Cosmopoetica

“detective or mystery convention is of course the group exposition scene at the end, in which the detective tells a gathered group, often including the culprit, what happened. If addressed to the criminal, it’s in the second person, informing the criminal of her/his own biography. The same convention is used in contemporary poetry—informing some “you” of her/his own life. No wonder it sounds accusatory.”

–Alice Fulton
notebook entry, 8/22/92

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The latest issue of Pleiades (30.1) has a great piece of criticism by Mark Halliday (“Pushcart Hopes and Dreams”), in which he discusses the Pushcart Prize nomination process and his own part nominating poems, including a close look at his 10 selections for this year. It’s an excellent work that bridges the essay and the critical review, and I highly recommend hunting it down.

But what grabbed my attention and seemed worth sharing was Halliday’s astute point about the poetics of the “post-avant” crowd, made by way of a pre-able to sharing his Pushcart selections (emphasis mine):

“With one or two exceptions, the poems I chose are easy to understand. Their thinking comes at you openly; they are not cryptic, oblique, convoluted, abstruse, gnomic, or private. They do not implicitly say to the reader, “Something mysterious and deep is going on here which you can only guess at and which could never be paraphrased.” Instead, these poems manifestly try to get something across to you, as if your understanding matters, as if life is short and obscurity is lonesome and the chances to communicate about mixtures of emotion and thought are finite.

The clarity and readability of the ten listed poems may reflect the rushed nature of my hunt: I felt I didn’t have time to sit there and ponder obscure poems for many minutes to see whether their difficulty was justified. More significantly, though, the clarity and readability of my selections reflect, obviously, my “aesthetic.” (I’ve never liked being told that I have a certain “aesthetic.” Students writing pretentiously confused and confusing poems have been known to say “Halliday has a narrow aesthetic.”) The qualities I praise in my ten choices could all be turned upside down by such readers as Charles Bernstein, Paul Hoover, Ann Lauterbach, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Cole Swensen—what I call clarity and readability, they could call obviousness, banality, reinforcement of oppressive capitalist norms… Often it has seemed to me that what those readers love best is not the “language-oriented” or “anti-quietist” or “experimental” poetry they praise, but rather their own generalizations about such poetry. When they’re expressing their views, their preferences, their defenses and attacks, that’s when you can tell they really care—and that’s (significantly) when they use language with intense clarity (insofar as they’re capable of intense clarity).

Now let me hurry to acknowledge that “language-oriented” and “experimental” poetry do not have a monopoly on badness. Bad poems, like bad persons, come in all styles and all traditions and all demographics. Pretension, fakery, preening, shallowness, dumbness, sentimental wallowing—you can find these failings in every camp. The vast majority of the six hundred poems I read to find Pushcart candidates were not experimental or disjunctive, because I didn’t even go seeking in most journals that tilt that way. (Though I did try Fence and New American Writing and Jubilat.) The vast majority of the six hundred poems were fairly clear while also dreary or thin or derivative or false.”

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“Poets who defy making sense and do it deliberately and often brilliantly (as Ashbery can) are making a kind of sense, and may be extending the range of what poetry can do, though they ensure that poetry’s audience will be small and chiefly academic: i.e., composed of people inclined to equate a puzzle with that which is meaningful.”

–Stephen Dunn

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“Poems for me never begin with the abstract idea of any form. You can’t set yourself to write a sonnet or villanelle. Any sonnet that makes good is a sonnet-sized explosion in heart, mind, and gut, and it sneaks up and takes you by surprise.”

–X. J. Kennedy

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[CC licensed image by moontan]

“What the slams are all about is an attempt to create an oral tradition. The real issue is that I don’t think there’s a lot of critical distinction in the slams. They are more interested in the quantity of expression versus the quality of expression. When I was at a slam in Boston I got in trouble for making a critical distinction. But, damn, it’s poems. I’m happy anytime someone gets up and gets poetic.”

(my feelings exactly)

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I just discovered that Carmine Starnino, who wrote the “Lazy Bastardism” notebook entry I referred to yesterday, blogs via the véhicule press blog. Go check it out!

