Author Archive
Jason Guriel
Some Thoughts On Poetry Readings: Part Three (Legendary Gigs)
I was there at the Six Gallery in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg read Howl for the first time. (I suggested the venue.)
Jason Guriel
Some Thoughts on Poetry Readings: Part Two (Various – and Occasionally Notorious – Characters Defined)
(I offer the following lexicon in good fun. Your additions are most welcome.)
Jason Guriel
Some Thoughts On Poetry Readings: Part One (A Lot of Less Is More)
Recently, I agreed to take part in an upcoming poetry reading with an economy-sized premise: twenty poets read their poetry but for only five minutes each. A few years ago, a music critic, assessing The Magnetic Fields’ triple LP 69 Love Songs, assured readers of the review that the 69 songs are brief: “nearly all under three minutes: there’ll be another one along soon.” The same principle would seem to apply to this upcoming reading: attendees who don’t dig my stuff won’t suffer too much; they can rest assured there’ll be another, less sweaty poet along soon. And since I have been known to sweat when speaking publicly – my students are used to my ever-present Evian and handkerchief – five minutes sounds about right (to my metabolism, anyway).
Jason Guriel
Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon: An Extended Letter for the Print Magazine which I’ll Just Post Here
Until I read A.E. Stallings’ recent piece on rhyme for the print magazine – a future-classic-of-poetics-masquerading-as-mock-manifesto? – I was living, unbeknownst to me, a slightly complacent life. I now realize I was prepared to let the American songwriter Jimmy Webb enjoy the last word on a tired rhyme – moon/June/spoon – a rhyme I assumed had long since seized up, succumbed to rigor mortis. Webb, a savvy lyricist, takes up the rhyme in his song “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” – performed by The Three Degrees in the The French Connection – which assures the listener that, yes, “it’s customary in songs like this to use a word like spoon.” And it is customary. And yet it doesn’t matter. Self-reflexivity saves Webb’s song – is, indeed, the song’s whole gimmick.
Jason Guriel
A Few Quick Questions About the Education of Youth Circa 2009
A recent post of Annie’s got me thinking: do educators still make it a habit of forcing students to recite poetry in the classroom, before the students’ peers? (I had to memorize and recite a few poems in my day, my day being the not-exactly-distant-or-sepia-tinted 1990s.) Is there a pedagogically sturdy reason for requiring students to get some poetry by heart, or is this practice now considered cruel and unusual, like the use of red ink and dunce caps? In short, should students be made to memorize and recite poetry?
Jason Guriel
The Occasional Curse of the Duty-write
The duty-read is slogged through easily enough and usually for good reasons: sometimes one needs to finish a book so that one can cross it off a list or take a test or assure an uncle or aunt (with the proof of knowledge of specific passages) that his or her gift of literature was a great choice. But the duty-write is another inconvenience altogether. If your love of writing poetry is a matter of public record – i.e. if your family and friends know there’s a poet among them – you may be familiar with this phenomenon. It occurs when a friend or family member asks you if you will write a poem for a wedding, say, or some other red-letter event. TV’s Carrie Bradshaw, writer and sex columnist, must deal with a duty-write in an episode of Sex and the City, and she’s not even known as a poet.
Jason Guriel
In the Year 2000
The current number of one of the better magazines in Canada asks a cross-section of smart writers and intellectuals to predict the state of the arts in 25 years. These are nervy folks, not unlike the sort of type-A’s you often find sealed in astronaut suits, tottering forward in slow motion. Facing the future, after all, wants bravery. And every now and then some intrepid soul does get it right – has gotten it right. Here’s the late, great poet and critic Randall Jarrell, on the future he never lived to see:
Jason Guriel
Child’s Play: A Reading of a Poem I Like
One word that gets a lot of play in our critical writing – since the dawn of Derrida, anyway – is ‘play’ itself. We’re often wanting more of it, not less, and the freer the play the better. But I wonder if the logic of Eliot’s old saw about free verse – “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job” – can be extended to the more general concept of play: no play is free for the person who wants to play well. Which is only to say: it’s nice, maybe even necessary, to have some rules in which to wriggle, even if the rules are arbitrary and amount to little more than a Houdini’s self-imposed straitjacket. The children at play in Suzanne Buffam’s poem “Play”, from her debut book, Past Imperfect, have the fun they have because of the rules they set for themselves. They don’t escape from this play unscathed – and neither does the reader – but then play doesn’t always end in pleasure. The poem, in other words, only looks like child’s play:
Jason Guriel
The Poetry in the Prose: Part Two
Last time around, I dealt with the unreadable poems of the fictional poets in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, or what one fellow blogger neatly dubbed, “dark-matter.” It’s not that these unreadable poems are composed solely of punctuation or something, like the experimental works of D.L., the self-anointed postmodernist in a certain David Foster Wallace novella. The Savage Detectives’ poems are unreadable because they’re nowhere to be found, because Bolaño withholds them from the reader, even though Bolaño, a novelist and poet, could’ve easily ghostwritten some decent lines for his characters. It’s fascinating, though, when novelists – especially those who aren’t known as poets – actually do write some poetry, for the purpose of, say, prodding along a novel’s plot. We usually neglect them, these works-of-art-within-works-of-art, but they’re not without their critics and admirers.
Jason Guriel
The Poetry in the Prose: Part One (and If You Haven’t Read The Savage Detectives Consider Yourself Spoiler Alerted)
The only piece missing from The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño’s 648-page puzzle of a novel about avant-garde poets in Mexico, is, oddly enough, their poetry. In an online conversation with David Orr and Marcela Valdes, Carmine Starnino points out that this poetry “is, quite likely, terrible,” especially since Bolaño’s poets spend most of their time making mischief, manifestos, these sorts of things. Orr, however, argues that the mythical poetry of Bolaño’s bards, through its very absence, retains the possibility that it is good. In general, it’s probably best for mythical works of art to stay mythical – that is, unmade but unmarred.
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
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Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
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Open Books
213 West Institute Place
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