2008 February : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for February, 2008

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part Two

This is the second of three posts devoted to the seminal Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry. This post deals with the question of the “New American Poets”’s political commitments, or lack of same.
Some of the poets gathered by Allen did indeed seek to transform society. Some sought to transform consciousness. Some sought to transform writing as a practice. Most just sought to write poems that felt more genuine to them than the products of the poetic orthodoxies of the 1950s. Robert Creeley, for one example, was almost purely concerned with the lyric notation of the moment-to-moment movements of his mind, emotions, and sensibilities. As he wrote in the preface to For Love: Poems 1950-1960, “Not more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it me”? (cited in M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets 147). This implies a notion of a life more authentic or at least more awake than the one most people live, but has no necessarily political valence: various religious disciplines of attention have the same goal.
John Ashbery was a Yale Younger Poet (and Frank O’Hara almost was, in the same year), and the revolution which interested him was what Julia Kristeva calls a revolution in poetic language, largely inherited from such forebears as Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, what he calls in the title of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard “other traditions”? (including Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Brooks Wheelwright, and David Schubert). It’s important to note that Ashbery has cited such canonical figures as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens as among the poets who most shaped his poetic idiom.

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02.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (15)

A.E. Stallings

Night Rhythm

Mention of “The Sheep Child” here has called to mind all kinds of recollections from the Atlanta of my youth, in which, among literary circles at least, James Dickey loomed large. Everyone had a tale, either of generous encouragement, or booze-infused arrogance and aggression–sometimes both. I myself had witnessed his (probably inebriate) overbearing on a literary panel (he insisted on answering every question from the audience, even if specifically addressed to another panel member), but also treasure a letter he typed (how quaint typing now seems!), addressed “Dear Mr. Stallings,” (sic) when my manuscript was a Yale finalist, encouraging me to keep at my work “for me, for poetry, and for Yale” as if he were Coach Dickey and I a quarterback…

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02.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Daisy Fried

Miltonheads Unite!

A month or so ago, Sophie Gee wrote approvingly in the New York Times Book Review about the movie adaptation of Beowulf and about Philip Pullman’s use of Paradise Lost for his His Dark Materials series. I haven’t seen the former or read the latter but think I’d probably like both. Gee calls both classic texts “virtually unreadable.” I’ll grant Gee Beowulf since it’s effectively written in another language (though various translations and a performance by Benjamin Bagby are both pretty good ways to access the original)—but Paradise Lost?
Gee, an assistant professor at Princeton who specializes in the 18th Century and who has written a very fun-sounding novel called The Scandal of the Season, which tells the story behind Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” writes in the NYTBR that Paradise Lost is “in ‘normal’ English, but its blank verse is so densely learned, so syntactically complicated and philosophically obscure, that it’s almost never read outside of college courses.” She also says Milton intended to make PL difficult because “he wanted reading to involve active intellectual labor as much as pleasure.”
It’s true I’m the only person I know who has never taken a course in Milton and who has read Paradise Lost (two-plus times) for fun. (Anyone else out there? Could we start a support group? Maybe Christian Wiman? Here’s his essay on reading “Milton in Guatemala” which also appears in his book of essays Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.) In any case, it’s also true that Samuel Johnson’s mot on PL— “none ever wished it longer than it is”—is apt enough. Still, whatever Milton’s intentions and Gee’s own reading difficulties, PL is a great read.

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02.24.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (21)

Poetry Foundation

Jumping the Snark

R. Kikuo Johnson’s graphic cover version of “Recitative” (by Harriet’s own A.E. Stallings) appeared recently as part of this site’s “Poem as Comic Strip” series. One of the commenters, Mahendra Singh, included a link…

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02.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part One

