Some further thoughts coming out of Alison Collins’ series of nests:

The show began with one hundred nests, but I think there were closer to eighty by the time the show closed. Collins was, as I understand it, giving them away here or there, perhaps selling a few. There were neither prices nor even a catalog of any kind at the installation. I saw no sign out for the space, and there wasn’t a single name on the wall anywhere inside the space on 37th St. or even on the big storefront windows. It was about as un-art world as a show in New York City can get, though I remember thinking some very meticulously stacked piles of rocks in a then-vacant lot on the Brooklyn side of the East River about ten years ago made for a pretty great show too. That artist went and hid in the nearby weeds if you tried to come around while he or she was working.

One theme amidst all the nests by implication is working with seriality – I take the term serial in relation to an artistic practice to be bound up with form and process at once while attending either implicitly or explicitly to an on-going life experience – in Collins’ case that experience being pregnancy and childbirth. It can often feel, I think, like an extended work is growing in several directions simultaneously when one is working in a serial manner –  you’re investigating a particular shape (which may or may not be tangible), you are not bound to a chronological sequence and, to borrow a bit of phrasing from Robert Creeley (writing in his intro to The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser) attempting to define the “progress” of the work or create “a skillfully accomplished enclosure” is really beside the point. Working serially is like being in the middle all the time while hopefully coming to understand the contours of the space and materials you’re working with, or at least that’s been my own experience. The final arrangement, such as it may be, may point away from its making despite wearing it.

And so a nest can be viewed as capable of serving as an enclosure until the service is no longer necessary, or until raided, or until abandoned or broken down by the elements. Its security is necessarily transient, and in Collins’s steel nests, which are not without their aspects of vulnerability despite the materials (I have no idea what the “new vulnerability” might be, by the way, though I’ll look it up), the transformations they bespeak take place off stage. They are known and unknown as well as continuous. All of this points to poetry for me, if not to poetics, which I barely understand unless they’re in motion and I’m not being asked to do something like reflect or judge or ponder relevance.

In using the term serial I don’t mean to conjure up the kind of story that is done in sections printed weekly or monthly somewhere, but say the word enough and I inevitably recall hearing my stepfather and his brother talk about reading serial adventure stories in Britain in the forties wherein one section would end with the protagonist in an impossible scenario involving being tied to a pole in the middle of a lake with alligators closing in and the first sentence of the next installment would be “and with a great leap she was free!” That’s quite a bit different than sculpting one hundred steel nests or writing one hundred and forty poems each titled “Have A Good One”, though the feeling of entering a new piece or segment is a bit like that of a freeing leap to find a new set of traps to enter or a set of shining bars to swing from.

While the relationship between the abundance of steel nests and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – Collins’ point of inspiration in making the nests in the first place – is not up on the surface of the nests themselves, the connection is going to be evident to any one who has read Metamorphoses and has a sense for that work’s handling of transformation as practically incidental to daily life, even that depicted through myth, which I suspect was no more abstracted from reality for Ovid than a list of cuckoo news items I see everyday on the aol news page I have to get through in order to check e-mail is for me. That said, you don’t have to have read the Ovid in order to connect with the work and 20-ft. long snakes are indeed taking over the country.

The “in their own terms” portion of the previous post’s title is borrowed from Fairfield Porter’s book of selected art criticism, Art In Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1955-1975. I tend to turn to Porter when I have to write prose. Partly because I adore the writing, partly because Porter, a painter himself, championed artists whose work was radically different than his own, and partly because he wrote the sentence “Criticism should tell you what is there.” That’s helped.

Also, the title “Currency of Fashions” from a few posts ago is also the title of a poem by Jim Brodey, a kind of reverse litany in which nearly every line ends with the word “nothing,” including the line “I am a princess of bubbly nothingness and mean nothing.”

Writers keep writing about the end of writing.

The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?

There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak.  Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?

And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).

*

They Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: As Poetry Perishes, Prison Population Soars

CHICAGO — As a result of poetry’s slow yet unquestionable death, droves of impoverished versifiers — writers who once worked as teachers or editors, or who relied on grants, fellowships, and publications for financial survival — have been filling the nation’s debtor’s prisons.

The first to note the phenomenon were the few remaining poets still conducting outreach workshops in jails. They were surprised by their students’ enthusiastic participation and polished writing. The only problem, reported one instructor, was a high degree of competitiveness among her pupils; one student described another’s work as “unbearingly knowing, with a jangling quality that hearkens to Pope.”

A guard described walking down the cellblock and finding prisoners in what appeared to be collusive discussion. He cocked his gun and approached with caution, only to discover what one prisoner confirmed as a “collegial conversation” on “Islands, Isolation, and Themes of Imprisonment in Early Donne.”

Another guard witnessed a tête-à-tête between an older and a younger prisoner occurring in the former’s cell. Demanding the reason for this meeting, the younger prisoner mentioned he was seeking direction on his dissertation, an exploration of the Beat aesthetic.

This reporter secured an interview with the younger prisoner.  “After my M.F.A., I was unsure what to do with myself,” the man explained. “I was several thousand dollars in debt, and thinking about a PhD, but I kept hearing the discipline of English had died. When I learned that several of my favorite poets and scholars had gathered in this debtor’s prison, I jumped at the chance. I’ll be here for about 5-7 years, which should be enough time to teach some composition courses to younger prisoners, and get in a good draft of my dissertation.”

