Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Ridiculous Reviews: Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson

February 13, 2014 / / 0 Comments

HcHart Crane’s The Bridge, 1932

"A form of hysteria…One thing he has demonstrated, the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration. No writer of comparable ability has struggled with it before and it seems highly unlikely that any writer of comparable genius will struggle with it again."

Yvor Winters, Poetry

 

 

 

EdEmily Dickinson, 1892

"An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village—or anywhere else—cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar…Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood."

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly

 

 

Reviews originally compiled by Bill Henderson in Rotten Reviews.

  

Tony Hoagland’s 20 Poems That Could Save Amercia

February 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

TnyPerusing a local-paper poetry-themed insert I came across the mention of a new essay by Tony Hoagland called "Twenty Little Poems that Could Save America" from Harpers magazine: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/04/twenty-little-poems-that-could-save-america/

I support the idea of revamping the way we teach poetry in secondary schools and in college. Poetry has slipped outside of mainstream culture and there are many reasons for this. Baby steps back may involve rethinking the cirriculum, something many forward-thinking teachers are already doing. Hoagland wants to use more contemporary poetry and has created a list of poems he believes "the kids today" can relate to.

I anticipate resistance to this idea (so does Hoagland) and I think it goes back to poets worrying that their favorite poems will be lost forever. This fear actually hides another bigger very secret fear that someday their own (future famous) poems might also be judged out-of-date, old fashioned, or just not modern enough and therefore doomed to be forgotten as the new poems and poets continually roll in and take over. Perinneals entombed in concrete will prevent this slippage.

But Hoagland loses me when he goes off on pop culture. In the beginning he says "Culture is always reanimating itself"  and then goes on to say celebrity culture is "a kind of fake surrogate for the culturally significant place gods and myth once held in the collective imagination….just as junk food mimics nutritious food, fake culture [fake culture??] mimics and displaces the position of real myth. [Real myth???] Real culture cultivate our ability to see, feel and think. It is empowering. Fake culture [again, fake culture??] makes us passive, materialistic and tranced-out."

First of all, obviously mainstream movies and music can cultivate our ability to see, feel and thik and are also empowering and can encourage us to be active and not passive. To argue otherwise is to be willfully ignorant. Not to mention there is no such think as an unreal or fake culture. Culture is what it is. Football, Kim Kardashian, violent video games, expensive cars and shoes…that's the culture now. Like it or don't like it. What you think of the prevaling culture is irrelevant. It reanimates regardless of the judgements on it from you or me.

But then Hoagland goes on to appreciate Glengarry Glen Ross and Citizen Kane. The thing is, nobody can be the judge of what is is specifically that moves someone else. It's not fake. It's just not your thing.

Anyway, we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. This essay continues the ongoing conversation about the role of art in schools and how we can better teach an appreciation of poetry.

I'm sure it will elicit many petty 20-poem list wars among poets battling it out for supremacy. But for those of us on the ground, a good weekend reading list if nothing else.

   

A Book About Dogs; A Book About Old Movies and Barbie Collecting

February 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

ChewFor Christmas I received this book of poems, I Could Chew on This and Other Poems by Dogs from my friend Julie. I assuming the book would be a silly parody of nonsensical dog poems. However, Francesco Marciuliano shows he has a mastery of that very meter of poetry that works to elicit a laugh. Call it doggerel (I couldn't resist), call them limericks, whatever…it takes skill. As some say about poetry, it can't be taught. As even more say about being funny, it really can't be taught.

All successful jokes and funny stories involve "comedic timing," which is another way of saying a finely tuned sense of the meter of the language. Bad jokes usually choke for lack of such timing.

 I loved these very funny dog poems. If you prefer cat poems you might read instead his poems found in the book I Could Pee on This.

   

TrinidadLast week I also enjoyed The Late Show, poems by David Trinidad. Yes, because I love pop culture and poems about old movie stars and movies. Yes, because there's an amazing poem about Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Yes, because I collect Cher dolls and so appreciated his poem about how the cut-throat, back-stabbing world of poetry coincides with his passion for collecting Barbie dolls and accessories. Yes, because there was a surprising Sonny Bono mention in the book.

But also because I just started reading Frank O'Hara's collected poems and biography and Trinidad is reminding me of O'Hara in style (and not just because he's also a gay, pop-culture loving poet).

