Comments on: Bolaño Blitz

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:38:35 +0000

Franz, calling you an “important and valuable poet” as i did
above—is that really a roundabout insult, a sly putdown?
if i say that your work merits its popularity and its prizes, then i’m punchbagging you?
if you interpret my praise of you as a litotes, what can i say—
whether you allow it or no, you are one of the poets i admire, and the fact
that your books have gone into extra printings shows that i’m not
alone in my admiration—
(and by the way, can’t i like other poets too? what’s the syllogism here: If i praise X or Y, ergo that invalidates my praise of you?)
Report this comment

By: Franz Wright

Franz Wright — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:32:31 +0000

I’m sorry, Bill–I always have had the greatest admiration for you–but your roundabout insults (comparing me to B. Collins, Mary Oliver, &c.)–have a little respect for Christ’s sake. I’ve lived through something like what you have most of my life (in spite of the stupid prize a few years ago, which I never asked for) and there is NO resemblance,no comparison, nothing, between my work and those people. You sly putdowns–it’s like dealing with a highly intelligent 15 years old, and basically, get off the subject of me as one of your pathetic punching bags, will you. Split. Franz
Report this comment

By: david chirot

david chirot — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:42:00 +0000

This is wild to just by chance stumbleo n this
about fifteen minutes ago my character El Colonel who has appeared in many journals on line–just finished a paiting which is called simply “Homenaje Roberto Bolano por El Colonel”!
I have written for some now re Bolano at my blog and some essays on line–
i think his most interesting and best written works from what I have read (which is up to half way through 2066 and including Romantic Dogs–)
are By Night in Chile and Distant Star
By night iin Chile is theone aboard and also in English translation which is considered his masterpiece in writing, in the writing itself, and thelayers of what he is exploring about the relationships of poetry with fascism.
Perhaps this is why in The usa the lamer and tamer Savage Detectives is so popular–it does not get involved with the darker sides of the American involvements with Chile’s 9/11–and the following tortures, disappearances, the gutting of the economy as the first “laboratory” for the Friedman “Free Markets” economics.
Distant Star, which was originally the last entry in Nazi Literature of the Americas–is also a brilliant “dive” into the poetry-fascism connection.
These aspects of Bolano’s work I have written a far amount on so far and now a longer series of pieces which has more esp re By Night in Chile, as part of my ongoing series of essays “The New Extreme Experimental American Poetry and Arts” which is an investigation into what poetry is in relation with torture, Guantanamo, the vast secret prison systems and a great deal more i the US since 9/11 in NYC.
Sections of 2066 have a great deal to do with the American-Mexican “connections” occurring in the border areas of factories, hundreds of women raped and murdered, the interweaving of drug cartels, the police, government officials and the Americans across the border.
It also has anenigmatic author whom his followers are looking for, as in Savage detectives–but at more complex level–
I think the works of Bolano that deal with the hypocrises of relationships of institutions and insitutions of the writing world, poetry, criticism, are vey appropriate to this time i the USA, which is celebrating a great change in its history and the same time supports with billions Apartheid, and shows no signs yet of doing anything about the rapidily growing system of “Gitmos across the USA” reserved for illegal workers and their families, and those who at any moment can be arrested for no reason other than by a decree of the President..
In By Night in Chile and Distant Star as well as some of the short stories and in Nazi Literatures of the Americas to a smller extent, one finds an examination of poetry as party to and with the events of the times,which includes so much massive oppression, while it in itself may try to tel itself that is free, disinterested, not at all part of things which exist all around one.
I think since these are tpoics and questions which are unpopular, there has been the massive promotion of Savage detectives, and of a kind of one dimensional Bolano for the American public.as well as its poets and writers and critics.
Report this comment

By: john

john — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:39:02 +0000

How dreary to be somebody. How public. Like a frog!
Now, to me, the public isn’t a bog, it’s just that . . . it’s a mythical beast. Like many mythical beasts, it has real powers, but they’re at best marginally relevant to the experience of a poem. If poetry were a mass-popular medium, then, yes, standing around the water cooler talking about the new Alice Notley book like people talk about the new episode of American Idol, that would be a cool experience (I’ve only seen American Idol a few times, and I’ve enjoyed it, and part of the enjoyment has definitely been talking with my coworkers about it); but, given that the poetry experience is usually solitary — with occasional public readings, some of them quite large (Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and John Cage drew the largest crowds of any readers I’ve seen) — given that it’s usually solitary, it really doesn’t matter that nobody for probably about a century had read an anonymous satire of “White Man’s Burden,” which an unknown ancestor of mine had clipped from the Kalamazoo newspaper some time around 1900, and pasted it in a family scrapbook, until I found it on a long-ignored bookshelf at the ancestral family cottage a few years ago — it doesn’t matter that the satire had never been famous, it still blasts any justification of imperialism to smithereens.
Or, in other words, yes, while I happen to love Longfellow, I love Dickinson and Whitman more.
Report this comment

