Lacking a general audience – poets still write for one another
• Since poets cannot support themselves by writing books & selling them to the general public; they end up teaching
• Academic life removes them even further from their public
• MFA students think that poetry has something to do with credentials
• Result: increase in the quantity of a poetry that is neither robust; resonant nor entertaining; a poetry that is limited in its variety; a poetry that both starves & flourishes on academic subsidies
• Poetry has a morale problem – But art should not be only about malfunction. Poetry need not come only from impairment.
• Poetry’s limitations today come not from failures of craft but from afflictions of spirit.
• Summation: The combined effects of public neglect and careerism, then, are intellectual and spiritual stagnation in the art form. … Attitude has replaced intellect.
  
  

Part II – The Next Era

• Poetry arises from what is intractable in the human spirit.
• A dead end is the fate that awaits any poetry that is not a record of the human spirit.
• Technical innovation [in poetry] for its own sake is like the tail that tries to wag the dog.
• I do believe the next era of poetry will not come from further innovations of form, but from an evolution of the sensibility on lived experience.
  
  

Poetry As a Career

• MFA programs can make a writer more knowledgeable in the traditions and the contemporary scope of the art, more accomplished in the craft of writing, more aware of the nimbus of critical commentary which surrounds and to some extent drives the art
• However, these programs carry pressures to succumb to the intimidations implicit in a climate of careerism. They operate on a network of academic postings and prizes that reinforce the status quo.
• They are sustained by a system of fellowships, grants, and other subsidies that a reader who is not a specialist might enjoy, might even buy.
• The MFA experience can confuse the writing of poetry, as a career, with the writing of a poem as a need or impulse.
• The creation of art is not a matter of fellowship. Writing a poem is a fiercely independent act. It is the furthest thing from mentors, residencies, and tenure.
• The one valid impulse to write a poem is not to impress but to share: wonder or anger or anguish or ecstasy. But always wonder.
• For the poet a sense of wonder is prerequisite to afford the possibility of the displacement of language into fresh response.
• Will the next Walt Whitman be an MFA graduate? Somehow it seems hard to imagine.
  
  

Write What You Live & Live What You Write

• the academic life can provide a perfectly good base of experience from which to write.
• But the effect of how we live on what we write—a linkage which seems to me very under-recognized today—suggests that if everyone teaches in order to support their writing needs, it follows that the breadth of the aggregate experience base available to poetry may suffer. In fact, with a few important exceptions, no major American poet has come from the academic world.
• Poetry, like a prayer book in the wind, should be open to all pages at once.
• It is the unconscious habit of poets to wait for the poem to come to them. Most contemporary poets align their role as writer with that of witness. They think of the artist as one more acted upon than acting.
• This is not to say, of course, that great poetry cannot come out of the most meager repository of lived experience. …The point rather is that poets today don't seem even to be aware that what they write will be influenced by how they live.
• When poets come to pay as much attention to how they live as to what they write, that may mark one new beginning for poetry.
• Poets should live broadly, then write boldly.
  
  

PART III – Change is Good For The Soul & The Poet

• Poetry, in its long history, has been all things to all people.
• The lyric poem by far dominates as the kind of poem written today.
• The sole function of the lyric poem, ubiquitous as its footprint has become, is to personalize the subject at hand.
• The ubiquity of the lyric poem today, to the exclusion of other modes of poetry, is another sign of poverty in the art form.
• In the eyes of those who succeed it, an age of poetry comes to be defined at least in part by what it was not.
• If the present era comes to be viewed by future readers as a time of worthy but not compelling poetry, it will not be for failures of craft.
• I don’t agree that our culture conspires to deny us our privacy, the quiet time it takes to read a poem.
• The human mind is a marketplace, especially when it comes to selecting one's entertainment.
• I think the responsibilities of the public to poetry are nil.
• Rather, I think the responsibilities are all on the part of poetry to its public.
• Poetry, coming from the other direction, must meet a standard of pleasure as well as profundity if it is to recover its place in American culture.
• Poetry needs to find its public again, and address it.
• Every poem implies its audience; our goal is to get that poem in front of its largest intended audience.
• In a golden age of poetry the audience will not be just the workshop, where poets write for other poets, or the classroom—both of which have provided crucial sanctuary to poetry during the past half century.
• Its audience will lie also in that world of non-poetry readers who come to discover its deep sustenance. "To have great poets, there must be great audiences too," Whitman said, and then he wrote for them.
• Groundbreaking new art comes when artists make a changed assumption about their relationship to their audience, talk to their readers in a new way, and assume they will understand.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Poetry - September 2006

The Drone of Modern Poetry?

