Cosmopoetica

The October 2009 issue of Poetry has a great book review by Jason Guriel, exemplifying just the kind of review I like to read: respectful, insightful, honest and entertaining. Guriel’s quite perceptive, getting to the heart of the craft of two very different poets and effectively transcending the “gimmick factor” of pairing George Johnston and Jeramy Dodds in the first place.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are a few choice snippets.

I love that Guriel can discern the “radical” in Johnston’s relatively traditional lyric poems:

So even though Johnston would seem to present a placid lyric poetry about domestic goings-on, the poetry is more “daring,” Sarah proposes, than what she calls “the linguistic antics of the avant-gardists”—and there is plenty of proof to pull and quote.

[…]

But when Johnston writes in more traditional forms—which is much of the time, at least in his early work—the results can be just as unsettling as his later, more formally mischievous achievements.

[…]

Perhaps, then, Johnston is less a “radical poet” and more the author of a clutch of poems that come to no easy conclusions and display a wide enough range of forms that we can save the fellow the indignity of classifying him. And anyway, the adjective “radical,” when applied to the noun “poet,” is redundant. Any person worth calling a poet (and there are far fewer of these than we might prefer) writes poetry because more basic modes of communication (like the emoticon-caulked prose of texting, say) just won’t do—because basic communication isn’t the point. “All poetry is experimental poetry,” wrote Stevens. In other words, all poets are always already “radical” or “experimental” or “innovative.” This isn’t to suggest that good poets haven’t occasionally huddled around some hub, mimeographed or e-mailed a manifesto, and declared themselves an avant-garde; this is only to suggest that all poets are mavericks, whether they, or their circle, choose to brand themselves as such or not. Johnston, for his part, didn’t much think of himself as a poet, let alone a maverick.

On the appropriation of Dodds’ work by “the avant-garde” (whoever they might be):

Still, some will want to claim Dodds for the revolution, and not necessarily those professional avant-gardists looking to fill their ranks. A recent review of Crabwise to the Hounds, by an otherwise sensible reviewer, insists, “if this book can be characterized it must be considered part of the avant-garde.” But must it? And which avant-garde? (There seem to be so many of the things, tramping bravely forward.) Perhaps the assertion ought to be: if this book must be characterized it can be considered part of an avant-garde. And yet Dodds, for his part, doesn’t appear to have imposed upon his poems the duty of prodding the reader out of passivity by scrambling the order of words for the sheer sake of scrambling it; nor does he wheelbarrow in and dump at the reader’s feet all of the clauses it was his responsibility to organize. Boring as this may sound, a genuine jolt requires careful planning, and in the first two lines of the book’s first piece—a ruthlessly scant six words—Dodds’s planning pays off:

A bed
robbed of its river.

And again, noting the craft in Dodd’ poem:

A poem—whether fixed or free, lyric or language, traditional or experimental, name the deadlock—assures the reader that there’s a sound reason for most, if not all, of its words. Even if it has been channelled via meditation or hallucinogens or randomizing computer program, the poem will somehow account for the quality of the meditation or give some assurance that the hallucinogens have been well spent or the lines of code well programmed. Assurance is not reassurance, and Dodds, like Johnston, doesn’t comfort (a verb that’s far too maligned anyway).

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From a mailing list I belong to:

“Marjorie Perloff thinks that so much depends upon the red wheelbarrow because agriculture is important.”

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I refuse to admit how and why I came to be in the “Letters” section of a television review of a show I’ve never seen (or plan to see), but this bit made it all worthwhile:

…the theme song. Good christ on a bike, I have never heard such a bloated, idiotic dog’s breakfast of musical twattery in all my years of TV addiction. It’s like having somebody puke needles into your ears.

That, my friends, is criticism.

