2008 March : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for March, 2008

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As an immigrant, I always assume that any observation or insight I happen to chance upon is already old news to the rest of the populace. Hey, have you heard the Eagles’ great new ballad, “Hotel California”? But who doesn’t know that Allen Ginsberg saw himself as a coda to Walt Whitman?

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03.13.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Linh Dinh

Last Chance! Whatever

In a recent post, Daisy Fried discussed the deflational aspect of standard journalese, how it flattens all horrors big and small into an efficient monotone. Newspaper lingo as tranquilizer. But there’s also yellow journalism, which is sensationalism for the lower class. (This term originates from the Yellow Kid, the first comics character.)

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03.12.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Daisy Fried

Evidence, But of What?, a Mini-Essay on Form

Does form need to support content? Or is it better when form does the opposite?
News item from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th Street
An Amtrak police officer was shot in the foot yesterday morning by a woman at 30th Street Station. The shooting happened in the vicinity of the McDonald’s at the station about 11 a.m., according to Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham. Philadelphia police took the female suspect into custody.
The circumstances of the shooting and the source of the weapon were under investigation, Graham said. Amtrak did not release the names of the officer and suspect. The officer’s injuries were not life-threatening, Graham said. The officer was taken to Hahnemann University Hospital and was in stable condition.
The news short is a form as surely as the sonnet. The news short generates mystery through compression, omission and conventions of tone, which take outlandish human events with an absolutely straight face. The best examples require the collaboration of a professional reporter and a very professional editor, neither of whom has observed the event. There is a tragedy in being shot in the foot, and probably an ugly story here. But tragedy and ugliness have been erased by newsification. The bizarre hilarity is not unlike Ashbery forcing surrealist comedy into the complicated traditional sestina form as in “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” where Popeye is the subject. Both are inspired deadpan mismatches of form and content—though in the case of “Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th St,” one suspects that reporter and editor are not actually keeping a straight face, because neither ever has anything but a straight face.

03.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Reginald Shepherd

Illness and Poetry

My friend the poet and critic Christopher Hennessy, who maintains a fascinating blog on the multiple relationships between identity (particularly gay identity) and creativity at Outside the Lines, recently asked me, after I described to him one of my chemotherapy side effects, that even picking up a piece of cold fruit burns my hands, whether I planned to write about the experience of having cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. Some excellent poetry has come out of that experience, most notably the late L. E. Sissman’s Hello Darkness. The very much alive Marilyn Hacker has a fourteen-poem sequence called “Cancer Winter”? in her book Winter Numbers, dealing with her experience of breast cancer. There is also, in prose, the late cultural critic Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and, more problematically, AIDS and Its Metaphors, and the late Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journal. I have not encountered the stigmatization of cancer Sontag writes of, though I am very familiar with the stigmatization of HIV, which has absorbed much of the “you brought this on yourself”? discourse that used to surround cancer.

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03.08.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Daisy Fried

The Bride-Choosing

I was trying to read my 14-month old daughter a Grimm’s Fairy Tale this morning, but poets of her generation are narratively-challenged, so I post it here instead.
The Bride-Choosing
There was once a young Shepherd who wished to get married; but although he knew three Sisters, each one was as pretty as the others, and the choice was therefore so difficult, that he did not know to which to give the preference. So he asked his Mother’s advice; and she told him to invite all three of them to supper, and to place a cheese before them and observe how they cut it. The youth did so; and the first Sister ate her cheese, rind and all; the second cut off the rind so hastily, that she cut with it some of the good cheese and threw it all away; but the third Sister pared the rind off very carefully, neither too much nor too little. The Shepherd thereupon told all this to his Mother, and she said, “Take the youngest Sister to wife.”
And he did so, and lived contentedly and happily with her all his life long.
I would have picked the first sister: Better in bed.

03.07.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Daisy Fried

Good Night, Sweet Ladies: A Thought About Slightness

Frank O’Hara and Emily Dickinson both wrote a lot of minor work. O’Hara’s minor work is usually more fun, to me, than Dickinson’s, but either way, they are poets whose lesser poems are an integral part of their overall body of work. Everybody needs to write minor work. I read somewhere that the filthiest limericks were probably written by anthology-rank Victorian poets keeping their hand in for when the big stuff arrived. T.S. Eliot kept his hand in by writing Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His separation of light verse from the rest of his poetry makes major work like Four Quartets seem all the more oppressively sober. (As a semi-aside, imagine the glummest passages of “The Wasteland” without the tragicomic pub scene.) It’s hard to keep Cats in mind when reading “The Dry Salvages” but Emily Dickinson’s outhouse poem, #1167 (“Alone and in a Circumstance/Reluctant to be told/A spider on my reticence/Assiduously Crawled…”) seems of a piece with the lifework of the Amherst recluse. Same with O’Hara: His chat matters. Sure, the greatest hits are capital-G great—Dickinson’s #27 (“Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me”), O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.” But neither one writes freestanding monuments of ostentatious ambition. Instead, each one’s work as a whole is a great city.

