Hello Harriet readers! Just a quick alumni news flash. In this time of dying bookstores, here’s a bright spot: a poetry bookshop in Beacon, NY called Hermitage. It opened in December, “focusing primarily on small press publishing in American poetry between the 1950’s to 1970’s.” If you’re looking for The Green Lake Is Awake or The Hotel Wentley Poems or a full run of Locus Solus, you will want to come here. It is only one room, adjacent to an art gallery whose current exhibition features typographical visual art. The proprietors, Jon Beacham and Christian Toscano, have a letterpress upstairs and ambitions for publications, readings, and more art. In their statement, found on their website, they explain, “Hermitage resulted from the frustration of the current model of how much of art and culture is presented by galleries, institutions, and other organizations.” In the wake of various discussions on Harriet past and present—discussions touching on AWP and the marketing of poetry—it is worth pointing out that an older, DIY model of distribution still exists. It requires only passionate conviction and community. Oh, and low rent!

It was Sunday, 40 degrees with a snowstorm on the way. What do people do in the suburbs? I put on some Elliott Smith and went down to the riverfront.

The January issue of Poetry goes live next week, along with my essay-review of new books by Mary Kinzie and Robert Pinsky. There was a bit that took me too far afield, so I excised it from the final draft. Still, it might hold some interest for someone somewhere! Readers of Pinsky’s Gulf Music know the book meditates at length on the etymology of the word “thing.” He even includes the dictionary definition as a sort of found poem, lingering on the irony that “thing” used to mean something more along the lines of an assembly, an address, and even a “giving voice to,” rather than “a concrete object, a physical or bodily thing.” This movement from thing as process to thing as object fueled the meditations of another poet—thirty years ago.

Here in upstate New York near the St. Lawrence River, bordering the expanse of that fabled northern land called Canada, I was awestruck by sunrise, the first sunrise after the solstice!

UTTERANCE

as crescendo filled the branchings
flickering the quilled exchanges
until one particular melody exhausted
silence and called out spontaneous
response:
abyssal the flame hatches

That’s from the Irish poet Trevor Joyce’s new book What’s in Store—a three-hundred-plus-page veritable bodega. (I discovered it through my favorite blog here, entry for Dec. 13.) There are translations and reworkings of: “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,” “Anonymous Love Songs from the Irish,” the Chinese poets Ruan Ji and Lu Zhaolin, as well as maybe half a dozen other sources. There are also short lyrics addressed to friends and loved ones. In light of all the Harriettalk about constraints and sonnets, one of the endnotes provides a tonic to too much purely formal ambition:

I didn’t think I had anything to say about the sonnetfest here on Harriet. But then a friend sent me an article about Edwin Denby: great American ballet critic, friend of Frank O’Hara’s circle, poet who wrote many, many sonnets. I had studied them years ago, and then put the book away (sonnets not being my cup of tea). I opened Collected Poems again this week, and have been unable to put it down since.

THE SUBWAY

That’s not in the buy. The company between stops
Offers you security, and free rides to cops.

If anyone can figure out how to send Jane back to 1949 to see MoMA’s exhibition of “Italian pictures,” which gave Wallace Stevens a bad case of ennui, please send instructions care of this comment box. I thought I would take the opportunity to point out that the museum seemed to be in a lull a month before their 20th-anniversary show “Modern Art in Your Life,” and the interregnum of September in New York—“covered with the dust and withering of summer”—seemed at least partly to account for his mood. However, there’s a little bit in his sour-lemon passage that seems worth teasing out…

Alicia’s post in tribute to Edward Thomas’s “The Owl” moved me. Especially so since it came after a terrible experience in a shopping outlet. My four-year-old and I were looking for snow boots and while we shared a sandwich in a packed food court I realized that I was only just starting to hear the pounding music in the backdrop: Christmas carols set to frenzied electronic beats.

My favorite carol this year has been O Holy Night. It's the music that makes the carol, and I've had fun dowloading different versions of it to compare. How to sing the words "Fall on your knees:" with soaring sternness like Bing Crosby, or hushed reverence like Josh Groban? You can chart a Melisma-meter with the versions on offer by Avril LaVigne, LeAnn Rimes, and Cristina Aguilera.