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I don’t remember the chain of events that brought me to this extended rumination on "blue"– as color, characteristic and quality– but it wasn’t, as a I first suspected, a treatise on depression. Rather, Gass’ short (91pp) book considers blue as the color of "interior life" and sexuality and what that means in word and mind. I’m not sure how to classify this meandering essay (which is a good thing). It’s part philosophy, part criticism, part personal essay, but at all times happily lead by language:

Blue: bright, with certain affinities for bael (fire, pyre), with certain affinities for bald (ballede), with certain affinities for bold. Odd. Well, a bald brant is a blue goose. And these slippery blue-green sources ease, like sleeves of grease, each separate use into a single–we think–fair and squarely ordered thought machine. Never mind degrees, deep differences, contrasting sizes. The same blue sock fits every leg. Never mind the noses of those Nova Scotian potatoes, blue noses are the consequences of sexual freeze, or they are noses buried far too long in bawdy books, or rubbed too often harshly up and down on wool-blue thighs. Not alone is love the desire and pursuit of the whole. It is one of the passions of the mind. Furthermore, if among a perfect mélange of meanings there is one which has a more immediate appeal, as among the contents of a pocket one item is a peppermint, it will assume a center like the sun and quire all others take their docile turn to go around.

This thought is itself a center. I shall not return to it.

Gass skillfully brings together examples and thoughts from a variety of sources– Beckett, Joyce, Lucretius, Aristotle, Rilke, Stein– without ever seeming forced:

…As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour.

From which he derives sometimes aphoristic metaphors and analogies:

A flashlight held against the skin might just as well be off. Art, like light, needs distance…

It’s hard to describe what Gass is doing (and what he attempts to do) in this sometimes paradoxically dense-but-never-heavy essay full of allusions to both external sources and itself.

(more…)

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Ihab Hassan (who you might remember from a previous entry here) hits another one out of the park with this piece in The Georgia Review, “The Way We Have Become: A Surfeit of Seeming”. A good bit:

Here I reveal my own prejudices about art, about the novel particularly, and about the current clamor of nonfiction (including this very essay).

For me, the Kantian criterion of “disinterestedness”—pleasure “without a concept”—still holds despite the turbid tides of ideologies sweeping over the world since the Critique of Judgment appeared in 1790. The criterion holds, not only because it “suspends” existence for a time, and not only because it permits the “free play of imagination,” but also because, in its self-relinquishment, it invites trust. In that sense, all disinterestedness is spiritual: it turns us into “transparent eyeballs,” for as long as it lasts. “All mean egotism vanishes. I am nothing, I see all,” said the man from Concord. (Of course, the bounties of fiction are not all spiritual; they are also adaptive, evolutionary, as Denis Dutton convincingly shows in The Art Instinct.)

But an ironic serendipity here intrudes: Coetzee himself knows that stories—unlike dogmas, documents, opinions—“tell themselves.” More, in an essay titled “On Authority in Fiction” in Diary of a Bad Year, he notes: “What the great authors are masters of is authority. . . . But what if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?” For us, who listen rather than speak, a story draws us out of ourselves while the teller’s breath still hangs within the sanctum of our hearing. Isn’t that auricular kenosis?

“Once upon a time”: yes, yes. This “yes” knows a certain truth, the truth of imaginative trust. This “yes” is also what a deep reading of literature demands, the kind of reading implied in Emil Filla’s haunting portrait of Kafka, titled “A Reader of Dostoyevsky”: the very image not just of absorption, but of self-recognition in self-loss.

Nothing here would surprise readers of earlier generations. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis remarks: “In reading good literature, I become a thousand men. . . . I transcend myself; and I am never more myself than when I do.” Nor is anything here alien to later generations—generations are not cast in iron—that might include, say, a Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winner for fiction in 2008. A small-town librarian in New Jersey saved him from being “young and knuckleheaded,” from being poor, brown, immigrant, rejected, by opening the wide world of reading for him. Thus, at a recent Sydney Writers’ Festival, Diaz praised readers (not writers, mind you, and not even literature): “We readers will be remembered more than any individual writer for safeguarding that delicate web of human interconnectivity that so many forces wish to buy, capture, enslave, and mine.”

Hear, hear! That “delicate web of human interconnectivity” depends on imaginative trust. (No, literature does not lie.) Still, the Internet is here, not just to stay but to evolve, and the fate of book reading remains in doubt. Studies say this, studies say that, as pols and experts haggle. Meanwhile, young and old alike lead their lives, lost as always in the continual translations of existence, in the play of appearances and whatever reality may be intuited or grasped.

