Category: Craft (Page 7 of 18)

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.

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.

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.

The Essay Project: Stripping Down

March 19, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Louise Glück, the recent, much deserved recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of the next essay in the David Rivard class packet. It's her “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence” essay and it’s very interesting that Rivard placed this essay after Tony Hoagland’s “Disproportion” essay because it takes an opposing stance (just like our previous essay did).

This isn’t one of my favorite Gluck essays. I loved both of her essay books American Originality and Proofs & Theories. But even back when was a young, egomaniacal little poet I wrote at the end of this essay TERRIBLE ESSAY (in all caps like that even).

Hubris, meet me.

Anyway, I can’t say I had a complete turnaround with this essay but it’s a good argument for inconclusion and brevity, stripping it back down, the opposite of all that extra bling and filler Hoagland (and vicariously I) were enjoying in his essay.

Glück is deprecating at first, admitting she has a “tendency to reject all ideas I didn’t think of first…[which] creates an obligation to articulate an argument.” Hey, it's almost as if she was arguing with Hoagland directly.

“I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence….to the power of ruins….wholeness is implied.”

She talks about Holbein’s drawings exhibited in an unfinished state and how they show the “power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial…”

She rejects the “cult of exhaustive detail” and finally declares she prefers “the suggested over the amplified.” This is a preference against flamboyance for subtlety. But unlike the previous essay we discussed, she doesn’t bank in terms like truth or authenticity. She doesn't make a character judgement in other words. This is a choice of craft, she says.

To show examples, she covers Rilke’s poem about the torso of Apollo and how Rilke is the “master of not saying.” She then covers Berryman’s Dream Songs,” the drama of which she says is “the absence of a firm self.” Then she moves to George Oppen and says she tries to read Berryman and Open side by side (interesting project idea).

“Oppen’s clean, austere, dynamic poetry has very few active verbs. No one uses the verb of being better.” And she talks about his silences and pauses. “..very little of the language is vivid….ideas are held in suspension….austerity and a distaste for blather.”

[mmmm….bather….sounds like buttah.]

Glück admits she has a “suspicion of closure” that is common for many post-modernists, who have the luxury of being suspicious of it, I might add. Certain experimental ideas in post-modernism have been labeled privileged and I think for good reason (although I do also like all those experiments). War-torn poets may yearn for closure in a way that middle- and upper-class poets can’t quite imagine. But this is a solid stance of poets of Glück's age and I don’t want to be dismissive of it either….it’s an offshoot of the challenge poet-modernism made to classic Academia and at that time it was very useful.

Glück talks about “the time it takes for information to be absorbed” as we read through a poem. I love this about Gluck, that she thinks this mental process through.

She talks about Oppen’s “characteristic move” of “the idea implied in being dismissed,” how he “defines things by saying what they are not….creation through eradication is, for me, congenial.”

For sure there is something frustratingly heartfelt in the unsaid-but-indicated thing, but I don’t know as I would go as far as to call it ‘congenial.’

“When poems are difficult, it is often because their silences are complicated, hard to follow. For me, the answer to such moments is not more language.”

This is an interesting position for a poet to take, for someone who's currency is language, but not very unlike her own poems. I just would insist again here that neither way is right or wrong, just strategies one prefers.

She calls the “dream of abundance” “all detail and no shape…’gratuitous.’”

She admits “withholding is currently suspect. It is associated with rigidity, miserliness, insufficiencies; with faculties either atrophied or checked. It is a habit not admired in personal interaction, in which realm it is associated with ideas of manipulation, slyness, coldness; it is considered uniformly dangerous in governments, and so on.”

It's hard to argue with any of that, even in our favorite poets. These attributes are human ones, of personal choice. Some miserly, atrophied, manipulative, cold poets are quite good (as the reading goes).

But none of this proves being flamboyant, effusive, forthright, loose and over-explain-y is wrong in any way.

Glück believes the tension “promotes depth” as it is “distilled.”

Now for me, the bang for the buck in this essay comes in her explication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which is really brilliant. She says,

[The poem] “is a poem of pathological delay. The action of the poem is inaction. “Let us go, then, you and I…” But Prufrock puts off starting….nothing in fact, occurs; nothing is ever begun.”

