Cosmopoetica

[I started noting great lines and stanzas to share from this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, but before long had in some way marked up the whole thing. I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of Darwish—much less read any of his work—until a few weeks ago…]

“To a Young Poet”

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.

If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.

If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.

Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think, when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

–Mahmoud Darwish
found in Poetry (March 2010)

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics, Poetry & Poetics 1 Comment »

Ron Silliman pays very close attention to the sentence. A recent review in Pleiades of Silliman’s book The Alphabet makes a persuasive case that Silliman is a poet who is deeply involved in creating poetry in which the sentence—rather than the line—is the fundamental unit of composition. George Hartley’s “Sentences in Space” goes into some detail about Silliman’s contention that there is a “new sentence” (indeed, not just new, but—at least at the time—occurring “more or less exclusively in the prose of the Bay Area.”

Which leads to Ron’s recent post explaining his statement that Tony Lopez’s book Darwin “just might be the most beautiful book of poems ever written.” Taking into account that Ron is no stranger to hyperbole—he has a lot of poetry in his “best” box—and that I do not (yet) have Lopez’s book, I’m again mystified. Here’s the excerpt from Darwin Ron uses as an example:

Let us continue our walk by entering into the manufactory of black tea. In forests of the Western United States, about half the fires are caused by lightning. As Fries has remarked, little groups of species are generally clustered like satellites around other species. Police said the man was wearing a dark jacket, beige or golden coloured trousers and dark shoes. America is bankrolling Afghanistan. My work is now nearly finished, but as it will take me many more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this abstract. These factors should be taken into account in any appraisal of the consequences of action that claims to be rational and thorough. The highest purpose is to have no purpose.

My initial reaction is much the same as Gary B. Fitzgerald’s in the comments:

So…THIS is poetry. Boy, was I ever confused.

I think I’m going to cry.

I don’t say this to run down Lopez or his book. This is a very small sample to go by and its a kind of poetry unfamiliar to me. But I’m missing something that is obvious to Ron. I feel a bit as I would if someone seeking to explain how Two and a Half Men is the best television show ever held up a banana and said “See?”

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 2 Comments »

I recommend Bob Grumman’s site/blog:
http://comprepoetica.com/newblog/Index.html

Good stuff that’s making me think. And I appreciate Bob’s responses because they don’t assume I am arguing just for the sake of argument or out of bad faith, which has happened (the assumption, I think, and my knee-jerk reactions which warranted it) on an email list we both share.

The beauty of the blog format is that topics tend to start with more depth and conversations can just be stopped whenever either person feels like it’s time– email lists tend to encourage and over-value getting “the last word” in. It’s messier, but more real, and seems to inspire less ping-pong.

Bob’s way of working– no auto-comments, just as box that gets mailed to him and to which he can choose to respond (or not)– is “old school” but effective. He has time to think about responses (if warranted) and, as he points out, it is easier to synthesize and combine responses to several comments in one place.
 
[cosmopoetica bobgrumman poetryblogs poetry]

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On the beach in Kodiak I kept thinking of these lines by e.e. cummings in one of my favorite childhood poems (still a favorite despite that horrific inversion in the third stanza):

“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea”

[cosmopoetica commings sea]

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JforJames from the NewPoetry list has a blog: ursprache

As does the prolific and under-recognized Bill Knott (though he never did answer my question about whether he’s the same person James Wright wrote about so long ago…

[cosmopoetica billknott ursprache poetryblogs poetry poets]

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There are quite a few things funnier than Kent Johnson’s latest rabble-rousing Epigramititis, but numbering well up there are the stuffy intonations of the poetry blogerati complaining that they don’t see the humor in such juvenile activities. As long as they are playfully stroking one another, then the most feeble attempts at humor raise much feigned laughter, but Kent is apparently despicable!

The “Robert Grenier” epigram is priceless. I quote it in total:

IT’S BASICALLY OVER

[cosmopoetica poetry poetics blogging kentjohnson epigramititis]

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I’ve often pondered why new media–particularly blogs, but also podcasting and audio-blogging–has really taken off within only a relatively narrow group of practicing poets. In the “post-avant” school, people blog like crazy and in all kinds of ways. More traditional and the “quiet” poets blog very little.

