Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 6 of 64)

Digital Literature: Historical Perspective & More Examples

December 15, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In one of my final posts of the year, I wanted to check in one last time with a bunch of thoughts about digital lit. This past year I cracked the gargantuan New Media Reader textbook (this thing: it will take me years to finish it!) and I’ve continued working on my own digital lit projects.

The introductory chapter itself was blowing up my head, “Inventing the Medium” but Janet H. Murray and it was basically a review of the history that got us to this point.

She talks about technology’s “breathless pace of change” and “braided interplay of inventions mid-century” (1950s/60s). She believes new media solved the issue of “linear media’s failure to capture structures of thought.” I would agree that linear media has limitations but we’re finding now that digital media is also struggling to keep us from a new kind of madness and that when Murray extols the new “consciousness reforming itself” we can now see that this is not always in positive ways.

She says the “shelf of Knowledge exploded.” Unfortunately, so did the shelf of false knowledge, (oh yes, the earth is flat again), to which Murray says this might speak more to the gaps between technical prowess and social development.

Digital tools have also increased, she admits, weapons acceleration, “killing someone as a way of information processing” in a deadly proliferation of creation and destruction. But Murray ultimately has (or had, this book is from 2003) faith in the same progress that led us to the atomic bomb. We are smart enough to find a way out.

And here is where I found the essay pretty illuminating. She divides us into two camps: the engineer and the humanist. This demarcation pretty much can be applied to any argument you’re having with someone over technology. (Oh well, you’re just a humanist!) But seriously, it shows us the roots of all the enthusiasms and resistances. And I have great sympathy for both sides, being in a humanist avocation and having an engineering vocation.

According to Murray, the humanist is worried the technological changes will lead to cultural confusion and existential befuddlement. The engineer would say we just need to invent the proper fix or instrument to solve any problem that comes up. The answer, for them, is problem-solving systematically.

To which the humanist (in me) might argue there are a lot fewer people thinking systematically these days.And when Murray speaks of the failed promises of print, I can’t help but think of the failed promises of the internet.

Murray invokes Hitler when she talks about the trajectory of unchecked rationalism (it would be most efficient to eliminate people draining the system, the elderly, religions we don’t like, etc.) but unchecked irrationalism is also horrifying she says. Humanists the see limitations of systemized thinking and the ultimate unknowability of life, its absurdities, suffering, longing, and needs. Engineers are solutions-based but often blind to the sufferings their solutions can inflict.

Murray says digital artists are interested in the exploratory processes of the mind. And personally, I find this to be a very, very interesting idea but I just wonder if we're in a better place than after 25 years of tinkering with mental processing.

New media artists are attracted to random combinations, the arbitrary nature of stories, choice and the garden of forking paths. Murray says in this way, we have “outgrown the garments of print” (and yet books, to a lesser degree than before, still thrive). She points to the failures of newspapers and their slowness to recover from inacurate news (Paul McCartney is dead, Ernest Hemmingway is dead, Dewey won) and yet I can’t help but think about the statistic that false news travels on the internet 10-20 times faster than the truth.

She takes us through a historical tour of the decades.

In the 1950s we saw quantitative data manipulation, artificial intelligence, databases, networks, multi-user terminals, the first formulated idea for the internet and hypertext as a term was coined, early ideas about networking that would one day transform institutions. In fact, she says, many of the ideas ended in the 1960s, but machines were too slow and those ideas didn’t get far at the time, only becoming realized in the 1980s and 90s.

The 1980s and 90s brought us personal computers, word processing software, storyspace, hypercard, video games, immersive worlds, cooperative programming, easier user interfaces, the second self, projected consciousness, an online community and complex social relationships. By the end of 1990s digital media had swallowed entertainment and education.

And by now, banking, commerce and almost everything else.

So here we are today with some great muti-media experiences, and yet corporations still have too much power over consumers and we suffer under the illusion of choice. We are more alienated from the real world and the damage humanists predicted is not just a dark fantasy anymore. We have seen an increase in surveillance, exhibitionism, stalking, threats to our productivity, shared hallucinations, disorienting data overload and Murray does admit this was all predicted by the post-modernists who “no longer believed anything [previously] asserted.”

We’re also now experiencing the death of expertise (unintended consequence of DIY and self-help).

Murray describes computer scientists as having an “exhilarating earnestness” while learning about “active construction of meaning” while at the same time humanists were celebrating deconstruction and the unraveling of meaning. Humanists have been exploring fragmentation, distrust of the imagination and a “loss of faith in the great meta-narratives,” a distrust of endings. They revel in the middle.

But there is something to be said for the potato root system, of a growth with no beginning or end, as long as it’s ultimately digestible (to stay in the metaphor). Digital media has also given us new avenues for whimsey and all the “good” kinds of communication and expression.”

And it bears a reminder, this is a 2003 book. Murray made grand predictions about how new media would resist commodification (it didn’t), that we would not crushed by our own knowledge (we did become crushed by our inability to parse the good versus the bad knowledge), and that our machines would not become our Gods (uh…yeah), and that new media would somehow miraculously escape ideologies (about that…).

10 Finds This Year:

So all my angst aside, I’m keeping-on with exploring digital media and some of it is delightful.

I’m still seeing some problems with accessing digital works. A lot of these older sites were not build as https, today’s secure protocols, and the authors have not upgraded them for usability. This is not unusual. It’s so much work to launch a project as it is and then by the time you move on to your next project, there’s no time to continually return to older ones and update all your old stuff. It makes the pieces highly perishable and costly, especially considering the time involved in making them.

Hobo Lobo of Hamlin: http://hobolobo.net/
Not a secure site but a lovely interactive illustration. It doesn’t work so well on iPad (no audio) or mobile. The technical considerations section of the About page is a meta-must read: http://hobolobo.net/what-is-this-thing#q (look for “bringing a linear story alive”).
High Muck a Muck: a digital poem with maps: www.highmuckamuck.ca
Hunt for the Gay Planet was a hilarious Twine HTML branching story, very funny. Unfortunately it’s been taken down but you can still watch the video capture on ELO: https://collection.eliterature.org/3/videos/hunt-for-the-gay-planet-video.mp4. There is something organically funny about the branching story form, just like there is with the haiku form.
The Struggle Continues: https://collection.eliterature.org/3/videos/the-struggle-continues-video.mp4 Another Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries video poem with music. It’s funny with some subversive politics.
Tatuaje is a short detective novel – what was interesting to me were the spaces for artifacts, photos, chats, maps, email archives, and scrolling text: http://tatuaje.centroculturadigital.mx/ (It’s in Spanish but you can interact with it if you don't speak Spanish).
Letters from the Archiverse is audio-visual word art. It’s also not available anywhere but in video format: https://collection.eliterature.org/3/videos/letters-from-the-archiverse-video.mp4 Words as material.
Loss, Undersea is a video that scrolls down a screen of visuals as a person goes through their day making choices. Great graphics regardless of the interactivity. Only the Flash version is available (who has that anymore?) but you can still watch a video capture: https://collection.eliterature.org/3/videos/loss-undersea-video.mp4
Thoughts Go is a short audio visual Flash poem preserved as a video: https://collection.eliterature.org/3/videos/thoughts-go-video.mp4
Umbrales is a spotlight and reveal interactive poem. Watch the video https://collection.eliterature.org/3/videos/umbrales-video.mp4 or visit the EN or ES site http://www.umbrales.mx/
VeloCity is a Flash video of word animation. See the video capture: https://collection.eliterature.org/3/videos/velocity-video.mp4

Also interesting:

https://breathe-story.com/ You have to read this short story on your phone. It doesn’t work well for ipad or computer because it uses your GPS location to build suspense into the story. It was short and too much of a sketch than a finished piece. Plus the GPS insertions were more unintentionally funny than suspenseful. (Even my dog Franz was captured in the first screenshot part of the story).