Upon further questioning, the younger prisoner clarified that he had, in fact, sneaked into the debtor’s prison.

“I’m happy here,” he said. “We’ve even founded a school of sorts – the Prison School of Poetry. We’re largely influenced by the works of Sir Walter Raleigh and the bards of the Irish independence movement, who wrote songs and poems on the eves of their executions.”

Report submitted from within debtor’s prison. Having endured numerous lectures on “the death of journalism,” this reporter decided to move in herself.

*

It’s hard to imagine an obituary for poetry until we know exactly why and when it will die, but here’s how one might start.

Poetry, Remembered as Gentle Source of Readerly Exaltation, Murdered in Bath

Poetry, an esteemed verbal art relying on compression, form, metaphor, or other means to achieve heightened literary and aesthetic effect, died Thursday when longtime companions Prose, Technology, and Incomprehension initiated a brutal attack at Poetry’s home in New Jersey. Poetry was at least 4,000 years old.

*

It’s equally hard to speculate on the aftermath of poetry’s death, but we can be confident New Mexicans will play a prominent role.

In “Desert Places,” Poetry Cited — and Sighted

ROSWELL—Since poetry’s demise last January 23, believers here and in other remote locations across America claim the form is not dead at all.

Mary McPherson, 32, was driving down Clovis Highway when she noticed the air shimmering strangely above the pavement. Scientists would cite extreme heat as the reason for the phenomenon. But McPherson has another opinion.

“It was a moment of loveliness that seemed loaded with significance,” she said. “No one will believe me, but I swear there was poetry in it.”

Robert Hache, 65, reported an equally uncanny event at the grocery store. “I was passing through the soup aisle, and suddenly I heard someone say, ‘Oops! Oops! I spilled the soups,’” he remarked. “It reminded me of the poetry I used to read when I was little. Everyone tells me that poetry is dead, but I’m not so sure.”

Psychologist Sinda Turner at the University of New Mexico described these apparitions as a normal element of grieving. “We tend to keep seeing the departed, in various senses, for years after the death,” she said. “Think of Elvis.”

She said she’s attempted to confirm the death of poetry with colleagues in the university’s poetry MFA program, but could not find the poetry professors.  “People say they’ve moved to prison, where they’ve founded a new school, and have already published several anthologies,” she said. “I’m not sure what to make of that. New Mexicans are very imaginative.”

“The folklorist Vladimir Propp thought he was accomplishing something worthwhile by identifying in Russian folktales thirty-one functions and 151 elements, with a mathematical symbol assigned to each.” — Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge

*

Asked why he continued to live in Vienna after the war, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said, “If you study malaria, you should live in the swamp.”

*

“When you think about it, wire walking is very close to what religion is. ‘Religion’ is from the Latin ‘religare,’ which means to link something, people or places. And to know, before you take your first step on a wire, that you are going to do the last one — this is a kind of faith.” — Philippe Petit

*

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” — Archilochus

*

“The Gradus ad Parnassum, much in use by schoolboys, provided epithetic and other phrases from classical Latin poets, with the long and short syllables all conveniently marked for metrical fit, so that the aspirant poet could assemble a poem from the Gradus as boys might assemble a structure from an old Erector set. The overall structure could be of his own making but the pieces were all there before he came along.” — Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

*

“The moon’s surface has been shaped largely by impacts.” — Docent to schoolchildren at New York’s Rose Center for Earth and Space

*

“Dreams and beasts are the two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature. All mystics use them. The are like comparative anatomy. They are our test objects.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

*

“But I have read history! And none, to a man, believed himself doomed!” — Unidentified interlocutor in a dream

*

Hor. O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Ham. And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

*

“All reading begins in the revolt against narcissism: when a book stops reflecting your own prejudices, whether for or against what you ’see in it’ — & begins to say something closer to what it does say, the core of the reality in the ‘objective’ aspect of it takes shape & you start wrestling with an angel.” — Northrop Frye

I’ve really taken my time having a go at Sean Patrick Hill’s review in Rain Taxi of State of the Union, the political anthology published by wave books. I know there’s been a tempest here about nepotism in the poetry world which I think is exactly as serious as nepotism anywhere else. But who is Nepot. Why do we name a vice after him. Most importantly I will confess to being one of the poets in the anthology Sean reviews. But I really don’t mind that he didn’t mention me or my terrific poem in what he wrote. I was far too busy researching him. I checked out his bio and his poetry to see who is he to be claiming to have a corner on knowing what the political in poetry is. I’m investigating the deep background to the dense harrumph through which he ventriloquizes this piece. Where’s Sean coming from. That’s my question.

His poems, kind of prosy, are gentle nature poems with an aesthetic burnish. So when I read his review of the State of the Union book I’m not more confused I’m depressingly lulled by instead how predictable his review is/was. His own work does not seem “political.” He begins the “review” like this: “…let’s be clear at the outset: for the most part, the generations of American poets writing today have experienced little of the world’s political strife beyond what they’ve gleaned from the proliferate media. From a casual look at the biographies of poets appearing in The State Of The Union: 50 Political Poems, one can’t help but admit that they speak from a certain privillege.”