Apparently Starnino has even linked here before (w/r/t Jason Guriel). I missed that too.

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[CC licensed image by topshampatti]

The January 2010 issue of Poetry has an interesting “notebook” by Carmine Starnino on “Lazy Bastardism”. Starnino makes a case for difficult poetry… or at least not giving in to notions of making poetry more intelligible for the “ordinary reader” when that market really doesn’t exist and the battle lines are being drawn out in a conflict that is occurring completely inside the heads of poets (the essay is, of course, far more cogent and eloquent than my rushed summary).

My fundamental disappointment with Starnino’s essay is his decision not to cite any specific poets or poems that exemplify this lazy bastardism. He apparently sees such work often enough to feel a need to very publicly note his objection… but where is it? I have some sympathy for Starnino’s argument, as far as I can understand it, but the whole thing is murky and abstract enough that I couldn’t hold up any specific poem as an example.

I must also admit that my first thought upon reading Starnino’s title was that this would be a (justifiable) indictment of the lazy bastardism of writing experimental poetry that is unintelligible and lacking in appreciable craft. In fact, just a few pages later, in the course of a completely unrelated review of Stephen Edgar’s History of the Day, Joshua Mehigan puts his finger right on the pulse of my objection to much “post-avant” poetry:

“The difference between these poems and much difficult contemporary work is that these yield meanings shareable by reader and writer.”

I need that “shareable” meaning. I’m sure many of the admired post-avant writers are quite brilliant… to the ideal reader that exists only in their own heads. The rest of us, including the post-avant’s many vocal admirers, are forced into the position of erecting a structure using the random pieces of building material provided to us (or patching holes in the ramshackle shack we’re offered), a kind of appreciation that is extremely malleable and far too susceptible to cults of personality and aesthetic electioneering.

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[image by ThomasThomas]

And as for the music of poetry, that special music I mentioned, it is imperceptible to some; unimportant for most; for others it is the object of abstract research, sometimes scientific and nearly always sterile. I know that honest efforts have been made to deal with the difficulties of this subject, but I fear that this energy has been misplaced. Nothing is more misleading than those so-called "scientific methods" (in particular, measurements and recordings) which always permit a "fact" to be given in answer to a question, even if it is absurd or badly put. Their value (like that of logic) lies in the way they are used. The statistics, the marks on wax, the chronometric observations of which are used to solve entirely "subjective" problems of origin or trend, do indeed say something; but here, instead of resolving our difficulties and ending all controversy, the oracles merely introduce a naïvely disguised metaphysics under the forms and apparatus of the material of physics.

Even if we measure the footsteps of the goddess, note the frequency and average length, we are still far from the secret of her instantaneous grace.

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On July 4 at 3:10a–when I should have been resting up for a day of starting forest fires with illegal fireworks and burning hearty meats on the grill in celebration of my country, the One Country to Rule Them All–I was instead engaged in a discussion on the New-Poetry mailing list in which I was described as (accused of?) being anti-intellectual.

This is my anti-intellectual story…

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Since every term used to delineate non-mainstream poetry from mainstream poetry is problematic (including all the terms I just used in the title and thise sentence), just take them with a grain of salt or mentally substitute your favorite term. What’s interesting here doesn’t rely on it.

I recently lamented the lack of teachers (in the general sense of the term) of new poetries. Tonight I made the mistake of trying yet again to make some sense of the post avant/quietist (god I hate those terms) debate with an eye, as usual, not to resolving the debate, but to read between the lines and see what readers of the former kind of poetry find in it. It’s now 3:45a, but I think I can finally go to sleep because I discovered a post with a poetry enthusiast doing exactly what I was asking for.

In “The Surgeries and Cuts of Ivan Blatsky,” Johannes Goransson shares a bit of how he reads this poem:

MISSPELLED

So restoration is not spelled au
I spelled it so thinking of the czech word restaurace
to restore
and go with a lady to the Room
like a unicorn in the mirror
all naked in the mirrors
so that I could see the blood trickling.