The Essay Project: The Contemporary Poets

December 3, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The next essay is from editor A. Poulin Jr. talking about "Contemporary American Poetry" (soon he would have a 1991 anthology of the stuff, my copy looks like this) in a piece called Contemporary American Poetry: The Radical Tradition.

And this is a good time to stop and reflect on the quite significant narcissism of those early 20th century poets labelling themselves 'modernists,' thinking the word modern would always apply to them and somehow defy the march of time. Similarly, post post-modernism (which technically could mean anything in the future) poets subsequently understood the problem and started labeling themselves 'Contemporary' like they were doubling down on a delusion. Their 'contemporary' poems are now 60 years old and as far from contemporary as poems could possibly be. I wouldn’t be surprised if poets now start calling themselves the Right-Nows. It's a straight line for there to here, narcissistically speaking,

In any case, we’re all soon Long-Agos, as are those modernists and contemporaries. But this little essay of self-congratulations actually has some interesting things in it. It attempts to define this body of “contemporary” poetry as poets writing since 1945 up to the current year (1980).

Poulin starts by exploring how all generations tend to rebel against previous ones, the previous generation's “essential beliefs….its excesses, principle atrophied into prejudice….petrified into cliché…[and] tyranny” but Poulin maintains that “the revolution doesn’t always realize a clean break….the blood, the genes remain, camouflaged by a radical façade.”

He then talks about what revolution these poets represent, their ceasing to believe the “orthodoxy of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics.”

And at this spot of the essay I have a crazy bit of marginalia right here talking about prescriptive craft advice and how it somehow corresponds to diet advice and how that makes us all fat” and I read it today thinking well maybe that’s true in some weird way, but what the hell does it have to do with this essay? Who was this person?

There is one word in this essay that is probably my least favorite essay word in these academic essays: unquestionable (unquestionably, kin to undeniably). A few sentences later there a phrase that something “is simply untenable.” All of a group, those words. Nothing is unquestionable.

He then lists the cast of New Critics,

Allen Tate
John Crowe Ramson
William Epson,

those poets who were an addendum to modernism and enforcers of Eliot's ideas, those "who transformed the experiments…into a legislative critical system…the New Critics…no longer regarded as sacred commandments”).

He lists the influences of the new poets, but during the entire essay fails to name the women who probably had more influence on experimental contemporary poetry than anyone else: Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, a good example of how important women were marginalized during this period of mythmaking about contemporary poetry. Poulin credits the French and Spanish surrealists as influences, Neruda and Vallejo and the popular arts (singling out Lana Turner, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan).

Like the Modernists before them of these “contemporary” poets, Poulin says, read the English Metaphysical poets and John Crowe Ransom…and that "the most adequate and convincing poetry” for them “accommodates mixed feelings, clashing ideas and incongruous images.”

Where they parted with the Modernists was regarding intimacy, the personal revelation, removing “artistic distance between the poets and their subjects, the poets and their poems.” Contemporary poets use persona and sometimes other formal devices but focus on “individual personality” and “intimate experiences” in disagreement with T.S. Eliot who claims that “poetry was an escape from personality.”

Contemporary poets incorporate “biographical details” and make the speaker, the “I”, themselves…writing “as if that reader were a confessor, psychiatrist, intimate friend, or lover.” In fact, a lot of these poets are interested in exploring the borders and depths of the Freudian subconscious and multidimensional personality….the self’s discovery of the outer world…sexual honesty…personal illness, madness, failure and self-destruction” And here he says something about the “near hysteria of Sylvia Plath.”

Oy.

But this part is good: “…the requirements of technique and craftsmanship raise…questions about just how personal and immediate a poet can be…any poem is a fabrication and takes time and calculation to complete. Like any other art… [it] is selective, calculated, and public gesture, a formal utterance for which the poet selects a language and voice, even if they are approximate to his or her own as the poet can manage.”

Poulin also discusses irony and paradox and raises the issue of irony's problematic distance: “Irony may thwart much genuine emotion, its absence also makes genuine emotion virtually impossible.”

How’s that for a paradox?

Poulin shows how irony helps in certain cases, like for Plath and O’Hara, to “temper the intensity of suffering by undercutting the vehement…” Camp irony can find a sense of humor in Plath’s suicide or O’Hara’s descriptions of emptiness and decadence. “…[where] laughter camouflages horror."

I would also argue that irony done well can express its very own deep-seated emotion, like hidden Easter Eggs, to reward the most engaged and patient readers. But that this technique wasn't being used as much with this set of poets, more so a technique used with later Generation X and Millennial poets.

Poulin talks about levels of ambiguity where reader interpretations are encouraged (Ashbery), where punctuation and pronouns are manipulated (Merwin and Berryman). Metapoetry is discussed, and allusions after "The Waste Land."

These poets, Poulin says, are not as interested in mythology in the classical sense. They are not likely to allude to ancient Greek poets. They are having a contemporary experience and are concerned with their own survival, not mythmaking except for “the suffering, middle-aged, white ‘human American man’…[the idea that] I am my own myth.”

Poulin then categorizes these poets as decedents of the Puritans or Whitman, basically pessimists and optimists.

The Puritans (ex: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton) are descendants of the fall of Adam, they see “humans as essentially corrupt, limited spiritually and physically and deteriorating. There poems tend to be “complex, emblematic, and metaphysical.” The Puritan poet is threatened by madness and…tempted to self-destruction.”

The Whitmans (ex: Allen Ginsberg, Louis Simpson, David Ignatow) “assert the holiness of Adamic self…a holy universe.” These poets are “often scornful of intellectualization” and believe in the “self’s limitless potential for transcendence.” There poems are often “open, loose product of emotion rather than of intellect or conspicuous craftsmanship, its language…more recognizably ‘American.’”

That’s a pretty good distinction. Poulin then lists poets inspired by the French symbolists, Chinese and Japanese poetry (Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, James Wright), the Spanish Surrealists (Philip Levine and Robert Bly), those who experimented with the prose poem as action painting or verbal jazz (John Ashbery, Lawrence Ferlinghetti).

He admits there was an “obsession with originality” and that

“each age discovers or fabricates one or two all-encompassing metaphors for the quality of human experience that it confronts or seeks. It was T. S. Eliot, of course, who fabricated the first encompassing metaphor for the twentieth century: the waste land was the image of human spiritual and cultural sterility…a powerful mise en scene of the modern situation, to a large extent its characters were composite ghosts, unreal men and women in an unreal city…Eliot set the scene, but contemporary poets have peopled that waste land, mostly with their individual selves.”

And they’ve done it with language, “by making poetry out of the full range of everyday speech—including obscenity, vulgarity, and slang.”

These poets are also very political and create a poetry that “responds directly” to the “broad spectrum of everyday political realities.”

Then he drops this bomb: “the political tradition was all but ignored during the first half of the century” completely ignoring the group of socialist poets of the 1920s and 1930s who wrote extensively about social conditions during the depression and against the Spanish Civil War, many of whom were blacklisted to such an extent they now literally don’t exist in the minds of New Critics and contemporary poets. There’s a whole book about this historical blacklisting called Revolutionary Memory by Gary Nelson.