Steve Burt’s quote from Wallace Stevens’s letters (in Alicia's comments section) also sent me to its source. One of the reasons to go back to a favorite poet’s letters—and Stevens never disappoints in this regard—is to confirm to oneself how uncannily history repeats itself. Or to realize maybe that it’s not history repeating itself, exactly, but our sentiments about history, our relation to it, that remains glumly constant. I had to smile, rereading a passage that I might have written on a sour day:

Don Share beat me to a post on Kenneth Koch and Patrizia Cavalli. “Talking to Patrizia” is actually one of my favorite love poems, tart and social and messy. So when I read Cavalli’s lesbian poems in Poetry I had the immediate intuition that this was the Patrizia who advised Koch to hide in the bushes. “Love/Is a god These Freudian things I don’t believe at all//This god you have to do what/He wants….” Of course, I had to revisit this poem, and ended up rereading all of One Train.

Christian Bok's post here is a sad reminder of a persistent problem with poetry reviewers and bloggers: the dismissal of "cerebral" work and the exaltation of a crude notion of the "emotional." Bok's reviewer is a tad less obvious -- he requires a "predicament" if not outright confessions -- but still, it seems to me a code for emotional blackmail.

I'm reminded, actually, of a single sentence in this review of Robert Hass. After telling us that Hass's poems "focus on the natural world, his private experiences, and the people and places he knows best," the reviewer complains, "Hass' work has a demure, sometimes evasive strain: He'd been publishing for 30 years or so before readers learned about his mother's debilitating alcoholism." I almost keeled over. Dear Reader, do you expect to know all about my mother too? Nobody told me this when I started writing poetry at 15, after Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. Nobody even told me at my MFA program! Is it too late to go to law school?

I know of a poem that addresses the problem of art, emotion and confession ...

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….)

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!).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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):

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.

“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.

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?

Emily Warn asked me to re-post my entry on the Chicago Review articles by Young/Spahr and Ashton so it can appear alongside hers and Alicia's. I just want to add a caveat: I wrote this post under the assumption that the CR articles to which it refers would be online. They are not. I'm not sure how much sense this post will make to you unless you have read those articles, so please keep that in mind as you read my argument (below the fold) that the avant-garde is more sexist than the mainstream. You can look at the chart, at any rate, to see some evidence for my claim. Thanks for reading.

The first day of a new month is like the beginning of a new poem: that tantalizing musical phrase, maybe just a few words, that arouses the mind to fresh configurings. Autumn color has finally set in, making the long rays of late afternoon still redder, but it isn’t very chilly. My roses are still blooming; so are my rosemary, basil and salvia. Last night’s Halloween was balmy. In between candy handouts, I sat down with the magazine The Hat, with its orange-and-black cover appropriate to either Halloween or monarch migration season. And the poems do flit. Want to see Hungary?

This late in the day, the panel topic seems too close in nature to the first two. Isn’t it revealing that three out of the four panels dealt with some variation on the topic of influence, lineage, tradition—because the crisis in representation of the canon is so problematic? Because there are so many different poetries that all claim some purchase on the history of poetry in English?

James Tate: Does a poet ever strive for obscurity? I can’t think of one.
Kay Ryan: Who needs more? [laughter]
Carl DennisPhillips: No one is deliberately writing so no one would understand what they’re trying to say. That would be perverse….

We had dawdled over lunch and now we were late. Having missed the opening statements, we arrived in time to see Sven Birkerts interrogate an increasingly uncomfortable Carl Phillips about one of his poems deemed “obscure.” Then he moved on to Kay Ryan, who completely disarmed Birkerts and the audience with her legendary wit. Then when he read a Tate poem that “throws you up against the gap of sense” Tate shot back gruffly: “It doesn’t feel like a whim to me. Feels like it means damn good sense!” (Nota bene: Poets like to talk about poetry, not their own poems.)

“Emily Dickinson was one of the three most intelligent people who ever took up writing poetry.”

At the suggestion of my editor Emily, I attended the Academy of American Poets’ Poets Forum at Marymount College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. With no traffic, it’s an hour’s drive from my hamlet to the most expensive neighborhood on the globe. In a moment of inattention, I nearly tripped over a teacup-something leashed by a mannequin-like creature dressed to the nines at ten a.m. of a Saturday.

A is for apple.

H is for harvest.

H is for House, Peter Greenaway's 1973 short, may be my ideal movie: under ten minutes; an organizing principle that distracts you from the highly personal motivation; orchestrated like a piece of music rather than a prose narrative. Has anybody else seen this? It's so obscure it's not even on YouTube.