Finally, I get this poem. Thank you Louise Glück.

“The future is impossible, the past lost. And the present a vacuum: non-action….The poem is all wringing of hands…the masterpiece of avoidance. At the poem’s center is the unsaid…”

Since I searched Google a few days ago for Glück, my news page has been posting links to recent articles about her, including these interesting things:

The Soul-Excavating Work of Louise Glück on Lit Hub

and Mourning, Reimagined: The Misunderstood Poetics of Louise Glück on The Harvard Crimson

Creepy Google. But thanks.

The Essay Project: Truth and Character

March 15, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Back to the essays from Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence class.

This new essay from my stack is a good example of how non-literary essays can be particularly good essays for poets. In our Essay class, a student pulled this essay "For the Artist Everything in Nature is Beautiful" from “Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell” by Auguste Rodin Originally published 1984.

Art essays are always great poetry essays. I have stacks of art books that have taught me invaluable lessons about creativity and how other artists think, the similar struggles they've gone through, how they solve problems with their projects. So don’t pass up those thrift art books that look interesting to you.

And this is a pretty important essay as they go, so timely as it follows Tony Hoagland’s "Disproportion" (which I ravenously agreed with two week ago). This essay is the other argument, the argument we’ve been hearing for the last 4 decades (or maybe longer, since the Romantic poets).

This particular conversation compares a Rodin sculpture to a a François Villon poem that inspired it, both depictions of the ravages of age.

[By the way, while I was in Cleveland a few months ago my parents had me watch the first two seasons of The Kominsky Method, also a depiction of the ravages of age].

The Villon poem talks about shrunken breasts and sausage-speckled skin and the “dream and desire” for “eternal beauty” and finding beauty in unlikely places. Gsell maintains the Rodin’s sculpture is possibly superior, more fearful of a depiction (being so visual).

“What one calls ‘ugly’ in Nature can become great beauty in art…When a great artist, or a great writer gets hold of one of these types of ‘ugliness,’ he instantly transfigures it. With a wave of his magic wand, he transforms it into beauty; this is alchemy, this is like a fairy tale.”

This is actually an idea going back to the Romantic poets elevating so-called common topics, an idea rising to a groundswell in the artist archetype we live by today. And it's a swell idea. It’s a good thing. It can be like a fairy tale.

The problem is this idea has become a cynical pose devoid of the authenticity it claims to represent. And here is where the whole idea of authenticity, truth and character starts to falter.

“The reason is that in Art, beauty exists only in that which has ‘character.’ ‘Character’ is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, beautiful or ugly. …the soul, the feeling…The ugly in Art is that which is false, that which is artificial, that which seeks to be pretty or beautiful, instead of being expressive; that which is affected and precious; that which smiles without motive; that which is pretentious without reason; the person who throws out his chest and swaggers without cause; all that is without soul and truth; all that is only a parade of beauty and grace; all that lies.”

There are many ways to be in this world, so many ways to express one's 'soul' and every communication (be it a painting, sculpture, poem, short story whatever) requires both its lies and its truths and these words 'character' words have become vague and insincere at best and stale, ugly lies at worst. These words have become establishment code for who's included or excluded as a 'serious' artist. It's fundamentally untrue.

Plus those words just can’t break through the wall of post-modernism with its deftness and exposing fake truths. If truths have turned fake then what can we say about the truths found in artifice?

I explain it like this: there’s a very good reason why a gay man (for example, or member of any other disenfranchised group) might be attracted to artifice and 'over-the-top' kitsch and big display. Why would that be? What do these ideas offer for longtime disenfranchised, excluded artist?

What does the idea of authenticity have for someone living a life that demands they hid their true selves? Not much. If you can't be your authentic self for one reason or another, if society's definition of authenticity itself excludes you, why cater to its limitations?

This essay has had its day.

The next essay will be another argument against the flair proposed by Tony Hoagland's essay on "Disproportion," this time by Louise Glück and it's an essay I find to be a much better (modern) argument against the frills of bling.

