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The Essay Project: The Metaphysics of Entering Poetry

August 25, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

First poet who’s book I liked was Philip Levine's What Work Is. I read a small amount of assigned poetry books in college and most were over my head. But this one I understood sort of spiritually if not just making sense of it. Therefore, Levine was a big early figure in my poetic imagination about who loving poets were. He was a living, working poet.

So when he came to Sarah Lawrence College to read in the mid-1990s and walked in the door right by me in the foyer of Sloanim House, it was like a superstar had entered the building. The only other poet I’ve had that feeling around was Joy Harjo, which was why I was more than willing to pick her up at the Albuquerque airport at midnight and drive her back to a hotel Santa Fe by the outlet mall so that none of the creative writing staff at the Institute for American Indian Art would have to do it.

As a poet from the industrial Detroit working class, Levin's subject was usually the intersection of poetry and his life with early labor work in Detroit factories. I vaguely remember choosing this essay for Suzanne Gardiner's essay class. It’s unstapled which means I might have used it to run off 35 copies (the class was popular and so crowded, students sat in chairs around the edge of the room; snagging a table seat was always unlikely). Student comments about the essay I wrote in the margins: “didn’t need an oxygen mask” (not so hard to read as some other essays in the class), “down to earth quality” (yes, that is Philip Levine) and “put poetry back in the world” which is someone’s idea about Levine’s project.

The essay was called “Entering Poetry” and it was excerpted in some anthology not noted on the printout (bad me). But eventually it became part of his book The Bread of Time: Toward and Autobiography (2001). (This is how poets in the 1990s were…they made gestures toward things. They felt too cowed by post-modernism to commit to actually doing anything.) But re-reading the essay again I was struck by how different it was than the other essays in the class. I really struggled to find essays to submit to the group and like the prior one (a journalistic screed on what was wrong with poetry today from a local newspaper), this one was very accessible, almost too accessible for the class. But in a way this essay presented another example, a more loose, more conversational and autobiographical essay about poetry that feels refreshing among the other think-pieces.

Levine talks about being a hard-luck city kid in Detroit trying to find his way, sometimes fighting through 1940's anti-Semitic bullies. He came to poetry after moving to the suburbs and finding solitude in woods behind his house. And this I found interesting because it mirrored my own experience: he discovered his love of words and his speaking voice not through reading. He sat in the trees and spoke “tiny delicious” sentences to the stars and “the smell of the wet earth would fill my head.”

This essay is frankly only an essay because it was excerpted as such in a book of essays. As part of a thing that is “towards autobiography” it’s just another chapter of human development. So not much theory here. More experience.

Levine talks about what an almost religious experience it was chewing on words. “I could almost believe someone was listening and that each of my words, frightened with feeling, truly mattered.” He then talks about wanting to learn to plant things and learning gardening words like “sandy loam” and he talks about the “earth’s curious pungency that suggested both tobacco and rust.”

Then he says

“tasting the words, I immediately liked them, and repeated them, and then more words came that also seemed familiar and right. Then I looked at the work my hands had wrought, then I said in my heart, As it happened to the gardener, so it happened to me, for we all go into one place; we are all earth and return to earth….I was sure too my words must have smelled of sandy loam and orange blossoms. That was the first night of my life I entered poetry."

As an aside (speaking of gardening), my workplace has started Slack social groups and I’ve joined many of them: cooking (just to see the pictures of food everyday mainly), gardening (people are too busy gardening to post anything there), pets (yesterday’s post was the adage "become the person your dog thinks you are" and I said my terrier thinks I’m a sucker), books (no one’s mentioned poetry yet) and music. I wondered to myself which group is going to be the first to start “shoulding” on everybody. You know, "You should eat/read/listen/adopt/garden with this." Guess who it was. Yup. The music group.

Anyway, Levine then switches gears (har!) and talks about growing up and working at Chevrolet Gar and Axel and his struggles there politically and physically and “the oceanic roar of work.” [This part of the essay has been excerpted here: https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/levine/poetsonpoetry.html.]

He says, “I have already tried at least a dozen times to capture the insane, nightmarish quality of my life a Chevy” and he says the thickness in his body affected his writing. “I carried what I did with me at all times, even when I lifted a pencil to write my poems.” Levine wanted to “say something about the importance of the awfulness I had shared in and observed."

Then he jumps to his later life as a professor in Fresno, California, and a dream he had there about a colleague back from a grease shop in Detroit, how the dream felt like a rejection of his former life and identity.

And so he started writing about it and realized when he closed his eyes he couldn’t see “the blazing color of the forges of nightmare or the torn faces of the workers….the deafening ring of metal on metal…or the sweet stink of decay.” Instead he saw a company of men and women he loved connecting with each other emotionally and physically. He imagined his former colleague with him in the “magical, rarefied world of poetry." The poem he wrote was “In a Grove Again” and then all the poems that would eventually became the book Not This Pig.

And the whole evolution of this story he is telling is just in an effort to temper “the violence I felt toward those who’d maimed and cheated me with a tenderness towards those who had touched and blessed me.”

The next David Rivard class packet essay is called “Notes on Poetry and Philosophy” by Charles Simic which you can find in The Life of Images, Selected Prose (2015). This is the complete opposite sort of essay, all the head and none in the hands. And yet…a little magically they are both about the metaphysics of entering poetry, one poet (Levine) just explains his connection more practically. The other (Simic) uses philosophical concepts. They both also allude to “the labor” of poetry.

He starts with a story:

“Some sort of Academy of Fine Arts from which they stole the bust of the philosopher Socrates so he may accompany them on what was to be a night of serious drinking.

It was heavy. The two of them had to lug it together. They went from tavern to tavern like that. They’d make Socrates sit in his own chair. When the waiter came, they’d ask for three glasses. Socrates sat over his drink looking wise….This was my father’s story.”

Simic talks about how his father got him into philosophy and how he has always digested the ideas of philosophy through poetry, for example:

"The other appeal of Heidegger was his attack on subjectivism, his idea that it is not the poet who speaks through the poem but the work itself. This has always been my experience. The poet is at the mercy of his metaphors. Everything is at the mercy of the poet’s metaphors—even Language, who is their Lord and master.”

Later he quote, “The twentieth-century poet is ‘a metaphysician in the dark,’ according to Wallace Stevens.”

Simic structures his diminutive sections under poetic and obtuse headings, like “The Fish is Sphinx to the Cat” and “Knights of Sorrowful Countenance Sitting Late Over Dog-eared Books.”

He says, “There is a major misunderstanding in literary criticism as to how ideas get into poems. The poets, supposedly, proceed in one of these two ways: they either state their ideas directly or they find equivalents for them.”

But he loses me here: “…the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up the ideas. If this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what has been thought and said before. [why necessarily?] There would be no poetic thinking in the way Heidegger conceives of it. There would be no hope that poetry could have any relation to truth.” [???—those are actually my question marks from the first reading back in the 1990s.]

“My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one’s walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. …where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear.”

That actually sounds like an interesting experiment to try out. “These objets trouves of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge. That’s not quite right! It’s not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.”

The next statement reminds me of an argument I had in Suzanne Gardiner’s essay class:

“…back to things themselves, said Husserl, and the Imagist had the same idea. An object is the irreducible itself, a convenient place to begin…”

“Not true,” I wrote in the margins. I remember how the class digressed into a side-argument about this, how I believed we compromise with our ideas of the irreducible self or thing. We say a chair is its irreducible self but it’s not at all irreducible; it’s made of materials with atoms, which are themselves reducible. And because the levels of reducibility are possibly endless, that make us crazy (because we're not scientists, after all), and we like to pretend the chair as the irreducible thing. But it’s far from true. It’s just our coping-mechanism…with a scientific reality.