Hearing music sets time free in the ear: the ear produces free time. This insight is the basis of lease-an-ear, a thriving service branch. The free time generated with the help of leased ears can be stored, for instance on tape, which constantly augments the sum of free time because nothing is ever lost. Last year alone, on a world scale, free time reserves of the magnitude of 350,000 music-years were stored -- just imagine! The most difficult problems of free time occur when leased free time does not find an ear because the ear that could produce it has already been leased out and is setting free time free elsewhere. Lease your ear to music!

All the talk about anagrams sent me back to one of the two OULIPO poets I truly love, Oscar Pastior. Translations of his work by Harry Mathews (the other OULIPO poet I love), Rosmarie Waldrop, John Yau and Christopher Middleton appear in Many Glove Compartments (Burning Deck). His Anagrammgedichte, alas, is untranslatable, as are many of his palindromes. He says (quoted in the introduction): "[Translation] is the wrong word for a process that does not exist. In a different language you think differently, speak differently, act differently, are different."

Dear Steve,

The coincidence of adolescence and the Norton's Anthology has ruined many a productive citizen, I think. I have sometimes heard the opposite claimed -- that teaching poetry in an academic setting ruins poetry, not adulthood, for kids. But I don't remember teachers shredding poems. I do remember leafing through classroom anthologies and being stopped cold by, oh, the usual suspects: Prufrock, The Snow Man, God's Grandeur, Batter My Heart .... Chestnuts all! Adolescents aren't totally original (which is why they don't blow us out of the water with their poems, despite their overflow of feeling), and neither was I.

I love the idea of your new book, The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence, because I certainly feel my poetic identity crystallized at "sixteen or seventeen" (to borrow the Muldoonism you identify). And I think your thesis, that modern adolescence and modern poetry intersect at the desire to resist closure/identity and maintain possibility, is right on. Do you think poetry without romance is sustainable? Or to put it another way, what does grown-up poetry look like by contrast?

Rigoberto may be right when he says of The Best American Poetry series that “there's something for everyone, usually, and like it or not the series is here to stay and to say something about the contemporary poetry scene.” There’s no denying po-biz exists, and this is one yardstick by which to measure the seductive racket.

But I worry, given the market pressures on young poets who invest in MFA’s, that little notches on one’s publishing belt are seen as be-all end-alls of poetry. Your resume and your poetry have no necessary relation to each other. None at all. Here are just three links to poets and poetry that cast a cool eye on the standard poetry career:

There’s a scene in Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim where one of the characters (who eats every night at the same Village restaurant, The Dante) is a poet on the trail of a Missing Person. This poet, Jason, goes to the New York Public Library and flirts with the librarian so that she’ll give him access to the index cards listing the titles each patron has checked out.* He realizes that two characters from different worlds have checked out the same books. What do a perfume manufacturer and a psychiatrist have in common? the poet wonders.

Well, as it turns out, they are linked to the same secret society, a diabolist cult.** The perfumier’s product is called La Sagesse (wisdom), and its corporate logo is the cult’s sigil. The psychiatrist (epitome of a different kind of sagesse) is helping one of its members escape. The poet Jason serves an alternative sagesse in his detective work, and it’s no accident that it begins at The Dante and pivots on the library.

Could it be that there is a profound cultural connection between the poet and the detective?***

A few weeks ago I remarked that if I were to write a book on poetic craft, it would mainly consist of notes on craft from other disciplines like dance or music. I keep a file of such quotes (I guess this used to be called one’s “common-place book” but now it’s just an endlessly scrolling doc on a laptop). I went back to it today and saw that I had juxtaposed these two:

If I had to pinpoint the moment when I stopped feeling lonely as a poet, it would have to be the day I picked up Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses at the St. Mark’s Bookshop five years or so ago. Perhaps I am reminded of it because, looking back at my previous three posts, I feel an unacknowledged debt to it. Or perhaps because of the unusual flood of sensation that accompanies the change of seasons. The eruption of molars–my son’s—could be part of it. One can’t avoid reflecting on bodies, pain, and intersubjectivity when a baby lifts his grimacing face to you for comfort, and the burden is on you to figure out the trouble when right through the O of his groan you see the startling white gleam breaking on the swollen gums.

Let’s take a break from theorizing (or not). Let’s play the J’aime/je n’aime pas game, which I am totally cribbing from the bloggers Jenny Davidson and Ed Park, who cribbed it from Roland Barthes, who said:

Nada Gordon wrote in this comment box:

Ange writes that,"the fiercest experimental writing... has always been related to experience in some way." Ange, could you expand on that? It seems to me like a huge statement and I'm not convinced it's true.

