Jonathan Mayhew posted the following response to the excerpt of an interview with Philip Levine that I included in a recent blog entry:

“I heard Levine give a reading years back and say he cut his lines in half because the New Yorker paid by the line. He could get paid more for the same poem that way,

just by
doing
this”

I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a criticism or an appreciation. It seems that Mayhew is saying that Levine has altered his art for commercial reasons. To which I respond, “yay, Philip Levine!”

Now let us sport while we may…I love that so many people are commenting on Levine’s distinction between “poetry temporal” and “poetry eternal” and my own volley against using criticism as a staging ground to launch one’s own poetry bottlerocket. It seems, though, that the very dialogue itself is caught up in the temporal rather than the eternal. So, since my time here in the blogosphere is limited, I’d like to change up the dialogue by asking what kinds of poems will be of interest in a thousand years?

The reason I started musing on the literary version of separation between Church and State—the separation between poet and critic—is because I think more and more we’re getting these hybrids, the poet/critics (or “pitics”) (or “croets”) who feel that they can straddle these two distinct bodies and attempt to satisfy them both, as if the point of studding is the mounting and not the siring. Would that it were so; there would not be nearly as many lame ponies limping about, half-workhorse and half-racer, too thick-boned to run and too delicate to work.

I was going to call this entry “Why I Am Not a Critic.” But then I realized I’d probably get blasted for that, because, after all, everyone is a critic—and—everyone is a critic. But what I mean to say is that I generally don’t write a whole lot of criticism. The truth is, I don’t much care about criticism. I think it’s wonderful that people are able to write criticism; I read as much of it as I can stand to read, which isn’t that much; and I quote from it when I need to, which is usually when I’ve run out of my own views, as happens more often than I’d like. But most of what I think about contemporary poetry happens at an instinctual level. Let’s call it “feeling” for lack of a more socially acceptable term. I often “feel” things about poems—i.e., whether or not I think the poem is “good” or satisfying or intriguing; whether or not I’d like to read it again; whether or not I’d be moved to put the poem on my wall or show it to a student or set it outside my office in the pile of “free for the taking” stuff (which usually means either I have two too many copies or I have one copy and simply think that one is too many).

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born 17 July, 1875

Jerry Rubin, born 14 July, 1938

Self-described “orphan of Amerika,” outside agitator, leader of the Youth International Party, indicted co-conspirator in the trial against free speech in the streets and parks of Chicago, sports writer, mayoral candidate, and revolutionary, Jerry Rubin once “liberated” the last few copies of the Declaration of Independence from a John Birch Society Bookstore in order to distribute them to members of Congress.

By which I mean "easy enough to get there." Especially from anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This Friday, 18 July, at 7:30 p.m., a stellar line-up of poets will be reading in San Francisco to benefit the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

The late William Talcott, editor of Thumbscrew Press, quite infrequently published a magazine called Carbuncle. The magazine was mostly devoted to poetry, along with artwork by poet Mark Neville, and the occasional interview and review.

One of the most provocative pieces of prose I’ve ever read appeared in Carbuncle #3, in 1991. It was a scathing review of a reading by Robert Creeley. Certainly the tone is critical and perhaps even, at times, mean. But the last line of it has stayed with me.

It doesn’t have to be about Creeley. It describes a feeling that so many of us might have had at a poetry reading, at one time or another. Good to remind ourselves that no poet should rest on his or her laurels, and that young poets need for older poets either to inspire them or to encourage them, but they rarely need to be bored (despite recent claims that poetry doesn’t need to make any bid for the attention of the reader).

Travis Nichols’ post on the current conjecture over who will or should be the next Poet Laureate of Britain contained a wonderfully sad story involving John McCain, Robert Pinksy, Charles Simic and an unfortunately bright-but-not-bright-enough man who wanted to illustrate McCain’s ignorance but instead illustrated his own (sidenote: I don’t see what this man’s being from Tennessee had to do with anything—the author of the original article could just have easily said that the man was from the US). The punchline was this: we live in a country where even somebody who seems to care about poetry enough to ask a trivia question about it (let’s call him “man from US”) doesn’t know who the Poet Laureate is. As for McCain, I think that a correct answer on his part—or even an answer on his part—would only have hurt him amongst his supporters; so, in essence, he gave the correct answer as far as likely McCain voters might be concerned.

The latest issue of Bat City Review is in stores. Edited by graduate students from the UT Austin program, the magazine features beautiful artwork and high-quality fiction. But the reason I bought it, and the reason I recommend it, is the outstanding quality of the poetry.

Larissa Szporluk

The Blogosphere is, as they say in stand-up comedy, a tough room: so many audience members seem to have shown up just to heckle. It’s strange how people lob remarks from the void—I wonder, often, how those same people might behave at parties.