Simic goes on to quote Jack Spicer, who saw himself metaphysically as a receiver of messages, to say “Poets think they’re pitchers when they’re really catchers.” Simic says we don’t “will our metaphors” and that words have “a mind of their own.”

I believe this is only because the workings of the subconscious are still so mysterious to us. We have no more evidence that we’re catchers than that we’re pitchers. Or rather we have a scant more evidence that we’re qualified pitchers than we are catchers. Simic hints at this very issue when he admits,

“Heidegger says that we will never understand properly what poetry is until we understand what thinking is….most interestingly…the nature of thinking is something other than thinking, something other than willing. It’s this ‘other’ that poetry sets traps for.”

And I love this part:

“My hunch has always been that our deepest experiences are wordless. There may be images, but there are no words to describe the gap between seeing and saying, for example. The labor of poetry is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words…the poem…presents an experience language cannot get at.”

He says “poetry attracts me because it makes trouble for thinkers.” In the marginalia I’ve written “How?” but this isn’t the kind of essay to describe the hows.

Very similar to Louise Gluck, Simic likes “a poem that understates, that leaves out, breaks off, remains open-ended…Emily Dickinson’s poems do that for me. Her ambiguities are philosophical. She lives with uncertainties, even delights in them. To the great questions she remains ‘unsheilded,’ as Heiddegger would say. The nature of presence itself is her subject. The awe off…the superme mastery of consciousness watching itself.”

And here Simic seems to admit the consciousness is situated within the self.

The Essay Project: American Families in Poetry

August 18, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Robert Hass’ essay "Families and Prisons” from the book What Light Can Do (2012) is the next essay in the David Rivard class packet. This was an interesting exploration about why American’s write about their current families more than poets do in other countries. Like their kids and wives, not just their families of origin, which all poets seem to write about (mothers, fathers, siblings).

Hass says autobiographical poetry about families is relatively new in lyric poetry although “family is one of the fundamental subjects of literature…the great Greek tragedies are about families, and so are many of the great novels of the nineteenth century.” He talks about families in great American plays (O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee) and families in Faulkner novels. But he says it wasn’t until Allen Gisnberg’s poem "Kaddish" and Robert Lowell’s book Life Studies that poets took on domestic life. The sixteenth century was all about erotic love, the seventeenth about “man’s relationship to God.”

“It is almost exclusively [an] American subject,” Hass says, having to do with American “culture and mores.” He quotes a Peruvian poet “who said he had no stomach for Americans and their little, personal poems.”

He talks about the intimacy of writing about one’s children and the “familial feeling” and “buried forms that the emotion can take.” says, “the child enters literature with romanticism…when the middle class becomes its main creator and audience…the child emerges not long after the idea of the rights of man emerged.” He notes where children and politics first merged in literature: Blake, Dickens (Oliver Twist), Hugo (Les Miserables), Dostoevsky, Chekhov. He talks about Gothic novels, sentiment, “tears and terror” and pathos.

Hass then talks about poets who self-praise themselves and poetry. He humorously (or maybe not so humorously) summarizes Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz to say “the proof of the greatness of poetry as an art is the fact that, though no one wants to read it or think about it, though it bores people to tears, and almost no one would under any circumstance short of compulsion read a long poem, and would only in moments of weakmindedness have the thought that it would occasionally be a good idea to read short ones…nevertheless by the sheer brute tactic of talking endlessly and on all possible occasions from the beginning of human utterance to the present moment about the truth, beauty, daring, wisdom, depths, sublimity, fineness, strength, power, necessity and indispensable force of poetry, that everyone else, mainly because the noise has been so incessant and they have had too many other actual concerns pressing upon them to bring the matter to the center of their minds, have more or less yielded, at least as a piety, to this barrage of propaganda from the poets and conceded to poetry the poets’ idea of its value.”

Hass says if you have any doubt about this listen to any lecture by any poet.

He then abruptly turns to talk about poets in prison. At first this subject shift made me lose my mind. There’s hardly a transition beyond “thoughts about the first subject” and “I want to turn now to the second.” I wondered if this was just an essay of disparate subjects strung together by a title? Ugh! But you have to go with the flow sometimes. I couldn’t see why we went from families to politics to self-praise, but Hass had a plan.

He lists the most famous of the imprisoned poets throughout time and some who died before a firing squad (“a gesture Gombrowicz would have found completely typical of the self-importance of poets as a breed”) and Hass says some of these poets in these cases are a “victim of their own success” and that “the only reason they are in jail is that they have succeeded in deluding their rulers into the conception of their importance.”

He then goes on to qualify the poetry of some prisoner and hunger-strike poets. They don’t all write amazing poems as it turns out. He talks about a certain Cuban poet forbidden from reading in public and imprisoned again each time he tries. “His poems, I am sorry to say, are terrible.” He says most people think so. Although martyrdom through poetry may be a respectable course, these particular bad but imprisoned poets “look more and more like the spectacle of human life, and less and less like the special distinction of poetry.” Hass says finally that

“some poets with a great gift might lack courage and some with the courage might lack the gift, that some were steadfast, some faltered, some were duplicitous and redeemed themselves, some were pure victims, helpless as crickets in a cage, and some were wrong, and some did harm. A few of their stories belong to the history of contrariness, valor, cowardice, to tragedy, and to loss so sickening and pointless it is not tragic.”

And here is where Hass makes his stand:

“The danger of this is that there is something wrong with admiring the calamitous. Also to mistake the power of poetry in our need to praise it. Writers like everyone else need examples to teach them courage and responsibility – Akhmatova waiting outside the prison wall in Moscow for news of her son, Whitman in the hospital wards of the Civil War, Ai Qing nursing the socket of his blinded eye in the wake of an attack by young Red Guards and continuing to work on his poems – but poetry needs to be able to face toward the world when no one’s suffering gives it special drama.”

He then quotes a Czeslaw Milosz poem from 1943 during the occupation of Warsaw, “The Songs of Adrian Zelinski.”

He specially notes these three stanzas, where our protagonist mostly just feels sorry for himself (far from a heroic sentiment):

"Somewhere there are happy cities.
Somewhere there are, but not for certain.
Where, between the market and the sea,
In a spray of sea mist,
June pours wet vegetables from baskets
And ice is carried to a cafk terrace
Sprinkled with sunlight, and flowers
Drop onto women's hair.

The ink of newspapers new every hour,
Disputes about what is good for the republic.
The teeming cinemas smell of orange peels
And a mandolin hums long into the night.
A bird flicking the dew of song before sunrise.

Somewhere there are happy cities,
But they are of no use to me.
I look into life and death as into an empty winecup.
Glittering buildings or the route of ruins.
Let me go away in peace.
There is a whisper of night that breathes in me."

This reminds me of how being desensitized to violence means you actually lose your sense(s).

Hass reminds us that (until recently) America was “ a space cleared of political violence, deprivation, censorship…roads without barricades…” and that American poems about current families tend to be poems about hope and poems about original families tend to be about fate. He says confessional poems were a reaction against T.S. Eliot and “the doctrine of impersonality.” But then he concedes that even Pound, Eliot and Yeats were autobiographical in their own way as “The Waste Land” is an “account of "a personal crisis….the terrible sense of sexual unhappiness and impending madness and exile from a father’s authority, with the predicament of Western civilization. The lesson of Eliot for young writers was that their most intimate suffering was a powerful metaphor.”