I heard a fascinating piece of gossip the other day. I heard that Helen Vendler doesn’t believe good poems are ambiguous!

I call it gossip because I heard it secondhand from someone who had heard her say this at some talk or other. At any rate, it led to lively speculations about what separated good old High-Modernist Ambiguity from bad Postmodernist Indeterminacy.* And it dovetailed with this Monet show I was mulling over, which in turn spoke to issues of ambiguity that I’ve been in love with since I first read a poem I couldn’t understand.

For Monet’s Waterlilies series crystallizes the question haunting all art: What is real?

I [heart] A.E. Stallings’s post on the vernacular:

Do I think the “plain-spoken” impetus in poetry has gone to far? Yes. "Plain-spoken" often just means dull and listless and unimaginative writing. Real plain-spoken people are more imaginative than that. “Idiomatic” after all, is Greek for “individual,” for “peculiar.”

There are poets who do plainspoken masterfully, and then there are the imitators. It’s a paradox that beginning students are always struck by: poetry is made up of the language we all use, but not everyone can just toss off poems. Even the plainspoken is a style, wrested through hard-won technique. (I think of James Schuyler, who was W.H. Auden’s personal secretary in Ischia; he once said of Auden’s work, If that’s poetry, I guess I’ll never be a poet. The irony is that one could say the same thing of Schuyler’s work. It’s that peculiar.)

Stallings’s post touched off another set of associations on a parallel track. I, too, was an ex-pat for a while—just a short year—in Ifrane, Morocco, in 1999. It wasn’t long enough to miss the American vernacular, but I became keenly aware for the first time of the jeers aimed at my native tongue. “Ah, American,” a librarian told my husband, wagging her head. “The Berber English!” Berber, of course, is one of the indigenous languages of Morocco, but you know—a redneck dialect. The Queen’s English was like to Classical Arabic. That was just the Moroccan view—you don’t want to know what the British academics thought of us!

These Jeanne Moreau-ish Bourgeois eyeballs (cast upward as, we are told, is proper to champagne sipping) led me to the entrance of the Williams College Museum of Art in a faint drizzle. Autumn has a light touch here: a burgundy fringe on the roadside, gold and blush in haptic patches on the tree crowns, like the burnish on a pear.

Inside, Modernism Concentrate: a Larry Rivers, a Diebenkorn, a deKooning, a Cornell—bang bang bang. Upstairs, a perfect Pisarro. A perfect Piero della Francesca. I wandered through the exhibition on Gerald and Sara Murphy, pausing at video of a Stravinsky ballet that made the hackles on my neck rise as I recalled the quote from Edith Sitwell’s A Poet’s Notebook that I had just been reading that morning in a coffeeshop:

I wrote a comment in response to Simon DeDeo's response to Don Share's post below. It dovetails with Rigoberto's call this week for more reviewing.

I don't disagree with Rigoberto. As an author, I loved getting reviews. As a critic, I like reading them, especially if the reviewer has style. But what's in it for the reviewer? If everything you write is positive, you're seen as merely a booster. If you write anything negative, you'll isolate yourself. Just to assume the critical distance, the authoritative mien of the reviewer, will isolate you.

These letters to Poetry magazine include valuable information by Eavan Boland, Mary Kinzie, Brian Phillips, Peter Campion, and our very own Emily Warn on what it means to review. I won't try to paraphrase their considered judgments here.

A few months ago I read Toni Bentley’s and Gelsey Kirkland’s ballet memoirs, and acquired a bad case of self-pity: here was an art so unlike poetry, where the practice was excruciatingly difficult, but the reward so concrete.

As in sports, one can still speak of beauty in ballet. Brian Phillips, in his article “Poetry and the Problem of Taste,” in this month’s Poetry magazine, claims it’s been two centuries since we could speak confidently of beauty, and asks “When was the last time ‘sublimity’ was a relevant idea?” Well, it’s relevant to Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery, and David Shapiro, and dozens of poets who haven’t completely acquiesced to the literalism of society in the age of mechanical reproduction. It’s relevant, possibly, to those of us who find the pop scientism of our day—“Blondness evolved in the north so that men could tell who was young under all those clothes!” “Music evolved so men could impress women!”—so banal as to make Creationists look good. At least, they have better stories.

The author of my favorite children's book has died. The New York Times on Madeleine L'Engle:

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand.

“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

“Heavenly Blue” morning glories sufflated by this new breeze come upon us now, coincident with a ritual the French actually have a word for, “la rentrée”*—applying equally to grownups back from extended vacations and schoolchildren beginning their semester. New flower at the terminus of flower season: how like ambivalent September.