That’s so full of assumptions that simply quoting him might be enough. I could stop. I could put a few beats or bullets zinging behind his grandiloquence and I think I’ve got it made, but wait it gets even absurder. “It is notable, even regrettable, that only one poet in the collection, Brian Turner (Ho-Hum) served as a soldier in an actual war zone.”

Since he does ultimately do the typical round up of who and what he does and doesn’t like in the book (Sean is a good boy after all and this is a review, despite the bombast he excitedly frames it in.) But the reason I’m writing is my own feeling that his frame is why he wrote the piece and so it not his poetic opinions (which were thin) deserves my attention.

I wondered what else (besides being a soldier) is considered political to this writer. I mean I noticed what wasn’t. Rape? Why isn’t rape considered political by Sean Patrick Hill? Isn’t rape part of war. I mean war everywhere. War in America for instance. I mean if the percentage of female contributors in State of the Union is in keeping with the rest of America it’s probably pretty high i.e. I’m thinking about the number of us who have been sexually assaulted. Should that be in my bio? Do homosexuals have any purchase on the world’s political strife. Guess not. Even though we see them hung in Iran. I think you have to be hung (internationally) to be taken seriously in this review. Be hung with a gun at war I mean. I know one gay contributor whose lover was murdered for being queer. That’s not political. I mean unless it appeared IN THE BIO.

So there’s a gross essentialism going on here in one single regard. Man at war. Instead of talking about the complexity of the question that frames the book he’s reviewing – what is a political poem today and how do we describe, experience, understand the intimate balance going on between information, sentiment and aesthetics that determines how we read a poem and whether it even seems political to us (because isn’t the notion of “the political poem” a complex projection and reception of self and selves onto the moving surface of the poem in its time? I think so. Isn’t every political anthology a new thesis of that. ) Sean has avoided the philosophical and aesthetic questions of the review he is writing to instead not so indirectly suggest that poets as a class are insipid. He cites as his one authority on that point, the critic and translator Eliot Weinberger. Sean’s own poems contain trips to Spain where maybe real political things are occurring unlike here. Like during the Spanish Civil War. Lorca was a political poet. Get it. He died. That’s a real poet. War becomes a new kind of romantic test here.

Whereas because I (and here I really mean “I” as a class) am a published poet and a former college professor he assumes we’re all middle class at least and have no experience with sexual abuse, sex work, discriminatory health care, bad education for being born in an unprivileged family… assumed we didn’t go to Vietnam nor our brothers or our friends, or our dads. Or feel the effects of it. Socially, economically. Our dads didn’t go to world war two and come back ruined and drunk and any activism of the mind or the body hasn’t been practiced by any of us here.

Sean didn’t serve. Is that the problem. Or he has a completely complicated relationship to class which he’s unwilling to discuss. Did anyone ever tell him a review isn’t a therapy session. The essence of his warm up (and closure) is the indirect corralling of all of us in the book into the state of his own embarrassed disconnect to the world’s strife and his consequent feelings of mediocrity. Because Sean feels mediocre we are all mediocre. That’s where the personal becomes political to him. It’s viral this lousy feeling he has about himself. He’s passing it on. The identification of Brian Turner as one who’s been in an actual war zone identifies him as a true player. That’s so extra-poetry. This is an anthology of political poems, not a veteran’s anthology. Being a soldier is political. This is new. New like Siegfried Sassoon. Being a college professor is not. You know why? Sean is one. This piece screams that what I hate most about myself is that I have a job. He sides with critic and translator Eliot Weinberger “in decrying the failure of American poets to engage politics on a deep level. Weinberger points to their willingness to work for the very society they accuse – as tenured professors, as grant acceptors, as silent contributors to the status quo. He even goes so far as to call these poets “wards of the state. “ Now I have nothing against poets and critics living on inherited wealth like Eliot Weinberger but it’s hardly a position to be scornful from. Tell you the truth what I would consider a political poetry anthology at this point in time is one in which poets and critics talk honestly about their own economics. I have sat at least at one table with Eliot Weinberger and another poet also supported by his family and they both talked disparagingly about teaching. I guess it was the rest of us being to polite and slightly embarrassed for them instead of calling their bluff and saying but you guys are rich that made this moment both sickening and possible and memorable. It was their privilege to assume that we wouldn’t call them out. I have nothing against rich people per se. I love some quite a lot. The ones I know. Work is not a shame. Wealth is not a shame. Lying is.

In the end Sean leaps to history, the great judge. The easily appropriated chorus. He shamelessly quotes what an “Irish Republican prisoner said about the Nobel ribbon around Yeats’ neck: “If he wrote the sort of poetry that told the truth he’d be more likely to have the other kind of noose slipped around it.” I love that Yeats was a pussy stands as Sean Patrick Hill’s final assertion – using a Republican Soldier as his sock puppet. Yeats was a pussy. Real men know that. Well that must feel good. Maybe Sean’s a political prisoner at the school where he adjuncts. Lots of us know the feeling, Sean. It’s political, too.