At the end in the final sentences Hass tries to tie American family poems (from happy cities) to a kind of bravery (a bravery of hope really) of its own kind and that this is a modest but true praise for poetry.

The Essay Project: Poems, the Will and God

August 6, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The following essay, "Art in the Light of Conscience" by Russian poet Maria Tsvetaeva is from the book of the same name and the student who handed this one out left off the author attribution (we all later wrote it onto our copies) and of the 19 pages, part of the right-hand text has been cut off by a bad photocopying job. So reading this was a challenge, then and now.

This is not the type of essay I tend to like, being a bit esoteric and vague at the same time. I spent time re-reading sentences to no avail.

Sentences like this: "Genius: the highest degree of subjection to the visitation — one; control of the visitation — two. The highest degree of being mentally pulled to pieces, and the highest of being — collected. The highest of passivity, and the highest of activity."

This actually makes sense after reading the full essay and coming back to it. Her idiosyncratic punctuation takes some getting used to. And I have to say, at first these musings seemed utterly random, but re-reading them a second (now third) time, they seem to have a structural logic.

In this essay, Tsvetaeva is trying to mark out the a religious parameters of talent and at the start, she addresses those who "consciously affirm the holiness of art." "For the atheist, there can be no question of the holiness of art: he will speak either of art's usefulness or of art's beauty."

Tsvetaeva believes art is like nature, it follows its own laws, not the self-will of the artist…"just as much born and not made."

And she questions whether art is truly "For the glory of God?…I don't know for the glory of whom, and I think the question here is not of glory but of power."

In comparing art to nature she asks, "Is nature holy?…why do we ask something of a poem but not of a tree?…Because earth, the birth-giving, is irresponsible, while man, the creating, is responsible…he has to answer for the work…[which is] supposed to be illuminated by the light of reason and conscience."

She then goes on to talk about ecstasy or intoxication in art (something "outside goodness"). She ruminates on what genius is, like a visitation, how things "came upon" Pushkin. Genius she says is both being subject to a visitation and having control over that visitation. Being pulled apart (passively) and being collected (actively). She says there is human will involved but will can only exist after the visitation.

She then uses Pushkin and Walsingham as examples, how Pushkin could not have planned everything, for "one can only plan a work backwards from the last step taken to the first, retracing with one's eyes open the path one had walked blindly."

She's full of delicious melodrama: "So long as you are a poet, you shall not perish in the elemental, for everything returns you to the element of elements: the word….The poet perishes when he renounces the elemental. He might as well cut his wrists without ado."

What does this mean for language and experimental poets? They have not yet acceded to the elemental or slit their wrists.

She then goes on to talk about the difficulty of teaching art: "What does art teach? Goodness? No. Commonsense? No. It cannot teach even itself, for it is — given. There is no thing which is not taught by art; there is no thing the reverse of that, which is not taught by art; and there is no thing which is the only thing taught by art. All the lessons we derive from art, we put into it. A series of answers to which there are no questions. All art is the sole giveness of the answer."

Oy. Hard to wrap your head around, but it's possible if you keep re-reading it.

She then wonders how culpable the artist is: "One reads Werther and shoots himself, another reads Werther and because Werther shoots himself, decides to live. One behaves like Werther, the other like Goethe. A lesson in self-extermination? A lesson in self-defense?…Is Goethe guilty of all the subsequent deaths?…no, Otherwise we wouldn't dare say a single word, for who can calculate the effect of any one word?"

I can't quite agree with that. We can calculate the effect of propaganda and misinformation. We can calculate the effect on persuasion with pretty accurate statistical margins. This is why marketing and political propaganda work, not on everybody, but on many. We are responsible when we say the word 'fire' in a crowded theater.

But then she qualifies that idea: "Artistic creation is in some cases a sort of atrophy of conscience–more than that: a necessary atrophy of conscience, the moral flaw without which art cannot exist. In order to be good (not to lead into temptation the little ones of this world), art would have to renounce a fair half of its whole self. The only way to be wittingly good is — not to be. It will end with the life of the planet."

She then talks about Tolstoy's exception, his "clumsy, extra-aesthetic challenge to art" but then humorously notices that "In Tolstoy's crusade against art, we are seduced again — by art."

Then she talks about "Art without artifice" in which she means a kind of art without affectation or ambitiousness. Of course I loved this part because it has everything to do with our cultural systems of talent hierarchies.

"…there are works that make you say: 'This is not art any more. It's more than art.' Everyone has known works of this sort. Their sign is the effectiveness despite their inadequacy of means, an inadequacy which nothing in the world would make us exchange for any adequacies and abundances, and which we only call to mind when we try to establish: how was it done? An essentially futile approach, for in every born work the ends are hidden. Not yet art, but already more than art. Such works often come from the pens of women, children, self-taught people – the little ones of this world….Art without artifice." Later she says, "A sign of such works is their unevenness." I would add their wabi-sabi.

Tsvetaeva then tries to make sense of the hierarchies of major poet, great poet, lofty poet, genius and here she comes back to the idea that the "poet's whole labour amounts to a fulfillment, the physical fulfilment of a spiritual task (not assigned by himself)…(No such thing as individual creative will.)…Every poet is, in one way or another, the servant of ideas or of elements."

She talks about God and prayer: "What can we say about God? Nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays…it is because we don't have anything to say to God….Loss of trust."

She is full of almost contradictions. Art is a visitation, but not by God. Art is a sinful, seduction. Art is elemental and natural. The poet is responsible…or not.

She tells a compelling story about how her mother could set the hands on a clock face in the dark without being able to see "the absolute time" and how her hand knew what time it truly was, like a blind visionary.

She talks about the "condition of creation" and how "Things always chose me by the mark of my power, and often I wrote them almost against my will…obeying an unknown necessity."

"I don't want anything that isn't wholly mine, wittingly mine, most mine…I won't die for Pugachov–that means he is not mine."

One of her last sections is Intoxiques (poisoned people). "When I speak of the possessed condition of people of art, I certainly don't mean they are possessed by art." She talks about the stuck artist: "Art does not pay its victims. It doesn't even know them….Shyness of the artist before the object. He forgets that it is not himself writing."

The cure? "To forget oneself is, above all, to forget one's weakness."

"Not without reason does each of us say at the end: 'How marvelously my work has come out!' and never: 'How marvelously well I've don't it!' And not: 'It's come out marvelously!,' but it's come out by a marvel, always a miracle; it's always a blessing, even if sent not by God."

"And the amount of will in this?…lines I got by hard work, that is, by dint of listening. And listening is what my will is, not to tire of listening until something is heard…Creative will is patience."

Her conclusion: "There is no approach to art, for it is a seizure. (While you are still approaching, it has already seized you.)"

"If you wish to serve God or man, if in general you wish to serve, to work for the good, then join the Salvation Army or something of that sort–and give up poetry."

I can't imagine our teacher Suzanne Gardiner agreed wholly with this idea or would Adrienne Rich and some very effective activist poets from recent history.

"…if your gift of song is indestructible, don't flatter yourself with the hope that you serve….It is only your gift of song that has served you: tomorrow you will serve it–that is, you'll be hurled by it thrice-nine kingdoms or heavens away from the goal you have set."

She admits those who serve are more important "because it is more needed, the doctor and the priest where they are at the deathbed. "And knowing this, having put my signature to this while of sound mind and in full possession of my faculties, I assert…that I would not exchange my work for any other. Knowing the greater, I do the lesser. This is why there is no forgiveness for me…"

I went from not liking this essay to not liking it again to finally coming around.