03.06.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Daisy Fried

The Anatomy of Pleasure

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What a delight to see on Poetry Daily yesterday that Knopf has put out a Selected Frank O’Hara, edited by Mark Ford. I have about eight copies of Lunch Poems, and a Meditations in an Emergency, and a Poems Retrieved, and two copies of the Collected, but it is certainly time for a new Selected, and Ford seems like a great person to have edited it. The Collected is often too much, and reading a new Selected O’Hara should be like seeing a museum show of your favorite artist, hung in an all new way by a passionate curator.
O’Hara reminds me every time I read him how dull taxonomies and endless discussions of poetry camps really are. Nothing against criticism, intellectuality, theory, scholarship, etcetera. I’m all for those things. I’m also for remembering that art’s a primary experience—you and the poem and pleasure.

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03.05.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (16)

Daisy Fried

My Favorite Word

The cookbook A Tuscan in the Kitchen, by Pino Luongo, is distinguished by not giving measurements for the recipes, and by the stories Luongo tells in between the recipes. In a section of the book called “Grandpa’s Nets and Grandma’s Pots” Luongo tells of his grandfather, a fisherman living in Orbetello during World War II:
My grandfather was a fisherman. His name was Ettore, but everyone called him “Bo,” which is an exclamation in dialect that means “Beats me” or “Don’t ask me” or “How should I know?” Like the rest of the family, he was anti-Fascist. During World War II, the Fascists put him in charge of all the civilians in Orbetello, and it was his responsibility to report anyone who did anything against the uniformed soldiers who occupied the town. They would say something like, “There is a man up in the hills. We are looking for him. Do you know where he is hiding?” And my grandfather would shrug his shoulders and say, “Bo?” So he was known as Bo Solimeno until the day he died.
After we read that, in Florence, Italy, in 2005, Jim and I spent the next two weeks rudely blurting “Bo!” every time one of us asked the other one something. Luckily we did not try it out on anyone else; my friend Paola later told me ‘be careful who you say it to, it’s not polite.’ But we did listen to see if we could hear someone saying ‘Bo!’ on the street.

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03.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Reginald Shepherd

White Dopes on Punk: An Analogy*

The dichotomy people in the literary world frequently make between mainstream and experimental poetry, conservative and “progressive”? poetry, is very similar in form and tone (the attribution of sin to one and virtue to the other) to the dichotomy people (some of them the same people) make in the field of popular music between disco and punk. Disco bears the burden of inauthenticity and ideological mystification, complicity and social complacency—bodily pleasure as the opiate of the masses. I find this still-too-common characterization curious, since disco’s main producers and audiences were black people and gay men. Punk, on the other hand, bears the banner of authenticity and critique, transgression and rebellion, a revolt against the body and enjoyment (see the Sex Pistols song “Bodies”). Rebels of all stripes tend to be rather puritanical.

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03.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Major Jackson

Eminently Fair

Australia’s leading poet Les Murray is one of the globe’s finest, and he knows it. So much so, a request to blurb a collection of poems by the poet J.K. Murphy becomes an opportunity for him to flaunt his clout. Apparently, Les Murray’s wife is an aspiring author, a social historian to be precise. Like a good husband, Murray thought he’d lend a hand to his wife’s publishing career. Nothing shameful about that, I guess.

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03.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Archive for March, 2008

Linh Dinh

The Fall of America

Linh Dinh

Last Chance! Whatever

Daisy Fried

Evidence, But of What?, a Mini-Essay on Form

Reginald Shepherd

Illness and Poetry

Daisy Fried

The Bride-Choosing

Daisy Fried

Good Night, Sweet Ladies: A Thought About Slightness

Daisy Fried

The Anatomy of Pleasure

Daisy Fried

My Favorite Word

Reginald Shepherd

White Dopes on Punk: An Analogy*

Major Jackson

Eminently Fair

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