And also because the book has a crown of sonnets and I love those (ever since Joan Larkin turned me on to them and the ones called  "the blackout sonnets" in her own book A Long Sound). And also because the poems are varied, some simple and short, some complicated and long. The lipstick-color collage is amazing. The movie-title poems are amazing, too. The book also deals with memory and childhood, toys, and the meanness of the poetry world. You get name-brand toy dropping and name-dropping of the regular ole literary kind.

   

Essays in Nov/Dec 2013 APR

January 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

EssI’m really behind on my poetry periodicals but I want to mention that there are a lot of good essays in the American Poetry Review (Nov/Dec 2013).

They published a controversial essay by Joy Katz on sentimentalism and the absurd lengths we’ve been trying to avoid it. At least that's how I took the piece. I heard through another writer-friend that Alicia Ostriker (who’s book Stealing the Language practically changed my life), was upset by how the essay used her as an example, thinking she was being criticized for sentimentalism. This is not how I interpreted the essay at all. Joy Katz really drags you through the drama of sentimental-avoidance in efforts to please current avant-guarde practitioners; and I can’t see why she would do this if not in defense of sentimentality ultimately as a choice.

Katz re-enacts the writing of a poem where a baby appears:

“A baby turns up in a poem I am writing…Oh no… A baby has turned up in a poem I am writing. Fear the world enclosing it: too easy to inhabit, too pretty, too comfy, too female, too married, too straight. A poem with a baby in it is automatically possibly all of these things, no matter what I am in my life as a person…

A baby has appeared. Fear loss of world, loss of danger, loss of trash, loss of anger, loss of war, loss of surprise, loss of mattering, loss of dirt, loss of wildness, loss of scale, loss of geologic time, loss of continents, loss of rivers, loss of knives, loss of meanness. Lost: the chance to go somewhere that scares me…I am writing a poem about. A cloud of aboutness hovers over my draft….  

(True story: In Paris recently, I read several poems with my young son in them. The work evinced a range of strategies, from fragments to collage to narrative to a lyric. An editor I was talking with afterward said, about the poems, “I’m not interested in content. Do you know what I mean?”)…Fear of loss of credibility…

Can you not see the irony here? If the editor (or the avant-guard, for that matter) isn’t interested in content, what difference does content (the baby) make? It should be irrelevant; but it’s not. Here "I'm not interested in content" means "I'm interested in content."

“(Fact: When a male poet writes about a baby, he is not accused of being “overwhelmed by biology.”[1] Fact: One of my teachers told me and a couple of other women that we should never write about our kids. I later realized he wrote about his kids.)”

Katz's essay is both aesthetic and political and yet understated, unsentimental. It dosen't draw absolute conclusions but it raises doubts. Maybe this is how it could be misconstrued.

In this APR there is also an email conversation between Gerry LaFemina and Stephen Dunn on the topic of irony that goes into length debating whether irony exists in the Tom Lux poem “Refrigerator 1957,” a debate I enjoyed very much because Lux was my “don” at Sarah Lawrence College. We all heard him read that poem about ten times while there. We even used to impersonate his performances of it just like we impersonated Marie Howe saying “the plumber I have not yet called” from her very serious poem “What the Living Do.”

Kids having fun in the 1990s.

There's also an essay by Jane Hirshfield, an amazing piece about (in defense of?)  the power of lyric poetry, speaking to “the inexhaustibility of existence itself” and therefore the inexhaustibility of the lyric.  She even takes on Theodor Adorno.  You go, girl!

There’s also a conversation with Philip Levine. Levine was the first famous poet I ever saw in the flesh, when he arrived one night for a reading in Slonim House at Sarah Lawrence College. I’ve been starstruk since. In today’s political climate, I’m developing a deeper taste for Levine just as I am for songwriter Billy Bragg.

By the way, for some amazing out-of-the-box poetry, I would recommend the 1998 album of Wilco/Billy Bragg taking unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics from Guthrie's family archive. Two nights ago, Monsieur Big Bang and I watched the documentary on the making of the album.

I also enjoyed poems in APR by Joe Wenderoth. And of course I loved the three Stephen Dobyns poems in the issue because I always love Stephen Dobyns poems a bit shamelessly. His poem “Sincerity” was particularly good in light of our ongoing debates about lyric poetry and writing from the "self."

    

Movies with Poetry: John Keats & Marlon Riggs (2009/1989)

January 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

BsBright Star (2009) is another BBC Films movie focusing on the 1818 love story between John Keats, (played like a heartthrob by Ben Whishaw), and Fannie Brawne, (played by Abbie Cornish), with screenplay and direction by Jane Campion.