Poulin talks about the “imagination of commitment” which he classifies into three groups. The first is the sociopolitical consciousness and nuclear holocaust. He lists the poets that deal with this:

“Nick and the Candlestick” Plath
“Advice to a Prophet” Wilbur
“After Experience Taught Me” Snodgrass
“Vapor Trail” and “Reflected in the Frog Pond” Kinnell
“Vapor Trails” Snyder
“At the Bomb Testing Site” Stafford

The second is historical events, personages:

“Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco” Wright
“Night, Death, Mississippi” Hayden

More specifically, the Vietnam War poets. Poulin says it is interesting that “despite the fact that many of today’s poets were active participants in World War II—or perhaps because they were—the experience did not seem to grip their imaginations as much as the conflict in Vietnam did.” He says not since World War I has there been so many poems about a single event.

He lists a few World War II poems here for contrast:

“On the Eye of an SS Officer” Wilber
“The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner” Jarrell
“The Heroes” Simpson

The Vietnam poems he lists are:

“Counting Small-Boned Bodies” Bly
“The Altars in the Street” Levertov
“The Asians Dying” Merwin
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” Ginsberg

This raises questions, Poulin says, about where poetry leaves off and propaganda begins and can propaganda poetry be any good. He also notes that all the poets writing about Vietnam were noncombatants and had never “been in the embattled country in contrast to “Wilfred Owen’s poems in the trenches.”

These poets experience only “the removed reality of the media…atrocities were not witnessed, but were ‘viewed’” and that their poems deal more with “the perpetrators of war” and “the language of war” and “the policy of war.”

The third group involves sexual politics and explorations of sexuality from poets like Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Robert Bly and Anne Sexton writing a celebration of her uterus.

Poulin then talks about the ecological poems of Gary Snyder and John Logan and the meta-poetries:

“Leaving the Atocha Station” Ashberry
“Fresh Air” Koch
“Riprap” Snyder
“The Language” Creely
“Single Vison” Kunitz

He ends talking about spirituality in poems:

“The Sleep Child” Dickey
“A Dubious Night” Wilbur
“Sometime During Eternity” Ferlinghetti
“I Am Waiting” Ferlinghetti
“Wales Visitation” Ginsberg
“Mary’s Song” Sylvia Plath”
"Lemuel’s Blessing” Merwin

All in all this is a good summary of this group (which we totally need because the moniker is so unhelpful). Here's the big list I compiled from the essay:

Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton
Adrienne Rich
Maxine Kumin
Denise Levertov
Robert Lowell
Robert Bly
James Wright
M.S. Merwin
Galway Kinnell
John Logan
Allen Ginsberg
Louis Simpson
Richard Hugo
Robert Duncan
W. D. Snodgrass
John Ashbery
James Merrill
Robert Creely
Richard Wilbur
Kenneth Koch
Stanley Kunitz
Donald Hall
James Dickey

The Essay Project: Writing About Yourself

November 17, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

David Wojahn, whose book Mystery Train I loved while I was at Sarah Lawrence, wrote an essay called “Generations 'I': The Future of Autobiographical Poetry" which is an awful title. I could understand "Generation I" singular and unquoted but not this plural quoted thing. Anyway, the essay appeared in a 1996 issue of the journal The Missouri Review.

This essay is about the dependence of current writers on Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, “possibly the most influential book of American poetry published in the last half-century” and how his legacy is “complex and troubling.”

“Without Life Studies, the careers of as diverse a list of poets as Plath, Sexton, Merill, Levine, Heaney, Bidart, Pinksy, Gluck, Hass, C.K. Williams, Sharon Olds, Frederick Seidel and Charles Wright would be hard to imagine.”

The autobiographical lyric, which has become so ubiquitous even “a former U.S. President, Jimmy Carter” had published a volume of autobiographical poetry, which to Wojahn might just signal “the utter exhaustion of a particular style of autobiographical verse…merely another form of…self-therapy movements…the very sort of specific personal solace offered also by AA, Al-Anon, Rolfing, Zoloft or Sufi dancing…”

Ouch. Wojahn then addresses the alternative avant-garde tradition of neo-New Criticism, close readings and “a rather schoolmarmish and moralizing tone.” He quotes Marjorie Perloff’s essay, “The Changing Face of Common Intercourse: Talk Poetry, Talk Show, and the Scene of Writing” (another farty title) to talk about how “the self” is packaged for TV talk shows “with their emphasis on intimate disclosure (usually centering upon what were once called shameful secrets),” in other words, “the media’s crass commercialization of human suffering.”

So he’s looking for a happy medium and admits that it’s “very hard to draw a clear line between work whose main value is therapeutic or inspirational and work that really addresses and expands the possibilities of the art itself.”

Wojahn feels talk show culture has negatively influenced the current confessional poetry and proposes Mary Kinzie’s alternative idea of “applied poetry."

In Wojahn's paraphrase, Kinzie blames Anne Sexton (practially for being a famous poet), for “a persona intrinsic to the making of poetry [being] mistaken all the way around for an excellent poem” as if those things were mutually exclusive. Sexton is to blame for “the dumbing-down of autobiographical poetry, a loss of aesthetic gravity which it [possessed] from writers such as Berryman and Lowell…a litany of victimhood.”

I feel this is a very mistaken impression of Sexton but let's continue.

Hhe turns to fiction writers who take use elements like “a sense of point of view, of strategic timing and delayed exposition” for granted…”ruminated asides” and artful “jump-cuts.”

Examples of this are C.K. Williams’ Tar and Frank Bidart’s Golden State (a book which, by the way, is now selling for 300-400 dollars used on Amazon right now).

“The new poetry of self, in other words, is seen as expansive and inclusive in ways which confessional poetry decidedly was not….One of the mysterious legacies of confessionalism is the reader’s implicit belief that poets tell the truth about themselves, and that this activitity is not only good, but sufficient in itself to create a good poem.”

He uses Bruce Weigl’s poem “The Impossible” as an example of a failed autobiographical poem, mostly because it doesn’t earn its end after some harrowing self-disclosure. (I took the ending as a bit sarcastic, but I could be wrong.)

I don’t have much patience for people trying to shoe-horn poems into their cookie cutter ideas about what poems should be, people who themselves who have little patience for the full panoply of what poems can be, or poems in the process of becoming something, which I feel applies to Weigl’s poem.

Wojahn insists personal poems must have “psychological perspective,” to overtly explain why a particular moment is explored, why it was chosen, to explain the “consequences” for the writer. He talks about “an inherent contradiction typical of many recent autobiographical lyrics…more frequently designed to convey the illusion of reportorial fact than to emphasize the complexity of psychological truth—or beauty” as if this is the final definition of poetry in all cases.

He prefers Susan Mitchell’s “Leaves that Grow Inward” and it’s “circuitous meditation.” Mitchell's poem is full of challenges to the idea of telling the truth or one's own truth, the role disguising the truth plays in an autobiography. This does make the poem very interesting, but not better or worse than poems that don’t do that.

Wojahn says the Mitchell's poem “refuses…to reduce the struggle between the self and the world to a well-intentioned truism.”

I would say Wojahn is not bringing the same skepticism to the first poem with his assumption that the author buys into the final truism or if maybe that truism is part of a longer journey. Plus, truisms are not, in and of themselves, bad to include or end upon.

Wojahn says he likes that the Mitchell poem’s pain has not “somehow been solved.” But there’s nothing in the first poem that feels “solved” either.

