At any rate on the way home it occurred to me that the slow demise of the newspaper industry (my old journalism teacher in college, Lee Smith, a by-then-retired former newspaperman used to tell us that tv news really began the work of reducing the citizenry’s reliance on things like multiple editions of papers per day) could kill off the New York Post and I’d have to find another source for terms such as “cheese eating surrender monkeys” to put into poems. I mean, the internet version of the paper is nice and free and all, or mostly free, but I’m less likely to read it as opposed to scanning it as if it were a photograph containing certain points of significance to get loopy with. I learned at an early age to read the newspaper backwards – this, incidentally, led me to instinctively “get” the value of studying any language-based composition from back to front unit by unit (sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, etc) as imparted in instruction manuals for teaching remedial English and comp. – but that pleasure is somewhat negated on-line, though I suppose it’s possible to replicate through some mildly masochistic plodding of course.

Speaking of portals, I have this terrific issue of Callaloo from 1999 (vol. 22 no. 2) that has repeatedly been useful to me through its features on Lorenzo Thomas and Will Alexander along with some very fine essay and interview work by Harryette Mullen. The interview Mullen conducts with Alexander is really great: fluid, funny, searching, and idiosyncratic the way a long conversation between friendly minds might be (Mullen: We all tend to be separated into our various boxes / Alexander: I just want to throw the box away). It’s also especially important to me to have access to an in-person conversation between two poets whose work is radically different from one another and who both openly admire each other’s work. While her essay focuses mainly on Alexander’s book Asia & Haiti, I have recently found Mullen’s descriptive terms vis-à-vis Alexander’s use of hypotaxis (syntactic subordination of one clause or construction to another) to be useful in discussing the title poem from Exobiology as Goddess, a book published five years after the feature in Callaloo.

Mullen muses on WA’s hypotaxis to the point of recasting it as “hyperhypotaxis” and figuring it’s attractive at least in part because it can “accommodate lavishly expansive sentence construction” as well as the many fields of knowledge to which Alexander has access. I started teaching Alexander’s work this year, and while it’s a challenge for me to do so – I tend to feel like his poems know far more than I can convey, for starters, though that should probably be the case for any material one might teach ­– I have found the undergrad writing students I’m working with to be quite open to Alexander’s incantatory ranging from pre-history to post-existence. In fact, we read the poem Exobiology As Goddess, which is fifty pages long, in one sitting a few weeks ago, person-by-person, page-by-page. The poem fuses language from exobiology, geography, Egyptian mythology and paleontology, among other subjects, into a clause-driven swirl that actually has a lot of space in it (double-spaced lines as well as a feeling of an aerial view stretching across the work) and reads fairly quickly once you let yourself go. It does at times feel like one long continuous and insistently rhythmic sentence-as-vehicle.

I’m hesitant to quote from the poem because I’m inclined to believe that you need to take the whole trip and I’m not interested in choosing lines at the moment and when I did begin to I wound up typing up the first five pages of the poem and that’s just not going to work. But there are his poems on this site, as you can find through an author search, and there are recordings of his readings over at Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alexander-Will.php) and that’s plenty. Actually, screw it, have a few lines from the middle:

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

There’s this other bit of his writing in Callaloo that I’m currently fixated on, though: a short personal essay entitled “My Interior Vita” that I’m finding to be valuable and kind (even though I need some of that garish quotidian the way an elm needs to get high). This is the third of seven paragraphs in the piece, and I’ll leave things here:

“For me, language by its very operation is alchemical, mesmeric, totalic in the way that it condenses and at the same time proves capable of leaping the boundaries of genre. Be it the drama, the poem, the essay, the novel, language operates at a level of concentration modulated by the necessity of the character or the circumstance which is speaking. My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that here-to-fore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.”

The PEN World Voices conference in 2005, cited this disturbing statistic from an NEA study: “Out of the more than 10,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999, only 300 were works in translation.

UNESCO figures showed that while 50 percent of all translations published worldwide are translated from English, only 6 percent are translated into English. “Clearly,” the report concludes, “in the dialogue with the world’s non-English-speaking majority, we are not very good listeners.”

More recent statistics are no more encouraging. The on-line journal Publishing Perspectives predicts that “literature in translation will [face] a drop off this year – as much as 10%.”  The same publication also found that while 117 independent presses published at least one work of fiction or poetry in translation in 2008, only be 95 such presses will translate a literary work in 2009.

Why does this matter — particularly to the United States? Speaking at that same PEN conference, Salman Rushdie put it this way: “It has perhaps never been more important for the world’s voices to be heard in America, never more important for the world’s ideas and dreams to be known and thought about and discussed, never more important for a global dialogue to be fostered. Yet one has the sense of things shutting down, of barriers being erected, of that dialogue being stifled precisely when we should be doing our best to amplify it. The cold war is over, but a stranger war has begun. Alienation has perhaps never been so widespread; all the more reason for getting together and seeing what bridges can be built. “

Or consider this excerpt from a poem called “Under this Same Sky” by Bangaladeshi poet Zia Hyder (translated by Naomi Shihab Nye and Bhabani Sengupta):

There’s an enormous comfort in knowing
we all live under this same sky,
whether in new York or Dhaka
we see the same sun and same moon.

This poem became the title poem for Nye’s beautiful collection of world poetry, Under this Same Sky.  What a small but potent first step it would be if all people recognized each other as co-inhabitants of our planet.  As Nye puts in the book’s final page:  “Don’t ever believe what anyone told you about not talking to strangers.  Talking and listening to ’strangers’ may be the most important thing you do in life.”

