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
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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.
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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.
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By: Doodle

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

At least it isn’t your two centos!
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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.
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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
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By: Aaron Fagan

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

I don’t like to think about my two cents.
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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….)
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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 …
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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.
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By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:31:21 +0000

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]
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By: Jordan

Jordan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:01:09 +0000

Nick, nice reference to Ashbery’s “The Cathedral Is.”
Maybe somebody already said this in one of these unreadable posts and comments, but the basic problem the poet-critic poses is how to understand approval and disapproval doled out by someone seeking approval in the same field.
Whereas the basic problem the poet poses is how to understand someone hellbent on wasting life.
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By: nick

nick — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:14:09 +0000

STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
What name do I have for you?
In all this springing up was no hint
Does it mean one thing with work
As I sit looking out of a window of the building
Slated for demolition
We’re leaving again of our own volition
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
The spoon went in just right,
The song tells us of our old way of living
The hat hasn’t worn too well
One professor in grad school, she called Ashbery “a trick on white people.”
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By: JP Craig

JP Craig — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:36:50 +0000

The notion that critics can’t perform a reading seems a bit unfair to me. It is difficult to get a reading published because journals prefer essays with “significant” claims, meaning addressing thematics, culture, or poetics. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t such readings out there. If you take the time to look through journals, you’ll find them. But it’s easier to find a good reading serving to illustrate an argument.
Yes, there are bad readings and bad critics. There are also bad poets. If you go around denying value, you’re only shortchanging yourself, foreclosing potentially useful or pleasurable lines of flight. It’s best to just take the risk that something will be crappy and give it a shot. It beats the hell out of TV.
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By: Jim K.

Jim K. — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:08:42 +0000

The desire to split everything from everything else in poetry gets a little
heavy and depressing sometimes. Art is not so elbowish. We should be free.
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:16:59 +0000

there’s nothing wrong with
literary criticism per se …i’ve read hugh kenner
& marjorie perloff & others it’s inessential
is all …a long time ago i learned
how to be a poet from ted berrigan
in a class once at naropa he said
” all you have to do if you want to
be a poet is read hundreds & hundreds
of poems by lots of different poets
& then write hundreds & hundreds of
imitations of those poems & after
a certain amount of time years
apprenticeship you’ll be a poet
that is you’ll understand how a poem
works how a poem operates the different tones &
registers poets use how the poem works
at the end of the line &c. &c. &c. ”
poems aren’t that complicated
some poems are complex
but that just means they
have lots of different parts stuck together in a particular
fashion is all
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By: mickey o'connor

mickey o'connor — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:16:59 +0000

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:33:31 +0000

I like the bit: “Most literary academics have no idea how to read a poem.” I have my way of reading poems. It would not work for other people the way it works for me just as the way others read does not work for me. It has taken me a long time to learn how to read and it is a process that changes as I get older and more experienced. It could be argued that I have even more experience with misreading–my misreadings and the misreadings of others. More a process of elimination than anything. I remember being an undergraduate (1994) and going to see John Ashbery read. I didn’t understand a single thing he read. It sounded as though he did not understand a single thing he read. He seemed to get tripped up over and over as he read off the page. People were laughing like he was a stand-up comic, but there was nothing that could honestly warrant much more than a mental chuckle it seemed to me. The guy I went to the reading with looked at me like I had something contagious when I said I didn’t understand what the big deal was. My professor the next day said John Ashbery is one of the most important poets in America…. One professor in grad school, she called Ashbery “a trick on white people.” I thought that was funny, but I also thought it was interesting that I didn’t totally agree when I might have agreed 10 years earlier. Taste evolves and I believe it has come to include certain critical attitudes. Where a generation ago might have thought a certain fashion was the rage or the lasting thing, the same way a generation before thought their fashion was the rage or the lasting thing and so on … the next generation is the generation of the DVD extras and all of the small print on the labels and where it was made and by whom and so on and so on. Boredom. Bursting at the seams with information but totally starved of all nutrition. As bored as Henry was of achilles except jacked up on Red Bull with no idea who Daedalus is until we open another tab and paste it to search Wikipedia. Then we are well on our way to becoming the worst nightmare of any elected official. Open-source humanity.
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By: Eshuneutics

Eshuneutics — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:23:19 +0000

A similar debate is taking place in the UK– yes, there are poets and critics outside the USA—which is aligning itself with this point of view, a view-point which is finely expressed here. The desire to split poetry from criticism reflects the common attitude that there is a division between teachers (critics) and makers (artists). Teachers, like critics, teach because they cannot make themselves. But good teachers are creative– are vital to keeping creativity alive. Critics have a vital cultural role to play, a therapeutic role in the true mythological sense of that word: a role that demands they “draw up” meaning from the wor(l)d. The war between critic and poet springs because people impose reductive images of both poetry and criticism. Shadow-boxing results.
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