I have marginalia at the end of the essay that says,

“Doty [Mark Doty] – Stay with it longer. Don’t clip that edge. Write beyond end. A real end doesn’t end neatly.”

I don’t know if that means Mark Doty was a guest lecturer that day. He did make an appearance in one of our workshop classes and then a tornado of competetion ensued when the students found out he would be teaching one class the next semester and there were only limited seats. Tears were shed. (Not by me; I didn't know who he was yet. If I had, I would have been a tornado too.)

The note could also be someone in the essay class quoting Doty though.

In any case, terms like “a real ending” are just as full of hooey.

The Essay Project: Tips and Postmoderns

October 1, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The final essay in the David Rivard Sarah Lawrence class packet is an introduction to the book Helpful Hints, Notes on Writing Poetry by Jon Anderson. Coincidentally, the next essay in the Suzanne Gardinier essay class is also an introduction (in some cases, these are really good essays) to the book The Postmoderns, The New American Poetry Revised edited by Donald Allen and George F. Butterick.

Anderson’s tips are from his days teaching and he cautions us that all his tips are “not applicable to everyone’s writing, that, in fact, their opposites might be useful.”

He states he wanted the tips to be brief, not prescriptive. Our teacher, David Rivard, must have considered these useful tips as well. When reading any list of tips, there are always plenty of things you like and don’t like. Everyone’s experience is so different as writers. I won’t focus on the tips I disagreed with. But I can tell by my notes from the 1990s in the margins that any advice to try imitate another poet’s voice or style struck me as scary and dangerous. I must have been afraid of losing myself.

Oh as if.

Here are my favorite tips:

Remember the world of ghosts & small gestures.
“I” “we” “you” usually give a poem location & implied reality.
"When you feel yourself getting 'carried away' with emotion, undercut it."
[I think that’s good advise although my experiment right now is to move closer to emotion. My note from the mid-90s says: “undermine yourself.”]
"Read: whole books, not just anthologies."
"Write too much, then cut."
"Say the toughest thing."
"Follow the path a poem takes, not your preconception."
"Don’t stick to the truth."
"Prose poems can change your rhythms & subject matter, relieve compulsive personal esthetics."
"Put something of interest in every line or sentence."
"Cultivate that part of yourself that is most unsure, tentative, delicate, self-dangerous, & expect to pay the price."
"Don’t be coy."
[Ugh! But that’s my bag!]

The next Suzanne Gardiner class essay is the preface to an anthology of Postmodern poems which mainly aims to explain what postmodern poets are and where they came from.

The editors date postmodern poetry to begin at the end of World War II. “Modernism came to an end with the detonation of the Bomb in 1945."

The preface doesn’t remark on Theodor Adorno's famous quote post-Auschwitz that ''after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric'' (1949) . Most definitely this influenced post-modernisms experimentations too.

Postmodernims is characterized as “experimental” and the editors list poets' influences as “Emerson, Whitman, Pound and Williams," egregiously ignoring ALL the womenfolk: Gertrude Stein, H.D. and Emily Dickinson whose influence was just as powerful.

This “underground” was first formed in “schools” like The New York School, the Beat poets and the San Francisco renaissance poets and the Black Mountain Poets, and all the other avant-garde of the 1950s.

Their poems didn't gain respect in the 1960s and 1970s.

Conceptual inspirations were: imagism, French symbolism.

Topics include: the limits of industrialization and high tech, spiritual advancement, communal energies, American individualism.

They were writing against: academic formalism.

They consider themselves: revolutionaries.

“Their most common bond is a spontaneous utilization of subject and technique, a prevailing “instantissm” that nevertheless does not preclude discursive ponderings and large-canvased reflections. They are boldly positioned and deft, freely maneuvering among the inherited traditions, time-honored lore, and proven practices, adopting what they need for their own wholeness and journeying.”

Yes, that’s how this preface talks. 🙁

Because the photocopied prefeace is from a later-day reissue of the anthology (1994), the editors briefly sketch out which poets were added since the original volume came out 20 years prior.

List of mentioned poets: Charles, Olson, William Everson, Robert Duncan, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Barbara Guest, Jack Karouac, Jackson Mac Low, Denise Levertov, James Shuyler, Philip Whalen, Robin Blaser, Kenneth Koch, Jack Spicer, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Lew Welch, John Ashbery, Larry Eigner, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Gregory Corso, Joel Oppenheimer, Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael McClure, Diane Di Prima, Anselm Holo, Amiri Baraka, Joann Kyger, John Weiners, Robert Kelly, James Koller, Ron Loweinsohn, David Meltzer, Edward Sanders, and Anne Waldman.

That's 38 poets of which 5 are women. Just sayin’ they could have done better. The editors tried and failed to organize poets by geographical boundaries. They ran out of room for theoretical writings and poet statements.

Charles Olson’s essay “Projected Verse” starts things off, as Olson they say was the first to use the term “postmodern.”

The most interesting part of the preface for me was the comparison of how each writer conceptualized the idea of postmodernism:

Charles Olson: “an instant-by-instant engagement with reality”
Robert Creeley: “”form is never more than an extension of content”
Frank O’Hara: “going on your nerve”
Allen Ginsberg: “Hebraic-Melvillean bardie breath”
Robert Duncan: “open universe” in which the poem “has only this immediate event in which to be realized”
Gary Snyder: “primitive,” “the decentralized” but communal
Amiri Baraka: “poem as bullet for revolutionary change”
The editors: “Primarily, it is a stance that does not shrink from confrontation with previously held convictions and proprieties, while seeking a restoration of some very ancient ones.”

They see postmodernism as “bold” and “heroic” which seems a bit over-the-top.

But there are some other adjectives that apply to the definition more specifically and helpfully: “idiosyncratic, “flexibility,” resilient and advantageous syntax,” exploration of language as a system,” “a different disposition of self,” a “quick willingness to take advantage of all that had gone before.”

Although the postmoderns are too "of their time" to comment on their own culpability in leading us where we are today, they are distant enough from their elders to criticize the moderns for similar liabilities. As they constrast postmodern from modern, the editors say “…if it’s true that the attitudes and commitments of modernism helplessly produced the Bomb and other forms of species alteration.”

We all helplessly produce untintended consequences.

This paragraph is a good definition what postmodernism is:

"These poets have taken advantage of the gains of imagism and surrealism, the chief accomplishments of poetic modernism. They are the grand and multifarious [not so multifarious if your read the table of contents] fulfillment of the vers libre of the early 1900s. Many demand a reorientation of values, a reexamination of the very premises of Western civilization. Most seek for the individual, a new relation toward his or her world, a new 'stance toward reality,' where each poem’s line, whether long-breathed or tightly controlled, is open to its own possibility, where the syntax responds with vital immediacy to the moment’s pulse. They are revolutionary, characterized by a willingness to seize the romantic imperative, to seek alternatives to the ‘static’ quo.”

The Essay Project: The Dawn of Writing Workshops

September 24, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re getting down to the last two essays from the David Rivard class at Sarah Lawrence back in 1994-ish. It’s another Philip Levine one and I would say this is my favorite essay in the project so far, but then Levine is one of my favorite poets so this is not a surprising thing. This essay makes me want to do a deep dive into all of his prose. It’s called “Mine Own John Berryman” and it talks about his experience at the Iowa Writers Workshop with teachers Robert Lowell (who sucked) and John Berryman (who was great). This essay, like “Entering Poetry” which we covered a few weeks ago was from his autobiography of essays that had just come out, The Bread of Time (1994).