The Essay Project: George Oppen and David Rivard’s Tips of Techniques

August 2, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Catching up on our essay class essays, the next essay in the Suzanne Gardiner class with "George and Mary Oppen: Poetry and Friendship" by Sharon Olds which can be found in the book The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (can read on Google books).

This essay is mostly about Oppen as a person and what Sharon Olds likes about his poetry: its cleanness, its ferocious and tenderly agile grammar, its passion for language and the human…its deep genuineness…air of inevitability…for all their wroughtness [the poems] had the authority of natural things….When I read Oppen, I could feel parts of my brain being used that had never been used before….his morality, his politics….a clear-eyed witness…his objectivity and his calmness…his persistent, tireless defining.”

It's sounds so vague but that's how poets talked about poems in the 1990s.

She also liked his “combination of modesty and certainty. It gave him a strong air of moral authority, authority without arrogance. And there was in his work such a sense of male sweetness, the strength that lets a man sow his vulnerability.”

Interesting, the opposite of toxic masculinity.

Olds talks about how sometimes she would “believe it and not understand it…the cogs locked—everything stopped.”

She liked how he was “alternatively elevated and concrete” and how he wrestled with “the problems of privilege, injustice, isolation, identity and poverty.” And how poems could “float in several meanings…rather than trying to find a single path through the poem and stick to it grimly” and how he had “the sound of a prophet….a religious sense.”

She recommended Mary Oppen’s memoir Meaning of Life and talked about visiting the couple in San Francisco and staying at their house and the conversations she had with them.

After the essay, there were attached to the stapled packed a few photocopied pages of 'George Oppen’s Notes' from his letters to Rachel Blaus, 1965 in Selected Letters of George Oppen.

I talk about the following note in my own little essay on digital literature: “the poem is NOT built out of words, one cannot make a poem by sticking words into it, it is the poem which makes the words and contains their meaning. One cannot reach out for roses and elephants and essences and put them in the poem.”

But a lot of these notes I either disagreed with or didn’t quite understand:

“We think the world because we have experienced it.” (You could argue the opposite.)
“The true question of philosophy lies not in what he says, but why he says it.” (There’s marginalia on the essay, not mine, which says “psychology” which is exactly what I was thinking, not poetry.)
“Intelligence is the ability to experience value.” (???)
“No one knows enough to make a book before he writes the book. The writing is a test and a discovery: test and discovery word by word as you go…” (probably true)

I wholeheartedly disagree with this next bit of self-servingness of WANT:

“Poetry speaks of the Will. It seeks to find what we truly WANT Poetry tends therefore to come into conflict everywhere with an established morality. For a morality must be based on the will, on what we WANT. We Even a revealed morality must speak, I think, of a conversation on the will. Of a redemption of the will. But a morality cannot be based on an end which we do not WANT”

(Covid19-2020 anyone?)

But these are interesting:

“POETRY: Openness:: it opens”
“…the serious artists are enemies of art
Always”
“Poetry is a non-tactical art. The poem works out the statement; it is not involved in the tactics of communication. Or of dramatization. This is the fault in Frost; he is too often being tactical.”

Speaking of Robert Frost, the next essay in the David Rivard class packet was Rivard’s own draft essay on Robert Frost and other poets, "Sentences and Syntax: The Voice Making Itself."

I don’t see this title anywhere online so it’s possible the essay was never published or published under another title.

He starts by describing an early-in-the-film one-shot scene from Goodfellas where Kenry and Karen enter The Copa and how this shot is is part of Martin Scorcese’s “cinematic syntax, how the camera becomes “a mediating character, an intelligence” and can be seen in other Scorcese movies like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

He says Robert Frost has a similar stamp of identity and Rivard uses "The Woodpile" to illustrate how the poem builds “an air of vague psychological menace.” The poem uses a particular arrangement of words to build this effect, Rivard says, “the scrambling of referents….expanding sentence lengths,” lots of conjunctions that build the scene and other words of “propulsiveness.”

Rivard then reviews Frost’s ideas about “sound of sense” (how the rhythm and intonations of the sentence have its own sense disconnected from the meaning of the words and Rivard uses Alice in Wonderland as an example of the sound of sense).

Rivard then uses the poem “Provide, Provide” as an example of the spoken voice which he differentiates from the “plain voice” of 1960s poets like M.S. Merwin, James Wright, Louis Simpson and Robert Bly…with their “straight-forward and uncomplicated syntax.” Rivard says that “as a style it is one of the dominant modes of magazine verse. The poem tends not to change pitch from sentence to sentence, never mind the line, and a kind of stasis sets in.”

Which is pretty amazing thing for me to read right now because Rivard recommended I read some Merwin when I took this class and Merwin's plainness drove me batty at that time and I remember writing up a paper for Rivard complaining profusely about it and feeling like Rivard was a bit offended by my complete distaste for Merwin at the time. I’ve since revised my opinion as people do when they grow up.

Anyway, then talks about Arthur Smith’s poem "Nap" and how everything in the poem is pointed at and that there’s “a lack of moment in the syntax.”

Then Rivard talks about Frost’s “sound of sense” theory possibilities in free verse where “the shapes and movements…are controlled largely by the sentence, not the line,” how greater variation and control can be used for pitch and postures."

This is a good point about free verse. He talks about how Louise Glück and William Carlos Williams do that. “Line breaks, phrasal units, clauses within sentences—all act as counterpoints to the sentence as it unwinds down the page.”

Rivard says, “the argument made by the sentence is the argument with the self.” This almost sounds like a George Oppen note.

Next Rivard talks about Philip Larkin’s poem "Reference Back" and Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 71" where Rivard talks about the poem's working out of thought and how inverted syntax and the left-out “connective tissue” can “produce torque” and tension in the lines. “The language has plasticity and mass as well as motion and exactness.”

Then he talks about Rilke’s "Spanish Dancer" which he compares to the Cezanne’s paintings and their use of color to create sense. Likewise, Rilke uses tension with music and meaning.

Then he discusses Denis Johnson’s "In a Light of Other Lives" and how speed is caused by “some unnatural line breaks” and some parings of plain and “extravagant” adjectives that “creates a charge.”

The final poem discussed is Frank Bidart’s "To the Dead" and how Bidart uses doubled punctuation, line breaks, stanza breaks, capital letters, dependent clauses, interjections, unfinished phrases…and constant hesitation or extension.

There's a lot going on in this essay. The next essay in Rivard packet is Adrienne Rich’s "The Hermit’s Scream," which we already covered in the Gardinier class so I’ll be skipping over that. This is the only overlapping essay so far so it must have been a popular one for poetry workshop teachers back then.

More Explorations in Digital Media Poetry

August 2, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Just finished Media Poetry edited by Eduardo Kac and although it's a bit old (2007), it really got my ideas flowing for some new pieces and solidified my thinking around what I want to do.

I created a few new things:

– my own essay on directions for digital poetry
– a digital literature primer (linked from the essay)
– I've also been exploring more digital lit pieces and updating my favorites list

The Essay Project: The Process of Making a Poem, Memorizing Poems

June 28, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In Suzanne Gardiner's Sarah Lawrence poetry essay class sometimes people like me (but this time it wasn’t me) would turn in newspaper clippings and articles about poetry instead of essays. I did it because I couldn’t navigate a book of essays for the life of me. Others did it for whatever reason and I’m thankful in hindsight because it gives us a break from academic blather. And I like that too, but sometimes you need a refreshing contrast.