The poet seeks to purify the language of the tribe (as Eliot suggested), but by the most intimate and emptying of encounters. In this ambiguous fulfillment, at once impersonally stylized and deeply self-interested, the poet struggles to identify in words, and at the level of words to unearth the means of embodying, clear and specific ideals of personhood and integrity.

Reading another book on craft by Mary Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose, I’m bedeviled by the impulse to pinpoint moments of agreement and divergence in her highly scrupled prose about scruples in poetry. It’s wonderful, on the one hand, to read a corrective of, say, Sharon Olds’, Jorie Graham’s or Adrienne Rich’s worst tendencies: “We can say: This is a decadent subject; this is a corrupt treatment; this is a marriage of the sentimental with the brutal (if these happen to be the case). We are not, in other words, sentenced to silence by the autonomy of the artist.”

But the devil is in the details, and books like this contain an awful lot of generalizations. Take the very first paragraph of the first chapter, “The Rhapsodic Fallacy”:

Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit
L’immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,

A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile ...

(Baudelaire, "Le Cygne")

The imaginary river that fecundates the flood-plain in the brain-pan belongs to the simulacral Troy, parvam Troiam, that Andromache builds in the Aeneid, in captivity, after her city was destroyed. I too want to build a parvam Troiam, when I write poems. But why I should feel exiled, or what I feel exiled from exactly, I don't know.

I had wistful thoughts today about the first times I saw a Peter Greenaway film, or a Fellini film, or Jacques Demy or Wong Kar Wai or Almodovar. How paradoxical it is that in their infinitely more expensive medium these artists can direct the most wonderfully frivolous fictions, but in the low-rent world of poetry, frivolous fictions bring down the sternest judgments. (It must be plainspoken, it must be true, it must be serious.)

I protest realism.

Ann Lauterbach told me that poetry is an art for the old.

Harry Mathews told me that a writer he knew who had won almost every prize under the sun was still fundamentally unsatisfied.

William Corbett told me that in his poems, Ted Berrigan opened his heart and said “This is who I am.”

August Kleinzahler told me that Mary Barnard was one of the two or three best female poets of the century.

Michael Palmer told me that there used to be only two cities for poetry: New York and San Francisco.

Marcella Durand told me one of John Ashbery’s favorite movies is “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

In 2005 I had a part-time job in midtown, and I would walk two long blocks across 55th St. from the subway to this office building (mechanically reaching into my bag for my ID card/barcode, without breaking my stride, as it came into view). There was little to recommend this stretch of parking garages, restaurants, delis. A whimsical umbrella shop. A second story window that one day in the middle of February lit up with a daffodil-yellow frock—the atelier of, I think, Comme des Garçons. A couple of famous hotels I would never enter. Antique stores with Meissen figurines and enormous dynastic urns.

Technically speaking, can there ever be half a list? Lists of ten are a form more ingrained than sonnets. Here are 5 books being shuffled and reshuffled on my desk—at the risk of sounding blurbish—

Jasper Bernes, Starsdown
“The following are urban samples uncovered during crisis drills.” Thus begins our ride through a visionary L.A. As a former New Yorker, I think I experienced some version of Jasper’s quandary: how to describe a city which has become such a symbolic construct that the “concrete” (an old metonym for the urban experience) — disappears. What stands in its place is everything you know about finance, real estate, infrastructure, gas prices. So the book replicates that freneticism; it delivers you “boulevards of vertigo” (driven, it seems, by morphemes mutating virally into near-rhymes and near-anagrams). But I think my favorite moment in the book is its stillest: “Desiderata on a Desert Island.” Stillest, and most majestic:

I’ve been thinking about the issue of texture. There has to be a word—I’m using “texture” for lack of a better one—that describes how words in a poem interact, how they produce sensation. There was a group of poems in the Kenneth Rexroth issue of The Chicago Review that grabbed my attention; they were by a poet unknown to me, Emily Wilson, and I enjoyed what she was doing immensely. Am I breaking any rules by reproducing one of them?

My post of the day is a reply to Kwame in the comment box of his post "Rebels." Among other things, I compare Kenny to Alfred Barr!

How did Yours Truly become a synonym for I? Yours Truly did not go on vacation. Yours Truly is the last blogger standing on Harriet during these dog days of the dog days d'Aug.

