Comments on: New Bat City

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:16:32 +0000

“Perhaps liking and understanding are not the reason for these poems to exist.” [Mary]
I like this. Because some people (mostly adolescents, admittedly) do like to spin (right round baby right round) for no other purpose than gettin’ dizzy.
“Szporluk’s poem suggests (among the many other things it may or may not be doing) that you also don’t want to see where/how feelings get made–it ain’t pretty.” [Michael]
I like this too. Though I had read “turn them into women” as the poet’s subverting the classical god-rapes-mortal myths: less lusty god/desses take pity on fleeing victims and defend their virtue from swans, bulls, or showers of gold by turning them into trees, stones, or echoes.

By: Steve S

Steve S — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:54:34 +0000

I'll leave the discussion hermetically sealed poems to others, but as a great admirer of Larissa Szporluk's poetry, I'd suggest the following two poems as something in a different (and my favorite) vein of hers: http://www.versedaily.org/2005/cuckoo.shtml (originally in Bat City Review #1, interestingly) http://www.versedaily.org/2007/gargoyle.shtml (full disclosure: I had the privilege of publishing this one originally, though I am no longer affiliated with that journal)

By: Michael Theune

Michael Theune — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:01:26 +0000

When I encounter a poem like “Animal-Man,” one of the first things I do is try to find the turns, the major shifts in the poem’s rhetorical progress. In “Animal-Man,” the major turn seems to be somewhere around the third-to-last line. There, the poem seems to turn from a lot of language about some pretty raw sexuality (some oral sex, perhaps, in the second stanza; some sexual images elsewhere) that MAY indicate a move into maturity (”turn them into women”–although I think this line also may be very ironic, and/or very frightening in the simplistic way it views the power of sex) to then what amounts to (at best) a joke (after all, “you grin from ear to ear”) about the status of the supposed feelings (the connectivity, the tenderness, the humanity) that supposedly emerge from such encounters–these feelings are not magical, the mystical “real” quantity of sex, says the poem; rather, they are made like sausage from the ordeal of sex.
The old saying has it that the two things you don’t want to see made are laws and sausages. Szporluk’s poem suggests (among the many other things it may or may not be doing) that you also don’t want to see where/how feelings get made–it ain’t pretty.
Now, whether or not the poem is really good is a whole other issue, but locating the turn, I think, helps a lot in beginning to get an initial grasp of what this poem is suggesting and doing.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:03:26 +0000

I happen to know that Unreliable’s late Russian teacher was Joseph Brodsky, so her modifier’s an adjective not a noun. And yes I did quote Eric Griffiths, a marvelous critic who also edited the handy compilation, Dante in English – Dante, of course, being a good test case for the memorable, along with those Unrl. fondly mentions.

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:08:54 +0000

I left a link to this essay over on Señor Don's blog, but thought others might find in it a useful conceptual tool—Jerome McGann's distinction between the oppositional and the accommodating: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/mcgann.html I for one feel meekly grateful that I get to live in a world where I don't have to choose between these ostentatively dual poetries. My late Russian teacher had us memorize well over 10,000 lines; it's interesting to see what has stuck. Auden stays, and Frost. Most of the stuff in translation is long gone, though. And many silly verses I admired as a teenager seem embedded in there for good, I fear, though fortunately drowned out by the innumerable fragments of Dickinson. Don, was it you who recently quoted Eric Griffiths?—"What was learned by rote is remembered by heart."

By: Lucia

Lucia — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:05:15 +0000

I just wanted to commend Mary’s bravery for voicing her opinion.
I think about the memorability issue in relation to a poem’s length, and the tendency toward gabbiness on the part of many contemporary poets. I like the gabbiness, but also want momemorabiility. (Don’t know if that’s a sanctified word.) And yes I’ve heard that one had to have memorized something like 10,000 lines of poetry to be admitted into higher education in ancient Greece, but that was a long time ago.

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:09:14 +0000

Shucks, Don! Thank you. Yes, I know you were at LI, together with the dazzling editorial team of Hacker and Shepherd. Anyhow, this quote just crossed my path, so thought I’d post it.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns … instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” (George Orwell)

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:28:34 +0000

Mary: thank you. Juxtaposing Akhmatova here makes perfect sense to me. And for the record, I have great respect for you and what you’re saying. (As well as for Literary Imagination, which I once briefly edited!)

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:36:37 +0000

I’m inclined to forgive you for just about anything, Don. Let it be known, that when I first saw the subject “Bat City Review” and the author D.A. Powell, I was eager to read on. I wanted to like these poems! But when they seemed to scrape my mind like a rusty nail, I wanted to understand them. Since my sincerity has been questioned, I should probably add that I am still being sincere. Perhaps liking and understanding are not the reason for these poems to exist. I am enjoying these quotes, thanks for them. Here, I’ve got a quote, too – and this, I believe, is mostly why I write -
ANNA AKHMATOVA: REQUIEM
Translated by Milton Ehre in Literary Imagination
Instead of a Preface
In the terrible years of Yezhov’s terror I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once someone somehow “recognized” me. Then a woman standing behind me, lips blue from cold, who of course never had heard my name, woke from the stupor we all were in and whispered in my ear (we all spoke in whispers there):
“Could you describe this?”
“Yes” was my answer.
Then something like a smile slid across what was once her face.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:23:23 +0000

Is the issue Mary raises related to how accessible these poems are?
If so, what make you all of Helen Vendler’s ” ‘Accessibility’ needs to be dropped from the American vocabulary of aesthetic judgment if we are not to appear fools in the eyes of the world.” (Notwithstanding that we’ve done a number of other things to appear foolish in the eyes of the world. You know what she means…)
And Geoffrey Hill’s saying that “public toilets have a duty to be accessible, poetry does not.”
You’ll forgive me for trotting these out yet again??