Linh Dinh

Power, Money and Fame

Linh: Everyone wants power. And money. And fame. Get over it.–Kenneth Goldsmith
I don’t seem to want power or money or fame. I only seem to want food and shelter, (library) books and good friends.–Unreliable Narrator

He said, she said, but I say that if power, money and fame are your primary objectives in life, then poetry is a dismal career choice. Imagine hearing your teenaged offspring confiding at the dinner table, his or her mouth stuffed with Chef Boy R Dee, “Mom, dad, since I won’t rest until I’ve achieved lots of power, money and fame, I’ve decided to study noncreative writing with Kenneth Goldsmith at the University of Pennsylvania.” With tuition for 2008-2009 at $37,526 and rising fast, $51,300 if you count cost of living, I’d advise against such a bold choice, unless you’re really dedicated to non-creativity, then go for broke, literally, and don’t look back!
Sure, it’s nice to always have enough change to eat, at least, and be sheltered, but money and power—I’ll leave out fame, for now–are rarely the rewards for those who won’t quit emjambing, starting from early youth, even as rejection slips flutter around their ankles, so what they’re chasing must be more pathetic and sublime than anything that would interest, say, Hank Paulson, Bernard Madoff or George W. Bush?

01.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (17)

Javier Huerta

On Advice to Young Poets: an excerpt from The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis

‘My verses, my Lord?’
‘Nay, I am sure that you have been writing some, for nothing else could have kept you awake till this time of the morning. Where are they, Theodore? I shall like to see your composition.’
Theodore’s cheeks glowed with still deeper crimson: He longed to show his poetry, but first chose to be pressed for it.
‘Indeed, my Lord, they are not worthy your attention.’
‘Not these verses, which you just now declared to be so charming?
Come, come, let me see whether our opinions are the same. I promise that you shall find in me an indulgent Critic.’
The Boy produced his paper with seeming reluctance; but the satisfaction which sparkled in his dark expressive eyes betrayed the vanity of his little bosom. The Marquis smiled while He observed the emotions of an heart as yet but little skilled in veiling its sentiments. He seated himself upon a Sopha: Theodore, while Hope and fear contended on his anxious countenance, waited with inquietude for his Master’s decision, while the Marquis read the following lines.

01.13.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Linh Dinh

We Baaad

Before the internet, writers interested in weird, amateurish or specialized lingos had to scrounge for them in used book stores and porn shops. There was no Google to barf verbiage onto your lap. I used to spend hundreds on magazines with names like Over Fifty and Fabulous, K.O., Soldiers of Fortune, Flying Saucer Digest and Teen. Bad, bumbling English is always a happenin’ planet, stretching your horizon, dude. In the visual arts, one artist in particular, Jim Shaw, alerted us all to the weird, goofy world of amateur creativity. He collected thrift store paintings and arranged them in installations. His 1991 show at Metro Pictures, NYC, was declared by critic Jerry Saltz as “one of the most important shows of the decade [...] it brimmed with dementedly entertaining art [and] unlocked the doors to scores of dead, forgotten, or otherwise devalued painting genres. It was a gold mine of overlooked pictorial information, a mother lode of untapped graphic imagination and pictorial possibility.” Sounds like flarf to me. It was flarf, flarf, flarf, before there was flarf.

12.19.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Javier Huerta

“Good Bad Poetry”: A Conversation

Now, far be it from “Poetry & Popular Culture” to take particular umbrage at the Poetry Foundation’s use of the term “good bad poetry”–despite the fact that Huerta doesn’t cite the essay “Writing Good Bad Poetry” that appeared in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and that was excerpted on this blog back in October. No, there is no umbrage taken, in part because the term “good bad poetry” is an adaptation of George Orwell’s term “good bad fiction.” While the Poets & Writers essay did acknowledge the Orwellian origin of “good bad poetry,” it’s perhaps no surprise that the folks at the Poetry Foundation want to make it seem like the term originated there—in the million-dollar Chicago offices of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious little magazine. After all, it’s Poetry’s own standard-bearer T.S. Eliot who famously quipped that while good writers borrow, great ones steal—a quip Eliot himself cribbed from Oscar Wilde.
I apologize to Mike Chasar for troubling him over my use of the phrase “good bad poetry.” (And thanks to Jeff Charis-Carlson for pointing out Chasar’s blog post.) Chasar faults me for not citing his essay “Writing Good Bad Poetry,” which appears in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. I have not read Chasar’s essay, but now that I know about it I definitely plan to read it. Perhaps had I known about it sooner I would have added his essay to my 3rd field/”Aesthetics of Bad Poetry” list for my PhD qualifying exams. The list, which I’ve been working on for a year and a half now, includes a section of primary works called “Good Bad Poetry.” I didn’t feel that I needed to cite a source for my use of “good bad poetry” in the McGonagall post because the phrase is commonly used in the literature I’ve been reading for my field. A difference: Chasar sees his supposed coining of the term “good bad poetry” as a discovery, as a revelation; I see the term “good bad poetry” as the given, as a starting point. Had Chasar had access to my reading list he might have been more familiar with the history of the phrase in question.