This article was in a 1995 issue of The Washington Post Magazine, “A Narrow World Made Wide” by Walt Harrington. It’s a profile of then-U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove.

Harrington follows Dove around for a few days while they talk poetry and she rewrites a poem then-called “Sweet Dreams” that eventually becomes “Sic Itur Ad Astra.”

They start by discussing her bewitching hour for writing which is midnight to 5 am, but she admits she can’t do this any longer with kids and a day job. This reminded me of writing in High Schoo and at UMSL in my St. Louis bedroom and at Sarah Lawrence in my Yonkers basement apartment. My sweet spot was 10 pm to 4 am. And I had particular parts of my room or apartment that were most conducive to creativity, somewhat like a vortex although I have never felt a real vortex so that’s just conjecture.

Harrington and Dove explore her new one-room writing cabin behind her house. She has a small stereo there where she plays records while she writes. This made me think of the one-room she-shed behind my house that a former owner blew glass in and then another made local, award-winning beer in. I’ve turned it into a Cher She-shed. Maybe it should have been made into a writing cabin. Messed-up priorities, huh?

The poem Dove is rewriting originated from a line in a notebook dating back to 1980. “For 15 years, she had looked at those lines every couple of months and thought, ‘No, I can’t do it yet.’ She wrote 300 other poems instead. But just seven weeks from today, [she] will consider [the poem] done—with a new title, new lines, new images and a new meaning the poet herself will not recognize until the poem is nearly finished.”

“It will be a curious, enlightening journey: one poem, one act of creation, evoked from a thousand private choices, embedded in breath and heartbeat, music, meter and rhyme, in the logic of thought and the intuition of emotion, in the confluence of the two, in the mystery of art and the labor of craft, which will transform random journal notations, bodiless images, unanchored thoughts, orphan lines of poetry and meticulously kept records of times and dates into something more. Words with dictionary meanings will become words that mean only what the experiences of others will make of them, words no longer spoken in Rita's voice but in whispering voices heard only inside the heads of those who pause to read her poem.”

The author traces her inspiration back to a line in the German book Das Bett and Dove’s love of the sound of German words and “the cadence of thought.” She says, “the sentence said something beautiful and it sounded beautiful: ‘And that is the essence of poetry.”

They start with her first draft that had a line I loved but which was lost to the next rewrite immediately: “we’ll throw away/the books and play/sky-diver in the sheets—” Dove decides she doesn't want the poem to be a “joyful, childlike poem.” The poem would transform itself to be about her ideas on fame instead, her “yearning to travel to the stars and her irritation with daily life.”

They talk about Dove’s unique filing system where she files poems “by the way they feel to her,” like if they contain violence or are introspective or are about her daughter.

She continues to edit the poem: “Rita now enters a strange and magical place in the creation of her poetry, as she begins to carry on a kind of conversation with her poem, as she tries to actually listen to what the poem she has written is trying to tell her, the poet. And the poem begins to create itself.”

What I like about journalistic pieces about poets in contrast to academic essays is the power of the journalist's observation brought to bear on the subject. Non-academic writers seem to be able to step outside of their own heads and look at things objectively, especially when they’re writing about the thought process itself.

“Some people's minds run from point A to point B with the linear determination of an express bus roaring from stop to distant stop. Theirs are minds trained to avoid detours, to cut a path past the alleys and side streets of distraction. Rita's mind is more like the water of a stream swirling randomly, chaotically and unpredictably over the stones below as it still flows resolutely downstream: "It's hard to describe your own mind, but I am really interested in the process of thought. Sometimes I catch myself observing my own thoughts and think, Boy, that's kinda strange how that works.' " Rita is not like those who see tangential thoughts as distracting digressions: "I'm interested in the sidetracking."

Again, this reminded me of my inability to tell a story straight through and avoid tangentials (especially verbal yarns) without going off into sub-stories and eventually losing track of the main point. Losing the thread. And how getting lost is remarkably fun.

“When I write, I feel like I am learning something new every second. But I'm also feeling something more deeply. You don't know where you've been. That's the mystery of it. And then to be able to put it down so that someone else can feel it! I feel incredibly alive."

She makes a million judgements as the poem progresses from draft to draft. She wants the poem to be a collage of fleeting images like a dream. She likes a line but takes it out to use someday maybe in another poem. Invoking food seems too earthy, corporeal. Another part is too surreal. Another part is “not believable.” Another word is too narrow. Some words are just “place holders for the poem’s cadence. New words will come.” Another word is “’too thick,’ not simple enough.” She plays with enjambment “looking for meanings that she didn’t see at first.” She wants more “intriguing, surprising metaphors” and to “imitate the clarity of children’s literature.” Does a line add anything? Does it add nothing?

When she gets stuck, she turns to work on another poem and that cracks the code of the poem she has put aside. “Distractions cleared a path.”

This is a great blow-by-blow feature on the writing process, the end of which discusses a poem's physicality, “…it must also look clean and pure on the page. The idea is to reach people not only through words, ideas, images, sounds, rhythms and rhymes, but also through the pattern of ink their eyes see on the page.” Finally, she gives a nod to Paul Valery’s infamous line when she says, “A poem is never done. You just let it go.”

Somewhat serendipitously, the essay we are up to in the David Rivard class packet is also a journalistic piece, although one written by Robert Pinksy himself from The New York Times in 1994 with the somewhat laborious title, “A Man Goes Into a Bar, See, And Recites: The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained.” This is a good piece about the technology of poetry as it relates to memory.

“POETRY is, among other things, a technology for remembering. Like the written alphabet and the printing press and the digital computer, it is an invention to help and extend memory. The most obvious examples are mnemonic verses ("Thirty days hath September. . . .")… Poetry, a form of language far older than prose, is under our skins.”

Pinsky lists all sorts of masterful forms and rhymers, from nursery rhymes to 'naughty limericks' to Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan (Nobel prize winner!), David Byrne (not a Nobel Prize winner), Salt-n-Pepa (it was the 1990s), Johnny Mercer and Mitchell Parish, hymns “some of which are excellent poems.”

Then he talks about the benefits of asking students to memorize poems and how when people do recite poems, we hear a “quality of attention” or a “peculiar quiet” from the listeners.

He talks about how many people know lines from T.S. Eliots “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and how “getting something by heart in an intuitive, bodily event” that fills “some peculiar human appetite.”

Unfortunately, I am terrible at memorizing things. In high school theater I had no stage freight but complete line blackouts that other actors had to rescue me from. It also explains why I was so lousy at learning French. Although later when I tried to learn Spanish, the French popped out unceremoniously to the chagrin of my Spanish teacher, which indicates a retrieval malfunction instead of a storage one. Probably the only thing I was ever able to memorize is Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard” and once at Sarah Lawrence Jean Valentine made us memorize a poem for her workshop class. I memorized Charles Baudelaire’s “Spleen.” I read it again recently and it’s like I’ve never read the poem before. It must be completely archived in some sub-basement of my brain's catacombs.

But while I was searching for the poem online last week I found this wonderful page of "Spleen" translations by different translators (https://fleursdumal.org/poem/161) with links to various editions of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. I tried to read these line by line so I could understand each translator's unique word choices and I kept getting lost. So today, I created this mashup of each writer's line in a stanza, side by side, one at a time. Of course, reading it this way you lose each writer's momentum, particular atmosphere and rhyme scheme. But you can always go back to the fleursdumal.org site to read them separately again.

Actually, the translation I memorized for Jean Valentine, the Penguin edition translation by Joanna Richardson, is nowhere to be found online. I still think its the best translation but that's a discussion for another day.