"American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today. ...The manner of it has long been mastered. Modernism has passed into the DNA of the MFA programs. For all its schools and experiments, contemporary poetry is still written in the rain shadow thrown by Modernism. It is the engine that drives what is written today. And it is a tired engine. "

--------------------------------------------------------------------------John Barr

--------------------------------------------------

John Barr is president of the Poetry Foundation and has served on the boards of the Poetry Society of America, Yaddo, and Bennington College. His books include The Hundred Fathom Curve (1997) and Grace (1999), both from Story Line Press. (From - Poetry: September 2006)

Louise Gluck

COPPER BEECH

Why is the earth angry at heaven?
If there's a question, is there an answer?

On Dana Street, a copper beech.
Immense, like the tree of my childhood,
but with a violence I wasn't ready to see then.

I was a child like a pointed finger,
then an explosion of darkness;
my mother could do nothing with me.
Interesting, isn't it,
the language she used.

The copper beech rearing like an animal.

Frustration, rage, the terrible wounded pride
of rebuffed love - I remember

rising from the earth to heaven. I remember
I had two parents,
one harsh, one invisible. Poor
clouded father, who worked
only in gold and silver.

-----------------------------------------------

From "The Seven Ages" by Louise Gluck; The Ecco Press: 2001

Vox Populi

What do you think might improve this Blog?


The Blog is fine as is....................................................44%

What the hell are you talking about?..............................22%

More of my poetry.......................................................11%

More poetry from poets I admire...................................11%

More on poetics............................................................11%

Poems in Vitro - Vol. 1, No. 6

The Changeling


THIS POEM HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!!!

Jean-Léon Gérôme

In the Desert (1872)
Oil on canvas
23 1/2 x 38 7/8 inches
(59.7 x 99 cm)

The Latest From Frank Matagrano

I just received a copy of “There Is Nothing to Love about Los Angeles” (Pudding House Publications: 2006) from Frank Matagrano. This is the first book of poetry in a long time that I devoured upon the first reading. There is a decidedly Whitmanesque flavor to this with titles such as: “Song of Myself in a Hotel with a View of the Pacific Ocean”; Self Portrait With Beating Heart in Your Hands”; “Self Portrait with Another Man”; “Self Portrait with iPod” & “Allowing the Body to Finally Speak”. The poems are introspective and lyrical:


From the title poem:

There is nothing to love about Los Angeles
-----except the idea of leaving

My life in your hands, the idea of you
-----carrying it from one palm tree

to the next, stepping on stars
-----pinned to the sidewalk, stopping


Then from “Song of Myself in a Hotel with a View of the Pacific Ocean”

4.

I am a historian of hallway conversation.
-----I know word for word

How a knock-knock joke begins. I am
-----an expert at doors


From “Self Portrait With Beating Heart in Your Hands”

…There are too many
people to adore and I am
embarrassed to admit
that I do not remember
the names of everyone
who touched me.


& “Self Portrait with iPod”

My song is the kind you love
-----but would never admit
In mixed company. It’s like this
-----in heaven, too, where the lung creaks
Open like a rickety screen door


Or “In the Dim Television Show”

I carry a copy of the book you read,
--------the book of poems
--you once read to me. This way, I can live

with a connection, something
-------like organ music, say Bach
--coming from an alarm clock speaker.

-------I have to be
completely alone when I read

and I have to do it right
-------before bed if I want any say
in how the dream plays
----------itself out.


Finally from “22 Minutes”

There’s a radio station that will give you
-------the world if you will give them
-----twenty-two minutes. I had five, enough
to hear about a plague of Mormon crickets
-------that turned Utah roads blood red

-----and a thousand Iranians who took to the streets
of Tehran in the name of reform for the fifth night
-------in a row. On my road - and I couldn’t
-----tell you how many times I’ve gone
down it – reception grows weak the further you drive.


There is much to like here as each poem resonates with this reader on one level or another. The poems peel away the different layers of the self like an onion being carefully sliced ply after ply revealing a different aspect of the self until along with the speaker of each poem we arrive at the inner core. We find ourselves staring at a persona we may or may not have known existed. The discovery of the self is one that is devoutly to be wished as a cathartic journey – even if it not the persona we expected to find.

------------------------------------------------
P.S.: Thanks, Frank, for sending this one out to me.

Gotta Minute....

Thanks for responding to the questionnaire.