Hi, Harriet. I’m going to do some more recycling! I wrote this review for some peeps and they never published it. I thought this was a bummer, not only because I’d spent time working on it, but also because I thought these books deserved some notice. I cut-n-paste the review here on Harriet for those reasons, plus the reason of needing things to blawg about from a contractual point of view, plus to say nyah nyah to the aforementioned review-not-printing peeps, plus to satisfy a certain meta-curiosity I’ve been feeling, namely, whether/how/why my writer-writing differs — in tone, substance, form, content, etc. — from my blogger-writing. But ugh, don’t bother yourself too much about that last bit if it’s of no interest; it’s only slightly so to me. Instead read these reviews and let me know a) whether/why you do/n’t find my comments about these books valuable and/or enticing and/or whatever, and b) if you already knew about these books, what did you think of them?

Reviewed below:

Rick Barot, Want (Sarabande, 2008)

Chris Martin, American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007)

Karen Volkman, Nomina (BOA, 2008)

American poets have long debated the merits of “free” versus “formal” verse, but since all poems depend upon conventions of sound and signification in order to be read, they are all in some sense “formal.” If poets are to make poems, they can’t not use form. They can, though, choose how to use it, and therein lies the challenge (and joy) of writing poems. These three poets make very different prosodic decisions, but each author, in his or her own manner, demonstrates the varieties of tension and pleasure which thoughtful formal choices can engender. (Did you catch those slant-rhymes, reader? And that run of trochees? Reviewers have to make formal choices too, you know!)

Rick Barot titles his second collection with a primal monosyllable of longing, but his poems offer a smorgasbord of satisfactions. Barot’s speaker takes walks along the ocean, goes dancing, lingers in bookstores, libraries, and galleries, travels widely, reads constantly and variously, and is usually in the good company of a friend or lover. The guy has a boyfriend who roller-skates around the apartment in the nude! If this is want, what would having look like?

Formally, too, Barot’s poems hemorrhage loveliness even when we might expect some dissonance. Though they rarely adhere to strict patterns of meter or rhyme, their meticulous syntax and elegant rhetoric create a strong impression of classical grace and harmony. The effect is so relentlessly successful it leads me to a strange suggestion: These poems may be too beautiful for their own good.

The primary red striped onto the black, the dye
spotting the mirror and sink with
a kind of gore, a sulfur that is in the air for days:
you are twenty-two and this means

even folly has its own exacting nature. The hair
turned red, as easily as last month’s
blue; the piggish, miniature barbell pierced into
a nipple. At the club I watch you on top

of the speaker, tearing the shirt your brother gave
you, the music a murderous brightness
in the black room. Now you want it all off, down
to clear scalp. Your head in foam,

you ask me to do the places you can’t properly
reach: the neck’s mossy hairs, the back’s
escarpment, an edge of bone the razor nicks
to small blood, tasting like peppermint

and metal on my tongue.

Gore and sulfur! A torn shirt! The lover’s blood licked from a razor! This is ardent stuff, but it’s hard to deliver a convincing blast of l’amour fou in quatrains as gracious and polished as these. (Who, other than my college roommate who wore a cravat and smoked a meerschaum, uses the word “folly” with a straight face?)

The dozens of allusions to other writers and artists here may suggest a preference for the aesthetic over the real. Nothing necessarily wrong with that; carving out a refuge from reality is a defensible motive for making art. But Barot’s magnificence of expression sometimes seems less a respite than a flat denial. When he writes about a flood that killed thousands in his native Philippines in 1992, the devastation sounds upsettingly pretty (“rain was in love with the world”; dead bodies were “slick as fish”), and I’m reminded of Wallace Stevens’s idea that “since the imperfect is so hot in us,” delight “lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.” Barot is an absolutely lustrous writer, either unwilling or unable to utter a flawed or stubborn sound. Even when one’s wanted.

*

Chris Martin’s poems are as shambling and nonplussed as Barot’s are poised and authoritative. The speaker in Martin’s first book wanders around (usually in New York, occasionally elsewhere), works up makeshift theories of human nature, cracks jokes, and above all simply pays attention: a sidewalk tout hands out mysterious fliers for “Computerized Donuts,” someone accidentally throws a Frisbee into the giraffe pen at the zoo, “a jay // Crowds a turtledove / From the clothesline nobody / uses.” Through Martin’s eyes, the world’s supply of trivial but somehow remarkable dramas like these seems happily inexhaustible.

When Martin notices “the birthmark / On the bridge of the nose // Of the girl in the deli / Buying a diet Pepsi” on his way to check out a gallery in Chelsea, and then refers to another woman’s nose as “Currinesque,” in reference to the contemporary painter John Currin, he fairly demands comparison to Frank O’Hara, whose I-do-this-I-do-that-as-I-walk-around-the-city poems also displayed reverence for both everyday images and the rare air of the downtown art scene. Martin’s prosody, though, is distinctively his own. Every poem here cinches his digressive sensibility into triplets of short, choppy lines, and provides no terminal punctuation until its very end, so that by the time I get to line thirty or so, I begin to suffer the kind of craving for closure a soprano holding high C must feel.

My love is studying
Anatomy and I
Am a dilettante resuscitating

The moaning anomie
Of postmillennial drudgework
Into daily veer

As Watts teenagers writhe
And jolt like the victims of electricity
We diminish them

To be, an earnest rage born
Of the absurd, a fit
Response to an irresponsible

Age, each morning’s paper
Soaked in a bloom
Of limbs . . .