When, like a lid, the low and heavy sky
Weights on the spirit burdened with long care,
And when, as far as mortal eye can see,
It sheds a darkness sadder than nights are;

When earth is changed into a prison cell,
Where, in the damp and dark, with timid wing
Hope, like a bat, goes beating at the wall,
Striking its head on ceilings mouldering;

When rain spreads out its never-ending trails
And imitates the bars of prisons vast,
And spiders, silent and detestable,
Crowd in, our minds with webs to overcast,

Some bells burst out in fury, suddenly,
And hurl a roar most terrible to heaven,
Like spirits lost for all eternity
Who start, most obstinately, to complain.

And, without drums or music, funerals
File past, in slow procession, in my soul;
Hope weeps, defeated; Pain, tyrannical,
Atrocious, plants its black flag on my skull.

Pinsky claims “The pleasures of having a poem by heart, if not necessarily always greater than those of analysis, are more fundamental.” It does feel like an accomplishment if you can get one completely into your head.

While I was working on last week’s Adrienne Rich essays, I found more Rich essays and letters. I wasn’t going to blog about them but there were some eerie and important critiques around narcissism worth revisiting.

The New Yorker had a great piece recently on the wellness industry, the quicksand of which I am not extricated personally but when I read Rich's comments about female self-actualization from March 2001 it resonated. She talks about early 1970s feminism and personal self expression.

"Personal narrative was becoming valued as the true coin of feminist expression. At the same time, in every zone of public life, personal and private solutions were being marketed by a profit-driven corporate system, while collective action and even collective realities were mocked at best at at worst rendered historically sterile” …in “mainstream public discourse, personal anecdote was replacing critical argument, true confessions were foregrounding the discussion of ideas. A feminism that sought to engage race and colonialism, the global monoculture of United States corporate and military interests, the specific locations and agencies of women within all this was being countered by the marketing of a United States model of female, or feminine, self-involvement and self-improvement, devoid of political context or content."

That's exactly why beauty products have co-opted political messages.

In August 1997, Rich wrote this:

Like so many others, I've watched the dismantling of our public education, the steep rise in our incarceration rates, the demonization of our young black men, the accusations against our teenage mothers, the selling of health care–public and private–to the highest bidders, the export of subsistence-level jobs in the United States to even lower-wage countries, the use of below-minimum-wage prison labor to break strikes and raise profits, the scapegoating of immigrants, the denial of dignity and minimal security to our working and poor people. At the same time, we've witnessed the acquisition of publishing houses, once risk-taking conduits of creativity, by conglomerates driven single-mindedly to fast profits, the acquisition of major communications and media by those same interests, the sacrifice of the arts and public libraries in stripped-down school and civic budgets and, most recently, the evisceration of the National Endowment for the Arts. Piece by piece the democratic process has been losing ground to the accumulation of private wealth.

1997 she wrote that! Pretty amazing. She goes on to say:

And what about art? Mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, auctioned at Sotheby's, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities, it dies into the "art object" of a thousand museum basements. It's also reborn hourly in prisons, women's shelters, small-town garages, community college workshops, halfway houses–wherever someone picks up a pencil, a wood-burning tool, a copy of "The Tempest," a tag-sale camera, a whittling knife, a stick of charcoal, a pawnshop horn, a video of "Citizen Kane," whatever lets you know again that this deeply instinctual yet self-conscious expressive language, this regenerative process, could help you save your life. "If there were no poetry on any day in the world," the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, "poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." In an essay on the Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, Clayton Eshleman names this hunger as "the desire, the need, for a more profound and ensouled world." There is a continuing dynamic between art repressed and art reborn, between the relentless marketing of the superficial and the "spectral and vivid reality that employs all means" (Rukeyser again) to reach through armoring, resistances, resignation, to recall us to desire. Art is both tough and fragile. It speaks of what we long to hear and what we dread to find."

In October of 1996 she wrote that we "go on searching for poetic means that may help us meet the present crisis of evacuation of meaning."

"In the America where I'm writing now, suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe familial, and at most to be "shared" with a group specific to the suffering, in the hope of "recovery." We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public, or as deriving from "skewed social relations" (Charles Bernstein). Intimate revelations may be a kind of literary credit card today, but they don't help us out of emotional overdraft; they mostly recycle the same emotions over and over."

Adrienne Rich signed a book for me once at the Dodge Poetry Festival around this time. She gave me a withering stare when I handed her my copy of her book An Atlas of the Difficult World as if to say, "you haven't read any of my books yet, have you." Like a statement, not a question. And I hadn't. But I didn't take it personally. I had my whole life ahead of me. But that state was more intense than the Cher stare!

But now I've come to really appreciate her comments and it grieves me somewhat that so few of us were listening to and registering her warnings. That deserves a Cher stare if anything does.

More New Mexico Poems From Our Guy

June 22, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I've read one other Jimmy Santiago Baca book before, seen him read live at CNM, am a big fan of his biopic. But I hadn't really had an a-ha moment with his poems yet.

Part of this had to do with when I read what I read. Timing is important. I had meant for this book to be included in the New Mexico set I recently blogged about. But I didn't finish it in time. But when you think about New Mexico poets (and poets writing about New Mexico), Jimmy Santiago Baca is a big deal. He's one of the most successful exports we have in poetry. And I don't think I appreciated his scope and vision until I read this collected set, which ranges from his first prison writings through his greatest hits.

Years ago I did a review of an anthology of poems about sex that were surprisingly unsexy in hindsight. Although duly noted everyone wants something different in their sex poems. But I was also disappointed in Erica Jong's collected poems (and what was sexier to passionate teen girls in the 1980s than 1970s Eric Jong novels?).

Anyway, this is all to say there are some prison letter poems that begin this anthology in "Excerpts from the Mariposa Letters" that are crazy, NSW sexy. Probably because they were part of prison letters and no-holds-barred desire. The fact that Jimmy Santiago Baca can merge ideas of lustiness and the New Mexico landscape is also appreciated. If you're at all squeamish about explicitness, skip this section. But if not, here's my dogeared copy.

This poet has been through a lot, and he's particularly good at investigating his own hardness and anger. "Looking" is a good example of this: "I feel something in me/move–/one movement in particular/crawls out of the dark in me,/a dead hand on bloody drugged knuckles/unfolding/coming to life."

A good example of the landscape/love intersect is the poem "My Heart" – "A hungry river basin/at the wind's edge/my desires sleep/like hot sunstones,/until the rain/awakes them." He's very good at creating a very particular physicality for emotions like this example are these excerpts from "The Dark Side,"

"My soul
falls like a black oak tree cracked by an ice storm.
It stares up with a skull's nightmare grimace
of cruel suffering on its frozen face.
….
I draw the curtains of my life shut,
a silent stranger to myself
chewing on the maddening, shredded remnants of my heart.
Accepting it as part of me, loving it,
not afraid of feeling its pain, understanding
how I always contradict myself,
I succumb to passion,
even indifference,
roar my loss and abandonment,
bell-bellow my cathedral soul…"

Wow. "Bell-bellow my cathedral soul." Good stuff. He's also good at this sort of purgatory of feeling, like in these lines from "Your Letter Slips Through the Opening in My Heart,"

"I pause home again: you are not here.
I pick warm left over words from your letter,
like last crumbs scraped from the dinner table,
place them in a tattered cloth
and fold in in my coat pocket.

I turn and close the paper, shut the envelope,
and walk down a dark hallway,
past sleeping rooms and down endless stairs
until my feet pause, and I stand staring at your address."