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[photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino] 

I’ve recently rediscovered Jorge Luis Borges, who I read avidly in my late teens but rarely revisited since. With some life, experience—and simply some time—under my belt, I have a vastly greater appreciation for his work. When I read Borges before, I was impressed by the inventiveness and concision of his stories, but not moved by them. Borges’ central interests–memory, time and existence–were difficult, if not impossible, for me to feel. In the long years since, most of them longer than they had any right to be, I’ve come to share some of Borges’ obsessions, and have to revise my assessment of his accomplishment—with such brevity!—from an objective “Great” to a wholly subjective “Amazing!” With Ficciones alone, Borges has vaulted right up into my small collection of touchstone authors who speak to me in a way I can’t define or properly convey here.

In his introduction to Ficciones, Anthony Kerrigan does a great job evoking a bit of what Borges means to me… so skillfully, in fact, that I’ve included it here. Kerrigan’s appreciation stands on its own, I think, and if it spurs you to pick up Ficciones—or any other Borges—even better.

***

The work of Jorge Luis Borges is a species of international literary metaphor. He knowledgeably makes a transfer of inherited meanings from Spanish and English, French and German, and sums up a series of analogies of confrontations, of appositions in other nations’ literature. His Argentinians act out Parisian dramas, his Central European Jews are wise in the ways of the Amazon, his Babylonians are fluent in the paradigms of Babel. Probably, withal, he is the most succinct writer of this century, and one of the most incisive as to conclusions, daring dryly to go beyond such a Mannerist master as James Joyce, who knew philology and felt legends, but eschewed meanings. Perhaps, though, his meaning is simply in the ritual tone of voice with which he suggests some eternal, unanswerable question.

(more…)

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Despite focusing in part on a poem that illustrates why I have to give August Kleinzahler poetic props even if he does come across as a bit of an ass sometimes, this is the kind of criticism I find—umm—confusing. I’m sorely tempted to get snarky, but maybe I’m just missing the point.

Three thoughts: first, it seems to me any number of adjectives and objects in the first sample could be arbitrarily replaced and make about the same amount of sense; second, the contention about beauty is belied by the very poem Shivani quotes; and, third, the second sample makes a bit more sense to me than the first– though I wholly disagree with what I think I understand of it.

The first excerpt from Anis Shivani’s review of Kleinzahler’s book Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Pleiades 29.2):

In “Watching Dogwood Blossoms Fall in a Parking Lot Off Route 46″ and the last poem in the book, “The Tartar Swept,” Kleinzahler adopts a shriveling fidelity to the Poundian aesthetic of beating matter down to its raw elements, deconstructed down to the alphabet-soup of fantasy posing as reality, meeting the challenge head-on. In the former poem, all boundaries between the authorizing aesthetic self and the impassable postindustrial landscape have collapsed:

The adulterated, pearly light and bleak perfume
of benzene and exhaust

make this solitary tree and the last of its bloom
as stirring somehow after another day

at the hospital with Mother and the ashen old ladies
lost to TV reruns flickering overhead

as that shower of peach blossoms Tu Fu watched
fall on the riverbank

from the shadows of the Jade Pavilion
while ghosts and the music

of yellow orioles found the seam of him
and slowly cut along it

We might say that Kleinzahler is here demonstrating an allergy to the sanctity of texts (to which to sophisticatedly allude, if you are a modernist giant), because in the end beauty is not a helpful construct. This is so because in the post-ideological age, anything can be cut and pasted with anything else, and moreover we can perform this adroit operation for all previous phases of history too.

And a little further on Shivani writes:

We perceive memoir as the unrecordable music of the self, playing on and on in infinity, outliving us by eons–since each and every experience is supposed to have been salvaged from triviality by the sanctifying effect of art. Potentially, nothing is wasted, not a moment of pain or joy. But the truth is, after Pound, no newness, and after Joyce, no nuance: these realities of aesthetic exhaustion have not yet penetrated to the common man. Kleinzahler gently mocks such pretensions in “Green River Cemetery: Springs,” as in a number of other poems:

…right before it ["the 50s"] blew into a camp B-movie
cavalcade of car wrecks, lithium
and broken hearts

(soundtrack by Schoenberg
and Elmer Bernstein). The afterglow of them:
neon on a sunny day—

celluloid in flames,
the fried image and random splice,
wild parabolas, butchery.

Is it possible at all to describe Sylvia Plath’s destiny, through all of the wreckage and pile-ups we think we have seen since then of artistic souls? Do we even, at a lesser remove, care to understand (the perhaps equally afflicted) Ted Hughes at all? How about the freneticism of the Beats, is that here to be experienced? Or has all become mush in our determination to lend it beauty, stolen and misapplied if necessary?