The most wonderful thing about this long essay experiment has been how I’ve come to soften about essays I formerly disliked. I’ve grown up, changed. But Philip Levine: it is so heartwarming to be able to say there has been no change. I still love his poetry and prose and this feels like a rediscovery.

This essay is full of not only beautiful passages, but criticism and praise of his teachers that hits exactly the right notes, like this beginning:

“I can’t say if all poets have had mentors, actual living, breathing masters who stood and sat before them making the demands that true mentors must make if the fledgling is ever to fly. Some poets seem to have been totally self-starting….I’m thinking of such extraordinary examples as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, who over a hundred years ago created not only their own gigantic works but the beginnings of something worthy enough to be American poetry, and they did it out of their imaginations and their private studies and nothing more. But then, they had the advantages of being geniuses….I think also of those poets who had to be poets, whom no one or nothing short of death could have derailed from their courses—John Keats, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud—who outstripped their mentors before they even got into second gear. There are those who were lucky enough to find among their peers people of equal talent and insight to help them on their way, like Williams and Pound, who for the crucial early years of their writing careers ignited each other…As for those of us here in the United States of America in the second half of the twentieth century, we have developed something called Creative Writing…One can only regard it as one of the most amazing growth industries we have. Thus, at the same time we’ve made our society more racist, more scornful of the rights of the poor, more imperialist, more elitist, more tawdry, money-driven, selfish, and less accepting of minority opinions, we have democratized poetry. Today anyone become a poet; all he or she has to do is travel to the nearest college and enroll in Beginning Poetry Writing and then journey through the dozen stages of purgatory properly titled Intermediate Poetry Writing and Semi-Advanced Poetry Writing, all the way to Masterwork Poetry Writing, in which course one completes her epic on the sacking of Yale or his sonnet cycle on the paintings of Edward Hopper, or their elegies in a city dumpster…”

Did he write this yesterday? From his grave? Yes. Yes. Yes. All of it. And how he threads the success of poetry workshops to the decine of civility. It's like he was my mentor and I didn't even know it.

And then! And then he goes into his own early experiences squeezing poems out of the collegiate poetry factory, with Mr. Confessional Robert Lowell no less who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Lord Weary’s Castle. Ground zero for the whole enterprise at the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Levine didn’t go to Iowa in 1953 to study with John Berryman (not yet famous for his “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”) but to study with the famous Robert Lowell.

“To say I was disappointed in Lowell as a tacher is an understatement…a teacher who is visibly bored by his students and their poems is hard to admire. The students were a marvel: we were two future Pulitzer Prize winners, on Yale winner, one National Book Critics Circle Award winner, three Lamont Prize winners, one American Book Award winner.”

Wow. Taking down Robert Lowell of the great Boston Lowells, relative of famous poets Amy Lowell and James Russel Lowell in just two sentences! Who Lowell was contrasted with who "we" were. It’s like buttah!

And what an amazing workshop class it was: Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass (who would continue in the tradition of Robert Lowell confessional free verse), Jane Cooper, William Dickey….among others.

“Lowell was, if anything, considerably worse in the seminar; we expected him to misread our poesm—after all, most of them were confused and, with few exeptions, only partialy realized, but to see him bumbling in the face of ‘real poetry’ was discouraging.”

Levine then gives an example of Lowell misreading a Housman poem and continues with a final discomforting scene:

“His fierce competitiveness was also not pleasant to behold…he seemed to have little use for any practicing American poet….During the final workshop meeting he came very close to doing the unforgivable: he tried to overwhelm us with one of his own poems….someone, certainly not Lowell, had typed up three and a half single-spaced pages of heroic couplets on ditto masters so that each of us could hold his or her own smeared purple copy of his masterpiece. He intoned the poem in that enervated voice we’d all become used to….I sat stunned by the performance, but my horror swelled when several of my classmates leaped to praise every forced rhyme and obscure reference…No one suggested a single cut, not even when Lowell asked if the piece might be a trifle too extended, a bit soft in places. Perish the thought; it was a masterpiece. And thus the final class meeting passed with accolades for the one person present who scarcely needed praise and who certaininly had the intelligence and insight to know it for what it was: bootlicking.”

I love this man.

Levine goes on to contrast the experience of his next workshop teacher, John Berryman.

“To begin with, he did not play favorites: everyone who dared hand him a poem burdened with second-rate writing tasted his wrath, and that meant all of us. He never appeared bored in the writing class; to the contrary, he seemed more nervous in our presence than we in his.”

“We returned the next Monday to discover that Berryman had moved the class to a smaller and more intimate room containing one large seminar table around which we all sat.”

My favorite teacher did that too. That must have been a thing.

Levine describes how Berryman managed to weed out “unserious” students, “a contingent of hangers-on” until “all but the hard-core masochists had dropped.” And incredibly not only was Levine one of these masochists, he was too poor to pay for the class and was coming anyway. Berryman would joke about it to Levine when Levine tried to say there had been a mix-up with the registrar. “I was the only nonenrolled student attending, but so extraordinary were his performances that the news spread and by the time he gave his final Whitman lecture the room was jammed to the bursting point.”

It never occurred to me to sneak into classes I wasn’t registered for. Dagnabit.

Berryman taught them how to find “hot” areas of their poems and revise toward the heat, how to be ruthless and make radical revisions. “There are so many ways to ruin a poem,” Berryman said. Levine talks about how Donald Justice was the superstar of the class.

Berryman also was a scholar of Shakespeare and one day had the students all re-read The Tempest. “There is great poetry hiding where you least expect it,” Berryman said. “We must find our touchstones where we can.” Beautiful.

Levine is often sarcastically funny. When Berryman was extoling the virtues of Macbeth, how Shakespeare had less than two weeks to write the play and how Berryman said it “’took him no time at all to write it, and yet it would take half the computers in the world a year to trace the development of the imagery that a single human imagination created and displayed in a play of unrivaled power.’" Levine, a former auto factory worker, retorts, "So much for the School of Engineering.”

Berryman also put students in their place. He “made it clear, those who best understood prosody—Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Blake, Hopkins, Frost, Roethke—had better things to do than write handbooks for our guidance.”

Other great Berryman quotes:

“Speed, achieved by means of a complex syntax and radical enjambment.”

“Certain poets are so much themselves, they should not be imitated: they leave you no room to be yourself, and [Dylan] Thomas was surely one of them, as was Hart Crane, who probably ruined the careers of more young poets than anything except booze.”

“Better to learn from a poet who does not intoxicate you, better to immerse yourself in Hardy, whom no American wants to sound like.”

“Write everything that occurs to you; it’s the only way to discover where your voice will come from. And never be in a hurry. Writing poetry is not like running the four hundred meters.”

“’No poet worth his salt is going to be handsome; if he or she is beautiful there’s no need to create the beautiful. Beautiful people are special; they don’t experience life like the rest of us.’ He was obviously dead serious, and then he added, ‘Don’t worry about it, Levine, you’re ugly enough to be a great poet.’”

Levine also drops the bombshell that Snodgrass claimed Lowell discouraged his confessional poems instead of inspiring them.

Levine talked about how Lowell’s favoritisms divided his class into “hostile factions” whereas in Berryman’s class everyone in the class stayed friends and “took pride and joy in each other’s accomplishments…we were learning how much farther we could go together than we could singly, alone, unknown, unread in an America that had never much cared for poetry.”