The Obama administration has promised to end an era of political and diplomatic isolation even as it oversees two wars. Has there ever been a better time to open our ears and our hearts to world literature? Is there any better way for every nation to appreciate the full humanity of all the world’s peoples than by sharing each other’s literature?

August is the month for star-gazing, and what better way to prepare for the Perseids than to spend part of this horrid sun-lit day reading about the great Romantic scientists?  In her new article, “Keats in Space,” Molly Young explains that the work of William and Caroline Herschel, Sir Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, and Mungo Park all took inspiriation from the same sense of adventure and awe as Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and the Wordsworths.  Has there ever been–or will there ever be again–such a correspondence between poetry and science?  Read it here and wonder.

The Top Ten Most-Read Articles on poetryfoundation.org

Of all the articles on poetryfoundation.org, these received the most page views:

1. “Show Your Work” by Matthew Zapruder

2. “Going Negative” by Jason Guriel

3. “Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing it Wants” by Mary Ann Caws

4. “To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not to Yield” by Stephen Burt

5.  “The Hero and the Gunslinger” by Aram Saroyan

6. “Let’s Face It, Nobody in Love is Original” by Jeremy Richards

7. “Only Connect” by Tao Lin

8. “I Blame Blogs” by Allison Glock

9. “Born Digital” by Stephanie Strickland

10. “Sex, Drugs, and Thom Gunn” by Tom Sleigh

The Top Ten Most-Read Posts on Harriet

Of all the posts on Harriet, these received the most page views:

1. “Craig Arnold” by Don Share

2. “It’s Always a Bad Time for Poetry” by Kenneth Goldsmith

3. “I’ve never had a sad cup of coffee” by Nick Twemlow

4. “Plath as a Major Poet: A Thread from WOM-PO” by Annie Finch

5. “The Inaugural Poem” by Travis Nichols

6. “A Few Harriet Statistics” by Catherine Halley

7. “I Hate Poetry” by Eileen Myles

8. “Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry” by Ada Limón

9. “John Updike’s Non-Poetry” by Eileen Myles

10. “No, You Shut Up!” by Travis Nichols

Poetry doesn’t need promotion. People need time. A revolutionary way to promote poetry might be to criminalize capitalism’s theft of people’s time.

It’s an answer that brings to bear the issue of poetry’s place in our wider culture and one which raises lots of terrific questions. Should poetry be something that is sold to consumers just as any other product, or is it indeed something special, something that carves out space in our daily lives, apart from all the buying and selling that seems to occupy us today?

It’s interesting to look at the answers provided by Sharon Olds and Carl Phillips, who were both offered the same question as Hejinian. Olds points to outreach workshops in schools, prisons, etc. as a way to promote poetry, while Phillips notes that poetry should be taught to the young. Both seem to push the “poetry as product” angle. Are these types of answers incommensurable with Hejinian’s push for a more dramatic shift in our society? Or can one attempt to apply both? I’d like to think we can.
With its focus on teaching poetry to people living in marginalized situations (in the hospital, in prison) Olds’s (and to a lesser degree Phillips’s) answer offers a way to have poetry itself apply pressure for the type of cultural change favored by Hejinian. The hope is then that such cultural pressure would not only uplift those who are currently marginalized, but also create an alternative to the ever-present capitalist culture.
Hejinian’s position is especially notable in that it calls on us to not only look for some way to convince the public at large of the value of poetry, but also modify our culture so that it is able to sustain something, such as poetry, separate from the circulation of capital.

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.

Carter betrays the fact that he never really said goodbye to Modernism; about poetry as dramatic monologue he says: “the point of a poem is not to present evidence about the poet or anything else. Poetry is not forensic. … A poem puts meaning up for grabs, permanently.” And as poets like Merrill and James Schuyler and Robert Lowell, et al., got chattier, it was they who said goodbye to Modernismo. Or put it up for grabs, permanently. I am sitting on this fence, wondering.
There is this lovely essay “Mozart and the Music of Intrigue” on the website of Caffeine Destiny. Its author writes:

The same nineteenth-century prejudice which charged Mozart with being frivolous upheld an artistic ideal that was the antithesis of Mozart’s. Ever since, art which aims to disclose the “authenticity” of the self has asserted a primacy it has refused to relinquish. Linked to this was an erosion of the idea of music as pleasure, as opposed to the emerging Romantic view of music as “expression.”

This classical taste was characterized by an indifference toward the self, and toward the need for the “improvement” of either the individual or society. As such, aristocratic mores constituted a personal and social danger: the nineteenth-century taste wished to be uplifted and edified, not beguiled or seduced.

I read this about the time I listened to this Poetry Foundation podcast contrasting poems by Stevens (pleasure) and Merrill (expression). The interviewer must speak for many when he says he prefers Merrill’s poem to Stevens’s. So I wonder if the shift from classical to romantic in music is comparable to what happened here between Stevens’s poem from 1950’s and Merrill’s poem from the 1990’s, or between the earliest Stevens and the latest Merrill.
“Why am I so often drawn to glamorously hopeless causes?” Ratcliff remarks, tongue in cheek. I double-starred it. There are stars in my copy on every page. Modernismo lives to dazzle.

2. Seamus Heaney Poem Sold as Construction Bond
Snaking the Drain blog reports that Heaney’s
“Glanmore Sonnet VII” fetched nearly $37,000, enough to build a cultural and arts center in the village of Ashford.

3. The Caffeinated Librarian Loves Creeley
Specifically Creeley’s homage to Robert Duncan

4. Motorcycle LEGO Blog Loves James Dickey
“Hey, it’s my blog, I can quote poetry if I want to…”