Comments on: GENDER HIKE

By: Cathy Halley

Cathy Halley — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:11:32 +0000

He’s about to wind up in our archive online.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:56:32 +0000

No need to be puzzled. I simply imagined discussion of Wieners might deserve a thread of its own. Nothing wrong with this one.

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:24:01 +0000

re: Wieners. He wasn’t nice to my friend, Antonio G. (1925-1989) Harvard ‘50. I knew Tony, a gay man, at the end of his life, when he was retired. Antonio was a poor Italian kid from the slums of Boston who turned himself into a ‘renaissance man,’ fluent in French, German, Italian, sang opera, saw combat at D-day, wrote an exquisite lyric of a dead soldier he came upon on the beach (unpublished), had a Fullbright to Italy, taught poor kids in Roxbury, was a school teacher for a living; he knew John Giardi and when John said he was going to translate Dante, Tony said, “But John, you don’t know Italian,” and I’m sure Tony rubbed people the wrong way sometimes; Tony had what I can only call a blunt, sincere, peasant sensibility, but very noble and charming in sort of an old-fashioned way, which didn’t quite fit into the suave Harvard blueblood set–they looked down on him; he didn’t get along with O’Hara’s circle at Harvard; O’Hara, for instance, cruised the men’s room at Widener Library at Harvard and Tony would never do that; Tony’s sense of literature was more severe and scholarly and not as flip and contemporary and amusing as the O’Hara set; the New York School simply didn’t make an impression on Tony. But, as he always put it, “I was willing to live in their world, but they weren’t willing to live in mine.” He repeated, quite often, in his old age, something Wieners told him when he was younger: “Renaissance Man, go home!” So I’ll admit I’m not really in a place to ooh and aah at every one of Wieners’ so-called dactylics…I am prejudiced…

By: Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:01:31 +0000

I’m still puzzled, Don, by why suggest a new thread. Was there something wrong with this one?

By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:57:10 +0000

What I have reservations about is using “great” in any other way, John.

I worry about checking it out simply because it reminds you of something else, like influences or allusions, or that it establishes a pedigree, or props up your arguments for a new school, style or movement, particularly when those arguments are based on how much you’ve read and how you get around.

Not “this has been important to me, check it out,” but “this has been so important to me I wanted you to read it too.”

Don’t just talk about it, in other words. Don’t just footnote it or file it.

Also poetry is not created great, it grows great. There are many silly little poems that mean a lot to me because I have lived with them for so long. They speak with ancient voices, from the other side, so to speak—like “So Much Depends Upon.” A puff of a poem if there ever was one but so ever young, talismanic and refreshing. A touchstone in our poetic culture.

Christopher

By: John Oliver Simon

John Oliver Simon — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:02:09 +0000

The great Charles Potts, an irreverent and iconoclastic ex-student of the questionable Ed Dorn, and the most charismatic poet of our transgressive and highly immature Berkeley poetry revolution of 1968, was quite surprised when I told him many years later that the last two lines of his obliterating poem Fu Hexagram 24 No Hangups, which begins:

Charlie Potts is dead
and I wonder if i should
be opening his mail
just as if it had been
addressed to me
by all his friends

are, when the line break is omitted, perfect iambic pentameter:

if everything is true
this match will sparkle

I like how we can say “great” here (Gonzalo Rojas, Willard Schmidt, Charles Potts), especially about the invisible poets or the ones from Chile or Thailand or the ones you aren’t reading in 72-point type, meaning I value this, this has been important to me, check it out.

By: Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:30:24 +0000

that’s beautiful. It’s kind of a universalizing weighing you describe.

By: Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:29:33 +0000

I love how you think about poetry because everytime I think, really? I know I count but I’m sort of deliberately unconscious about it. I wld never suspect that Wieners wrote dactyls though it reminds me of the late great Paul Schmidt saying that Dennis Cooper wrote his fiction in dactyls. I wonder about Wiener’s notebook or typewriter at that time. Surely his poems were written in either but my mind (and the margin you discuss) slides to the typewriter. How one would fling the carriage recklessly and a new level of flatness would occur. His poems are almost emotive stripes.

By: Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:26:34 +0000

One thing I found in the workshop which only classically existed on one day is that we had “common ground” of a location sort. I mean in workshops the group looks at a certain say historic poem, or student poem, or has a common assignment. But for landscape – I mean to some extent this always happens. I was teaching in San Diego for a few years and I felt the problem of my poems and the students was writing poems there. But to set out to hike is to set out to make the hike the studio so to speak. So there’s a common gathering to some extent. To which weirdly though they signed for it many of the students had resistance to using. That there needed to be a better or more informed name for a tree. I felt like that might have wound up being the true location of the workshop and the poems. I only saw one day’s worth of poems and then a couple more. More are filtering in now. I since leaving the academy have been wanting to resist the workshop in many ways especially where product is the end point. I thought process. Why not let what we did or touched on be on the road of your ongoing process. Like one long poem of a life pretty much. We see chips.

By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:26:16 +0000

Looking at it again I wonder if it might be that he consistently starts on a powerful upbeat–a stressed syllable or beginning of a phrase–but since it’s free verse (skillfully avoiding iambic meter) you don’t really notice it as a rhythmic thing–it kind of sneaks up on you. Though these two lines concluding a poem are completely dactylic:

glassed in their eyes and hide words
under the coats of their tongue.