This essay made me reflect on my own experience with the best teacher I ever had, Howard Schwartz. Later at Sarah Lawrence College when I was getting my MFA in one of the imfamous Creative Writing programs, Tom Lux confidently announced to us that in his workshop and classes we would get the closest reading of our lives. And to his credit, it was pretty close, but no cigar on the closest. That was in Howard Schwartz’s class. Lux would take us line by line, but Schwartz took us work by word like a poet mechanic. We’d spend ten minutes debating whether a title should be using the word “A” or the word “The” and it drove some students batty but I wouldn’t have changed a thing about any of the many classes I took with Howard Schwartz. He too was the just right combination of encouraging with no-bullshit tolerated. You had to have a tough skin or develop one. Some students couldn’t do it.

I'm going to order the full Levine suite toot suite!

The Essay Project: Language Poetry

September 16, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This next article from the Suzanne Gardiner class at Sarah Lawrence was an interesting one, "1NK M4THM4T1CS, 4N 1NTRODUCT1ON TO L4NGU4GE POETRY by JOEL LEW1S" and it appeared in the magazine Poets & Writers in Sept/Oct 1990.

One of the interesting things about this old P&W article from 1990 is that it wasn’t wall-to-wall Writing MFA ads like it is these days. This article only has three: Washington University in St. Louis, Vermont College and Cleveland State University. Which seems like a lot but it's not. There are also ads for journal subscriptions, writing competitions and book publishers.

In this essay, Joel Lewis quotes Language poet Charles Bernstein to say Language poetry “does not involve turning language into a commodity for consumption; instead it involves repossessing the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, it’s production.”

Total sense, right?

Lewis traces what exactly Language poetry was reacting against starting with the New York School's opposition to the New Criticism of the 1950s, “the egocentric, single-image, quasi-romantic poem that dominates literary magazines.”

The irony here is that language poetry has come to dominate magazines and book prizes over the last few decades every bit as much as new criticism once did. And how strange it is that everyone is always reacting against literary magazines and most likely because their poems were not getting into them (which involves its own egocentricity). And then considering the very small readerships of literary magazines, it's quite amazing so many revolutionary poetries result.

“I look out my/window and I/am important” jokes scholar Robert J. Bertholf. Even the line breaks are true. Bertholf continues with the satire of the typical workshop instructor asking, "Has s/he earned this last line, class?”

You can see why someone would want to revolt.

Lewis says “it seems that mainstream poetry exists simply to justify an apparatus of writing grants, workshops, summer poetry camps, and magazines, rather than for any reading audience.”

Which is an interesting thing to say because I can tell you this: thirty years later Language poetry has done nothing to change that fact, but arguably made it worse.

There’s a fine line between art pieces that use words as visual material and experimental poems that do the same; and I feel language poems sometimes cross that line depending upon the intent of the poem. Lewis overtly states this when he says Clark Coolidge’s landmark 1970 book Space “turned the subject of poetry onto itself by treating words as solid objects, much in the way a painter uses a tube of oil paint—as material for making art.”

The intent of sense making by parataxis is a different intent that separating words entirely from any sense-making aim. And word as paint, wood or any kind of object steps away from poetry and becomes a physical object of art. I have the same issue with digital poetry that likewise doesn’t use words for any language-sense-making aim.

Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman (pictured above), Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andres and their journals from the 1970s and 1980s are discussed.

“Admittedly, a good deal of the poetry is difficult. It requires that the reader drop his or her notion of the poem as anecdote or self-revelation and accept it as a ‘living document of the author’s engagement with the reader and the world through language as the agent of shared thinking.’”

This reminds me of a very talented undergraduate poet I knew at University of Missouri-St. Louis named Diane Harvestmoon who once said she read Gertrude Stein like listening to rain falling. I finally got it and still believe her definition of language poetry was the best I've ever heard.

“This is not writing aimed at reaching the masses, but at that fierce and devoted group of believers who are already serious readers of poetry.”

Poet’s poets. Scientist’s scientists. There is a definite need in the world for pure experimentation away from any practical application. And sometimes, like unintended consequences from pure scientific experimentation, there are found practical benefits. These poets ask “’How does it make meaning?’ Rather than ‘What does it mean?’” This means these poems study the way we read poems, which is important but not for everybody. There are other neccessary goals for poetry. When anyone makes the statement that this is the new poetry and other poetries are done for, then we have a problem. When magazines and book prizes publish mostly language poetry, then we are leaving out other vital audiences and experiments.

I, myself, am interested in project-based language poetry which Lewis here calls “procedural investigations”like Ron Silliman’s using no verbs in his poem “Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps” or Ted Greenwald’s poem on one-word lines, “Makes Sense” or David Melnick’s poem using a “self-invented vocabulary list,” “PCOET” or Len Hejinian’s poem “My Life” which is almost autobiographical but in a mishmash scramble:

"…Why are these people writing to each other. It’s true that there are times when its embarrassing to have come from California. The late afternoon light, which my mother always referred to as “backlighting,” gentled the greens with blue and grey. I only want the facts. It’s o.k. to have pancakes for dinner.”

These writers are trying to get out of their own heads and Lewis says they are not interested in writing what they already think. He traces their influences to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creely, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Larry Eigner, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, Vladimir Khlebnikhov, early William Carlso Williams, 1960s cinema and art, the writings of earthworks artist Robert Smithson, minimalism, scientific, nonliterary vocabulary, Rolan Barthe’s writings about the death of the author and other ideas of post-structuralists. These poems reject new Criticism’s ideal of "representational language carrying meaning in a story or anecdote."

The problem with destabilizing authorship (which eventually results in destabilizing expertise and somehow humility) is the atmosphere of meaninglessness we are living in today, where everyone accuses their neighbors of fake news. To challenge reality is to destabilize it and there are political ramifications for that once the cat is out of the bag. To use a flawed piece of rhetorical language.

Like digitial poets, language poets have written a lot of criticism and theory. And Lewis admists “these critical writings are far more interesting than Language Poetry itself.” I’ve said as much about early digital poems. “Their works may become little more than fodder for numerous internalized academic debates. Will Language Poetry become part of the very institutions it opposes by providing yet another entrée on the menu of Modern Language Association (MLA) conventions.”

Yes and yes and yes.

Lewis also points out that Language Poetry “has generated a great amount of outright hostility….Poetry raders, at some level, are a society of believers….has faith in the rituals of the form: the conventional handling of metaphor, closure, and the narrative are not only accepted by expecte, and any desecration of the tabernacle of poetry often results in the cry of ‘philistine’ or anti-poetry.’”

There’s also a new accusation of white privilege made against language poets, that these poets exist in a safe harbor that permist the luxury of experimentation and play. Marginalized writers may feel pressed to keep trafficking in sense-making. No group is monolithic, however, and there are experimental black poets like Harryette Mullen. But many other poets from marginalized communities might feel they cannot afford to avoid the poetry of poltical witness in service of what Language Poetry critic Tom Clark calls “the usual disjointed, self-referential mucking about grammar.”

Because even these attempts to avoid the self somehow comes back upon the self and self-referenced process.

Ron Silliman admits this poetry “threatens established thinking” and so it now exists as threatened. We are now wringing our hands at the loss of rational thinking on social media and in govnerment. Instead of pushing readers to use their critical thinking skills more, people have given up figuring out the new quagmires and as a society we're all doing far less critical thinking.

So although I feel there is a need for this type of experimentation and I personally enjoy reading the results, the project’s goals have not been met…like…at all. I compare these language experiments to spending the last decade watching ghost-hunting reality shows. I really enjoy it; I always hope they’ll find proof of a ghost; but reviewing the results from ten years ago against shows of today we don’t have much to show for all of it. Does that mean we should stop trying to prove ghosts exist? I don’t think so. But we should have more humility and, like any good scientist, reconsider our hypotheses.