There are lots of New Mexico moments, "In the Foothills" which starts at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Sandia poems like in "It's an Easy Morning" where he is "exhorting me to write/as real as the sand my feet print."

There are poems that are full life sweeps, like "With Paz By the Fire Last Night" and "Set This Book on Fire!" that trace his experiences as a reader and writer and issues of class in academia.

There are also some great social justice poems here, full Ginsberg-like sprays of issues of the day and the suffering caused by those in power. "With My Massive Soul I Open" is a good example and the long poem "This Disgusting War!"

The long poem "Rita Falling from the Sky" is another good example of the literal trek for justice. It's also full of horny toads, coyotes, weather, cacti, agave hearts, chili powder, cedar, juniper, cottonwoods, sage, mesquite, tortilla, corn, beans, maize, quelites, an exploration of what thirst for truth/thirst for water is.

There's also a moving poem about a transvestite prostitute in "Smoking Mirrors" created for a project with James Drake's photography.

The long poems in the back are all impressive, the life-sweep of "Julia," the elegiac "Singing at the Gates," the final moment with "Against Despair," a beautiful poem about enduring the attacks against your poetic and spiritual voice. A perfect ending to the collection. Watch Zach Czaia read the poem along with a great introduction as part of his Poetry Lockdown series.

The Essay Project: Physically Pleasurable Poems

June 17, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re back to the essay bundle from David Rivard’s Sarah Lawrence Class. And I'm to the Robert Pinsky essay, “Poetry and Pleasure” which was from the book Poetry and the World (1992). You can also catch the essay online.

So Robert Pinksy: very respected as a critic of poetry, even among those who dislike poetry criticism. A few times I’ve tried to enjoy his essays (particularly in The Situation of Poetry) but I have always failed pretty hard. He’s so dry and stuffy, I always thought.

He begins this essay talking about a poem he loved as a child and its essential physicality, “what I could feel the consonants and vowels doing inside my mouth and in my ears.”

He talks about Yeats and “the idea of pleasing…[the] sense in which a work of art is a gift, a gift of pleasure which some of us aspire to give.”

He then talks about magazine and workshop poems and even “one’s own poems” that fail, “they are not interesting enough to impart conviction. Most of them fail to be surprising or musical or revealing enough to arouse much interest.”

Then he goes on to say the most interesting poems for him have the same quality as songs, jokes and personal letters “which embody for me the qualities of physical grace, lively social texture and inward revelation.”

You could easily say this about many other cultural artifacts so his short list is a little curious, but I like these things too so why quibble.

By physical grace he says he means “the counterpoint of their music and their sentences…..something that approaches actual song." He says, "Here is Ben Jonson singing” as he introduces the Jonson poem “His Excuse for Loving.”

Jonson “defeats the predictable” Pinksy says and “the elements that delight us appear to grow out of the swelling sense that he will sing, even though expectation and age threaten to hold him back.” It is an achievement of “personal expressive rhythm” Pinksy says.

“As to jokes” he continues, it is their structure. And here I have to say this really warms me to Pinsky, his explications of comedy is this serious way.

“I think that the idea of ‘good jokes’ and ‘bad’ ones reflects a misconception; the timing and social placement of the joke, and the textural pleasures of its telling, matter far more than the mechanical burning of a narrative fuse toward the little explosion of a punch line.”

Yes.

“The joke about the one-armed piccolo player might be right for a certain moment after a picnic, but not for the car ride home. …People naïve about jokes fail to see this enormously social, contextual limitation to the form, and are bewildered when the Jewish parrot joke that caused tears in one setting invokes only polite smiles in a slight different one; moreover, such a teller exaggerates the importance of ‘how’ it was told, while underestimating the original teller’s sense of precisely when to time the joke.”

Doesn’t this explain where we are today? The tragic internet-is-everywhere drifting of jokes into social areas where they were never meant to drift and causing high offence?

He goes on to talk about a joke’s “charm of texture," touches of joke-telling that “establish context and conviction, make up the living body of a tiny work of art, for which the punch lines is merely the graceful closure.” What we call "‘taste’ or ‘timing’ or ‘tact’ or ‘wit.’"

A problem poets and comics have in common, he says, is “how to arrange and dispose a feeling—how to put something first, something else second, and so forth. The silliest joke, too, must solve this problem…The skill…of presenting the joke is in presenting the dance or tension of the two elements, ordinary and bizarre.”

Pinsky finishes by talking about “music’s grace” being “the most basic aspect of a poem’s appeal” but that the social contextual sense is the next “profound pleasure….by revealing to us the inward motion of another mind and soul.”

He explains his love of letter -writing in this regard because he can go “a little further into myself than I might in conversation; the element of planning or composition seems to strip away barriers, props, and disguises, rather than to create them.”

Did I even realize this before he said it? What is a blog if not a long letter into the self?

He illustrates this idea of self with Walt Whitman’s poem “Spontaneous Me” where Whitman does a quick inventory of his momentary self and ends cavalierly with

“And this bunch pluck’d at random from myself,
It has done its work—I tossed it carelessly to fall where it may.”

Pinsky concludes:

“Such movement cannot be affected or faked. It comes from conviction: confidence in the power of rhythm; trust in the social generosity between artist and audience; belief in the movement of one’s own thoughts and feelings. Convincing movement is what commands interest. (Boredom appears to be a response to tunelessness, timidity, or weak faith in the work of art, a sense that the soul is standing still.)"

He ends with Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Incantation”

“Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

…

And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction."

Pinsky says, “It is good to read a poem that suggests that poems are supremely important…[that] promises vital, unsuppressible knowledge…[with] the most pleasurable ways of knowing.”

Great essay. Maybe it was me who was dry and stuffy.

Ridiculous, Conspicuous Poetry Products

June 10, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

It's time for Conspicuous Poetry Products again. Birchbox continues to send me interesting monthly boxes full of very literary beauty promises.

But it's been making me want to abandon all my glumpy little bottles of mascara forever.

A perfume sampler just arrived and one of the samples is from, I kid you not, Commodity Fragrances, LLC., who presents this new cologne called Book.

It's tiny cover describes its scent like an entry from a dictionary: Book, noun.

They claim the fragrance is "bound together by a crisp cover" (whatever that means) and that it's "a tip of the hat to the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds of the world, conjuring the warmth of a quiet moment curled up with a good book."

The description ends with the uber-nerdy: "Eg. Get lost in a good book."

E.g.? Really? I don't even think they're using that abbreviation correctly.

And I have to tell you, a tip of the hat to the Fitzgeralds this fragrance is not. It smells like our childhood gerbil cage, I swear to God.

Not necessarily a bad thing. I just had a Proustian moment. So I guess it's really a tip of the hat to the Prousts of this world if we're being honest in advertising.

Anyway, moving on to this cleanser from my last month's Birchbox, a product from anatomicals. Their tagline is "we only want you for your body" to which I would say be careful what you wish for.

While showering I often look for good reading material and this is what greeted me on the back of this "shower to the people" cleanser tube:

"one day the world may truly wake up to equality, fairness and justice. but until then, it will just have to content itself with waking up thanks to this all embracing, completely non-discriminatory, slightly left of centre and highly invigorating body cleanser. beware though, you could soon find yourself on the street protesting for the full-sized version."

You don't want to know what I responded back to this tube of body cleanser. It's not very polite.

Don't even get me started on the pretentious lower case; because right now I have to apologize to both Karl Marx and my grandfather who both warned me this would happen someday. Goddammit.