Last night I dreamt that I was reading Freud’s book, “On Dreams” but couldn’t decipher the symbolism...

Just Give Me The Facts

Got these from an e-mail that's been going around the office:

------------------------------------------------

The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

------------------------------------------------

Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the U.S.Treasury.

------------------------------------------------

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

------------------------------------------------

Coca-Cola was originally green.

------------------------------------------------

It is impossible to lick your elbow.

------------------------------------------------

The State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska

------------------------------------------------

The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% (now get this...)

------------------------------------------------

The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%

------------------------------------------------

The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400

------------------------------------------------

The average number of people airborne over the U.S. in any given hour: 61,000

------------------------------------------------

Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

------------------------------------------------

The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.

------------------------------------------------

The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.

------------------------------------------------

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:

Spades - King David
Hearts - Charlemagne
Clubs -Alexander, the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar

-------------------------------------------------

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

--------------------------------------------------

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

What I'm Reading

The Beauty of the Husband (a fictional essay in 29 tangos) -
Anne Carson (Knopf - New York - 2001)





















The Seven Ages - Louise Gluck
The Ecco Press - 2001






















What Are Big Girls Made of? - Marge Piercy
Knopf - New York - 1997






















OMEROS - Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus & Giroux - New York - 1990

Back to Poetry

BACK
Ruth Daigon

Back
reversing the flow
back through the looking glass
up from the rabbit hole
in from out there.

Back
into the stunned silence
of snow, a gray quiet
a stripping clean to the roots
and our breath making perfect circles.

Back
to Main Street
with summer twilight
spreading like fire in dry grass,
the soft susurrus of a slow leak in the day.

My hands
stretching like antennae
now in this street now in that.

Back
to wrap that child's universe
around me once again
and warm this woman's frame.


HOW OLD WOULD YOU BE IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW HOW OLD YOU WAS?
(Satchel Paige)

A door in a sudden garden swings open
and everything comes back.

Ma's wheedling: C'mon Cookie.
Smile for the camera.
Sing a song.

The rock I'm standing on,
smooth
hot.
The sun bouncing off my Buster Brown,
I sing and Mr. Shucket
hands me a dollar.

Pa, just up from the city,
crouches in the lake
washing his arms past
his carpenter tan.
Then, swimming with eyes shut,
he splashes everyone.

Friday, I can hardly wait for Friday.
Every other day's like
jumping up and down
on one foot in the same spot
but Friday pa arrives from the city.
Friday the butcher come to kill chickens.

Stay in front, ma yells
from the back but I crawl
through dirt underneath the house
to watch the headless chickens dance.

I spin like them,
flop in the grass,
split a blade down the middle,
whistle through it
and the sun spills its miracles on me.

If I never learned to count,
I'd be back in that feathered time
with nothing to forget,
nothing to recall,
starting all over again.

-----------------------------------------
Ruth Daigon spent most of her life in the extreme climate of Winnipeg, Toronto, New York and Connecticut where her primary activity was singing as a Columbia Recording Artist, guest artist on CBS's Camera Three, soloist with the New York Pro Musica and in concert and recital appearances. When she sang at Dylan Thomas' funeral, she never dreamed that poetry would take over your life. Her collaboration with W.H. Auden to record Renaissance poetry and music for Columbia Records also gave no hint of what was to come--editing Poets On: for 20 years, contributing to major poetry journals and winning national awards like "The Eve of St. Agnes Award" (Negative Capability). Her latest poetry collection, Handfuls of Time, has just been published by Small Poetry Press. Her previous book, Payday at the Triangle, was published by Small Poetry Press.

I'm Off

To Toronto:

















Back Monday - but don't wait up for me!



.

"Come Down & Set a Spell..."

For The Birds -

Don Hong - Oai @ 2001

The Long & Short of It

Apparently, according to Bill Knott "...short poems are not real poems, are they in the Norton, is there a short poem in David Lehman's anthols, he's the boss of poetry what he says goes and he says no to short poems, does Louise Gluck write short poems of course not, ergo the short poem is not a legitimate mode or form, ..."

Some of my best work (such as it is) might be considered abbreviated. Is in fact the short poem really that easily dismissed by poetry editors or is this a format that is ideal for the 21st century attention spans? I had always been taught that the economy of words in poetry is something "devoutly to be wished". Shouldn't a poem be measured on a PPL (Punch Per Line) or PPW (you figure it out) basis?