Setting aside the wrangling between Goransson and Joseph Hutchison, I greatly appreciate what Goransson has done in his post. I, like many of the mystified, recognize that there is a tension between traditional ways of examing a poem and newer poetries that don’t necessarily rely on the characteristics those methods were designed for. The tools are misfit. As Goransson prefaces:

I am opposed to defending a poem that I love; I am opposed to the idea that there must be some kind of organic unity of the poem that can be revealed through close (but apparently, as you’ll see, not very close afterall!) reading; I am opposed to the idea that sharp turns in poems are bad, or that ephemerality is bad; and I am opposed to the use of “avant-garde tics” as a criticism

But then he gets down to business and does exactly the kind of thing I think we need a lot more of, sharing what and how the poem means– and I use that phrasing purposefully– to him. As he puts it:

However, against my better judgment, I will now attempt the stunt of showing how this poem makes a lot of sense and perhaps to show however sketchily what appeals to me about it.

I hope Johansson doesn’t retrospectively feel he made the wrong decision. And I know it’s a lot of work to put together a reading like this. But it’s desperately needed. I think many readers are like me– they don’t dislike new poetries, they are baffled by it. I suspect many also, like me, want to find a way to read the poems. Who desires dislike or distaste? But where we spend many years being taught to read classic, traditional and mainstream poetry, we get very little exposure to the basic features of new poetry or ways to read it.

If I could find more examples of this kind of writing– sharing personal feelings about specific poems without engaging in divisiveness or derision– I would feel a lot less despondent about contemporary poetry. It’s amazing to me that there is so much (often heated) discussion of poetry and poetics and so little attention to poems.

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I clearly live in a different world than the flarfists and their new admirers. My reaction to the Poetry magazine feature on flarf was a long, sighing, bleeeeeeeehhhhhhh. With a few exceptions—Jordan Davis’s second poem and Sharon Mesmer’s entry—the poems just bored me. Or were, in the case of Christian Bok’s (sorry, I don’t know how to quickly make an umlaut) poem, just another in a long string of totally incomprehensible work from a celebrated author, not a single word of which I’ve ever understood. I’m way too dumb for Bok’s poetry! But the Lego drawings were fun…

I assume the flarf poems were worked and shaped and basically in some way crafted by the authors, but I see little evidence in the result, which is generally about as (un)interesting to read as it is to randomly Google (which was fun for the first few days of Google’s existence; the novelty quickly wore off), or flip through a book reading random sentences. Which is to say: not very.

I had pretty much the exact opposite reaction to the entire issue of Poetry than Stan Apps, who shares in excruciating detail how horrible he found the “Poems” and how fantastically interesting the “Flarf and Conceptual Writing.” For all the vitriol Stan directs at Tony Hoagland’s poem, at least that poem conveys something from the author, where stanzas such as:

RadioShack
GNC
Sears
Crabree & Evelyn

or

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57 H98 06], used as a plasticizer: 52%.

are essentially only poetry if I use them to create a poem in my head with or between the assemblage I’ve been given. And that assemblage is pretty thin. Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure” it seems to me, has much the same intent as a flarf list, but also tells a story (of a kind), crafting the search-engine like facts into a sequence that is thoughtful and amusing.

Some flarf is funny. Nada Gordon’s poem made me smile when I wasn’t wincing, both of which may well be part of the flarfist intent. The 22-panel Emo cartoon was funny, and reminiscent of a number of web cartoons I read regularly, though it was 14 panels too long. But John Hodgen’s poem “For the man with the erection lasting more than four hours” was funnier than both, as was Beasley’s “Let Me Count the Waves.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t some bad entries on the “Poems” side of the ledger: Philip Levine and Charles Simic, for example, have pieces in the issue I can’t believe would make it out of the slush pile if they’d been submitted by anyone else. But overall, I think Poetry has—in the past few years—become a much more interesting publication publishing more variety than ever, as both the flarf and recent vizpo features demonstrate, not to mention poems like those by Ange Mlinko and Amy Beeder in this double issue. And it’s been my reading experience that the flarfists and post-avants are in no way immune to the same kind of name- and relationship-based favoritism they despise in the world of the mainstream.