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:25:27 +0000

. . . they have a wonderful emporium——
a charming store——i’m particularly amused by the way
they change the name of their store so often——
one week it’s called “Post-Ahole”
and the next week it’s “Barf”
and the week after that it’s “Slo-Po”——
and next week, well, who knows, the Avants never run out of novelties——
their only problem (and it’s a joke alright, but the joke’s on them)
is that the poetry public won’t shop at their shore——
the poetry public prefers the store where they sell
Oliver/Olds/Collins/Hirshfield/Wright et al——
the poetry public won’t buy their wares,
no matter how loudly they sneer at the poetry public.
Report this comment

By: john

john — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:31:58 +0000

I’d be very pleased indeed to think I’d ever written anything as good as my favorite Longfellow.
Lewis Carroll and Baudelaire got my back on that one.
Whittier remains worth reading too. Lowell, I don’t know.
Report this comment

By: Daisy

Daisy — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:16:19 +0000

on the other hand, it doesn’t follow that because they’re popular they’re no good, either, right?
Dickens was very very popular.
Daisy
Report this comment

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:00:01 +0000

p.s. sorry, typo toward the end : should read : “chronicle”
Report this comment

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:58:55 +0000

It’s important to remember that the poet and the blogger-commentator are 2 different people. 2 different people, inhabiting the same life-form.
The poet simply loves his/her poems; the world will do what it will. The commentator tries (unsuccessfully) to correct all errors of experience. There’s something of a mismatch there, a dissonance.
If poetic value is measured in sales figures… oh, forget it.
It’s simply a dream, an ideal of consonance or harmony (between the poem and the public). Bill’s knotty dream for today. Don’t try to hold him to it, like some kind of critic-accountant. Are you guys critics or accountants?
Two kinds of equivalent irkdoms :
the irk of coterie poetry, complacent, satisfied with its’ chronical of parochial malice;
& the irk of public poetry, clever, satisfied with its simulated bonhomie.
These are two kinds of irksomes of style, very prevalent.
Why? Because poetry, like public architecture, is pretty darn rhetorically whatever, you know? Not easy!
Report this comment

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:22:40 +0000

Um, Bill… If contemporaneous sales figures were some real index of poetic worth, we’d have to say that Whittier was greater than Whitman, no?
These “great” poets you name who “reach” the “public” today: Possible they may turn out to be our Longfellows and J.R. Lowells?
Kent
Report this comment

By: Jordan

Jordan — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:48:44 +0000

The idea that poets should know their place as determined by sales figures calculated in the low four digits, that’s a joke, right?
Report this comment

By: john

john — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:29:10 +0000

I thought about busking poets when Daisy and Jordan were praising the de-sanctuary-izing of poetry last week! I’ve met poet-buskers, and Thoth bless ‘em.
Report this comment

By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:35:01 +0000

I don’t think Bill is complaining about the names, per se, but about the wink wink nudge nudge insider nature of New York School (and other true abstractions!) poetry, or at least of its current followers. Have we all been to the reading where a poet gets up and makes little smirky allusions to New York School writers and poems and then struts back to his/her seat king/queen of the who cares club? Yes. But what are you gonna do? Start busking?
Report this comment

By: john

john — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:57:49 +0000

William Dunbar dropped a bunch of names in “Lament for the Makirs,” and that poem still packs a punch, even though many of the names mean nothing to me, not being a scholar. Not to mention Dante . . .
The question isn’t the name-dropping, it’s how the names work in the poems. O’Hara and Berrigan aren’t Dunbar & Dante, but I love them still, and it’s fine if anybody else doesn’t. A recent O’Hara review connected his name-droppings (sorry!) with elegy, which made sense to me; the sense, in diaristic writing, of time’s ceaseless flow, and its inevitable drowning of each of us in the sea of the past.
Report this comment

