Comments on: Poets Forum (Part 1)

By: Drew Gardner

Drew Gardner — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:35:40 +0000

I also caught The Birds on AMC that night.
There’s another aspect of that gas staion scene I noticed — Hitchcock’s obvious delight in the destructive chaos he’s creating. When the horse and cart come around the corner in the height of the destruction it’s almost gleeful. The social reality depicted in the movie is one of repression and artificiality to the point where one almost wishes for it to go up in flames. The prescience here is real in part because the audience’s own desire to see the maddening and oblivious human world destroyed comes out in that sequence — or at least the neoncon-ish image of the oblivious pudgy smoker/driver/consumer in that scene. There’s also a strong subcurrent in The Birds of either an excess or a deficit of maternal love in the two main characters which resonates weirdly with altranately attacking and not attacking birds, which are not subject to rational explanations of their behavior or expositions of ther history.
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By: john

john — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:21:23 +0000

I met my wife at a sit-in. Engagement with the world — it’s the only source of hope. But I don’t recommend doing it for art or for documentary purposes. Do it for life if your life calls you to. If you don’t feel called, give it a try and see.
And one bit of advice: If you go in wearing your aesthetic hat, you will find much to object to. Unattractive chants at rallies. (“All we are saying is give chants some peace.”) Unappetizing rhetoric all around. Yadda yadda — lots of yadda yadda. If you must be aesthetic about it, I recommend Coleridge’s closing encomium in his poem to Charles Lamb: “No sound is dissonant which tells of life.”
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By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:08:23 +0000

But there are poets of engagement. I don’t know — Brian Turner. Siedel. Mark Nowak. Baraka. They don’t seem to have any more purchase on the collective imagination than Ashbery or Merwin or Creeley. Then what?
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:37:32 +0000

Thanks, Ange, for summing and summoning the panel. Perhaps the social nature of a panel does damp down the differences and the times relegate our idiosyncracies, and our social differences and social actions to reading and writing. I’ve been re-reading Denise Levertov (her 84th birthday would have been this Wednesday) and her poems that would now be termed documentary poems–poems that use snippets from media and government testimony to create affect–seem almost one last frustrated attempt on her part to say something that will snag the attention of the apparatus behind the words she quotes. Other poems of her, though, could only have been written because she took action with others:
The choice: to speak
or not to speak.
Those of whom we spoke
had not that choice.
(from “Protestors”)
Through the midnight streets of Babylon
between the steel towers of their arsenals,
between the torture castles with no windows,
we race by barefoot, holding tight
our candles,
(from “Candles in Babylon”)
I wonder if the flattening of difference is due not to their similar demographic but to the seeming futility these days of such action, or of having very few poets represent the point of view–as Levertov did to Duncan–that some great art results from engagement, not detachment, with the world.
Emily
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By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:28:13 +0000

“from the outside there’s not enough difference to account for the rupture the intellectuals like us feel.”
Simon — at least hypocrites (yeah, I miss the 90′s too) feel the distance between their actions and their ideals. The current realpolitiks has no ideals — it’s just about power.
It’s really no surprise that Pinsky and Hejinian appeared more alike than different on the panel. He quoted Corso’s “Marriage” and compared it to Dexter Gordon; she played Stalling and dropped names like Eisenstein and Shlovsky. I’m not sure what would have stood out in this context: Lobachevsky? Erasmus Darwin? Frege? Aleister Crowley? It’s hard to assert one’s alterity as one of the black-clad chancellors of the Academy.
And I’m not making fun of them. But being in a social setting will tend to emphasize the social features, right? And we’re basically alike: it’s what they call a demographic.
On the page though, we’re pretty indelibly idiosyncratic.
So I am not a fan of conferences, readings, etc. But I am totally a fan of that page. I agree with you: let’s all read and write, in that order.
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By: Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:40:48 +0000

It’s terrific to hear some big names (how did Lyn Heijinian and Robert Pinsky sit down together — sounds like Yalta) affirm “biodiversity”. The standard “state of the art” criticism is to say that there is too much poetry, not enough wheat-from-chaffing, that sort of thing — as if poets have a duty to be quiet for their betters.
I don’t think it’s possible to be too strongly in favor of “people writing”. Blogs — I mean, should this not be an English teacher’s wet dream? People voluntarily writing Themes for English B? Of course much of it is horrific, but then, they learn quite quickly that the way to get more readers is to write better: better prose, better themes. It seems like a virtuous circle to me, and I can’t see a downside. Even the academy should be in favor — these massive archives will keep their students’ students in business for years.
I was thinking recently about “movements” — this is one thing that really does seem to be dead to contemporary poetry. Lyn and the langauge team seem to have been the last group to really have been able to assert some kind of hegemony over our thoughts. My own feeling is that the explosive growth and sophistication of the marketing industry has drained the life out of the phenomenon — things like flarf existed in a grey zone, half serious and half (the more important half) mockery and comment on the naming moment itself.
The world going to hell — from my point of view, right after graduation, rendering all my political science classes irrelevant (we were taught the “next big thing” was a cold war with China.) It really has been driven to the forefront, and it’s impossible to ignore. Even Helen Vendler (who once proclaimed she never voted) is angry. But then, it’s important to realize that the world has been hell for most people well before 9/11 — neither the attacks nor Bush came out of nowhere. It’s “blowback” and while Clinton was much easier to love (apparently his favourite poet is Walt Whitman? God I miss the 90s) from the outside there’s not enough difference to account for the rupture the intellectuals like us feel.
The writerly response to the war has been quite heartening, actually. Some institutions (Harpers, the New Yorker) really stood up; others (The Atlantic Monthly) have not. In terms of poetry, we will never go back to Carolyn Forché, but the “avant garde” has proved surprisingly adaptive. We will wait, perhaps in vain, for the great “war poetry” of the invasions — in part because our armies are no longer representative of our nation.
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