Comments on: Publish and Perish

By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:42:25 +0000

“- the long, careful silence and eventual purity of the poem. My question is: is this concept really generative for contemporary poetry? ”
Perhaps the word poetry should be plural here. Clearly for some poetries it is not generative, since they thrive on fluid spontaneity. For others it is richly generative; probably it is usually the case that it is generative for contemporary poetry in meter. With meter (meaning not only iambic pentameter, but any counted shape), there is a mercilessly intensifying frame inside which each syllable resonates and so there is a lot of motivation for a poet to make sure you have each syllable resonating right, the energy intensified to its height, before releasing it to the world.

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:50:55 +0000

Wm. Blake, Printer & Engraver:
“Enough! —Or too much.”

By: Mgushuedc

Mgushuedc — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:34:32 +0000

To answer the question, my saying this is already too much.

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:55:35 +0000

From Elaine Scarry's 1985 The Body in Pain:

Although play is often sensuous (for in play the senses become self-experiencing), work entails a far deeper embodiment; the human creature is immersed in his interaction with the world....and thus almost without cessation he enacts a constant set of movements across the passing days and years. [...] It is in the very nature of work—as is dramatically visible in forms of physical labor and craft such as coal mining, farming, building, or inventing—that the worker "works" to bring about severe alterations in the world (relocating a rock; creating a piano or a hayfield or a house where there was none) and only brings about those alterations by consenting to be himself deeply altered (that his muscles, posture, gait will be altered is certain; that he will undergo the more severe alteration of injury is at least risked.

What I love most about Scarry's definition (work being the repetitious, consuming movements which permanently alter the worker's body) is that like Philip Levine's, it allows for more than one kind of work—a more spacious definition than those usually foisted upon us by that monotonous vocabulary of manufacture, commodity, and exchange. Hmm.

By: Doodle

Doodle — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:19:38 +0000

Who’s confusing silence with profundity? I just find it hard to believe a contemporary poet would be capable of silence. Nothing mystifying about not buying into the quantity = quantity choice. Nor is self-restraint to be confused with laziness. Churning out work because it’s supposed to be a form of productivity is no pretense. Folks might like to try it.

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:12:59 +0000

In which she parses the parsing.
Fortunately for my flagging amour propre, I never meant that Travis was exercising an exclusive claim to the epidemic language-game of describing artistic creation in terms of wage-labor-for-capital(for if anyone’s to blame for it, maybe it’s Dana Gioia); I but harrumphed in the general direction of: oh my goodness gracious would you look at us. And happily maintain that there is benefit (if not profit) in thusly looking—a benefit which in fact Steve enjoys when able to observe how intractably located art is within commerce, having been able to distinguish between them first.
(Possibly they evolved in parallel, art and commerce, like domesticated animals and agrarian culture. [Which would be which? Yes.] And perhaps Stephen Jay Gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria would be a useful construct for discussing two human endeavors which, like faith and science, will never really work and play well together. Or Lakoff and Johnson’s orientational metaphors, e.g. GOOD IS UP and TIME IS MONEY.)
Fortunately for logical empiricism, it is in fact an act of demystification to dislocate, even temporarily, that which it pleases us to call “reality” from its common metaphors. All the better to see you with, my dear. There can be no demystifying without the mystifying. To dust off our hands briskly with: “IT IS ITSELF! Well, my work is done.”—would of course be tautological.
Alors, speaking of “work”—another intriguingly culturally mystified word (thanks to Steve for bringing it to the party). Why is work good? Of course Puritanically-inflected America urges its unqualified habitual practice; yet to what extent and depth need writers voluntarily join that particular game? What about Eliot’s (much-abused) “necessary laziness”? What about nothing to do, nowhere to go, as those hard-working Zen guys like to say?
I wholeheartedly applaud Steve’s dry conclusion. Not only do most of us have poetry-sucking day jobs, but even in our off-hours we roil in a mass-market-media cacophony the likes of which Marcuse never foresaw—an experience pretty much the exact opposite of recollecting anything in tranquility—to say nothing of TEH INTERWEBS; and thus few of us stand more than a slim chance of ever being Chaucer.
(Though as my teacher once said to me, impatiently: Never mind that‚—do you even know who you are? I didn’t, and don’t; only that I nestle comfortably in the cleft between Doodle’s less-can-be-more and Steve’s more-would-be-nice.)

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:09:55 +0000

“As for ‘If it’s beautiful, publish it’ – that’s a very nice phrase, but it doesn’t, uh, mean a whole lot.”
Uh, why doesn’t it, uh, mean a whole lot? And, uh, why does it have to uh, mean a “whole lot”? Uh, why can’t it, uh, just mean, uh, what it says, uh?

By: SteveZ

SteveZ — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:10:31 +0000

I’m gonna agree with Travis here. It’s important to avoid mystifying the production and distribution of poetry by understanding that it’s not outside the marketplace or commodification. I think Travis’s use of language was not only not unexamined, but necessary. As for “If it’s beautiful, publish it” – that’s a very nice phrase, but it doesn’t, uh, mean a whole lot.
But I think there are other interesting mystifications, too. One is the strange idea that poetry much be labored at intensely and then distilled down to its finest essence, the individual poem. This nonsense of course pops up in Jordan’s post above, (which is strange because Jordan’s whole MO seems to be about doing away with quality control – BTW, a great MO, I think!) but also the same exact idea is expressed in William Logan’s review of Frank O’Hara that ran in yesterday’s NYT. It’s a matter of conceiving of poetry as craft, as a fine and dainty labor that one masters in ponderous hours.
Another good mystification surrounds just those authors mentioned about – Oppen, Rilke, Larkin – over these dudes hangs the aura of austere labor – the long, careful silence and eventual purity of the poem. My question is: is this concept really generative for contemporary poetry? Or does it confuse silence with profundity? Does it make our (male) poets into wise old sages?
Obviously, individual’s rates of production vary – but I say, work. Musicians practice every day, artists go to their studios, etc etc. If we’re making art then let’s make it and let’s not cloak our slow and lazy production with the aura of silence, by pretending that poems come out slowly because they are careful and crafted, when really – we have day jobs.

By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:02:31 +0000

I mean the relationships between production and distribution for both writers and readers. It may be as simple as if it’s beautiful, publish it, and the corollary, if it’s beautiful, read it, but I wonder.
We live in the late-capitalist world, and most people access poetry (unexamined language alert!) through the marketplace, so it’s interesting to me to examine the machinery without overly mystifying it. I also think it’s advantageous for poets to have a sense of how all this works and not to simply sit back and hum the Beach Boys’ “Hang on to Your Ego.”

By: Jordan

Jordan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:01:00 +0000

Do you mean production or distribution? Kenneth Koch said that he worked on poems every day in order to have written (maybe!) a poem every year. As for the rate of publication and distribution, it depends on the work, doesn’t it. David Shapiro, quoting Kenneth again: If it’s beautiful, publish it.