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I recently ‘fessed up to a friend that I sometimes enjoy William Logan’s vicious reviews. I don’t necessarily agree with the substance of Logan’s criticism—in fact I agree with most of the well-publicized pans—but I admire his verbal facility, his sharp, intelligent wit, and, yes, his literate snark. I’m not a big fan of negative reviewing for what I consider to be pragmatic reasons, but I can appreciate these aspects of Logan’s hatchety reviews in the way I can appreciate a standup comic even if I have no sympathy for the ideas he is joking about.

Bill Knott recently (re)posted a blast at Robert Hass that closely resembles the ideal of the comi-tragic critical form in my head. Knott’s diatribe made me laugh out loud, which I appreciate. It’s a creative work in and of itself, which so few examples of this kind of writing are… it’s pretty obvious that when he wrote this he was on some kind of crazy “roll.” And Knott doesn’t pretend he’s writing from some generic, generally representative, objective place but straight out of his own personal (and personally affronted) perspective. Plus, Bill’s a far better poet than William Logan.

I can’t say that I agree wholly with Bill’s take on Hass, but it’s a take that is something to behold. Hass’ poetry has never really stood out—it’s difficult for me to recall anything of his I’ve read—despite reading at least three of his books. But he is the author of one of my favorite traditional prose poems, which I (almost guiltily) include here:

"A Story About the Body"

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

–Robert Hass

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There’s a brilliant essay by Ihab Hassan on "Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization" in Philosophy and Literature. A few bits and bobs:

I seem to have cornered myself into the position that aesthetics generally, and literary theory in particular, have something to learn from great art. (I can hear Gotthold Lessing grumbling and tossing in his deep grave.) Learn nihilism or what?

Learn more than nihilism, I think. Theory can take a hint from the inexhaustible range of human emotions, sensual impressions, and artistic forms.

A good theorist will be as inward with the aching human body–the mortal "body as the real and final home"–and with the human mind and heart, as any poet or novelist. A good critic will know how to follow the "inner momentum of a poem," as Helen Vendler does in Poets Thinking, rather than some extraneous thesis. (We can all do with a fix of "negative capability" now.) Best of all, both theorist and critic will find a way to withdraw tactfully sometimes, or at least turn aside, mindful of Cage’s insight that the best criticism of a work of art is another work of art.

[…]

This leads to the core of my essay. An epistemology of experience, relying on pragmatic principles, depends less on metaphysical truth than on human trust. This trust, as William James shows in The Will to Believe, depends on another’s trust, just as our faith "is faith in someone else’s faith…." Hence the self-defeating character of radical relativism, of extreme particularism. Hence, too, the innate sterility of fundamentalism, which spurns human trust in favor of fiats, ukases, edicts, writs, and gospels of every kind.

The fiduciary principle I invoke here, this idea of trust, is also the trust on which knowledge rests and by which knowledge is shared. Call it the epistemic contract; call it the aesthetic compact as well. Without this tacit compact, the artist can not create, let alone communicate; without it, the aesthetician can not theorize; without it, the critic or reader or viewer falls silent. This trust, I would argue, has a spiritual character.

[…]

I have stood frozen before certain objects in galleries around the world, feeling that no experience I’ve had at the Metropolitan or Uffizi, at Karnak or the Parthenon, can help me cope with what appears before me. I don’t simply mean the shock of the new; I also mean the profound, and ultimately inexplicable, threat of otherness. And I also mean the paradoxical temptation of indifference. You end by asking yourself: do I really have to deal with this? Do I care?

Admittedly, our perplexity nowadays is partially due to the radically disjunctive legacy of modernism, postmodernism, and assorted avant-gardes in the last hundred years. But haven’t we inured ourselves to the various avant-gardes by now? Haven’t we absorbed their shock? We actually live their scandal, or, rather, we let the media, if not our servants, live it for us. In any case, the arts continue to create their audiences somehow–with the possible exception of contemporary music.

But the difficulties of aesthetics today, of literary theory as well, are due to something larger than catachrestic modernism and paratactic postmodernism: that is, a collision, not only of styles, values, and expectations, but also of radical assumptions of being. Call it ontological diversity, a clash not of civilizations but of ways of being and breathing in the world. And yet, that may be precisely the creative moment in globalization, before homogenization sets in, before differences freeze into lucre or flare up into rage.