Yours Truly discovered that a perfectly banal stretch of road nearby, a road beleaguered with frequent back-ups and endless stoplights, clusters of strip malls, car dealerships, cabinetry and tile and “window treatment” stores; this road Yours Truly would do anything to avoid except that it’s got the only bookstore within miles (a Barnes and Noble with a decent poetry selection), an Old Navy and a Wal-mart (as depressing a shopping experience as Yours Truly has ever had, execrable labor practices aside); this road known as Route 6 actually expires in Provincetown, Mass.!

It's as if I could just reel it in, that selfsame Route 6, and find myself at land's end.

If you had started when I first advised you, you might have seen our tracks in the sand, still fresh, and reaching all the way from the Nauset Lights to Race Point, some thirty miles,—for at every step we made an impression on the Cape, though we were not aware of it, and though our account may have made no impression on your minds. But what is our account? In it there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth.
(Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod)

I so missed the beach this year that I planted a white rugosa so I could at least smell that familiar beach rose smell, and watch the tomatoey hips ripen over the weeks.

Much that is called "woods" was about half as high as this,—only patches of shrub-oak, bayberry, beach-plum, and wild roses, overrun with woodbine. When the roses were in bloom, these patches in the midst of the sand displayed such a profusion of blossoms, mingled with the aroma of the bayberry, that no Italian or other artificial rose-garden could equal them. They were perfectly Elysian, and realized my idea of an oasis in the desert.

Wish you were here, Yours Truly, The Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa.

Courtesy of the website wood s lot, I found this site by the trenchant name The Business of Emotions. "Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers." Shouldn't every poet with ambitions to sell books -- especially books predicated on sharing emotions and experience, from motherhood to depression -- grapple with the question: Am I in the business of emotions?

***

Courtesy of an old college professor, I'm reading Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Seven Stories. (How lucky to have just a few people -- a handful -- in one's life who can anticipate one's literary tastes! And on any given day the mailbox may yield a little present.) Ask people to name their favorite Russian writer and usually it comes down to either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy; but for me it's Gogol. Which Seven Stories descends from -- there's even a hand that detaches itself from a pianist and roams the streets. And (come to think of it) the Eiffel Tower also detaches itself from the ground, terrorizing Paris, and stomps across the countryside before committing suicide in Lake Constance.

(Doesn't the prospect of the Eiffel Tower terrorizing haughty Paris fill you with immoderate glee?)

Kwame's post (below) got me thinking about, of all things, motherhood. Because he brings up our cultural identities as something both constructed (a narrative) and a given (we can't choose it), and because the one aspect of identity I've ever been asked to write about was -- not my race, or my nationality, my parents' immigration, or my gender, but my reproductive status. Will you, I was asked, review some new poetry books about Motherhood?

No, I said. For several reasons.

1) The commodification of pregnancy and motherhood irritates me, and it's unclear how poetry books "about" the subjective experience of mothering aren't merely an offshoot of this.

2) The commodification of poetry books -- which includes, among the more "experimental" players, organizing collections around a theme: it's good marketing.

"But we live in the real world," you say. "We package the experience, but there's real value inside."

Peter Gizzi's The Outernationale is magnificent. It gives me what I need from poetry -- a reminder to feel alive -- even as it addresses a bleak civic landscape. The long, excellently palindromic "Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures" sent me hunting for this quote:

Exiting from positivism -- casting aside the possibility of art's going back to the moment at which sensation becomes sign -- is in practice exiting from the hope of art's inhabiting a public, fully translatable world. And that -- more than positivism or materialism per se -- had been the utopian motor of modernism from Courbet and Manet to Seurat and even van Gogh. (There is no "even" about it in fact. Van Gogh believed in the material world, and art's responsibility to retrieve the shock of it, and to translate the shock into a new and fully public language, as no one had ever believed before. He was the Prince Myshkin of positivism. That after his death he became the model of alienated individuality and the patron saint of visionaries, is I guess what simplicity gets for its pains.)

(T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea)

... But also the patron saint of coffee mugs and tote bags, which proves his success at finding a "public language" -- after all, the Autobiographical Vincent wouldn't be so popular if he had painted black and white squares, nor has Renoir's relatively tranquil life kept him from being translated to kitsch just as frequently. Still, to be confronted by an actual Van Gogh, in the flesh, always brings with it a shiver of sensation. Gizzi may never be a "public poet" for all his pains (and the reasons for that are obvious from this article; Silliman's rebuttal of it today is the last word on the subject) but he, too, remembers that a shiver of sensation is vital, it's the first thing, before mere message or artful phrasing. "The moment at which sensation becomes sign" is Gizzi's moment as much as Van Gogh's.

