Yes, Lebanon does fill me with some trepidation, more for the safety of my kids than my own person. (See the article on Beirut by the estimable Michelle Orange in the current Virginia Quarterly Review — most of it is up on the VQR website.

But above all, my sojourn in Morocco a decade ago left me with the sense that experiment in poetry, at least the Ashberian experiment, is very culture-bound. It checked my cherished belief in the infinite plasticity of logopoeia. I can’t say more here, but it did resonate with what you had to say about poetry and expatriation in an earlier post. Thanks for your posts here on Harriet. I enjoyed them!
Report this comment

Thanks so much for giving us the news on Rusty Morrison’s book from Ahsahta Press. I’ve read the section you quoted over and over and find it haunting, economical and bled to the essential. The formal apparatus too, on the basis of this one passage, compels. In your comment above you ponder “the arrogance of standing outside” … I think that’s the way you put it. That is a powerful issue, cleanly stated. I said, in my comment to Ange above, that this perspective (her word for it) is not something that should be used as a criterion, but simply as a fact. Your framing it as a potential form of “arrogance” extends even more deftly what I was trying to say. There is a danger in assuming some sort of special knowledge when really what we are speaking about is, as Ange said, perspective – a different angle of view should not be considered commensurate to some sort of extra wisdom. That, as you intimate, surely would be a form of arrogance.

Martin
Report this comment

Obviously, I’m not talking about:

“My girlfriend Becky’s daughter Susannah’s kindergarten teacher was Kevin Bacon’s mother.”

(Also, I’m not impressed: I acted in a musical with an actress who was in ‘Animal House,’ so my Bacon number is ’1.’)

This, however, is useful:

“I’ve known Gary Snyder for forty years, and he blurbed my book.”

and

“I studied as an undergraduate with Daniel Hoffman. I had a baby with the pioneering feminist poet Alta. Ron Silliman used to read at the open readings Richard Krech and I organized in Berkeley in the late sixties. The very radical and invisible, at least to the mainstream, Northwest poet Charles Potts has been my close buddy and collaborator for four decades. Charlie was a student of Ed Dorn’s, which bounces right to Olson.”

So, thanks, John. This, for good or bad, helps me aeshetically peg you–whether you like being pegged, or not.

And it reveals why you would, of course, howl at my critique of Modernism.

No surprise there.

I’m not sure what Catullus has to do with it.

Annie, thanks for playing. Who was your mentor at Yale? You’d have to give me more of your direct influences before I could place you, but having conversed with you here on this board, I feel that you might be one of those rare poets who is truly independent, and not attached to a school. We need more of those.

Thomas
Report this comment

Catch up, man. You should learn to Google.
Report this comment

I had a 15-minute fame moment at a Latin American poetry conference where I was the only invitee from north of the border. Everybody loaded me with their self-published chapbooks and such. Before I left the conference I went through the box and tossed about half. I felt a little guilty about it but I was flying a long way home. Those were precious human beings too.
Report this comment

It does offend me a little, though, that you would think I’d write a personal letter in the same way as a silly blog post. Really, dude.

P.S. Lightweight. You should read my books. I take things very seriously. Blogs are for entertainment (preferably when completely snockered).

I’ll try to be more humorless in the future.
Report this comment

If you’ve really known Gary Snyder for forty years then please ask the old coot why he never answered my e-mail. Everybody else writes back.

Report this comment

“When it comes to the sauces or stews made from these respective types of chile, many connoisseurs ask, which is hotter, the red or the green? The answer is: it varies. Green is usually considered a bit hotter, while red is said to be milder but more pungent. Some consider the red to be more consistent in its heat level, with the green more likely to vary between extremely spicy and not so spicy. One point in the green chile’s favor, though: it definitely has a higher level of vitamin C than its red counterpart.”
Report this comment

And Obama and Cheney are cousins . . . which means, of course, that the New Critics are to blame!
Report this comment

I’m just having a little trouble deciding if they’re Green or Red…the beans you’re full of, I mean.
Report this comment

Unfortunately, the ‘reply’ feature can make it hard to follow a thread. I think maybe it was you who first questioned it when it was first put into use–good call.