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“I couldn’t bear the idea of being a doctor of something I couldn’t fix.”

–Kay Ryan from Salon

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I’ve just finished listening to an absolutely maddening episode of the Slate Audio Book Club:  on Infinite Jest which reaches epic heights of cluelessness. You’d think that with three reviewers–Troy Patterson, Katie Roiphe and James Surowiecki–there’d be a bit more understanding of David Foster Wallace’s book and a bit less wishing that Infinite Jest were some other kind of novel. Troy Patterson (I think– they’re not particularly good about identifying themselves or addressing each other by name… and I can’t bear to listen again to try to figure it out. It’s obvious.) is the only one you can be sure has actually read the book, but he’s way too timid in the face of Roiphe’s inanity and Surowiecki’s whingeing.

The idea that Infinite Jest is "messy," and the corollary that it cold have been a great book if the good parts were removed from all the non-essential detail and disconnected "digressions" is ridiculous. It’s like reading Whitman and complaining that he’s not Emily Dickinson or Kay Ryan. The idea that Infinite Jest is messy in the shallow sense it is used here–messy in the way my daughter’s room is messy; messy in a way that it would be an improvement to be "cleaned up"–is facile. In Infinite Jest, Wallace essentially took Joyce’s idea of stream-of-consciousness and reshaped it into a contemporary form. Where Joyce framed Ulysses on a classical foundation ripe with allusion to classical sources and history, Wallace built his novel in the post-structuralist cloud of mess media, disaffection and urban myth; where Joyce’s characters "digressed" within the concrete (and protected) environment of a single day in Dublin, exemplifying classical unity, Wallace’s characters and the narrator exist in a world with no such safety net from the ever-present danger of solipsism. If Infinite Jest is messy, it’s messy in the sense that the city and forest are both messy, in the way that sex is messy, in the way that love and friendship are messy.

Many of the stories and sections that Roiphe complains don’t contribute to her apparent desire for a book constructed on the cliched triangle of genre-style plot are, in fact, connected directly to the most central theme (if you can call it that) of the book– the Entertainment. Because most of those "irrelevant" stories are building up layers of reality using urban myth in a world where perhaps those myths aren’t myths at all. And if that’s true, then perhaps the Entertainment– another urban myth derived (at least) from Monty Python and manifest today in movies the The Ring– is real.

Roiphe complains that Wallace is guilty of constantly writing in a way that says "look at me!" But this gets it precisely wrong. What Wallace actually does is write in a way that constantly cries out to the reader–sometimes plaintively, sometimes with delight, sometimes in fear–"OH God, I can’t stop looking!" Wallace was clearly highly intelligent and hyper-analytical, unable to just disengage and passively ride the media tide and profoundly resistant to the opiate of shallow entertainment. He wanted a big picture understanding in a world where there is no longer any such thing… but where the fundamental condition that asserts that impossibility is itself open to question. These questions of humanity and beauty and unified engagement in the post- and post-post-modern (etc) eras are soul-twisting and skull-cracking… that Wallace didn’t try (or desire) to put it all into some kind of objective, dispassionate box is to his credit and our benefit… even if it may have ultimately led Wallace to his own end.

Which is why one shouldn’t be surprised at the deep humanity of Infinite Jest. I’ve written about this before, particularly with regards to the usually mistaken idea of simple irony that is (ironically) often used to characterize Wallace’s work, but if you aren’t seeing the intensely human engagement that drives Infinite Jest, you aren’t reading nearly well or deeply enough. You’re guilty of the same passive, shallow engagement that Infinite Jest itself is one long statement against. Or, as someone in the Book Club discussion quotes Wallace as saying when asked about the "dissatisfying" ending, perhaps Infinite Jest just isn’t for you.

To "get" Infinite Jest demands time and attention. It is, literally, the infinite jest, but stakes a claim exactly opposite the Entertainment that is at the heart of the book. All you have to do with the Entertainment is turn on the television and it does all the work for you, creating a concise, unified, deadly package. James Surowiecki’s whining that the book was so much work to get through  is a complaint from the other side of the chasm, from the land of the all-consuming, but depthless, Entertainment.  Infinite Jest is an entertainment that asks you to do more than that. It asks for sustained engagement, for which you get real, unbounded rewards. The book isn’t sewn up into a single, easy-to-digest microwave meal–which as we see in the book is its own kind of death. Troy Patterson is on the right track when he asks whether we shouldn’t call Infinite Jest something other than a "novel," if only to avoid the incredibly limited expectations of what novels are, what they can do, and how they should work that people like Roiphe and Surowiecki put on display here.