And so on, for another forty-nine lines of subordinate clauses and phrases, before Martin grants us a period at last, and lets us take a breath. Martin’s penchant for kinking his syntax further increases the sonic anxiety, and the combination of runaway sentences, strong enjambment, and syntactical inversions makes for a fretful but invigorating reading experience. I want to rush through the poem, since I won’t be able to comprehend a complete thought until its end, but at the same time, nearly every line forces me to stop, take stock of where I am, and wonder how I got there.

This formal tension neatly mirrors Martin’s chief thematic question, which is whether the poet’s job is to make sense of experience, or simply to record it. “I am / Not even a cinematographer wrenching / Beauty from an otherwise // Dumb panorama,” he writes, “I am that dumb / Panorama . . .” The poet’s investigative sentences seem driven by a desire to interpret and synthesize, but his halting line-by-line perceptions suggest he doubts poetry capable of anything more than “dumb” observation. It’s the collision of these two impulses which creates the strained but sweet “American / Music” Martin has “come to / Bring you you redoubtable ear.”

*

Instead of inventing a new form, Karen Volkman revisits a very old one. Nearly every poem in her third collection is an Italian sonnet, a form which poets writing in rhyme-poor English tend to avoid because it demands more rhymes than its English cousin. Volkman’s not daunted by the form’s challenges, and finds plenty of room to maneuver within what Wordsworth called “the sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”

The blue blanched figures—system of a bird—
possess the future in the singing spring,
syrinx opulens, the eye a ring
noon will burn in like a perfect word

in a breathing sentence the silence blurred.
Principally throat, motion arriving
aural integral or static wing
comes to this remonstrance, harm, high, heard

and white kept opiate the nothing wides.
Palliative the skewed sky shackles, flails.
High integument that curts and glides

and beads the waters where its silver sails
the streaming numbers, aureate scales.
Enough says the girl and screams and hides.

Some might say Volkman can handle the sonnet’s prosodic strictures so easily only because she’s excused herself from the form’s traditional obligation to make an argument, or at least sense. What, after all, does this poem mean? Since when is “curt” a verb? Why is the sky skewed, and what does it shackle? Where did that girl at the end come from, and what’s she so upset about? Sonnets by hall-of-famers like Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Spenser may be (and are) subjected to multiple interpretations; still, it’s usually clear what they’re about on some basic level.

Volkman’s sonnets make a different kind of sense, though. I can’t offer a convincing gloss of the poem above, but if I overheard someone reading it aloud in the next room, so that I could make out its cadences but not the words themselves, it would sound completely intelligible, because its sentences are structured in ways I expect from a sonnet making some kind of argument. What Volkman’s sonnets are “about” is the syntactical and sonic rhetoric of the sonnet itself. The poem’s form isn’t a means to an end, as in a traditional sonnet; it’s an end in itself, a demonstration of itself.

There’s also a wily rhetoric of diction at work in these poems. Considered in isolation, the words which end each line in the sonnet above might seem to have been lifted from a deeply sappy, long-forgotten nineteenth-century poetess. In context, though, we see those stereotypically poetic words in pitched battle with the other registers of vocabulary in the poem: colloquial, erudite, foreign, even scientific. The poem enacts its argument not in the form of ideas expressed by its words’ denotative values, but by setting up a conflict between different types of words, their connotations, histories, and associations.

Nomina’s sameness of sound and scheme from page to page can make the poems begin to blur together, so it’s best to take them in small doses. Yet Volkman’s subversive exploration of the most venerable of all traditional forms is undeniably fascinating. Of these three books, hers is both the most volatile and the most fastidious. All three, though, are excellent specimens to wave under the nose of anyone who says there’s no freedom to be found in formal verse, or form in free.

Participants in the "What Is a Poet?" symposium at The University of Alabama, October 1984. L-R: Bernstein, Vendler, Jay, Perloff, Altieri, Stern, Ignatow, Simpson, Lazer, Levertov, Burke. Photo by Gay Chow.

No, no, don’t expect an answer from me; I’m just using my Harriet soapbox here to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a unique event in American poetry. In October of 1984, my friend and colleague Hank Lazer gathered together here in Tuscaloosa a sparkling group of poetry and poetics all-stars (Charles Altieri, Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Burke, Donald Hall, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Marjorie Perloff, Louis Simpson, Gerald Stern, and Helen Vendler) for three days of conversations and lectures concerning the aforementioned question. (The lasting result of this meeting was a terrific collection of essays with the same title as this post.) As you might expect, there were disagreements among the symposium participants regarding the nature and function of the poetic act.

That’s putting it gently, actually; it’s my understanding that people stormed out of rooms! But, as Hank writes here, looking back, at least this disparate group came together to argue face to face. It does seem like now, these years later, most writers of poems–not all; most–don’t even bother to argue with those whose poetics they find alien or alienating. It’s much less threatening, after all, to simply seek the friends, blogs, readings, ancestors, journals, and presses with which one feels an affinity, and ignore the rest. So here are three cheers for “What Is a Poet?”, one of poetry’s great brawls. You can find a complete transcript of the contentious panel discussion which concluded the symposium at that same link I gave above.

Last summer, I was asked to write something about Hayden Carruth, and I did, but the folks who had asked me to write the piece never published it. Carruth died in September of last year. He had been an idiosyncratic but pervasive force in American poetry — both as a writer of poems and a critic of poetry — for more than fifty years. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times. And below is the appreciation I wrote last summer. It’s lazy of me, recycling old material here, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to offer this piece for your consideration. Hopefully it will both garner Carruth some new fans and spark good memories for old ones.