If you live in or around New York City, you know that it was in chaos yesterday after torrents brought three inches of rain in one hour down on its delicate mechanism, a nouveau riche’s Philippe Patek accidentally submerged. A tornado (tourbillon) even touched down in Brooklyn. When a waterspout on the Hudson moved in and shredded trees like a peppermill last year, it was only days after I gave birth in Sleepy Hollow (where it came ashore), and of course to my addled brain it seemed like an augur. A few weeks after that, a manatee was spotted, in the waters off our town where freshwater meets the saltwater Hudson, thousands of miles north of its natural habitat.

“Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.”—Susan Howe

Henry VIII bequeathed to his royal children a love of seeing bulls and bears “baited,” that is, penned up in a ring or chained to a stake and set upon by fierce dogs. The bulls—on occasion “wearied to death” for sport—seem to have been more or less anonymous, but the bears acquired names and personalities: Sackerson, Ned Whiting, George Stone, and Harry Hunks (the latter blinded to increase the fun).

That parenthesis might well have read “the latter named to increase the fun.” For it seems that the point of delectation was whetted by dignifying the creature with a human name.

Speaking of John Wieners and then dressing rooms—there is a nine-page interlude in A Book of Prophecies inventorying a phantasmagorical fashion catalog:

7. Bill Blass beret out of
the Sorbonne sewer gray
shirt and tunic matching
8. Anginalia boredom
on false fronts
9. Tie and blouse by
Paisley
10. Hattie Carnegie
modeled by Mrs
Burr of Dorset violets
and glasses in cookie
cut
11. Kaspar Kentucky
tweeds jived with
previous dark imposition

Wieners shocks with inimitable juxtapositions—Sorbonne sewer, Burr of Dorset violets, tweeds jived. He’s first of all a voluptuary of syllables. But then he seethes with caste consciousness too:

Ingmar Bergman directed Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny and Alexander, among other films. (“You must see The Virgin Spring!” a friend pleads.) But so purely do these two films vouch for the magical influence of art, dreams and dressing rooms: without which no eros, no childhood, and no intuition of justice.

John Wieners's A Book of Prophecies is brand new from Bootstrap Press, and only exists for general consumption because the young poet Michael Carr found this unpublished journal in the Wieners archives online, requested a photocopy, sought permission from the literary executor, and published it out of pocket. [Update: see comments box] This is from a 1984 interview with Wieners -- you can find it in Cultural Affairs in Boston (Black Sparrow):

Immanence is so much cooler than mortality.

Remember: he was a sonarsman on a destroyer!*

It's hard not to get on my high horse about the "frivolous," a pejorative some poets throw at others from the shelter of their glass gazebos. Conservative poets use it to shore up their position that poetry should be a high art, thus "serious;" political poets use it to shore up their position that poetry should denounce violence and imperialism, and be thus "serious."**

So when Auden says --

There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.

This villain, who puts words together with no intention of stating, hoping, praying, or persuading ... only imagining, only creating ... is to many immoral, certainly frivolous, a trivial person in a time of trouble (and what time is not?), a parasite upon whatever scrofulous body the body politic possesses at that moment. And roses are intolerably frivolous too, and those who grow them, snowmen and those who raise them up, and drinking songs and drinking, and every activity performed for its own inherent worth.

That's William Gass again. I have to go back to this essay ("Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses") once in a while to remind myself that the writing that really brings me to my knees almost never has to do with politics, "memory," or any moral imperative. But I was surprised -- not unpleasantly -- to find a persuasive ethical account of "pure" poetry in W.H. Auden's 1957 essay, "Music in Shakespeare."

Somewhere in his essays, William Gass says that in reply to the foolish question, 'Who do you write for?' he says 'The ear.'

This recurred to mind this week while perusing American Religious Poems: An Anthology, which I had gotten for my mother-in-law and which now served as fresh reading material for me, away from my own books. What a satisfying reading experience it was, and how easily conflicts over different compositional methods -- say, Gjertrud Schnackenburg vs. Michael Palmer -- are subordinated to a similar goal: addressing the pure and perfect Ear.

Even in circles where religious sentiment is taken to be a kind of failure of imagination ("middlebrow"), it's hard to escape the air of transcendence that hovers over literature. I mean, delete the references to God in Annie Dillard and you practically get W.G. Sebald. Yet their audiences probably don't overlap that much.