Apparently some people agree with me & thus they have launched a quarterly magazine devoted to mico poems & micro fiction - called you guessed it :

INCH

Submission Guidelines

Poetry: We are looking for smart, complete poems one to nine lines in length. Don't send us a good line or three-- send us a complete poem that bites, resonates, or sleeps with giants. Submit one to five poems with a cover letter. You may include more than one poem per page provided that you insert ample space in between. We do not accept previously published work or simultaneous submissions. Submit your work to Inch because it belongs in our magazine, not because you're desperate to place it somewhere. All rights revert to the author upon publication, though we will occasionally ask if we may reprint poems in our double-sized spectacular issues. Pays three copies. Submissions that include poems longer than nine lines in length will be read and ignored.

Fiction: Flash fiction. Microfiction. Call it what you will; Inch publishes the finest stories of 750 words or less. Submit one to three stories for consideration. Include a cover letter. All rights revert to the author upon publication, though we will occasionally ask if we may reprint fiction in our microfiction bonanza issues. Pays three copies.

Submissions should be addressed to the fiction or poetry editor's attention. Include SASE. Mail submissions to:

Inch / Bull City Press
1217 Odyssey Dr.
Durham, NC 27713

E-mail submissions are not accepted.
-------------------------------------------

Now, excuse me, I'm off to write some narrative poetry!

Celestial Ride

Salvador Dali - 1957

oil on canvas

On The Right to Write Poetry

“I know I can’t write a poem. I have no right to write a poem. Mark Strand has the right to write a poem, not me. He went to Yale; he lives on the yacht of his youth. Me, I grew up in an orphanage, no family, no money, no “educational opportunities.” No background, no breeding. Scum like me can’t write poems. …Lower-class scum, menials like me have no right to write poetry. The occasion of a poem? You wanna know the fucking occasion? There is none for me. Strand and Williams and Pinsky et al. have “occasion.” I have no occasion.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------Bill Knott

In the recent interview conducted by Robert Arnold - (editor of the on-line journal Memorious) - with Bill Knott, I’ve come across one of the most caustic diatribes denouncing the world of poetry that I’ve read recently. It is based on (if we are to believe the rhetoric) certain accomplishments he has failed to realize. But after considering his invective it appeared that there was in fact a flaw in his logic.

Knott comes to the conclusion that he is a failure due to what he states are irrefutable facts. i.e:

1-The Guggenheim Award is valueless since it has been given to “no-names”.

2 - It took him 35 years to receive award whereas other recipients achieve this in less time.
3 - Not selected for BAP (Best American poetry) or any other anthology.
4 - Books of poetry have not won any award of any type.
5 - Never invited to judge book contest.
6 - Received tenure at 55 years old, fifteen or twenty years after the successful poets of my generation
7 - The successful contemporary USA poet must have a publisher who stands behind and supports them:
8- Poets work must be in print and remain in print:
9 - Daniel Halpern will ask the successful poet to judge a book in his National Poetry Series:

Conclusion: These criteria are not matters of opinion, points of critical debate; they are factual data. Add them up and they measure failure.

I do not intend to argue here whether or not Bill Knott is a failure at poetry. That is a moot point. Most aspiring poets would gladly trade poetic places with him. The point is that poetic success is measurable in gradations and not in either absolute poetic triumph and/or defeat. The more interesting upshot of the above quote & the Memorious interview is that Knott appears to imply by his responses that success at poetry is determined by socio-economic status. His statement implies that an upper-class poetic voice is acceptable & viable whereas a lower-class poetic voice falls on deaf ears when it comes to the literary establishment.

Does in fact “Noblesse Oblige” give the poetic dilettante entitlements that it denies a lower-class counterpart? Are poets with poor & untraditional backgrounds really denied access to the higher rungs on the ladder up the poetic hierarchy? Are an MFA and proper breeding sufficient variables leading to an equation ensuring poetic success?

Of course to statistically determine if this assertion were true, it would entail conducting an in-depth study of the socio-economic backgrounds of published poets in various poetic journals; poets who received poetic awards; received tenure; have books published (& remain in print) by mainline publishing houses & be selected for renowned anthologies. To my knowledge such a study has not been engineered by any social scientist. It might be interesting though to see if any of Knott’s allegations hold water!

Bill Knott On:

Vanity Books

• Vanity books can’t be classified as publications.

• And one of the chief dangers. Vanity publishing is costly not just in terms of money. Its profligate habits can lead to the loss of judgment and value. It can mislead: it can cause me to be satisfied with work which is less than my best. I become self-indulgent, lazy; my standards are lowered. An outside editor would not accept what I’ve let pass.