The artcile also includes some sample writings from Charles Bernstein which encapsulates language poetry's goals in a surprisingly sensical way:

“Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference,
it brings you to your senses.”

And this from Rae Armantrout

“Going to the Desert
is the old term

"landscape fo zeroes"

the glitter of edges
again catches the eye

to approach these swords!

lines across which
beings vanish / flare

the charmed verges of presence”

and this fragment from “Person” by Bob Perelman:

no matter how liberal the building codes
glass houses conceived in sin from day one
blizzards of chance down on the fountain of youth
all without a verb
because capitalism makes nouns
and burns connections.

The Essay Project: Duende

September 7, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I remember this next essay in the David Rivard class packet. It was a popular one at Sarah Lawrence because Federico Garcia Lorca wrote so eloquently about New York City. The essay is “The Duende: Theory and Divertissement” and like other Spanish works of poetry and prose, it dances around the topic a lot. And I really like that about Spanish poetry; but I’m annoyed by the fog of un-specificity in the essays. It starts to sound like so much spiritual, tent-revival mumbo-jumbo after a few pages.

Lorca's essay is describing moments when someone will say, “Now that has real duende!”

He says Manuel Torres once said this about a singer, “You have a voice, you know all the styles, but you will never bring it off because you have no duende.” This statement is so assertive you sense there's a blowhard behind it. Lorca goes on to say duende can be found in “anything that springs out of energetic instinct” whatever that is.

Lorca admits it's all a big mystery, “ a mysterious power that all may feel and no philosopher can explain.” He calls it an “earth-force.” All artists work toward perfection “at the cost of a struggle with a duende,” which is not an angel or a muse, “the Muse dictates and…prompts. There is relatively little she can do, for she keeps aloof and is so full of lassitude….The Muse arouses the intellect….but intellect is oftentimes the foe of poetry because it imitates too much.”

Ok, I'm half way there but not completely…sounds tricky. He continues…

“The Girl with the Combs had to mangle her voice because she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form, but for the marrow of form—pure music spare enough to keep itself in air. She had to deny her faculties and her security; that is to say, to turn out her Muse and keep vulnerable, so that her Duende might come and vouchsafe the hand-to-hand struggle. And then how she sang! Her voice feinted no longer; it jetted up like blood, ennobled by sorry and sincerity, it opened up like ten fingers of a hand around the nailed feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni—tempestuous!…”

The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all the forms as they existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just-opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instills almost religious transport…”

"All of the arts are capable of duende, but it naturally achieves its widest play in the fields of music, dance, and the spoken poem, since these require a living presence to interpret them…”

"The magical virtue of poetry lies in the fact that it is always empowered with duende to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, because with duende, loving and understanding are simpler, there is always the certainty of being loved and being understood; and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression acquires at times, in poetry, finite characters.”

If you’re still confused, here is more information about the Duende in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_(art)

The essay has a spiritual element I didn’t quote but that is captured in Wikipedia: “at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.” The Wikipedia also contains Nick Cave’s description of duende as a sadness in love songs.

So although I think Lorca’s very long-winded description is way too elusive to be useful (which may be the point), I actually do believe in duende. The problem is, it’s subjective measurement. What produces an emotional response in one person does not produce an emotion response in another. A lot of it has to do with culture and environment.

This is duende as described in the final stanza of Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.”

The Essay Project: Sharon Olds’ Little Memoirs

August 31, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Next up from Suzanne Gardiner's Sarah Lawrence Essay class back in the mid-1990s were three pieces by Sharon Olds who was very popular with the women I knew at the college and it seemed this was because she was a very contemporary confessional poet who was not afraid of writing about sexual content, parental abuse. And that was very appreciated in the 1990s. But I had a hard time getting into Olds because her prose and verse seemed a bit flat to me. This feels almost like sacrilege to say.

In three stapled packets there were two tiny memoir essays that I can’t find online or referenced in a book anywhere although the photocopy is clearly from a journal or anthology somewhere.

In the first little essay, “Small Memoir on Form” the first sentence is “Meter and rhyme always had a strong power over me” and that’s pretty much about as exciting as the thing gets.

Olds takes us through her autobiographical reading-list as a teenager, which sounded pretty advanced to me but I recently read Mary Oliver's childhood list and it was also pretty advanced. Olds read Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Auden, Roethke, St. Vincent Millay, Donne among others…it really is a very long list. Then how she studied foreign languages to read international poems in their original languages (now that's passion for poetry!), and then how she loved diagramming sentences….

“There was always that danger, that any received form might take over, emptying itself of the heart it was meant to support.”

College was scanning poems and avoiding history, math and science. Then she lists all the forms she practiced until earning her Ph.D. and immediately freeing herself with free verse:

“I think I saw the sonnet form as somehow located in an atmosphere of elegance—a court with a Queen—a decorated place where one fit into the pattern. A kind of Anglophile upper-middle-class world. And I wanted to sound like a “real person”—an “ordinary woman.”

What I find interesting here is the juxtaposition with the essay last week by Philip Levine and his heartfelt scenes, narratives and conversations. Olds' essay is more abstract and unparticular about what these references and influences opened up in her, bringing it all alive for us. She talks about wanting to get on the page “energy and joy of language…an independent will and soul…pent-up feelings and subjects…sentimental and melodramatic.” But there's no energy and joy here somehow.

But she does say she always a poem was something “inside you, almost written really, and it’s up to you to get it out intact. Transfer its life onto the page until it can breathe on its own.”

She talks about dancing, hard-rock dances and the contrapuntal, the trochaic rhythms of her early poems. “For the first years, all I wrote was personal…it was all I could handle. My heart was too small.”

Then she goes into process a bit:

“Form. I try to start at the beginning, and work through toward the (as yet unseen) end, trying to feel when the poem is going away from its path (which it’s creating), it’s heart-line (head-line, body-line, soul-line). If I’ve gone the wrong way—cross out back up to where it feels right, starting bringing it down again.”

and

“The strong energy position is the beginning of the line for me rather than its end. I see the images scooping up…”

She then questions whether we want poems to “’lift up’…from the level of ‘mere life’” or “get it on the page as is.”

“You have control over what you write on the paper, but not what comes into your head. You don’t make an image, like a cake, out of ingredients. It ‘comes to you’: it’s a gift….the whole poem is like that—it comes to you, appears inside you, you let it out onto the page half active, half receptive, a kind of love-making. To put more emphasis on formal patterning would be, for me, to give too much power to one side of the equation—to be false to the terms of the enterprise.”

So much of human thought is still so mysterious. I do think you can control thought to the extent you control what you read, hear, what your conversations are about. You can prime the mind. But you can’t manipulate it fully to operate however you'd like.

Olds ends on her idea of free verse as a “soul made visible” and strangely the last little paragraph is about the power of poetry. And that “some say” it keeps us from going over the edge."

The next little essay is “A Brief Visual-Arts Memoir” and it’s similarly flat.

“I don’t remember the first real painting I saw. I drew a lot, wrote a lot, made Christmas cards and elaborate tiny place-cards for large family dinners.”

She talks about documentary photographs in Time Magazine that moved her. She says, “Of all the arts, dance is the most important to my work.”

Sentences like that…it feels like a sketch that never developed into something.

She continues, “…memories and feelings…locked up in our muscles.”

“I feel the beat (meter) physically.”