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:17:25 +0000

Hey Franz, Bill, Kent -
in answer to your questions -
it’s ALL democracy.
I mean the desire to speak to everybody, sine qua non. Hence Bill’s huffs, Franz’s squibs, Kent’s ego-trips. MY ego-trips.
& the hopes for poetry, with a non-capital “p”.
What unites all 3 of you chaps is an animus against the coterie – the insider, the name-dropt cachet. What makes Berrigan, for example – or Ashbery – somewhat slack sometimes, in spite of their good points.
But this is a strictly literary problem, n’est-ce pas?
I mean, what will last? & what DESERVES to last?
Report this comment

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:13:16 +0000

Matt, come on, are you really “amazed” that the poetry-reading public hates
you Avants, and doesn’t buy your books,
opting instead for poets like Wright/Hirshfield/Oliver/Olds/Collins et al,
poets whose books run into multiple printings——
poets who, in my opinion, are among the best now writing in the U.S.—
but forget my opinion, think about WHY these poets are able to connect with that “great audience”
which the poets you admire are incapable of reaching——
Matt, if Berrigan was really “making a human connection with the reader,”
as you put it, why, then, over the past two or three decades did his books not
achieve the readership of Oliver, Olds, Collins et al——don’t the sales figures of these latter prove
that THEY are the ones who are making a connection with the reader?
THEY are the poets (and the younger Wright and Hirshfield, and others I’m not listing) who are reaching readers——
Matt, if Berrigan and you other Avants really aren’t, to use your phrase, “shutting out the reader,”
then why aren’t YOUSE on the Poetry Foundation’s bestseller list
instead of THEM?
You can refute me, Matt, but you can’t gainsay the numbers.
Report this comment

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:20:25 +0000

It never ceases to amaze me how people have such hatred toward what Bill calls “coterie poets”. What is so offensive about this? What is the problem with writing poems about people you know? I mean, it’s cool if it’s just not your taste, but why the snarling self-righteous comments against it?
Rather than shutting out the reader, I think Berrigan’s (and others’) name-dropping is a way of making a human connection with the reader, which if I’m not mistaken is what Bill always claims to want from poetry. I think Berrigan is a lot more engaging than the majority of poets out there.
Report this comment

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:54:42 +0000

i’m not saying that poets like Wright and Hirshfield who can reach a wider audience than most of us
are the only important and valuable poets around,
but in a country founded (in theory if not in practice, as Prop 8 most recently bitterly reminds us) on the principle of equality,
surely such poets who are able to bring their verse to the people, and who embody the ideals of the democratization of poetry,
surely they should be particularly praised and honored?
i think such poets (make your own list if you want to, but in actuality the list is not made by you, it is made for you—)
are on the whole more important and valuable than coterie poets like Berrigan——
Report this comment

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:46:55 +0000

Well, now THERE’S a comment that Bill Knott (who, I’d wager, is sure to be much more read and discussed down the road than Franz Wright) will want to add to his Bolano-like collection of mean-spirited blurbs…
Kent
Report this comment

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:57:01 +0000

Dear Franz, i thought i was defending poets like you, in my comment above——
your books (and those of Hirshfield, Olds, Oliver, Collins et al)
deserve to be on poetry’s best-seller list, i meant to imply, because you have bravely remained open to the potentials
of that “great audience” which Whitman declared US poets must address, or try to address——
i apologize for not making that clear——
i have great admiration for poets like you who somehow are able to allow the possibilities, who
manage to not trap themselves in a dead-end corner of coterie coziness, in the confines of some spurious “school” or posturing avantgardism——
*
. . . as for what happened to my “genius”! Come on, Franz, i never had any to begin with; all i had was desire and that fizzled out with age: as you rightly observe, all i have left are empty gestures, formalist fumerie like this tanka:
31 SYLLABLES
even the wisest
(even the esteemed poets
who when I was young
acclaimed me as promising)
have at times been proven wrong
*
Report this comment

By: Franz Wright

Franz Wright — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:39:53 +0000

Bill, what happened to your genius, its vast generosity and playfulness, its poignancy and power to inspire? What caused such radical regression? When did it get replaced by all these petty and paranoid and utterly inconsequential preoccupations. I don’t know how many times I have come across these adolescent rants of yours–over nothing! And the constant attacks on other poets! What happened to you. Because whatever it is has happened to your work as well.
Franz
Report this comment