• I intend to vanity-publish all my work on my blog, eventually, and to offer there my self-pub books in PDF files free to anyone who wants them. The “print” alternative has become impossible for me. In short, it’s my failure as a print poet that has led me to the Web. I wouldn’t be blog-publishing (vanity-publishing, PDF-publishing) if I had been successful as a print poet.

Writing Poetry

• I once dreamed of writing a line that I could put into every poem. A line that would fit into every poem I wrote, that would not be out of place no matter what the poem was.
• 
  The occasion of a poem? It makes me think of that quote from Henry James: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Doubt seems to be my normal state which the poem or its origin suddenly and briefly overcomes. I know I can’t write a poem. I have no right to write a poem. Mark Strand has the right to write a poem, not me. He went to Yale; he lives on the yacht of his youth. Me, I grew up in an orphanage, no family, no money, no “educational opportunities.” No background, no breeding. Scum like me can’t write poems. After his Ivy League education, C. K. Williams lived in Paris on a trust fund for ten years while he wrote his first book; me, after high school and two years in the army I worked as a hospital orderly while I wrote my first book. Lower-class scum, menials like me have no right to write poetry. The occasion of a poem? You wanna know the fucking occasion? There is none for me. Strand and Williams and Pinsky et al. have “occasion.” I have no occasion.

American Poetry

• Poetry is so disesteemed and undervalued in this country that lots of poets compensate by assuming self-defensive repressive stances that internalize the hatred and scorn directed towards them. Poetry is disdained as trivial and sordid by society at large, by Puritanical political traditions. And poets respond often by considering these criticisms as valid, and try desperately to answer them and refute them by the high seriousness of their work. Their answer to being scoffed at by those above is to create a similar hierarchy in the sub-realm of poetry, in which its lower elements (the proletarian comic modes) are rejected and despised.
• 
  (“American” poetry is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. It never existed. “American” poets who write in English are Colonials, Diasporics, Offshoots, Sub-branches.)

Role as Poet

• But don’t you understand that that inability to commit to an esthetic is the root of my failure as a poet? It’s my lack of courage, really. I’ve been such a coward. Look at [Charles] Simic and Tate and compare them to me. Their courage and persistence, as opposed to my fear and wavering. Their lifelong devotion to a style. My cowardly abandonment, my desertion of every possibility. Jack of all modes, master of none, that’s me.

• “The same kind of poem from a particular poet” is what defines a strong poet, the opposite of a dilettante like me. Philip Levine is a great poet because he has had the courage and the strength to maintain his voice and his stylistic convictions through a lifetime of effort. Ditto Simic, Tate, [Sharon] Olds and others.

• One must create an established coherent poetic personality to be successful. And one must stick to that chosen persona or edifice. I don’t see Larkin ever deviating from his. As you read his Collected [Poems] you never suddenly find him trying to write something like [Ted] Hughes’ “Crow.” But turn my pages and you’ll find me trying to be [Karl] Krolow on one and Parra on the next. That’s why I’m a failure, and why I have come to the elephants’ graveyard of failure, the Web, to publish my poems. I’m posting all my poetry to my blog because ipso facto I have failed as a print poet. Facts are facts. I can’t console myself with spurious theories that will “demonstrate” anything I want them to.

Socialization, Self-Identification & Poetry

• Robert Arnold: "You use class as a metaphor a lot, it seems, and much has been made of your background—from the orphanage to your time in the army and then afterward as a poor hospital orderly. That time in your life seems almost mythological at this point, with Charles Simic and James Wright both writing anecdotes about it. How much does class, and your background specifically, figure into your identity as a poet?"

• My identity as a poet doesn’t exist, due to the class background you speak of. Every child at the orphanage knew they were on an assembly line that would shoot them out into the bondage of lower-class robot-slots; army, factory, the meniality of a desperate dead-end life….
• 
  Extra added attraction: When I was 15 years old [1955], the orphanage sent me to the state insane asylum at Elgin, Illinois, where I was incarcerated for a year. ...How I survived that hell I’ll never know, and in fact most of my time there I have blanked out of my mind. (Need I mention there was no schooling facility, no educational activities provided to me and the other teenagers there. Nor were we segregated or separated or safeguarded in any way from the general adult population, some of whom were psychotically harmful both to themselves and others. Yes, I can recall being beaten and pushed around and abused in the usual manner of such places.)
• 
  So what fucking “identity as a poet”? I don’t have an identity as a human being, much less a poet.
• 
  But what the hell, on the other hand, maybe the state insane asylum ...maybe that shit-hole wasn’t any worse really than Exeter or whatever prep-school in which Pinsky and Strand and Bidart and Charles Wright and C.K. Williams and William fucking Matthews were also suffering the traumas of their teen-angst years at the same time as me, back there in 1955….