The Essay Project: Writing As If Our Lives Depend Upon It

June 8, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So we're back to the handouts from Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence class on reading poetry essays. There were four essays stapled together in this weeks packet.

The first two are Adrienne Rich's short five-paragraph essay "As If Your Life Depended On It" and "The Hermit’s Scream," both found in her book What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Poetics. You can also find the book here: http://docshare04.docshare.tips/files/26340/263406179.pdf

The first essay is important because this was a big manifesto when I was at Sarah Lawrence: “You must write, and read, as if your life depended upon it.”

I was always hard-pressed to figure out how to make this edict feel right for me, a spoiled suburban kid. What profession would I have to have to make reading something a matter of life or death? That's kind of why I became an English major. Would it be researching my political speech before a firing squad? A doctor on a desert island with an antiquated Physician’s Reference Guide? See? This is how spoiled middle-class kids think.

It reminds me of how I once approached Algebra II in high school by pretending ,y assignments were decoding military messages like I was in some kind of Pat Benetar “Shadows of the Night” video or something. That trick worked, btw. I got an A in that class. Unfortunately I was taking the class pass/fail. Sigh.

But anyway, that’s not even what Adrienne Rich meant. She goes on to say that it means letting your reading penetrate your beliefs, “the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your…carnal life,” for your reading to “pierce the routines…”

She talks about how hard this is to do, socially speaking. And how scary this idea is…

“To read as if your life depended on it — but what writing can be believed? isn’t all language just manipulation? Maybe the poet has a hidden program — to recruit you to a cause, send you into the streets, to destabilize, through the sensual powers of language, your tested and tried priorities? Rather than succumb, you can learn to inspect the poem at arm’s length, through a long and protective viewing tube, as an interesting object, an example of this style or that period. You can take refuge in the idea of “irony”. Or you can demand that artists demonstrate loyalty to that or this moral or political or religious or sexual norm, on pain of having books burned, banned, on pain of censorship or prison, on pain of lost public funding.”

“Or, you can say: ‘I don’t understand poetry.’”

Good swipe there at ironic distance and academic politics.

The next essay in the set is “The Hermit’s Scream” which starts by describing how Rich was haunted by an Elizabeth Bishop poem, it’s observation and description, “Chemin de Fer” and how subtle is the call to action in the poem: “What teaches us to convert lethal anger into steady, serious attention to our own lives and those of others.”

Then Rich goes on to question what political activism is and how it might be related to making poetry:

“There is still no general, collective understanding from which to move. Each takes her or his risks in isolation. We may think of ourselves as individual rebels, and individual rebels can easily be shot down…”

“Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.”

She then talks about types of anger, non-violent, direct action, what faith means for an activist and how one must fight against unquestioning belief:

“An activist’s faith can never be unquestioning, can never stop responding to ‘new passions and new forces,’ can never oversimplify, as believers and activists are often tempted or pressured to do.”

Was she clairvoyant or what? She even points to the “ominous cult of violence in contemporary cities” [and rural places I would now argue] and the “role of mass media in promoting violence” and “patterns of brutality.”

“’Nonviolence,’ ‘antiviolence.’ The feebleness of the language, however passionate the determination, tells us something. Violence is what looks out at us from those phrases: its expressionless or grinning face is what we see, not what it displaces. War goes on demanding its ‘fatal unity.’ What face has ‘visible and responsive peace’? What does it mean, to put love into action? Why do I go on as if poetry has any answers to that question.”

The essay then goes on to discuss Suzanne Gardiner’s poem “To Peace.” Is this some student kissing up to our teacher?? WTH. But in hindsight I’m glad they did because it’s great revisiting this amazing Gardiner poem, is a conversation between herself and the enemy peace. Some excerpts:

“Peace I have feared you hated you scuffed dirt
on what little of you I could bear near me

….

Coward I have watched you buckle under
nightsticks and fire hoses…

…

Where are the stone
lists of those who have died in your name

…

…How
will I teach my children whom to respect
how to find themselves on a map of the world
when I have seldom seen your face
Tell me Bloodless Outlaw Phantom what is
the work of the belligerent in
your anarchic kiddom Where is my place

Rich says, “There is not a real poet alive today, or for some time past, who would do what Homer did or even if he/she could, or Virgil….the glorification of war an conquest.”

But it’s not that black and white, is it, Rich reminds us because there are “those who have grown up knowing that violent resistance is the only way to stay alive. The questions of the poem need concern all those who condemn violence" "…theatrics can distract us from…the knowledge that at the end of the twentieth century there is no demilitarized zone, no line diving war from peace, that the ghettos and barrios of peacetime live under paramilitary occupation, that prisoners are being taken and incarcerated at an accelerating rate, that the purchase of guns has become an overwhelming civilian response to the perceived fractures in the social compact.”

Wow.

She then explores the June Jordan poem “For Michael Angelo Thompson,” a chilling poem from an event in 1973 when Thompson was hit by a Brooklyn city bus and was turned away at the hospital and later dies. Rich talks about how her first reading of the poem as a white person was that it was “elegiac, not furious” but this was a misinterpretation of the refrain “Please.” The poem is a requiem she comes to understand.

Rich goes on to quote Audre Lorde’s “Power” which starts “The difference between poetry and rhetoric/is being/ready to kill/yourself/instead of your children" and ends the story of a man pushed to violence and then called a beast.

Rich ends the essay by quoting Lorde in saying that writing “at the edge, out of urgency” opens you up “to a constant onslaught…of possibilities…like meteor shows all the time….constant connections.”

The third essay in the set is only the partial excerpts from An American Primer with no author attribution. Turns out this is Walt Whitman (thank you, google). The book seems out of copyright now so can find some reprint versions around.

This section is about the power of place names: “All lies are folded in names” and we are immediately reminded of the current controversy over using American Indian identifiers for sports team names.

“Names are the turning point of who shall be master. There is so much virtue in names that a nation which produces its own names, haughtily adheres to them, and subordinates others to them, leads all the rest of the nations of the earth. I also promulge that a nation which has not its own names, but begs them of other nations, has no identity, marches not in front, but behind.”

The essay ends with:

“Californian, Texan, New Mexican, and Arizonian names have the sense of the ecstatic monk, the cloister, the idea of miracles, and of devotees canonized after death. They are the results of the early missionaries and the element of piety, in the old Spanish character. They have, in the same connection, a tinge of melancholy and of a curious freedom from roughness and money-making. Such names stand strangely in California. What do such names know of democracy, — of the hunt for the gold leads and the nugget, or of the religion that is scorn and negation?“

“American writers are to show far more freedom in the use of words. Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are to-day already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect, — words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood, — words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature.”

The final essay in the set is Audrey Lorde’s famous 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury.”

Lorde’s essay is aimed at women and talks a lot about ancient and hidden possibilities in our non-European, native-mythizing consciousness and it reads a bit vague and dated late-70s feminism.

“I speak her of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”

Very strongly worded. But it exposes succinctly the divide between activist poets and academic poets engaging in language play. She goes on to say,

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

I have to admit, a lot of Lorde’s essay is over my head, especially sentences like this:

“We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialize to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safely.”

I get the point now finally typing it out, but I did get lost in “resistance to the deaths we are expected to live.” Live through? In any case, it speaks to a harrowing existence. I get that.

What I like about Audrey Lorde's essay is the vulnerability she mixes in with her headiness. This is something Adreinne Rich lacks. And Lorde's transitions are natural and fluid, unlike the second Rich essay which jumps from one short section to another with little connective tissue.