Ange Mlinko : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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We are now approaching that time of year … when we wish we were elsewhere.
…I am now in the town that time forgot, San Carlos, after a night on a crazy ferry, but on my way to tropical islands presided over by Ernesto Cardenal, known as El Poeta, probably the most famous Nicaraguan, who built his own community of local primitive artists and foreign mystics. Ange should aspire to so rule.
Hasta luego,
David
I had known nothing of Cardenal’s community (described in various places on the web as Marxist-Christian and primitivist) in the Solentiname archipelago until my husband passed his friend’s email to me. It is very difficult to find any information about it on the web, and doesn’t present itself as a place one may visit.
On the other hand, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, in Scotland, is open to the public. The most famous vis-poet/gardener seems worlds apart in sensibility from Cardenal, but he too had a political vision, one that married Arcady and the French Revolution. (I am not yet an expert on Finlay, but visiting Little Sparta is one of my life goals….)

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12.09.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Ange Mlinko

Dispatch from a Banquette

Lou Reed was sitting at the table next to mine last night, in a tiny basement cabaret in the theater district. I have no talent for recognizing celebrities, but the few I have have invariably been musicians.
On the banquette right next to me was a man there alone, in beautiful clothes, and we struck up a conversation. (“I’m a jazz vocalist.” “I’m a poet.”) “Because the way people receive music has changed, people hardly ever see live performance,” he rued. “And the training we used to get, which was to come to clubs like this and try things out, see what worked and what didn’t, and get mentored by older guys, that’s gone.” Eventually the lights went down and my friends Bree and Franklin began the show (if you’re in NYC—go see it!).

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12.03.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Ange Mlinko

Sound and Drink

I don’t think brevity will ever go out of style.
June
Dangled above
the traffic’s rasp:
a contrail
a crow
a nail gun’s echo.
Sappho Hears
gossip
makes it
song
it won’t be long
before everyone
hears
“June” is by Joseph Massey, from a new chapbook called Within Hours (The Fault Line Press) and “Sappho Hears” is by Gloria Frym, from a chapbook called The Lost Sappho Poems (Effing Press).

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11.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Ange Mlinko

Marianne Moore and Revolution

Was it really four years ago already that the new edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore was published? I remember standing in a bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a new baby, worshipfully cradling that expensive hardcover. And then, rashly, buying it.
I dug it out today to re-read an obscure, previously uncollected poem from 1919 called “Radical.” It was first brought to my attention in this article by Steve. It is a youthful political poem that Moore later suppressed.

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11.27.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Ange Mlinko

A Note on Christian Wiman’s Reading of Basil Bunting

After more or less admitting that I think exhortations to political poetry are essentially religious, I finally get my hands on a copy of Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. There, in a brief on poetry and religion, Wiman writes, citing Tillich, “Art needs some ultimate concern.” At every turn, it seems, poetry is turned into a vehicle: for the avant-garde, for political engagement, for meaning against the Void. All these different appeals have one thing in common: they are teleological.
Teleology
Noun ( pl. -gies) Philosophy
The explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes.
Theology The doctrine of design and purpose in the material world.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent.(denoting the branch of philosophy that deals with ends or final causes): from modern Latin teleologia, from Greek telos ‘end’ + -logia (see -logy ).
The great thing about Ambition and Survival, though, is that Wiman can’t quite get with the program. He trusts his nonteleological ear too much.

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11.25.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Ange Mlinko

The Canon within the Canon

W.H. Auden’s Christianity is the subject of a fascinating article by Edward Mendelson in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. “In apparently secular poems, he kept hidden what was often their religious starting-point.” That Auden kept his religious awakening under wraps at first, so as not to call down the wrath of his rationalist friends, is understandable. But fellow Christians would hardly have been any happier with Auden’s version of Christianity:

Auden took seriously his membership in the Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself. To the extent that they became ends in themselves, or made it easier for a believer to isolate or elevate himself, they became—in the word Auden used about most aspects of Christendom—unchristian.

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11.20.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Ange Mlinko

Make This My Default Location (II)

The Dark Months of May is a companion volume to Ballad of Jamie Allan: a prequel, really. It starts out as the chronicle of a breakup in a terse, personal plainstyle, which Pickard has been honing since the 1960s (see Hole in the Wall: New & Selected Poems). The personal is always imbricated with the landscape (a la Hardy):

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11.15.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Ange Mlinko

What’s a Political Poem For?

This is for Rigoberto following his Szymborska post.
A few weeks ago, I attended my first town meeting. Somehow, it was nothing like the town meetings of Stars Hollow, with its “lovable curmudgeon” of a mayor and enchanting agendas, motions to rename the streets to reflect their 17th-century heritage, etc. No, it was a town meeting in a toneless courtroom, presided over by a technocrat who wants to put zinc orthophosphate in the otherwise fairly pristine water supply. Zinc orthosphosphate is an anti-corrosive; its sole purpose is to coat the pipes because some villagers on dead-end streets have brown-water problems.
Offhand, I would say, this already sounds like a boring poem.

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11.15.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (44)

Ange Mlinko

Make This My Default Location (I)

“Jamie Allan was a Northumbrian piper, a border gypsy, born 1734 in Rothbury and who died in the Durham Lock Up in 1810 where he was serving a life sentence for stealing a horse from Gateshead seven years earlier. During his lifetime he became a legendary rogue, but one of immense talent as a musician, often patronised by the aristocracy who, however, became wary of him when his wayward behaviour began to match their own. As he grew older his attraction to them diminished and his struggle to survive intensified along with the other gypsies who were regarded as rogues and scum and treated as such. He retained a few loyal supporters, mostly on the North side of the Tyne, who tried to get him released, but they failed and he died confined miserable in Durham.” (Tom Pickard, Programme Note)
Flood Editions has just published Ballad of Jamie Allan by Tom Pickard, the most thrilling poetry book I’ve read in quite a while. It is based on the libretto Pickard wrote for composer John Harle; their folk-opera (“though that label may be too ‘classical’ for the folk world and too ‘folky’ for the classical world”) premiered at The Sage Gateshead (what a name!) on the River Tyne, very probably on the spot where Jamie Allan stole his last horse, and very serendipitously on Jamie Allan’s own birthday.

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11.12.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Ange Mlinko

It Must Give Pleasure, It Must Change

We can all rest easy now. A judge ruled on what makes a poem.
In a twist that Alicia will appreciate, the plaintiff apparently argued that a poem in rhyming couplets is not a poem. The judge ruled otherwise, noting that “a poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary.”
An old law prof of my husband’s, who is now a judge, told his class: “Lawyers and poets are the only people who read every word.” While a post on attorney-poets would be fun, I’m thinking more of judges, and judging, and how difficult it is to separate our enjoyment of poetry from judging and condemning. Most of us love a very few poems to distraction, and hate everything else. Critics who fawn over the Bad or dismiss the Good come in for even greater ire. Is there any possible corrective for this judging, judging, judging?