If you scroll up, you’ll see I did answer your ‘FOOKIN’ question, and I also gave a rather in-depth opinion of Cummings…

Thomas
Report this comment

That which manifesto-ism ‘discovers,’ however, is not real.

Here’s what you wrote, Robbins:

“If poetry no longer adequately embodies what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling,” that is simply a historical fact.”

See? You’re a manifesto-ist yourself.

You confuse a fact like electromagnetism with the content of your Raymond Williams quote, which is speculative crock.
Report this comment

My girlfriend Becky’s daughter Susannah’s kindergarten teacher was Kevin Bacon’s mother.

I sat at the feet of Robert Duncan, Josephine Miles and Lew Welch. I’ve known Gary Snyder for forty years, and he blurbed my book. I heard Jack Spicer read a month before he died. I met Allen Ginsberg once and he came on to me, without success. I read with Kenneth Rexroth, Brother Antoninus, and Michael McClure. I studied as an undergraduate with Daniel Hoffman. I had a baby with the pioneering feminist poet Alta. Ron Silliman used to read at the open readings Richard Krech and I organized in Berkeley in the late sixties. The very radical and invisible, at least to the mainstream, Northwest poet Charles Potts has been my close buddy and collaborator for four decades. Charlie was a student of Ed Dorn’s, which bounces right to Olson. I met frequently with Lawrence Ferlinghetti over a period of several months but he didn’t end up publishing any of my projects. Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirshfield, and devorah major were my close working colleagues in California Poets In The Schools. Judy Grahn called me a few months ago to apologize for some things she said to me thirty years before. I was the first person to review Juan Felipe Herrera. I met Annie Finch for about 30 seconds at AWP. That should be enough connect me in three steps to just about anybody.

I know many of the most important contemporary poets in Latin America very well, and I translate several of them. Gonzalo Rojas connects me in just two steps to Pablo Neruda.

I knew Catullus. Catullus was a friend of mine. Tom Brady, you’re no Catullus.
Report this comment

Interesting to me (& I should have seen it coming) that you would take my remark about poets seeing the poetry of America “before their eyes” in a very literal (photographic) way. My mother used to call my brother “the eyes”, and me, “the ears” – because I missed seeing what was in front of my nose, but heard things. What I was thinking of, I think, was the unpredictable way that an artist senses the “poetry of life” (in Stevens’ sense) – in the midst of terrible crises & existential demands – or, in this case, in the midst of what seems to be an anti-poetic (American) situation. & in recording that (poetry of life) in actual poetry, the poems become, again in Stevens’ sense, “the sanction of life”.

This is a concept of poetry which is greeted mostly with scepticism today.

On this question of “blueprints” & critical reception, you write :

“People will make blue prints and schemes. That is how art is codified, how taste is set up, how criticism works. When you say that “this isn’t a process subject to anyone’s reductive blue prints” my question is how then will we recognize it as art. “Unpredictability and surprise” have always been part of the process. Imagine when Vermeer first looked through a camera obscura, as he was said to have done, and saw a more perfect vanishing point than the naked eye could see. But his critics and patrons had to come to terms with what he was doing and he then came to terms with their coming to terms.”

- Yours is a very commonsensical response to my truisms. But I think the blueprints of critics & the negotiation of reception are ALWAYS secondary phenomena (no matter how much the artist herself learns from the critic).

This kind of remark of mine is usually held up to ridicule in online forums : it’s considered either rose-tinted idealism or as a cliche. But I think it needs reiteration, in a climate where various febrile, hybrid & opportunist forms of intellectual gamesmanship try to pass themselves off as poetry. As I understand poetry, the compositional process itself enfolds both blueprint & the element of surprise. We need to return to a sense of poetry as a kind of superior harmony – a kind of singing-speech which effects the reader on a measurably more refined & intense plane than anything “outside” its own harmonic world. The poem should offer the powerful shock of beauty (maybe as Aristotle understood catharsis) : & not just the knowing pleasantries & sophistries & all that jaded guile.
Report this comment

Pound influenced Ginsberg, who influenced Dylan, who influenced you. (I wouldn’t have guessed this if you hadn’t said it.)