“So the visual is essential to me (perhaps as the musical or the conceptual might be to someone else), and the visual arts are important to me mostly for the joy they give me.”

All the many declarations of things that "are important to me" feel empty and undeveloped.

But then she does say something interesting about Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party piece: “Chicago’s combination of massive ambition and precise gorgeous detail—a large dramatic piece made of many individual pieces.” She also likes Louise Bourgeois’ piece Femme Ccouteau. But her favorite art object is New York City. End of essay.

So….those were pretty uninteresting for me. But then the last little stapled was something different altogether. One page is a biographical statement of how she wrote “The Wellspring” which was a poem included in Best American Poetry 1989. She says she was writing the poem on the train from Pittsburgh to New York City and:

“…it took eight hours to find the ending, or for the ending to find me. I wrote and wrote, and crossed out and crossed out. It’s something that happens to me sometimes—getting stuck on an ending for hours and hours. Probably lots of people would leave it then—take a break—and that’s probably the right thing to do. I just can’t. The poem keeps pulling at me. It pulls me back to the point where it starts to go wrong. It won’t let me go…I have to finish it, according to its own lights, before I can be free of it and it of me…This ending was waiting for me at home. When I saw, across the reed swamps and the Palisades, the tiny steeples of Manhattan, I ‘got’ it.”

Whoever turned in these packets then added “The Wellspring” poem on the next page. Then the page after that is the rewrite of the poem, now titled “The Source” from her 1996 book which used the title The Wellspring.

This is a poem about sex with men and a very physical description of giving head. The poem then turns into a poem about her father which is pretty amazing (and disturbing sub- textually) but still shockingly amazing. I think in the class we were probably discussing the editing process between the two poems and evaluating the changes.

Obviously Olds didn’t let the poem go on the train that day. She kept rewriting this quite extraordinary poem. I feel the first poem was stronger, more confident. The book's version became more tentative.

For example the Wellspring version starts with this line: “It is the deep spring of my life, this love for men.” That line must have had an impact because I can find quotes of it online as one of the great opening lines of a poem.

The same can't be said for the changed, more vague version in the Source poem, “It became the deep spring of my life.”

As if it wasn’t always a thing that was. Later the Wellspring line, “and drive the stuff/giant nerve down my throat till it/stoppers the hole of the stomach that is always hunger” becomes “and help guide the massed/heavy nerve down my throat until it/stoppers the hole behind the breastbone that is always hungry,”

It’s a bit less salacious the later-day way. Not to give the poem away but Olds eventually has a conversation with sperm and the earlier Wellspring lines “Stay here—for the/children of this father it is a better life;/but they cannot hear me. Blind, deaf…” become “Stay here–/for the children of this father it may be the better life;/but they cannot hear. Blind, deaf…”

The certainty becomes a “maybe.” And the heartbreak was in the certainty.

Sharon Olds has very nice hair, by the way, so I added her to my list: https://www.pinterest.com/poetmarymccray/poets-with-sexy-hair/

Books About Identity

August 25, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I picked up Chen Chen’s book When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities because of the Cher reference in it. But this book did not disappoint. Every poem was a dream. It’s one of those books you enjoying so much you slow down in order to be able to be with it longer. Every poem was an experiment of some kind but with an emotional quality that didn’t feel cold.

“Self-Portrait As So Much Potential” starts us off by introducing us to how the poet sees himself and what his mother wanted him to be. Chen Chen writes delicious lines like “I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic./Come amble & ampersand.” It’s a scat skirting around the emotion of being a disappointment as a gay son. Experiment that are touching makes these very engaging pieces. “In the Hospital” is another good mom poem.

Chen Chen does a kind of spiritual questing here with a kick of humor, like in “I’m Not a Religious Person But.”

And then there are moving love poems like “Summer Was Forever” and the questioning “Elegy”

And the sheer scope of his identity poems: “I am making my loneliness small” from the poem “West of Schenectady” and “my hands/have turned out to be no bee,/all bumble,” from “How I Became Sagacious.”

His experiments are even somehow holistic as in “Please Take Off Your Shoes Before Entering Do Not Disturb.”

And that’s all just in section one! I’ve check-marked almost every poem in this book as a favorite. So from here let me just list the favorites of the favorites:

The lovely ode “To the Guanacos at the Syracuse Zoo” ends with “But isn’t this/how it happens?Aren’t all great/love stories, at their core,/great mistakes?”

“Elegy for My Sadness” hit a heartbreaking home-run with its conflation of Frenchness and depression and I’m sure I will be coming back to this poem many times.

“Kafka’s Axe & Michael’s Vest” covers the idea of silence. A few of his poems reference Paul Celan and asks the question on all of our minds, “What does it mean, to sing in the language of those/who have killed your mother,/would kill her again?” and the tough question “Are we even built for peace?”

We get more of his struggles with his family in “Chapter VIII” when he says “I tried to ask my parents to leave the room,/but not my life. It was very hard. Because the room was the size/of my life.”

And the love poem which is the ode “For I Will Consider My Boyfriend Jeffrey” – “For he looks happy & doesn’t know I’m looking & that makes his happiness free.”

Likewise I bought the chapbook Notebooks from Mystery School by Margaret McCarthy because of her Cher poem in it and the interesting thing about reading this collection was how I had misjudged the Cher poem out of context of the rest of the chapbook. I had read her poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking At Cher,” which is a poem about aging and the transformations we perform in order to avoid aging’s abuse, as sort of dismissive and a critique of maybe what not to do, how not to age like Cher, but the lines were opaque so I wasn’t sure about that.

I was off the mark in any case. This poems are gritty and unapologetic about identity with poems like “Slut” and the free use of words like “crone” and hints at black-sheep arguments with her family. In hindsight I don’t feel McCarthy was invoking Cher as anything less than a admiring curiosity and that the reference to Cher’s “raven heart” was a reference to a “shaman heart” who illustrates that matter can match spirit (we're only as old as we feel).

The New Yorker had a good essay recently called "In The Wars, The Strange Case of Ivor Gurney" by Anthony Lane which was about Kate Kennedy’s biography Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney.

This is an interesting piece because Gurney was a private and not an officer like some other famous World War I poets (Wilfred Owen for example). His poems are right in the trenches. He was also an accomplished composer.

The article raises questions about the border between sanity and genius. When discussing his orchestral work “Gloucestershire Rhapsody” the reviewer says, “We are at the core of the Gurney conundrum: where does musical ingenuity end and mental volatility begin? So many of his songs are like interrupted idylls, wrong-footing us with their surprising harmonic shifts, as if we had tripped from grass into brambles. Should we revere such an instinct for the unforeseen, or pity the anxious sorrow that lies beneath?”

Lane then talks about Gurney's poems and that “a reading of ‘Sweller in Shadows’ compels you to ask: Gurney was no Modernist, but by what token do we treat his thronging, darting effusions as testaments to an inward disarray, while the laying down of fragments, in the hands of T.S. Eliot, is viewed as a strategy of great deliberation and cunning?”

The article excerpts from his poems “To His Love” and “The Not-Returning.”

Conspicuous Poetry Products: Poems in Valentino Ads

August 25, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The New Yorker has been publishing ads by Valentio where the word Valentino is mentioned in a poem.

One ad displays Valentino in larger font size with a poem by Ocean Vuong called “Gian Giacomo Capriotti to Leonardo Da Vinci.”

The other one I've seen is this ad with “The Feminine as Armor” by Janet Mock.

I hope the poets were paid well.