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What is honorable in "so it goes" and in the mournful brilliance of Barthelme’s stories … in Speedboat, in the conundrums of V. is the intelligence that questions the shape of life at every point. It is important to concede the honor, the nerve, the ambition– important even if it is hard to believe anyone in the world could be happier reading Gravity’s Rainbow than reading Dead Souls.

–Elizabeth Hardwick
from "The Sense of the Present"

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A post on a mailing list brought my attention to Michael Schiavo’s body-slamming take down of Matthew Dickman’s recent volume of poetry All-American Poem. I don’t have any real problem with negative reviews, though I do find them generally less-than-productive and in those cases usually wonder if the time and energy spent taking a chunk of poetry down wouldn’t be better spent elevating something the author does like. But any review, positive or negative, has to pass the smell test and Schiavo’s unfortunately carries the faint stink of the personal, hinting at a personal agenda. It’s hard to take broad assertions like “Dickman is full of shit” and that “everything” about Dickman’s book is “insulting and self-centered” seriously. Similarly, while I understand that the general thrust of the review is frustration at an Emperor that Schiavo feels has no clothes, two paragraphs of sniping at awards and fellowships Dickman has received starts to make me wonder if there aren’t some sour grapes festering in there somewhere… and perhaps there should be! I’m just unsure how it helps make the review stronger.

I say unfortunately because while I don’t agree with a fair number of Schiavo’s aesthetic contentions, he makes a solid case that spurred me to consider Dickman’s poems more closely… a case undermined by what reads like personal enmity. A good review should spur thinking about the poems, not questions about the relationship (if there is one) between the reviewer and the poet.

Another problem with strongly negative reviews is that their authors sometimes give in to temptation to overreach and include edge-cases, surmises, and marginal details that weaken their argument when those details are held up to scrutiny. For a simple example, Schiavo takes Dickman to task over his poem “Chick Corea is Alive and Well!” (shared in this blog because it was the first Dickman poem I’d seen, and one I do like):

Dickman is full of shit for a poet who is supposed to be such a straight shooter. He cites a Chick Corea album cover where the pianist is “smoking an unfiltered cigarette” and, on the LP itself, his “poor dead fingers” are “flying / like ghosts over IT DON’T MEAN A THING / IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING.” According to Mr. Corea, no album exists with such artwork, neither is the experimental jazz musician known for his Duke Ellington covers but his fusion work with Miles Davis and his own band, Return to Forever. I won’t even bother with the necrophilic ending. This is not Whitman containing multitudes that contradict nor New York School abstraction of logic or language. This is just a bad poet writing about a subject with which he has no connection. It gives him the chance to use another pop culture reference he’s vaguely aware of so he can demonstrate how in tune he is with “the people.” He gives negative capability a bad name.

The problem? First, while Corea is certainly known for his fusion work, many jazz fans know his early work quite well, particularly albums like Tones for Joan’s Bones which are hardly fusion… and Corea does play “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing” on at least one album that I own (Chick Corea & Friends which I bought because it includes Lionel Hampton) which has been released a coupe of times under different names in the last decade. Which wouldn’t be important if Schaivo weren’t using that as evidence of Dickman’s evident bad faith. Second, while it’s hard to prove a negative, phrasing such as “According to Mr. Corea, no album exists with such artwork” is at best misleading, since Corea has “said” nothing of the kind… and the non-existence of the cover in question isn’t asserted by a wholly incomplete discography which doesn’t even include the three releases I just mentioned.

The bottom line: this review would be much more powerful if it didn’t appear so personal and if questionable details weren’t included and used to hang broad arguments that attempt to get inside Dickman’s head… stick to the poetry! It works. Nevertheless, Schiavo does do things too many negative reviews neglect:
he links to the book, he quotes liberally from the poems, even offering
links to poems that might not be formatted accurately, and he offers up
counter-examples of poems and poetry. For all his evident anger and frustration, Schaivo seems to be in good faith and ultimately recognizes that readers have to decide for themselves. For that I’m grateful.

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