• When I met Philip Levine in 1969, after my first book had been published, he was a tenured professor at Fresno State; I had spent the previous ten years earning a living as a menial hospital orderly/ bedpan jockey. Levine’s written 9,000 poems about the what, the one or two summers he worked as a manual laborer or factory hand, but I’ve never written a single line about my orderly decade. Nothing, no poem, no fragment of a poem about when I was fifteen years old incarcerated in the Elgin, Illinois, state insane asylum... Out of my “experiences,” barely nothing has emerged. Why? The answer is very simple: Levine is a great poet, and I’m not. He’s had the strength and the courage to remain open to and to retain his humanity, which I was not able to do. I’ve failed in every way to live up to that task.

• I wonder if my internment as a poet has been much different from those earlier incarcerations,... I don’t think so—it seems to me that the authorities of poetry, the overseers, the supervisors of poetry, have treated me with the same disdain and contempt and indifference as did the authorities of those other institutions. Maybe that’s why I became a poet, to ensure that I would continue to receive the brutality and neglect I had become accustomed to in my youth.

The Effect of Poetry

• I regret everything I had to do with poetry in my life. My involvement with it has brought nothing but unhappiness and bitterness.

• Maybe I could be thankful to have survived the unhappiness of the past if the unhappiness of the present wasn’t overwhelming me.

• I’d be happy to pay the price of the experience if the resulting poems were worth it, but they aren’t.

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From: Robert Arnold - An Interview with Bill Knott - Memorious 6 - June 2006

Marge Piercy

Visiting a dead man on a summer day

In flat America, in Chicago

Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete.
The Potter Palmers float
in an island parthenon.
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
are postmarked with angels and lambs.

But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned
in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow,
sketched light arch within arch
delicate as fingernail moons.

The green doors should not be locked.
Doors of fern and flower should not be shut.
Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave.
It is not now good weather for prophets.
Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey.

On the inner green door of the Getty tomb
(a thighbone's throw from your stone)
a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed:
how all living wreathe and insinuate
in the circlet of repetition that never repeats:
ever new birth never rebirth.
Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand.

Sullivan, you had another five years
when your society would give you work.
Thirty years with want crackling in your hands.
Thirty after years with cities
flowering and turning grey in your beard.

All poets are unemployed nowadays.
My country marches in its sleep.
The past structures a heavy mausoleum
hiding its iron frame in masonry.
Men burn like grass
while armies grow.

Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut
of this society you stormed
to be used, screamed
no louder than any other breaking voice.
The waste of a good man
bleeds the future that's come
in Chicago, in flat America,
where the poor still bleed from the teeth,
housed in sewers and filing cabinets,
where prophets may spit into the wind
till anger sleets their eyes shut,
where this house that dances the seasons
and the braid of all living
and the joy of a man making his new good thing
is strange, irrelevant as a meteor,
in Chicago, in flat America
in this year of our burning.

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From: "Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy"

Alfred A. Knopf (1982)

The Buzz

Mosquito
by Alex Lemon

You want evidence of the street
fight? A gutter-grate bruise & concrete scabs—
here are nails on the tongue,
a mosaic of glass shards on my lips.

I am midnight banging against housefire.
A naked woman shaking
with the sweat of need.

An ocean of burning diamonds
beneath my roadkill, my hitchhiker
belly fills sweet. I am neon blind & kiss
too black. Dangle stars—

let me sleep hoarse-throated in the desert
under a blanket sewn from spiders.
Let me be delicate & invisible.

Kick my ribs, tug my hair.
Scream You’re Gonna Miss Me
When I’m Gone. Sing implosion
to this world where nothing is healed.

Slap me, I’ll be any kind of sinner.
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from Mosquito: Poems Tin House Books (August 28, 2006)

"Mosquito" is Alex Lemon's first collection of poems. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines including Tin House, Denver Quarterly, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast and Pleiades. His translations (with Wang Ping) of a number of contemporary Chinese poets are forthcoming in Tin House, Artful Dodge, New American Writing and other journals. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is the assistant editor for LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation and is a frequent contributor to The Bloomsbury Review. Currently, he teaches at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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P.S. I didn't realize that C.Dale posted the same poem today. However, I firmly believe it deserves the exposure.

Assholes Often Look Alike