It’s an ancient story: I went to graduate school because I thought I was smart, and immediately discovered how stupid I was. Among the many indicators of my ignorance, one stood out: Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems, which had just won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry. I went to school at Syracuse, from whose faculty Carruth had only recently retired, and he retained the status of a household god in those parts. He is older now, nearing ninety, and I doubt he does much socializing. But those fifteen years ago, he would be installed in a corner at parties, offered tidbits and drink, doted upon and feared. I tended toward the fear end of the spectrum. I never spoke to him. But I read his poems.

I wish I could go back and watch that kid I was reading those poems and turning pale and clammy as the winter skies of upstate New York. For starters, there were so many of them: two hundred or so, from thirteen books, written over more than forty years. Then the chilling realization that there had to be even more somewhere, since these were only the “shorter” poems. (Copper Canyon published a companion Collected Longer Poems in 1993.) And then there was the extraordinary diversity of the poems themselves. Formally, it seemed Carruth could pull off anything. There were poems in all manner of meters, rhyme schemes, stanza patterns, and received forms, some of which I recognized, others I knew I should know but didn’t, and not a few I suspected had simply been invented by Carruth himself. But Carruth was not a strict formalist, or not exclusively; there were also poems that scattered language across the page, using white space for pacing, and poems in very free verse, some with lines of two or three syllables, some with lines as gigantic and manic as Ginsberg’s, and every imaginable variation in-between. For a young writer who hadn’t (hasn’t) yet figured out how to do even one thing well, this apparition that could do at least a dozen things brilliantly was terrifying.

Beyond the remarkable how of the poems—the solidity and variety of their constructions—there was also the what to be reckoned with. I’d read a poem like “Marshall Washer”–a deeply felt, sternly authoritative account of Carruth’s friendship with his farmer neighbor in rural Vermont, full of insight and information about spreading manure, raising cows, and building fences–and think I had a bead on Carruth’s tone and concerns as a poet. But then some pages later I’d come across translations of short lyrics by Nerval and Lamartine, and be forced to expand my sense of what he was up to. Then there were pitch-perfect and hilarious dramatic monologues in the voices of working-class rural New Englanders trying to keep body and soul together on their dying farms and in their dying mill towns. Then paeans to classical Chinese poets. Caustic political poems about Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and industrial pollution. Erudite lyric flights with titles like “Almanach du Printemps Vivarois” and “Loneliness: An Outburst in Hexasyllables.” Ecstatically ragged analyses and recapitulations of obscure old jazz recordings (“When Dickenson came on in it was all established, / no guessing, and he started with a blur / as usual, smears, brays – Christ / the dirtiest noise imaginable / belches, farts / curses / but it was music . . .” (“Paragraphs”)). Nature poems, love poems, political poems, lyrical poems, narrative poems, dramatic poems, funny poems, serious poems, angry poems, sad poems, joyful poems. The poet seemed at ease with Chinese, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Indian, French, Italian, German, and English literatures. He also knew how to bale hay. He was witty and scholarly, but utterly allergic to bullshit and pretense. Who was this guy? When I came to “A Little Old Funky Homeric Blues for Herm,” and after much study realized what I was looking at—the 2,700-year-old Homeric hymn to Hermes, recast in jazz slang (“Knock off that hincty blowing, you Megarians, / I got a new beat, mellow and melic, like / warm, man. I sing of heisty Herm”)— my last screw came loose. Was such an exercise supremely nerdy? Sure. Was I nevertheless supremely jealous of the poet’s knowledge, and wholly won over by his humor? Absolutely.

The equal measures of anxiety and enjoyment I felt as I came to understand the depth of Carruth’s technical skill and vastness of his frame of reference ensured I would return to his Collected Shorter Poems again and again as I struggled to bring together my own first book of poems. But these years later, taking the book down from the shelf, it’s not so much the how or what that strikes me as the why. When I think about why these poems were written—what it was that hurt Carruth into poetry, to borrow Auden’s phrase—I realize that reading them, I never feel the author is writing to be admired, or to fulfill or defy expectations, or to dazzle or baffle or flatter or decree. Carruth never panders; not to himself, and not to us. Galway Kinnell’s blurb on the back of the book gets it right: “This is not a man who sits down to ‘write a poem’; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being.” And T. S. Eliot, describing his “Impersonal” theory of poetry in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” makes the point even more clearly, in terms which seem to me to describe Carruth’s achievement perfectly:

“There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

It’s hard to learn how to write poems, and it’s hard to decide what to write them about. It’s hardest of all, though, to discover (or create) a good reason to write them at all. I don’t think I realized when I read Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems in 1992 that the most crucial lesson he had to offer me was the necessity of confronting that fearful task directly and continuously, with honesty and integrity. If I’ve begun to understand that lesson in the years since, it’s in no small part thanks to the present moment of the past which lives in that book’s pages.

– JULY, 2008

Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09 (photo: C. Dungy)

The street sweepers have passed, and the crowd control fences have been carried away.  Pride, for some, is over and done.  But for many, the persistent resistance that Pride weekend celebrates still thrives.  Thank goodness. In honor of Pride and, moreover, in honor of the spirit of resistance and persistence of the Stonewall rebellion and the movements it spawned, (and also in a sort of answer to a question Catherine Halley posed some time ago), I’m going to share a few poems by a small sample of writers from the West Coast LBGT community.

Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho, connects her love of the poet Sappho to a very contemporary, daily existence.  Our lingering fascination with the poet from Lesbos is filtered through this book’s witty, sometimes heartbreaking perspectives.  In the poem, “How Much Can I Have of Sappho?” she grapples with what it means to be denied the right to claim the poet.  Here are the final two sections of the four-section piece:

III

I live with the anger that Sappho and I
are denied each other.
She’s a word like “aunt,” I’m a word like “quaint,”
we’re always off-rhyme,
two words like “ain’t.”

People say to me, “You know, she didn’t have to be
a lesbian.  You know nothing
is proven, right?”

A one-size-fits-all meaning of the word lesbian
is one I don’t even ask for.

“What would Sappho think?”
I ask myself.  She would think, “Who’s that
new girl?”

IV

People just can’t find
a way to let me
have her.

And why not?
What would they
lose then?

Maybe people just feel a need
to put me in my place,
to set me straight.

What attracts me to this poem is its plain spokeness, and also its light touch (“What would Sappho think?” / I ask myself.  She would think, “Who’s that / new girl?”)  These belie a turbulent emotional undercurrent.  The poem keeps up a calm face even as there is a great deal of emotion, intention, complexity of purpose contained therein.  It feels like an apt statement of a sort of committed resistance that must carry on daily, that cannot risk expending overmuch energy at every turn because there is going to be another struggle to undertake the next day and there must be energy kept in reserve.

A complaint that is often waged against poets writing from marginalized communities (I hate that phrase, pardon my use of it here for expedience’s sake) is that they are not angry enough, that their poems are not direct enough in their articulations of resistance.  I, personally, love a poem that expresses a kind of restraint while it makes clear that the speaker is not going to roll over and hush up anytime soon.  There is a certain kind of staying power a poem like this suggests, that the speaker’s resilience is not going to sputter out overnight. This is a good thing, since, as her poems suggests (read some more here), there is still plenty of work to be done.

This poetic conservation of energy, even when circumstances might suggest appropriate conditions for immoderate rage, seems to be one of the key factors tying together the poets I am looking at today.  D. A. Powell’s new book, Chronic, is full of poems that play a number of emotional registers, backing away from all out rage much of the time and employing, instead, sarcasm, sideways references (which in poetics speak we call allusion), understatement, dry wit, feigned indifference.  Poems like “centerfold” and “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song ‘good times’ by chic” overlook what’s at their core, if by overlook we can simultaneously mean to willfully look beyond as well as to carefully survey.  When the matter at the core of the poems has to do with chronic disease, the degradation of civilization as we know it, and love’s ever-dissolving potential, it might be best to take a step back every now and again to gain a fresh perspective, to rest the spirit for the inevitable struggles ahead.

This post owes a debt to Cole Krawitz and Griselda Suarez, the two San Francisco Bay Area writers who organized a reading for the 2009 National Queer Arts Festival.  I was familiar with the work of most of the poets reading at the event: D. A. Powell, Eloise Klein Healy, Jewelle Gomez, Elana Dykewomon, Ching-In Chen, the magnificent Dorothy Allison, and the multi-genre force, Rigoberto González.  Only one poet was completely new to me: Ely Shipley.

Shipley’s work fits into this idea of persistent resistance beautifully.  The poems take on ways of looking, and chip away slowly, often delicately, at the perceptions they initially suggest:

Boy with Flowers

My aunt loved me, asked me:
will you be the flower
girl at my wedding?  But I’m not
a girl, I argued, and she persuaded me:
you’ll get to throw rose petals

onto the aisle, walk before me, both of us
crushing them beneath our feet, my gown
dragging over them.  I agreed.  I wanted
nothing but chivalry.

At the church, my mother and I
waited in the small room.  She brushed
my aunt’s hair until the dress arrived.
Isn’t it beautiful?  And I agreed until they tried
to put me in it.  I’d seen my father

and uncle earlier, standing in a circle
of other men, smoke hovering over their heads, a halo
and their voices kind, quiet, and deep.  I told my aunt—
I want to wear a suit like them!  She promised

if I wore the dress I could wear anything
I wanted after: army pants, a sheriff
badge, cowboy hat, and pistols.  My mother shot her
a look in the mirror where we posed, both of them
angelic in white, and me not yet

dressed.  Today I wake from another dream
in which I have a beard, no breasts,
and am about to go skinny-dipping
on a foreign beach with four other men.

I’m afraid to undress, won’t take off my shorts,
so they gab me, one at each ankle, the other two
by each wrist.  I am a starfish hardening.
The sun hovers above, a hot
mirror where I search for my reflection.

I close my eyes.  It’s too intense.  The light
where my lover is tracing fingertips
around two long incisions in my chest.  Each sewn tight
with stitches, each naked stem, flaring with thorns.

The turns in this poem, intensified by the line breaks and also the leaps from one situation to the next, amplify the sense of long struggle.  The poem is about now and also about always, and its pace, slow and steady but also, somehow, accelerated, seems just right for a situation in which everything happens at once and, also, situations unravel over long periods of time. “Boy with Flowers,” the title poem of Shipley’s collection, reveals in increments and, with each revelation, suggests plenty more that’s gone unsaid.