Anyway, Thomas is talking about personal acquaintance more than influence here. Everybody’s connected personally. I tried to think of a poet who wouldn’t be, and couldn’t.

It’s fun for me to think about musically. I’ve played with people who played with people who played with Louis Armstrong, Toscanini, virtually any musician in the world. Which means, of course, that the New Critics are to blame.
Report this comment

“How much do you want to bet I can trace any critic or poet, living or dead, in three steps or less, to either Ezra Pound or John Crowe Ransom, or both?”
Report this comment

The issue isn’t really whether Cummings is a good poet, or not. Bachelors and Masters from Harvard, a clever and erudite man, absolutely, and at least he had a sense of closure in most of his poems…but I consider him, like nearly all 20th century poets, really, a minor figure. This, for instance:

all which isn’t singing is mere talking
and all talking’s talking to oneself
(whether that oneself be sought or seeking
master or disciple sheep or wolf)

is didactic, miserably so, too clever by half, and it obviously betrays where most Modernism really finds its source: the Transcendentalists, those blue-blood New England puritans who picked up some German and lost their wits…

Poetry ought NOT to be studied or traced, but we have whole schools who wear ‘trace me’ on their sleeves, and such are the manifesto-driven Moderns. I always laugh at how we take them SO seriously.

As Professor Kirby-Smith says,

“For my part, I admit that whenever I encounter the lowercase personal pronoun “i,” thejammingtogetherofwords, an excess of ampersands, and the abbreviation “cd” for “could” in a piece of writing by anyone other than cummings, I immediately stop reading.”

The minute we take Cummings seriously–have you ever heard him read his poetry? slowly, ponderously, with self-imporantance, it’s deathly boring–the game is up.

Imagine someone ponderously intoning ‘all which isn’t singing is merely talking’ and that, in a nutshell, is the problem with modern poetry.

Now someone very clever could say, ‘but it’s brilliant, you see? He’s defending singing while talking and showing how poetry is really both…’ but the divine poetry does not travel with such blah blah blah. Poetry shouldn’t be something which explains us to death. The didactic DOESN’T GET BETTER as it explains itself. Cleverness kills poetry.

Cummings knew Scofield Thayer very well–married his wife–the wealthy friend of T.S. Eliot who published his ‘Wasteland,’ but High Modernism doesn’t want to have anything to do with Cummings, because he’s silly, and “High” cannnot afford to be silly. That’s the problem with Modernism: it’s either silly or very, very serious. It’s either lowercasehahaha or ‘The… Waste… Land.’ The playfullness of Futurism, which is really all ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Wasteland’ are, in the end, is fine, I have no problem with it at all. But we make it so much MORE than silly Futurism. What I dislike is how High Modernism’s little party solidified into Self-Importance, and thanks to the New Critics, became American Poetry itself.

Cummings is OK as a brilliantly, secretly, erudite, silly, minor poet. But as an influence, he’s poison.

Just take Merwin and his lack of punctuation. I’d like to see Sacha Baron Cohen do a send-up of American Po-Biz. I can see a Modernist Professor teaching a Workshop, coming into his classroom and sitting on the desk at the front of the room, stark naked, and saying, “Now why do you think a poem needs punctuation? Does a poem really need punctuation? What do you all think?”

Here’s a poem I wrote on the train this morning which gives a glimpse of my true feelings on the matter:

O, Mallarme

O, Mallarme
Picture in your mind
Some poetry
manifestoofcummings
writ LARGE
on Charles Olson’s
ass Pound Williams
does anyone really like
that poetry
Romantic Primitivism (hey)
Roussea Derrida (hey)
idiot ideogram (hey)
is this poetry
O, Wieners
feel sorry
for me

Thomas
Report this comment

& still, Martin, thanks.

margo
Report this comment