By: Doodle

Doodle — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:19:20 +0000

Jack Spicer joke – don’t be confused. Hey, he was from Berkeley!
Report this comment

By: Former Berkeley Girl

Former Berkeley Girl — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:15:09 +0000

Doodle,
Did what to whom? I’m confused.
Report this comment

By: Doodle

Doodle — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:33:51 +0000

Somebody’s vocabulary did this to them.
Report this comment

By: john

john — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:14:48 +0000

“Why does Bill Knott put people’s names in quotes even when they link to their actual blog?”
Hey, I wrote a poem that addressed, among other things, that very topic!
The relevant portion:
The political blog scene with which I’ve overlapped a tiny
bit and the music blog
scene with which I’ve intersected a
lot both don’t care that
I don’t post my last
name.
The only people who have ever
cared have been denizens of
the poetry blog
scene. It’s really
weird. And funny! Especially when the guff comes
from poets associated with the fetish of
“the death of the author” — not that Barthes’s essay is
worthless — or from a poet — and this happened
once — who first made his
name
under a pseudonym! And I admired — and
continue to admire — his old pseudonymous
poems. So it was flattering to be argued with
by him, and to be challenged about my
name
and be referred to as
“John”
in quotes as
if that’s not my
name!
It is my
name!
(Only a few people have ever called me
“Johnny”
and fewer still
“Jack”
though I always liked
“Jack”
and briefly used the radio
pseudonym
“Big Jack”
and my attempt 16 years ago
to give myself the nickname
“Babe”
failed pitifully.)
When I started this
blog it was on a whim and an
ambition to write and think and take part in
interesting conversations and I
wasn’t sure whether I’d want my last
name
associated with it so I
kept it off, and whenever anybody challenged me I
always said that the last name is findable on
the links on the blog — specifically on
the “My Band”
link — and that if people were so
concerned about
it
they could look it up.
http://utopianturtletop.blogspot.com/2008/04/sardines-by-michael-goldberg-1955-why-i.html
“John”
Report this comment

By: Former Berkeley Girl

Former Berkeley Girl — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:47:32 +0000

Why does Bill Knott put people’s names in quotes even when they link to their actual blog?
“Former Berkeley Girl”
Report this comment

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:17:01 +0000

Better than any “manifesto” of recent (or unrecent) years:
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/oppen-hawkins.shtml
Report this comment

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:44:33 +0000

And here’s something quite Bolanoesque: John Tranter has posted an irate comment by Clayton Eshleman beneath a review at Jacket of my book I Once Met.
Is there no sanctuary? (Though I’m perfectly fine with the unusual intervention!)
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-johnson-met-rb-cralan.shtml
Kent
Report this comment

By: john

john — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:04:12 +0000

Agreeing with Henry: “I want poetry to be understood as very special, very other – but NOT in need of special protection.” Socially, poetry is special. Often in the condescending sense of “isn’t that special?” But also in the sense of a specialized interest. In college I met a small-town high school teacher near retirement who had published two books of marvelous, witty poems. He was a straight-laced looking fellow, and I was a hippie punk kid, but we somehow hit it off — we must have read on the same bill, but I have no memory as to how that could have come to be — and he urged me to keep writing, saying, with quiet intensity, “People are going to say to you, ‘Oh, you write poetry, that’s nice.’ And as you get older they’ll say, ‘Oh, you write poetry.’ And then they’ll say, ‘Why are you still writing poetry?’” At this point my memory falters. Did he quote a LeRoi Jones poem? He might have. I would not have read the Jones poem by that point, so I wouldn’t have recognized it, and my later memory of the line may have blended with my memory of the conversation. It makes a good line in any case. He said something to the effect of, “You have to remember the magic words. The magic words are, ‘F*** you.’” I am confident that at least those last two words were part of his advice. Said with a smile.
Report this comment

By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:59:06 +0000

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/publishing/bestsellers.html
… the list from August 08——
maybe when it’s updated, Berrigan will be on it . . . in which case,
i’ll eat my words . . .
hey “Matt”—— you should hack Amazon and divert all those
orders for Jane Hirshfield and Franz Wright
to your Piss-Avant faves . . . that’s the only way your gang
will ever sell enough books to make the list——
Report this comment