But I do appreciate that some of those commenting on the flarf issue have pointed to poems and lines they like rather than attempting to elevate their preferred pieces by denigrating others, which is useless to me approximately 99.341% of the time. There’s a fine line between productive contrast (such as Stan Apps’ comparison of Hoagland’s “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” with Fitterman’s “Directory,” which I don’t buy at all and, in fact, illustrates precisely the problem I have with a lot of flarf, which is that Stan Apps’ reading—his creation using Fitterman’s words—is interesting; Fitterman’s poem is not) and the dubious taste of adrenalinized attack that emotions can propel us past rather quickly)

As I’ve noted here many times, including at length recently, I continue to look for my way into some of these different poetries, so I truly appreciate the blog entries and willing commenters that follow them. And whether I find much “there” there or not, I applaud Poetry’s effort to present a more diverse range of voices and approaches to poetry. In some ways the editors put themselves in a no-win position doing so, alienating some of the mainstream readers while inviting mockery from the rest, but it doesn’t appear to deter them from doing their best to revitalize the magazine.

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[wow, this post got mangled somehow. I've fixed it. I think.]

I’m convinced that the variety of contemporary poetry scenes and the poems that emerge from them provide clear evidence that poetry is not only alive and well, but more vital than ever thanks to blogs and other forms of powerful personal publishing and social networks allowing poets to discover and connect with one another in ways a generation before couldn’t even dream of.

Despite the diversity, my own tastes remain largely mainstream. I can’t find a way in to many “post-avant” poems, which partially explains why I used to feel cheated by them. When I considered how *I* might write such poems, the best I could come up with was an intuitive assemblage, riffing on words, navigating by connotation alone. At worst I imagined these poems as the hermetic products of a wholly personal randomness, words unworked, their authors stopping at the point of “it means to me,” while I see the work of poetry as fashioning the gift– that can only be a gift if it can be given away, and that must begin wth the author giving that gift to me.

There’s an essential selfishness in my own assumptions. If I don’t understand a poem, eventually I start thinking of it as a sham, a ruse, a trick, rather than suppose the existence of a poetry I just don’t get. But if I accept that the atonal (relative to tradition) music of an avant garde jazz musician has something more behind and in it than the similar sounds made by a beginning saxophone player as I once was, even if I enjoy listening to it about as much, and even if the exact nature of the difference between the two is unclear and to some extent a matter of faith, then it’s not just charitable but more sensible– and perhaps obligatory– to assume that the lack of art I perceive lies not in the maker by in myself.

But how to find that way in? Surely everyone– except William Logan and a similar embittered few who have given in to the slight, reductive comforts of the committed curmudgeon– would rather discover the power of a piece of art than revel in (or resent) its ineffectiveness. I’m eager to find my way to the work, and willing to put my shoulder into doing so, but I don’t have the vocabulary or a handhold among the fundamentals of enough strength to pull myself along. Much of the poetry that continues to mystify me is made of the same materials as the poems I enjoy, but formed in some mysterious forge into an inexplicable stuff so other to me that my reading of it becomes like sustained reading in a foreign language without the benefit of a teacher, bilingual friend or Rosetta stone. a fraction of beautiful music might emerge occasionally from my interpretive butchery, but not enough…

Maybe I should get it and don’t, end of story. But I can’t help wishing I had some help. I clearly recognize the danger posed by thoughtless education and anthologizing, and the damage that can occur when a work of art is reduced to an object lesson, a few surface levels illuminated and the rest ignored until it’s frozen forever into the shape of a popularized, received reading serving as a cultural artifact (Frost anyone?). But someone who loves a poem can share something of that love without smothering either. That nothing approaching the whole, rich existence of a piece can’t be explicated for someone else doesn’t necessarily devalue what can be communicated. If anything it *heightens* the value of the small fraction that can be shared because of its rarity and it creates a currency the new reader can mine from poem to build creations of their own, be they in the shape of reading or writing or both.