Sooner or later, "Cucurrucucu Paloma" finds its way to you, poets, and you swoon -- because you are among the last, the very last swooners.

Looking around the web for information on the songwriter, I came upon a credit for one Tomas Mendez. Its first recording ever was by Harry Belafonte on July 20, 1956.

This is almost exactly a year after Wallace Stevens dies, on August 2, 1955. So how do I explain --

On May 10 of this year Gabe Gudding reprinted a poem by Henry Gould on his blog; the poem incorporates a bit of pink chalk graffito Henry found on the sidewalk in Providence RI when he walked home from work one day. Signed "Clio," as in the Muse of History, it seemed like a sign of some sort.

Years later, he sent the poem to Gabe because Gabe's daughter's name is Clio. Unbeknownst to Henry, she had lived on that street in Providence, and was the author of that graffito.

My sons' pediatrician is keenly interested in temperament. Observing my chest-beating, bellowing, early-walker of a one-year-old this morning, he suggested a book that might help me negotiate the difference in temperament he perceived between mother and son. Little does he know the general consensus in the family is that this baby bull is a Mlinko. His placid father and brother look on in amusement as Mom wrangles with genetic payback.

I mention this -- the fact of temperament and its ability to mask itself, to go undercover, like that demur mother in the doctor's office -- because of an interesting exchange between two poetry blogs this week. Musing on the brilliant work of Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988), Jack Kimball i.d.'d the great American poet as eccentric by temperament. Gary Sullivan pointedly disagreed. He took the stock avant-garde position that art is social and that great art -- art that advances its genre -- is a group effort. He accused Kimball of perpetuating that old bourgeois-individualist cliche of the loner artist.

Cynthia Rowley store in Easthampton, 2005. Just imagine my delight when I stumbled by. In one of the most forbiddingly high-rent places in the nation, someone decided to display a pearl beyond price, to be had by anyone for free. (Click on this entry to see the close-up.)

"Concepts, too, have feelings," Carter Ratcliff says in his afterword to "Arrivederci, Modernismo:"

I am not saying that a concept -- "number," for example, or "constitutionality" -- is literally capable of emotions. What I mean is that there is an emotional tone to the understanding of such things.

An art critic, a writer who specializes in the analysis of mute artworks, who intuits the messages and emotional tenor of physical objects -- perhaps such a writer is more comfortable talking about "emotions" in this broad way. But by 1974, when the poem first appeared, Her Majesty Modernismo had already been deposed by poets who said "I wanted to be more myself," including James Merrill, who went from writing poems such as "The Black Swan" to writing more personal, personable, poems that explored -- among many other things, of course -- his immediate family. I could never really understand this historic shift.

The most extraordinary document came in the mail the other week. It was a reprint of art critic Carter Ratcliff's* poem "Arrivederci, Modernismo" by Libellum, Vincent Katz's press. It was first published in 1974 by Adventures in Poetry, and it comes to us now, 33 years later, with an introduction by Katz and an afterword by Ratcliff himself. The poem bears none of the earmarks of a second-generation New York School poem ca. 1974, but it is unmistakably a product of the regime it claims to be saying goodbye to. "Arrivederci, Modernismo," the narrator keeps repeating, addressing this movement, this era, this regime as though it were a narcissistic lover:

"There were so many good-byes right from the very start that, strange as it is to meet you once again, Modernismo, it isn't strange to be saying, at long last, good-bye, adieu, arrivederci ... to you this time, Modernismo, dear."

It's a lot like revolution: the unintended consequence of deposing the old authority is that one undermines all authority, and ultimately one's own.** "There were so many good-byes right from the start," and so inevitably there must be a good-bye to the good-byer. Or is there?

Hello Harriet,

I am Ange Mlinko and I will be your co-conspirator for this segment of your flight.

Last year I left Brooklyn for my own private Hartford, but since the Internet has truly turned all geography into a suburb of Itself, I find myself returning, as always, to a neighborhood of writers; a landscape made wholly of symbols. Now I can say, with John Ash:

THE PLACE TO BE

It is essential to really look at the place --
I mean the physical city or landscape
you live in, and consider whether it sometimes
inspires feelings of hope and desire, times
when the Platonic ideal of the right place appears,
splendid and ghostly, behind everything that is wrong,
for it is generally certain that a lot of things
will always be wrong. This clouds our vision,
but if you don't, on most days, love the place you live in,
as if it was the only place on earth, you had better get out,
otherwise you may be dead already without knowing it.

(from To the City, Talisman House, 2004)