Archive for September, 2007
Christian Bök
Quick Review 01
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“My feelings of anger do not interfere with my work. In order to have good health, I have to act in a pleasing way to other more powerful individuals. At times I think people are trying to annoy me. I feel more angry about myself these days than I used to. More people than usual are beginning to make me feel angry. I am so angry and hostile all the time that I can’t stand it. From time to time my feelings of anger interfere with my work. I feel that others are constantly and intentionally making me angry. I feel so angry that it interferes with my capacity to work. I feel unhappy about my physical health. My feelings of anger prevent me from doing any work at all.”
from “Avail”
in Last Instance
by Dan Farrell
Krupskaya, 1999
—————–
A.E. Stallings
Anxiety, a rant in three fits
Fit the First: Anxiety and Audience
I was working on this post a while ago, perhaps an oblique response to Brian Phillips’ essay among other conversations, and then got caught up in some other thoughts and discussions. But this still seems relevant, especially viewing recent comments to Christian’s Failure posts (particularly Marty Elwell’s).
I wonder why we Anglophone poets are evidently so worried about audience. I meet plenty of Greek poets. They are writing in a marginal (though not currently endangered) language for the tiniest of audiences: even a best-selling novel here sells just a couple thousand copies. I’ve never seen Greek poets sell books at a reading, though they often give their reading copy away to a new fan. Poetry books are to be presented to friends, relatives, critics, editors. For a Greek poet, the ultimate wider success is to find an English translator and have their books published in English (whether in America, the UK, Canada), to reach a world audience. I’ve even encountered younger Greek poets who are writing in English, though it is not their native tongue. Personally, I think this is disastrous, but they seem to view it as a kind of survival technique.
So what do we English-speaking poets have to complain about, really? Why are we whining?
Ange Mlinko
J’aime/Je n’aime pas
Let’s take a break from theorizing (or not). Let’s play the J’aime/je n’aime pas game, which I am totally cribbing from the bloggers Jenny Davidson and Ed Park, who cribbed it from Roland Barthes, who said:
Christian Bök
Writing and Failure (Part 8)
Readers of these posts about failure are offering lots of excellent responses to my provocations, and I am grateful for the interest. Some of you have suggested that the avant-garde indulges in asensual, abstract writing that disowns “figural” devices rooted in our “experience” of the world. I have tried to suggest, however, that (on the contrary) much of the avant-garde concerns itself with an unmediated experience of material language itself—a language full of empirical sensation free from essayistic abstraction. The Black Mountain poets, for example, deploy concrete language in order to transcribe the act of paying attention to the “proprioception” of the body during the act of thinking; moreover, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets go on to deploy concrete language in order to display the material texture of words themselves, doing so in order to subvert the exchanges that (for the sake of abstract meanings) otherwise suppress our direct, “opaque” experience of such overloaded signifiers. I believe that, far from failing because such poetry is simply “too conceptual,” both movements (and other flavours of the avant-garde) succeed because of their passionate commitment to the creation of “sensational” experiences made out of nothing but words. I am hoping that, by offering these concluding sentiments, I might close the topic of “failure” for now, in the interest of opening up a newer topic for discussion….
Rigoberto González
Those Pesky Minority Poets
You know, in light of the recent Poetry Society of America ruckus, in which board members Walter Mosley, Rafael Campo, Elizabeth Alexander and Mary Jo Salter resigned after comments made by the now-former board president William Louis-Dreyfus (after the contentious selection of the controversial John Hollander as this year’s recipient of the Frost medal), I had to step in and say something, namely, that expressing discontent, protesting, indeed making noise, is the only way to enact change.
A.E. Stallings
The Rainbow Connection
A couple of my fellow blogsters also have little ones underfoot, so I’m sure they will appreciate the problem of “toddler music.” (I need to track down Steve’s suggestion of a couple of weeks ago.) I was given a four cd set of toddler tunes, and also own some Rafi and other singers big in the little people set. Yes, I know, there’s no reason toddlers can’t listen to “real” music. Now my son (3) would just as soon listen to “Peter and the Wolf”, which he says he “watches,” because I guess to him it is like a movie, only scarier, perhaps, since the wolf as a sound rather than image on a small, two-dimensional screen seems freer to roam about the room and lurk in the dark corners of the house. But as an ex-pat, I was keen that our son learn all the English children’s songs and rhymes of my own childhood, so out came the toddler tunes.
Christian Bök
Writing and Failure (Part 7)
Ange Mlinko has suggested in her recent post that the avant-garde avoids an engagment with the sensuality of experience, when in fact nearly every variety of avant-garde practice takes delight in the material pleasure of language itself—the jouissance of its phonemes and textures, often freed from the arduousness of sense. Ange admits to disliking discursive, essayistic language in poetry (and I totally agree that such anecdotal reportage is almost always tiresome), but I am not so sure that the cited poets, whom she dislikes, actually make a habit of indulging in such asensual, abstract writing at all. Ange dismisses both the Black Mountain poets and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets out of hand and then goes on to celebrate, as exemplary, a work by Basil Bunting—but ironically, Bunting has written a poem in the tone of a short essay, subordinating the concrete, material language of “seafoam” to a lot of abstract claptrap: “its restless immobility infects the soul”; or “its indifference haunts us to suicide”; or “strong memories…exasperate impatience” (to cite but three of many examples in the work). I think that, in this poem at least, abstract nouns outnumber concrete nouns to such a degree that, if submitted by one of my young poets in class, such a poem might actually “foment” some very discouraging commentaries about essayistic meditation, in the hope that the sensual appeals of the “real foam” in the poem might otherwise prevail….
A.E. Stallings
Happy Birthday T.S. Eliot
I was reminded by several people (and the Writer’s Almanac) that today is T.S. Eliot’s birthday. T. S. Eliot was one of my first loves as a forming poet.
Rigoberto González
Wednesday Shout Out
I sent the following piece as a replacement (that for some reason was never posted) for a poem that was included in my Top Five love poems feature on the Poetry Foundation website last Valentine’s Day. My translation of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XX could not be published online because of a copyright snag. I’m happy to present the replacement love poem here, written by Kimiko Hahn:
Stephen Burt
no telling
It’s not clear to me that the Internet is the best medium– in fact, it’s clear that it is not the best medium– for long-form reflective, evaluative or detailedly analytic criticism of poetry, or of any other art form whose products are both durable and portable.
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A thoughtful blog. To be honest, however, I've never much been worried by Auden's ... MORE »
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Interesting post. I need to pick poems for two readings next week and I always ... MORE »
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