It’s taken me a while to post this piece, as I’ve been beset by chemotherapy side effects of my colon cancer treatment, especially a debilitating bout of chemo fatigue, and a nasty cold on top of this, which just seems unfair. But when has my life ever been fair?
Much of what poet and critic Joshua Corey understatedly calls the “remarkable storm of controversy”? occasioned (but not caused) by my attempt to describe a phenomenon, “post-avant garde poetry,”? much mentioned but little defined, was aroused by my linking of current “post-avant”? poetry with what has been called “the New American Poetries,”? after the famous Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1960. This observation was purely descriptive, not evaluative. The poets often referred to as “post-avants”? have clearly been influenced by the New American Poetries. But there is much disagreement about who has the right to claim the New Americans as their inheritance, as if their work and its legacy were something to be owned. But no one can lay exclusive claim to an artistic heritage or tradition. Such things are available to all, which is one of the many ways in which literature improves on life.
In turn, this debate derives from how one interprets that work and that legacy. The two main claims that have been made are a) that the very diverse poets gathered under the rubric “New American Poetry”? were political and/or social revolutionaries and b) that they shared a program of total or near-total negation. I will investigate both these claims.
I hope that this series of posts will prompt debate, but I also hope that the debate will maintain a reasoned and reasonable tone. Shouting matches do nothing but make one hoarse, and personal attacks do nothing but make one mean.
This first post discusses the anthology as a whole and its work in producing the grouping we now call “the New American Poetries” out of a number of poets whose work often had very little in common. The second post will focus on the artistic statements of individual contributors. The first post will address broader issues of the relationship between “progressive” art and “progressive” politics. I won’t spoil the ending.

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02.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Christian Bök

Late Review 03

Fake%20Math.jpg
—————–
“A new weapon in the war against explosions:
EXPLOSIONS! Hearing aids may explode!”
from “Watch for Exploding Cells”
in Fake Math
by Ryan Fitzpatrick
Snare Books, 2007
—————–

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02.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Rigoberto González

The University of Arizona Poetry Center

Poetry%20Center.jpg
Those who have enjoyed Poets House’s old venue on Spring Street (I have yet to make it to the new location down by Battery Park—but I’ll get there!) understand the overwhelming energy that comes from being surrounded by books and books of poetry. At any bookstore (except at Open Books, of course) poetry gets a slim reception, almost as an afterthought, with little attention to range, certainly none to content. Poetry is tucked away like the ugly cousin to the more glamorous Fiction category. At Poets House, poetry haters need not enter. This is our space, our comfort zone, where verse—from the weak to the brilliant, from the esoteric to the populist—can claim a slot on the bookcase without apology or explanation. It is poetry. I’m thrilled that such sites are also thriving elsewhere, as in outside of New York City, like the Poetry Center down in Tucson, Arizona.

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02.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

A.E. Stallings

Lightning and Lightning Bug

I have been thinking about diction lately—the quandaries of word choice. Maybe it is partly to do with my 3-and-a-half–year old son’s vocabulary becoming richer and more sophisticated, and one finds oneself pushing him gently towards one word choice over another, though both might be more or less intelligible in context. Diction is often what makes or breaks a poem, though it can seem one of the least important of its mechanisms. Perhaps since John Ashbery made jarring registers of diction—from Elizabethan to contemporary slang and pop references–so much a part of his style, it has become a common-place of contemporary American poetry. Well-handled, mixed registers of diction can be playful, rousing, provocative; though it seems to me mixing registers is often adopted by poets as a postmodern tic, and that when it is applied glibly, the effect is of a poem channel-surfing, or too busy talking to itself to listen.

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02.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Christian Bök

Late Review 02

—————–
“juicy baby
rubber fist
red jawbreaker
gluts opera-mouthed
palate heaves
lip popper
sloppy baby
gurgle slick
gloam limpid”
“Ballgag”
in Thumbscrews
by Natalie Zina Walschots
Snare Books, 2007
—————–

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02.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

It’s tempting to invoke the phrase “Oedipus complex” in discussing this book by debut poet James Allen Hall; Mother (with a capital M), mythic figure, source of many glorious beginnings (and a few tragic endings), and indeed the defining lens to the worlds of the imagination and reality, is an unavoidable muse, an inescapable word uttered as an expression of wonder, a declamation of fear, and as the point of reference for things beautiful and dreadful. But Hall’s Mother moves beyond the son’s eye and takes shape as an independent body with agency and history outside male desire. She exists, with and without him:

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02.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Archive for February, 2008

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part Two

A.E. Stallings

Night Rhythm

Daisy Fried

Miltonheads Unite!

Poetry Foundation

Jumping the Snark

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part One

Christian Bök

Late Review 03

Rigoberto González

The University of Arizona Poetry Center

A.E. Stallings

Lightning and Lightning Bug

Christian Bök

Late Review 02

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

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