Does the kind of poetic practice each engages in partly determine their engagement with blogs and other social software? The way I work, blogging about poetry and poetics– and reading those blogs– is less interesting the more I write. I certainly fall into the “School of Quietude.” My writing engages with the writing of others, but not much with the writing of other poetry bloggers. Perhaps a deathly kind of solipsism?

[cosmopoetica poetry poetics blogging]

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We work in the company of others (philosophers and farmers, artists and scientists, as we variously require), and we work in the dark. The historian Daniel Boorstin has remarked that ignoring the past in making decisions is like trying to plant cut flowers. Likewise, to ignore the future, when “we’ll all be dead,” is to ignore the present. Here perhaps, at this gathering, we can at least aspire to that alternative space I’ve been addressing, one that is at once inside and outside, a part and apart, much like the workings of our various arts, a space of circulation and exchange. In opposing the profoundly destructive designs of those presently in power, we might consider the architecture of what the poet Robert Duncan once called the ” symposium of the whole,” a site where the other is addressed and not demonized, and where reason and imagination conjoin. Maybe that is the tonic from which the scale will arise.

[cosmopoetica, culture, poetry, art]

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My friend David Graham has a good poem on Writer’s Alamanac this week (scroll down to February 19). It’s a particularly good fit for Keillor’s voice… which I generally like anyway, being a member of the great-unwashed poetry-non-elite. You can listen now to the Real Audio stream.

[cosmopoetica, david graham, poem, reading]

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New to me: Spork. Some interesting work (poems, stories, drawings) by mostly other than the usual suspects. Rather annoying layout.

[cosmopoetica, spork, reading]

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A lot of good stuff (in the form of mp3 files) has been added to the PennSound site since I last mentioned it here. Take a look; have a listen.

[cosmopoetica, poetry, mp3, audio]

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In Slate yesterday:

By never firmly establishing what it itself was for, the English department cultivated habits of withering self-reflection and so became one mechanism by which the university could stay in touch with its nonutilitarian self and subject its own practices to ongoing critique. Did the theory era produce bullshit by the mountain-load? Of course it did. But by allowing “literary theory” to turn into a pundit’s byword, signifying the pompous, the outmoded, the shallow, the faddish, we may have quietly resolved the argument over what a university is for in favor of no self-reflection whatsoever.

A brief history of teaching English as a profession, the Sokal hoax, and some French intellectuals… what more could you want?

[cosmopoetica literarytheory literature]

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An interview with, and some readings by, Galway Kinnell. The Book of Nightmares is one of my favorite booklength (a very short book!) poems.

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Nick ponders blogging and the possibility of blogs evolving into their own form of literature. I’m seeing variations of this question by all kinds of bloggers. This kind of contemplative regard– beyond the mechanics and affordances of blogs as tools– seems a sure sign that there’s some kind of evolution going on.

Part of what has kept me from posting much here lately involves these issues. The entry Nick points to in his post is itself, in part, a rumination on the circumstances that motivate (and demotivate) my blog activity. I don’t know what I want this and other poetry blogs to be… I just know that most of them aren’t there now.

In the past I’ve complained about the lack of discussion of poems in favor of disconnected discussions of poetics. But the dead cat discussion (start here and read forward) over at Kasey’s wasn’t what I had in mind. Maybe I want more poems. Maybe I want the blogs themselves to be poems. I don’t know. I guess I have this fundamental belief that while you can show me things you like in a poem, and possibly convince me of its worth where I previously saw none, it is extremely unlikely– perhaps impossible– to take a poem away from me when it is already mine.

These kinds of negative poetics always (because the poems chosen are generally from established poets) end up in a microscopic accounting of pin-heads and their personal angels in defense of an ultimately unjustifiable aesthetic choice. A sophisticated and lengthy exchange of “I like it. I don’t like it.” Why expend so much energy in that direction? I would much rather see Kasey use 1/10 of his admittedly phenomenal intellectual power to illuminate something that is dark than shine the sterilizing gaze of his clinical spotlight on something he just doesn’t like, no matter his incredulity.