12.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Javier Huerta

McGonagalls All

Javier Huerta: More and more I am convinced that what we need now is a revival of bad poetry. So I’m working on a book of bad poems.
Friend Unnamed: You mean another one.
JH: Ah, well . . .
FU: Listen, why do you speak of “revival’? Don’t you think bad poetry has been alive and well all these years. In the biggest journals. In the smallest zines. In slams. In MFAs.
JH: I’m not interested in passing judgments. Those poems you consider bad poetry, I’m sure, have their defenders. When I say “bad poetry,” I mean a value neutral category of writing that involves the affected, the hyperconventional, the ornamental, the anticlimactic, the disproportionate.
FU: Neutral, you say.
JH: Well yes, you can have good bad poetry or bad bad poetry. I read somewhere that the International Society for Humor Studies discontinued its annual Julia Moore Good Bad Poetry Competition because the entries failed to ascend (I was going to say descend) to truly memorable badness. Writing good bad poetry is an art. When I say I’m working on a book of bad poems, all I mean to say is I want to engage this art form. Now, if you consider my first book to be bad poetry, I can only say that that badness was not intentional.

11.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Javier Huerta

Against Poets

Poets give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching, to consist with right practice. We must avoid their specious tropes and figures and the vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world. I saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the gods. For they deserved to be chased out of the lists and beaten with rods. No one can interrogate poets about what they say. The dialectic cannot engage them. Most often when they are introduced into the discussion some say that the poet’s meaning is one thing and some another, for the topic is one on which nobody can produce a conclusive argument. The wit of the fables and religions of the ancient world is well nigh consumed: they have already served the poets long enough; and it is now high time to dismiss them; especially seeing they have this peculiar imperfection, that they were only fictions at first. Poets are liars. Their creation is far removed from the truth, and this, it seems, is the reason why it can produce everything, because it touches or lays hold on only a small part of the object and that a phantom. The very fact that they are poets makes them think that they have a perfect understanding of all other subjects of which they are totally ignorant.

11.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Javier Huerta

Ghosts in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

I am haunted by the ghost in the footnote to the first sonnet. Footnotes in Charlotte Smith do much more than cite sources, and this first footnote interacts with the rhyme of the final couplet to emphasize the word ghost.
Ah! then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost,
If those paint sorrow best—who feel it most!*
* “The well-sung woes shall soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint them who shall feel them most.” Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard,” 366th line.
The end words cost/most produce an off-rhyme, but the asterisk sends the reader to the footnote in order to encounter the true rhyme. Since the sonnet’s couplet keeps the same rhyme sound as the Pope couplet, ghost is both present and absent from the sonnet. A ghost, not unlike an echo, can be a present absence or an absent presence. In Pope’s poem, Eloisa and Abelard are not the ones singing “the well-sung woes”; they are calling on a future bard to sing the woes for them. In addition to having to witness “every pang” and “every sigh” of the living, the speaker of the Elegiac Sonnets is haunted by the ghosts of Eloisa and Abelard. Elegies confront loss, but, more accurately, they must confront the trace of what was lost. In Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann claims that the “peculiar force” of Smith’s sonnets “comes from the fact that they are not elegies for some particular person or persons” (157). These elegiac sonnets depict a dreary vision because the presence of those who are supposed to be absent haunts the poet/speaker out of all possible resort.

10.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Olena Kalytiak Davis

O LITERATI, GET UP!

09.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)