Of course, a healthy dose of criticism is good and necessary. And it may even be useful to call out the romantic banalities when you see them—though I think anyone who tires of banality should probably avoid the arts altogether.

Etheridge Knight

When I was an undergraduate, serving as editor of Sonoma State University’s literary magazine, I called my favorite living poet and asked him if he could be the “featured poet�? in our next annual issue.

Etheridge Knight was flattered, but also frank. “Will you pay me?�? he asked. He explained that he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer, and that he “could use the money.�?

The magazine paid him, though I think it was a paltry sum. I remember wondering why it was that one of the most famous poets in America was strapped for cash. I imagined that it had everything to do with his medical bills. His fortunes must be getting drained, I thought. In those neophyte years, I had naively assumed that book publication equaled money. I knew nothing of the economics of poetry.

I love this idea of valueless, unoriginal poetry based on junk. I’ve been trying to write poems, and now it turns out that I could have just been assembling them. I mean, I’ve done some avant-gardist things in my time (let us call them, for lack of a better term, “poems"), but I think I spent way too much time worrying about making “sense�? (who even knows what that means anymore?) So today, since I’m, like so many effete bourgeois Americans, absolutely burdened with leisure time, I went out to see how this concept of Conceptual Poetics might liberate me from the senseless drudgery of writing.

Last night, re-reading Lina Wertmuller’s screenplay for Seven Beauties. I only made it as far as the scene where Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) kills his sister’s pimp before I decided I needed to read something less brutal. So I picked up the latest issue of Luna, volume 8, and settled into bed.

Major Jackson’s post about poetry birthdays prompted me to pull out my copy of A Book of Days for the Literary Year, put out in 1984 by the Book-of-the-Month Club, this being Allen Ginsberg’s birthday.

This was also the day in 1964 when T.S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx: “The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.�?

In California I often hear the term “slow food.�? But in Tennessee, I imagine such a term would be redundant. From grits to ribs to greens, Tennesseans simmer and smoke and stew their cuisine. Vegetables are often still grown on small farms and picked by hand: lima beans, butter beans, collards, sweet corn, melons, cabbage, peaches. Hogs are butchered locally and made into chops, hams, pickled trotters, ribs, souse, hocks and bacon. From the woods come ramps, morels, cressy greens, poke salad and dandelion greens, pawpaws, black walnuts, hickory nuts, dewberries and blackberries, wild persimmons. Game and fish, sorghum and wildflower honey, hominy and peanuts—the ingredients are simple, their flavors enhanced primarily by heat and salt.

I have an undergraduate student this year whose work is playful, lyrical and surprisingly tender, given its edgy nature. So I thought I would nominate him for the Best New Poets Anthology. Apparently, it's not as easy as one would hope.

I have to confess, I love the Parthenon. Not the original (though I might indeed love it, if I ever get a chance to see it) but the reproduction.

to a good home....

Received in the mail several copies of Free Poetry, a series of chapbooks edited by Boise State University’s Martin Corless-Smith. The books aren’t copyrighted, and they are distributed gratis. They can be reproduced and shared with any and all readers.

I was visiting a creative writing class last week, and students were asking questions about craft, process, etc. A young woman raised her hand: “where do your words come from? Do you spend a long time figuring out what words you’ll use? Because they always seem so precise.�?

Her question was both simple and complex, and I perhaps gave the simpler answer: words are the most fundamental tools of poetry. I spend hours putting words into poems and taking them back out. I gather words the way a landscaper might gather plants, and I look for the ways in which they can fit together, sustain one another, complement each other, create larger areas of meaning and image, be of use, be striking, be organic to the world they inhabit.

I don’t mean for that to sound as provocative as it does. Trinidad is in the midst of editing Dlugos’s Collected Poems. Dlugos is still under-read, in part because contemporary poetry is still just catching up to his Pop-Art poems, his eclectic palette of cultural references and tones. I did hear Joan Larkin singing Dlugos’s praises to students at New England College two summers ago, and I think that Trinidad’s loving restoration of so many heretofore unpublished gems will help to bring these poems—both intimate and public, wistful and acerbic—to a wider audience.

The former Cotton Exchange in Memphis has been transformed into a loving tribute to the fiber that shaped the South: King Cotton.

The museum is a fine combination of multi-media presentations and preserved artifacts. One of the display cases features a compendium of products made from cotton, including hair curl activator, disposable diapers and Laffy Taffy. Another display illustrates the various grades of cotton, from the “fair�? to the “middling�? to the ordinary.

In Robert Altman's seminal film, Nashville, a third-party candidate named Hal Philip Walker is running for president on a ticket known as The Replacement Party. "I'm for doing some replacing," he says of the bureaucracy in Washington.