This was another winner with great depictions of the following:

– the pompous, insufferable poet who has no sense of humor about himself or anything else, played by Paul Schneider as Keats’ friend Mr. Brown

– sequestering yourself to get writing done

– poor reviews and poor sales

– choosing a life of poetry even though this entails poverty

– really good friends who are actually not very good friends whenever they provide blind, tragic generosity.

Just as she did in The Piano, director Campion makes another unhurried, particular movie. She is a master of shooting the outdoors, the outside lawns and forests of Hampstead Village, full of butterflies and the sounds of the woods. Campion is also good at including adorable little girls in her pictures, girls who run around the heath and steal the movie.

Here, Campion sets up a parallel of craft between Brawne’s labors over stitching and sewing her fashions and the labor of Keats' writing. There is a scene midway that is a remarkable bit of visual poetry itself: Brawne laying in her bed in the first thoes of love as her window curtain floats across the room toward her.

Campion also does a few studies in the ruffles of “almost-silence” (with interesting foley sound effects) and visually in a look at love’s madness (with a succession of butterfly scenes that begin with beauty and end in depression—hey, we’ve all been there).

Brawne suffers trying to relate to Keats, declaring, “poems are a strain to work out” before she asks Keats to teach her how to read a poem. Keats describes reading poetry to her as similar to swimming in a lake. The point is not to rush over to the other side but to enjoy floating in the middle of it.

Many of Keats' most famous poems are recited. You also get to feel the exhilarating joy and tactility of receiving hand-written letters.

But warning: this movie is not for those with a “delicate constitution” as the film requires a steady crying jag that lasts practically the full final half.

TuTongues Untied is one of the documentaries listed in the documentary about 50 documentaries you should see before you die. The movie is both a collage of experiment and a personal statement by Marlon Riggs about his experiences as a black gay man. Between narratives, the movie weaves in spoken-word poetry, popular music and dance.

At the time of its release, the movie was labeled pornographic and used as an example in the attack against national funding for the arts. Looking back, that response looks shamefully puritan.

Beautiful performance poetry on issues of race and sexuality. Not for those who are squeamish about frank discussions and depictions of race and sexuality. Highly recommended otherwise.

  

   

A Book About Fathers

January 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

MkWhile I was working at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I would occassionally come across copies of a book by Maurice Kenny called Connotations all around campus. Last week I finally finished one of the multiple copies found in my own office.

The poems in the book are primarily about Kenny's father but also stories farther back into his ancestry, stories of his childhood and how his experiences then concern him now as he faces a future idea of his death.

The first section contains musings on paintings of male nudes. I found this section to be a bit repetitive and vague.

The poems in the second section are much more particular and literal vs. figurative (we leave that to the first section…pun intended.). I didn’t really love these poems either at first but they have stuck with me. They depict his complicated relationship with his father and they work to give you a cumulative sort of rendering of his father that is strong in the sum of its parts (which are the individual poems).

The poem “Strange Love” about his sisters reconciliation with her father during a Christmas exchange of presents is indicative of the section's theme:

“His protection beat scars/on her legs and arms.”

The poem “Complicated” does this as well:

His knife drew blood/that his hand wiped off.”

Kenny struggles to understand his father who both protects and harms in visceral ways. You can take the whole of this book as a metaphor for the struggles many have dealing with parents who also harm on their way to help.

  

Tourist Poem Written After an Execution

January 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Poem-ft-smithFirst of all, it's amazing where you come across poetry in your travels. Second, it's always moving to find a poem serving as an appeal to the afterlife.

On our way home from Pennsylvania after Christmas, Monsieur Big Bang wanted to stop in Fort Smith in order to do some research on Belle and Pearl Starr for his consulting project with the show Quick Draw.

At the Fort Smith historic site, I came across this poem called "My Dream" written by Rufus Buck on the backside of a photograph of his mother. It was found in his cell after his execution for rape on July 1, 1896.

I've cleaned it up…there's a piece of punctuation after practically every word…blame his fragile state of mind…and I've fixed the spelling.

 

 

 

 

The poem reads,

I dreamt I was in heavenamong the angels fair;
I'd ne'er seen none so handsome
that, twine in golden hair.
They looked so neat and sang so sweet
and played the golden harp.
I was about to pick an angel out
and take her to my heart
but the moment I began to plea
I thought of you, my love.
There was none I'd seen so beautiful
on earth or heaven above.

