Comments on: A Few Thoughts on Poetry and Criticism, Part III

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:27:01 +0000

Tom Raworth Cento
lo! nears the orgone-bug
through adjectives
you get what you put
inside the dentist’s peephole
all the boats go out to sea
and the plane lands
on the windowsill
water tower thumb tacks hold the country down
this spy seemed reasonable
now is a word i like and morning, morning now
in a restaurant in cincinnati
punctuated by birdbaths
i’ve also got some stars and moons
facts, give me some facts
did you guess? some people are dancing
moo moo went the cows in the only way they could

By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:03:16 +0000

I started to compose a cento of Clark Coolidge then realized it didn’t look any different from the rest of his poems.

By: Doodle

Doodle — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:44:26 +0000

From The Centos of Ezra Pound:
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
You were praised, my books.
What if I know thy speeches word by word?
I am homesick after mine own kind.
I, even I, am he who knoweth the roads.
Go, my songs, seek your praise
From the young and from the intolerant.
Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are,
For I was a gaunt, grave councillor.
Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatified.
Even in my dreams you have denied yourself to me.
Will people accept them
With minds still hovering above their testicles?
The small dogs look at the big dogs.

By: Doodle

Doodle — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:04:08 +0000

At least it isn’t your two centos!

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:54:52 +0000

CENTO OUCH? Am I supposed to be feeling really humbled and stupid right now? Please advise.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:07:19 +0000

Jordan said:
>Nick, nice reference to Ashbery’s “The Cathedral Is.”
Aaron said:
>FYI, Jordan, Nick’s sonnet is an Ashbery amalgam.
Line 1: “Late Echo”
Line 2: from Ashbery’s first poem at age 8
Line 3: “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (first published in POETRY)
Line 4: “Just Walking Around”
Line 5: “Scheherazade”
Line 6: “Attabled with the Spinning Years” last week’s New Yorker
Line 7: “The Instruction Manual”
Line 8: “The Cathedral Is”
Line 9: “Mottled Tuesday”
Line 10: “A Worldly Country”
Line 11: “A November”
Line 12: “Song”
Line 13: “The Gallant Needful”
Line 14: [See Above]
CENTO OUCH.
Kent

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:57:38 +0000

I don’t like to think about my two cents.

By: nick

nick — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:01:28 +0000

I like to think of it as a googlecento, Aaron (the traditional googlecento is “stitched together” entirely from the contents of Google search results pages; clicking on links to locate additional text is frowned upon….)

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:49:50 +0000

“Due to the heavily policed institutional borders between creative writing and criticism or literature, the interrelationship of the two is often obscured.”
Heavily policed institutional borders? Would you please elaborate …

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:57:32 +0000

Reginald deserves our thanks for his deft and gracious way of opening these various cans of worms. This one has, for the moment, perhaps exhausted its crawl…but permit me to point out one dimension of criticism that has gone unmentioned here: I mean the question of ethos. Criticism distinguishes itself from other literary arts–at least to my taste, and I lay claim to no other–by its democratic (or perhaps more properly, republican) earnestness; its claim, however latent, to inform and correct the sensibility of the masses; its commitment to being the vehicle of a certain kind of civility. This spirit may be expressed (as in the case of the New Critics), or latent, or present in some fussy confusion of the two (as in any recent volume of the PMLA), but in any case, it declares its awareness of a singular fact of modern culture: that everyone has the right to judge. (Trilling, I believe–in one of those moments where a critic seems to renounce this ethos in the service of something more profound–made this point best.) The work of art, insofar as it shows traces of the legacy of modernism, turns a defiant face to that aforementioned singular fact, saying, in effect, judge me if you can, if you dare, but I care not; and it could be argued that in the dominant moods of modern poetry–surreal, confessional, identitarian, post-avant-garde, etc.–one can detect the same defiance, turned now this way, now that. The work of criticism, on the other hand, seeks to educate judgment, to insert itself into a hierarchy organized by the rational judgment of people’s ability to judge; and in this lies its earnestness, that it is born of the attempt to reconcile us to the tacit democracy of judgment in we which wander, dazed, wounded, half-blind, as among the shrapnel of the gods.