Where are the teachers? To whom does a beginner bring his beginner’s mind to learn this new language? Many of the post-avant artists– exhibiting a trait of the avant-garde– are clear about, and take rightful pride in, the value of their part in creating something new and transformative. A significant part of that value derives from how (and how much) their work breaks with inherited conventions and where their work can be located on some mythical map of the poetry cosmos.

This means I need a lot more help finding my way inside the poetry of Bruce Smith and Clark Coolidge than I do Philip Levine or Jack Gilbert. I’ve plenty of handle on Charles Simic, but Jack Spicer remains somewhere beyond enigmatic. I need fewer people telling me who their poetic opposition is and what these new poetries aren’t, and don’t desire to do, and more willing to show me something of what they choose to do and what they are. The negative space around these poetries– whether a product of indifference or hostility or inattention– yields a poem’s position without definition, locates its body in a general relation to poems I understand without providing any clarity about what it is.

I know much can’t be taught. Some things that can be taught arguably shouldn’t be. And some things that can’t shouldn’t be attempted lest the poem end up as dead as Twain’s vivisected frog. But that leaves a lot of room for those who possess the gift of new poetry to give the gift of others in return. One of the greatest things about art is that appreciation, aesthetics and enjoyment are part of an economy of abundance without meaningful counterfeiting. Giving our gifts away increases the gifts we possess.

I dream too of a dream anthology with a true selection from the contemporary scene, even as a I recognize that by definition such an anthology could never be truly contemporaneous. I can go to any library or bookstore and find numerous examples of anthologies of mainstream works up to the present day, but scouring the web with my best Google-fu comes to nothing. For the initiated, the web of poetry blogs and innovative publications is a vast anthology, but for the uninitiated it’s a bewildering array objects trapped behind the clearest glass.

Years ago I asked Ron Silliman what he thought should be in a dream anthology of the post-avant and friends, one from which wandering fools like myself could read and from the knowing be taught. He responded quickly that it was an interesting idea he would have to think about. I guess he’s still thinking. I’m certainly still waiting.

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Interviewer
Tu Fu is a kind of reporter.

Frank Bidart
Exactly. There’s always a pane of glass between you and what you desire. We live in a world where we are surrounded by people who tell us you can break the pane of glass if you do one thing or another: if you believe in psychoanalysis, Scientology or Marx. They all say there’s a way to break the pane of glass, and the poems clearly do not find a way to break the pane of glass.

Interviewer
What I’ve always related to so much in your work is the notion that the poems are a kind of fog on the glass, so you can see it.

Bidart
To be able to describe that structure is itself a way to get beyond the pane of glass, not just to be at its mercy.

–Frank Bidart
from Tin House Review, Summer 2008

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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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Poetry is–as the poet said, though his subject was butterflies–an army of stragglers. Contemporaries, aeons, and cultures apart slog wordlessly through the mud together, not at all pally, not at all like Virgil and Dante. There’s no uniform, no team shirt, no battle or plan of battle, no weapons, no organization, no hierarchy, no ranks or badges except for homemade ones that don’t count, enemies and detractors everywhere. Its colors you should think twice about before rallying around (I don’t know what they are, perhaps sable on sable), and its only cavalry is the reader, and there’s only one of him or her, sitting at home minding his or her own business, without a horse to hand, or a thought of you. There are plenty of fellow travelers, whom you can tell from their air of confidence and impunity, and because they tend to get there faster. (Even though of course there is no “there.”)–how can I call anyone to the barricades?

What really matters in relation to poetry has probably never been said– Ezra Pound’s “logopoeia” (doing things with words) the nearest thing. All there is is confusion, pretense, contradiction and instinct. Most of what proposes itself–or is hailed or dismissed–as poetry at any given time probably isn’t. Poetry is soluble intelligence, but it reserves the right on occasion to be stupid. (and sometimes it is nothing but feeling or insight or glossolalia or journalism.) Poetry is subtle, but sometims “as subtle as a flying mallet,” as the man says. Poetry isn’t about rules or infractions, but there is something by definition rebellious in its use of speech for its own purposes. Poetry may be effective or ineffectual, but it is never overly designing. Poetry is delayed, instant; unending brief; electric, tiny. Each poem is an insurrection against the world before it existed–or a desertion from it.”