Speaking of plenty more going unsaid, there are a slew of other writers whose work I’d love to address here: Charles Flowers, C. Dale Young, Toni Mirosevich, Troung Tran, Eileen Myles, Jericho Brown, and Elizabeth Bradfield spring immediately to mind.  I’ll close, though, by writing briefly about the inimitable Rebecca Brown, whose earthshaking works of fiction and nonfiction are go-to books for me when I want to think about how to use language most evocatively. This is so partly because Brown’s books are so amazing in the manners in which they manage to be simultaneously direct and indirect.  I’m thinking, for instance, of her phenomenal story “What I Did” in the short story collection The Terrible Girls.  In “What I Did” the speaker narrates, in gruesome detail, the specifics of carrying some very clearly referenced thing, but she fails to ever, directly, state what that thing actually is.  It’s a brilliant deployment of abstraction in the midst of clarity, so the story works as allegory and testimony all at once.  This idea of staying power that I’ve been working around in this post seems to come forward throughout Brown’s many volumes of prose.  Each time she tackles a subject in her books, be it her mother’s death, a progression from young lesbian to elder figure, caring for those afflicted with AIDS, grappling with identity, or learning to play war with the kids on the block, Brown does so in an unflinching manner that demands you stay with her for the long haul.

Brown’s work, like the work of all the writers I’ve written about today, bears little resemblance to the glitzy weekend my city’s just celebrated, with its corporate sponsorship and its start-on-time-end-on-time-kindly-police-escorted parade.  This work bears more in common with the dangerous confrontations at the Stonewall Inn, and before, and after, and on and on for the years and years, the decades of struggle and progress and tide turns and surprises (pleasant and unpleasant) and constant persistent celebration and resistance some of us have made note of only on occasion ever since and some of us, thank goodness, are alert to most days.

Celebrity: the modern, secular form of martyrdom, where individuals are cast into the riotous blast of an eviscerating, obliterating light. How many personal disasters of every conceivable kind — suicide, homicide, divorce, addiction — before it is understood that celebrities are victims? “Their divorce was more predictable than their marriage.”

6. Penance
With the insistent picturing and telling of Celebrity, it is of course not uninteresting to be a poet. John Ashbery once remarked, “To be famous, and to be a famous poet are not the same thing,” by which he simply wanted to point out that the world of poetry is not included in celebrity picturing and storytelling. Why is this? Because the economy of being a poet subverts the received relationship between ambition, money, and success. Poets must acknowledge this fact a priori, at the outset; must, in a sense, agree to it. Many persons in many fields have an increasingly hard time making a living, and endemic poverty caused by social oppression is not something to be lightly set aside. To be poor in this culture carries all kinds of stigmas, and invites all kinds of rhetorical evocations of the American Dream, which holds that the pursuit of happiness is necessarily tied to the capacity to earn a living. (What constitutes a “living wage” in a culture driven by WFP is worth a pause, as we witness the slow but certain shrinkage of the middle class and the institutions of social transformation — schools, libraries, museums, newspapers, research universities, concert halls, and so forth — in which it has traditionally invested.)

A living wage: that which allows a person sufficient freedom to feel she/he has some control over her/his destiny; an alignment of capacity to activity which leads to a sense of sufficiency.

Nonetheless, persons who wish to become poets in this culture must make a kind of promise or vow, like St. Francis, in which they agree to a kind of economic obscurity, at least in relation to the writing of poems. The history of the embedded relation between poverty and poetry is not just a romance but is linked to the history of spiritual resistance, a resistance which characterized the initial founding of America, sometimes with dire consequences, and which finds its greatest secular expression in Emerson’s Self-Reliance. People are disturbed when poets make a decent living as professors; they think it is a sort of bad joke (but of course newsworthy) when Allen Ginsberg sells his archive to a major university for big bucks, as if some breach of decorum had been committed. They are not equally bemused when movie stars, baseball players or television news commentators get millions upon millions for acting a part, playing ball, or reading aloud the news in front of a camera.

When poets make Money something is askew. As if, for every celebrity—say Michael Jackson or Madonna or — exploding in the firmament like giant stars, there needs to be a shadow figure, an obscure Other toiling away in the dimmest corner, lost in the dark matter of the universe, never to be found by the searching lenses of far-reaching cameras. Poets must hold down this invisible portion of the universe, the part that we never see but guess at, lest the whole thing fly apart in a final radiance of destruction, on the incendiary flames of outrageous (mis)fortune.

Off-camera and out of earshot, watching the night snow fall, noticing that snow contains myriad nows.

There must be some remnant habit of willed obscurity, of volunteer poverty for an acceptance of an inequity, a gap, between work and recompense, in which some vague need is met, a sort of spiritual critique, an antithetical motion, however far-off, however imperceptible, of the equation of happiness with the capacity to buy things, many things, more things than one could ever possibly need. As if, on the Day of Judgment, poets will step forward out of the crevices — the tiny rooms, the smoky bars — by the hundreds and thousands wearing dark glasses, like a great witnessing Chorus, to proclaim the faith of little children, the hope of the excluded, and the charity of the hard moments.
(She catches sight of herself in the mirror. Go in fear of hyperbole.)

[From The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking, 2005)]