Goodbye my dear wife and mother,
also my sisters.
Rufus Buck,
Yours truly.

1 Day of July
in the year of
1896

Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Virtue, Resurrection
Remember me Rock of Ages

    

January 2014 Poetry News

January 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Dipping my feet back into the scene this month, I am very sad to see we've lost a three-some of poets recently:

  • Amiri Baraka died on January 9 as reported by CNN – I saw him read once in the mid-to-late 1990s at one of the Dodge Poetry Festivals I attended in New Jersey with a gang from Sarah Lawrence College. Baraka was even mentioned in the snarky piece my fiction-writing friend Julie and I wrote for our zine, Ape Culture, called "How To Tell If You Are At Ozzfest Or Dodge Poetry Fest."
  • Wanda Coleman died late last year on November 2013 as reported in the Los Angeles Times. I saw Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman speak many, many times at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the poetry panels where she was a staple panelist every year. She was outspoken and thoughtful and I always thought I would be seeing her again at the next bookfest I attended. Truly sorry she is gone.
  • Argentine poet Juan Gelman died on January 14 as reported in the Los Angeles Times.

In other news, former US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan is recovering after a crash with a car while riding her bike.

   

Pop Culture, Art Culture, Value & Camille Paglia

January 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

BadartBecause last year Cher was mired in an interview scandal over comments she made about Miley Cyrus' controversial performance on the Video Music Awards, my friend Christopher, fellow-poet and pop-culture aficionado, sent me an editorial on the topic by controversial critic and pop-culture academic, Camille Paglia. I blogged about it yesterday on I Found Some Blog. I don't always agree with Paglia (politically) but I felt her comments hit a target about Miley Cyrus and the vapid sexuality of pop performances today, not to mention the corresponding vapid rebelliousness of the avant garde's stunt art…

"…the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus' performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed, and cringingly unsexy, and effect heightened by her manic grin.

How could American pop have gotten this bad? Sex has been a crucial component of the entertainment industry since the seductive vamps of silent film and the bawdy big mamas of roadhouse blues. Elvis Presley, James Brown and Mick Jagger brought sizzling heat to rock, soul and funk music, which in turn spawned the controversial raw explicitness of urban hip-hop.

The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European art-film eroticism and that were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.

…

But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.

Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

…

Pop is an artistic tradition that deserves as much respect as any other. Its lineage stretches back to 17th century Appalachian folk songs and African-American blues, all of which can still be heard vibrating in the lyrics and chord structure of contemporary music. But our most visible young performers, consumed with packaging and attitude, seem to have little sense of that thrilling continuity and therefore no confidence in how it can define and sustain their artistic identities over the course of a career.

What was perhaps most embarrassing about Miley Cyrus’ dismal gig was its cutesy toys — a giant teddy bear from which she popped to cavort with a dance troupe in fuzzy bear drag. Intended to satirize her Disney past, it signaled instead the childishness of Cyrus’ notion of sexuality, which has become simply a cartoonish gimmick to disguise a lack of professional focus. Sex isn’t just exposed flesh and crude gestures. The greatest performers, like Madonna in a canonical video such as “Vogue,” know how to use suggestion and mystery to project the magic of sexual allure. Miley, go back to school!

Read the full piece: http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/27/pops-drop-from-madonna-to-miley/

After taking my MOOC class on contemporary poetry last year (which I loved, by the way), I think there is room to pause at this statement, "avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against." After all, even Madonna needed a church to subvert against. Avant guarde artists have run the irritant gamut. And I think this is why it feels like rebelling when we take up kitsch and bad art, hence the popularity of MOBA, the Museum of Bad Art in Boston.

Don't get me wrong, I love MOBA on many levels: ironically (the whole museum is ironic) and literally (I have a soft spot for participatory attempts beyond one's skill). More on this later, but I do believe we can actually conflate gestures of loving something both ironically and literally. One level I don't love MOBA on is the level of the rebellious, avant-garde. To me that reads like a cynical, take-over gesture by artists who have run out of any other ideas. It's like robbing the innocents of their playroom in order to fashion your own school of thought. This wouldn't necessarily include language poets,  Dada poets, John Cage-inspired poetics or found poetics (which are healthy experiments, I think), but might include any overt celebration of the bad as a suspicously rebellious way to question value-systems. It's not fair to those who spend hours crafting and its not fair to those who are beginners. It's bad karma and it's a dead end.

   

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