–Michael Hofmann
from “Manifesty of the Flying Mallet” (Poetry vol. 193, no. 5)

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…it’s a pretty depressing day, you must admit, when you feel you relate more importantly to poetry than to life.

–Frank O’Hara
from “Statement for the Paterson Society”

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[photo by suttonhoo]

Look out poets, poetasters and poetry pornsters, there’s a new school in town: The Plumbline School. I have to admit I’m still baffled by the whole thing, but any idea that puts the question to Ron Silliman’s divisive, polemical, binary school of poetics (the “Post-Avant” vs. the “School of Quietude”) should have the benefit of my meager support!

It looks like the place to start is the first, inaugural post. The entry “Random Thoughts and Two Poems” caught my eye–mostly because it purports to illustrate important principles (in the guise of random thoughts) through poems not of the school founders’ own making (because we all know that last person who knows anything useful or accurate about a poem is that poem’s author): Dick Hugo’s “Death of the Kapowsin Tavern” and Reb Livingstone’s “Finite and Fortnight.”

I don’t feel any closer to understanding what the Plumbline School is about, but I am grateful for the two poems, both new to me. And maybe I’ll figure out the plumbline stuff later.

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Here’s one indicator by which I can differentiate my aesthetics from a rather large group of (mostly) contemporaries:

I find this poem by W.S. Merwin a wonderful, tiny work with some lasting resonance:

“Elegy”

Who would I show it to?

On the other hand, Bruce Andrews’ over-celebrated poem (I don’t know that it has a title) strikes me as a now-stale joke tied too closely to the context of the time, not unlike Rauschenberg’s “White Painting” or even Cage’s 4′33″:

A banana is an example

It’s not that the Emperor here has no clothes (I’ve come around– a little– on some of Andrews’ work), just that the once surprising duds are now threadbare…

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[photo of Keats' Tombstone by Carlo Tancredi]

A comment at lunch today that made me realize I don’t talk much about formal or classic poetry. Reading this blog gives the impression that my poetic interests lie with a relatively narrow band of contemporary and free verse. It’s actually quite the opposite!

The poetry that I count on and come back to most– the poetry that has been with me since the beginning– is almost all formal. The few poems that I have memorized and never forgotten are formal poems. If I had to list "favorite poets" generically, then the Top 10 might not have any free verse poets at all.

I resist that kind of disordered listing because while all the different poems I like fit in the very broad rubric of poetry, I believe that for the most part, English poets through the Victorian era were engaged in a fundamentally different project from the Romantics and their ilk… who were themselves engaged in a project more different than similar to the poetic renaissance of the 50s and what has come from them.

Good new formal poetry still appears occasionally, but its time has passed in the same way that good straight-ahead and bop-ish jazz musicians still emerge despite the heyday of that music being over and the context mostly forgotten. I realize that this is partially the same argument made against the "School of Quietude"– an argument I respect but can’t share.

It’s quite possible that my attachment to these earlier formal poets is a sign of critical weakness and insufficient acumen, that I’m stuck in the past, and/or that I’ve just never matured as a reader. I don’t worry much about it. If someone feels they’ve gotten all they can from a classic poem and "moves on" from them, that’s OK by me. I feel like the lucky one!

I haven’t posted a lot of formal poems here or talked about them because I’ve assumed that a lot of it goes without saying. Most of the poems are readily available… and I may be discovering new things about them, but they are not necessarily new to anyone else. I may not talk a lot about them, but I may post from that pool more often.

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Love him or hate him, Pinsky has created a good model to keep in mind when considering questions of poetry, poets, and poetics. Answer the questions with poems. It’s at least as exact as the philosophical meandering I’m likely to subject others to at the drop of a hat.

It also gives me an excuse to share a Wallace Stevens poem that feels as if it sees right into me and seems appropriate given the endless winter we’ve been experiencing here.

“The Snow Man”

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

–Wallace Stevens

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