The Essay Project: Sparkle and Excess

March 5, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I didn't recognize this essay at first. It's another one from David Rivard's class set called “On Disproportion” by Tony Hoagland. I’m predispositioned to like Hoagland. He’s very funny. And this essay is from one of my favorite books, his Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft.

He divides the world of poems into “two large camps”

(1) “the conservative, well-wrought, shapely poem” and

(2) “the deformed, admirably lopsided, zany, and subversive one.”

“Any good poem," he says, "tames the savage or savages the tame to some degree.” Balance. I like it. He talks about how good poems should hold “certain opposing energies” and defines “disproportion” as a “conscious indulgence in stylistic effects…indulgences of the unconscious impulses…..even when such indulgences distort the ‘packaging’ of the poem.”

[Because I’m also Cher Scholar I might call this the Cherness in a poem.]

Hoagland first looks at the straight-laced poems of Horace who “harmonizes and subordinates parts to a whole” and who believes “the middle way is best.” Another example he uses is William Carlos Williams’ poem “Pastoral,” a poem which he says has an “appealing plainness….directness that seems open and American.” Horace poems, he says, are “didactic in…intention and argumentative in its structure…architectural and conservative…symmetrical and lucid.”

Hoagland uses Oscar Wilde as a comparison, a poet who contends “what art really reveals to us in nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition….If nature had been comfortable, man never would have invented architecture…” He's so funny.

Hoagland contends that Wilde was more “frank than most artists about the ego drive that lurks beneath making, and the need to make the ego feel safe. The goal, as he presents it, is a sense of mastery.” Hoagland points out our internalized “biases when we say a poem should be ‘economical’ and ‘efficient'…"applying commercial terminology to art.”

I would also ague that we misread "authenticity" as this same kind of economy. “Control exacts a cost too: It is often achieved at the expense of discovery and spontaneity,” Hoagland says.

He then covers a few poems of Wallace Stevens, “the first poet in whose work [Hoagland] recognized elements of style as deliberately excessive….[with elements of] playfulness rather than loftiness.”

Hoagland appreciates the way these poems are “elastic in form instead of architectural, more like a Sinkly than a Grecian urn with” their “willingness to gallop off…allowing language to balloon into clause upon clause….experience…not really interested in organizing…excess instead of wisdom….opulence instead of utility…sometimes far-reaching heartiness….the human value of flamboyance.”

As a Cher fan, of course I’m inclined to agree with all of this.

It's not “mere style,” Hoagland says. But then he wonders if style can even compete with “autobiography crowd[ing] the pages of literary magazines, proclaiming the virtue of the raw, the mimetic, and the experiential.” Alas, this is a Rolling Stone music critic too!

Hoagland admits this thing “uneconomical—the marriage of a lot of fancy words to a little bit of situation…linguistic vaudeville…” combined with sobriety can create “a boozy eloquence and then into a serious invocation.” He maintains “our ability to change direction in an artwork is greater than we commonly suppose….comedy and pathos coexist.”

He quotes the Denis Johson poem “It’s Thursday: Your Exam Was Tuesday” to say “The most literal-minded of readers might charge that the poet wastes twelve lines to say nothing more than that ‘the moon came up.’”

The ultimate disproportion poem cited is “Cities” by Susan Mitchell and Hoagland refers, as I have above, to rock music’s terms: “feedback occurs when a guitarist moves his instrument too close to its amplifier—an ugly screeching burning sound is the result…often produced deliberately” and this equates with Mitchell’s “pure voluptuousness of sound."

Hoagland says we seek control “economy and proportion. We discard such insubordinate language because it doesn’t match the rest of the furniture in the house, because we aren’t supposed to allow an elephant in the living room: It makes ownership unclear.”

He then covers Tess Gallagher poems, “disorder maps". This poet, he says, is "seized by the muse (the medieval called it the furor poetica) and carried away.” He says we should see this as “not only an ecstatic ‘giving in’….but as a rebellion against the predictable development of more generic poems….Excesses, this essay argues, are good. In capable hands, they demonstrate freedom, give pleasure, celebrate artifice, react against convention, and illustrate the healthy, complex earthiness of the maker.”