Mike’s on the right track:

The issue of craft, I think, is finally a canard — who cares whether Mary Oliver has met the particular terms of her ouvre in a manner that we must admit is unimpeachably “well done”? Of course she has. And Lyn Hejinian’s MY LIFE is also “well done” according to the parameters of Language Poetry’s manual of style. But these two judgements of “well-done-ness” HAVE NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH EACH OTHER (caps for emphasis not in peavishness). What do these poems DO DO DO for the poets and their readers?? A genealogy of reception is what’s required, as assiduous and imaginative as Nietzsche.

I like Nick’s analogy to a prayer and the rhetorical question regarding how there could be a bad one. I’m also driven to post here one of my favorite pieces by James Wright, who has invaluable advice when confronted by someone who can’t understand why you like something they don’t (for the record, I don’t care much for Mary Oliver’s poem either– I just don’t see the need to say more than that. Or even that!):

This afternoon, after I had lectured for an hour or so, a girl came up to me and exclaimed, “I feel so shaken! How can you go on and on so passionately about the poems of Robert Herrick? I think he’s too–too pretty. I don’t think I like him.”

Ears small and delicate as the inside of a monarch butterfly’s wing: her nostrils seemed strong and careful enough to catch something beyond the fragrance of the sea beside Eype, Fowey, Mousehole, the whole of ancient Cornwall. I would have liked to ask her to take her shoes off and walk across the floor of that dismal classroom. I don’t know how I know, but I know that her toes would have been as sure and strong as the horns of a snail.

Anthea, Julia, Electra, why do I love Herrick?

I don’t know. Lucky, I guess.

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I’ve been away from poetry blogland for quite some time: partly due to a really heavy travel schedule but also because I had grown weary of the whole scene.

If I read, I write. It’s not in my nature– nor is it very fulfilling– to lurk. But I have to ask myself what I am getting out of the experience. Very occasionally I discover a new writer or some new work that I really enjoy. Even less often there will be discussions about writers and work that I already enjoy.

Most of the time I just feel like the lone standard bearer for a whole group of poetry and poets that are casually dismissed. I’m invited to try to get into the Post Avant, but most of them have (apparently) already read all of those in the “SOQ” and written them off as– at best– also-rans in a race long since over.

Poetry blogs are a territory that has pretty much been claimed by those of a particular aesthetic that I only partially share. The others like me appear to be content with the traditional publishing devices (web-based and not) and mailing lists. And maybe I should be too. It’s not as if there is some lack of work to be engaged with or writing to do, and while I don’t feel fulfilled by that online community and its strange reticence, I’ve never felt fulfilled by the local community either… which is what drove me to the web in the first place!

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Regarding Tony’s latest rumination on the role of the editor, someone posted a comment (apparently seconded by Jordan) questioning whether Tony was becoming a new/another Ron Silliman.

If he is, then good! We need another 100 Ron Sillimans coming at poetry from their own perspectives, rather than the one overshadowing so much of poetry blogland. Let 100– no 1000– Sillimans thrive. I may disagree with Ron 95% of the time, but he always makes me think, and I admire his audacious rethinking of so many aspects of poetry: its history, evolution, form, and function.

That’s why I admire Tony (and Josh Corey), even though I may not always agree with them. I admire their large projects, their barbaric yawping, and– yes– their hubris. I’m envious and excited and dubious about what they are doing and applaud their doing it. I have enough on my plate just trying to digest the relatively small village of poetry that I am trying to understand and my own tiny poetics. I’m glad these people are out there shaking their fists at the sky and calling poetry out…

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I love Texfiles and if I kept a Jim Behrle style crush-list, Chris Murray would be right there near the top… but I have to confess that I don’t understand the imbroglio on her blog surrounding the review of Kent Johnson’s new book.

I’d already seen the review (and I am mightily resisting the urge to put the word review in quotes here) on a mailing list. I read part of it and finally stopped reading because it was clear that this was going to be one of those pieces that didn’t really engage the poetry in question and– here I have to agree with Gary Sullivan– it took a hectoring, bullying tone that is always quick to turn me off.

I expect a review to tell me something about the poems themselves (which this review does not), not attempt a clairvoyant analysis at my failings as a person if I don’t. “Reviling or ignoring” Kent isn’t necessarily because of his ability to “make us uncomfortably aware of our own pretensions.” That kind of condescension irritates me even though I DON’T ignore his work. Not to mention further characterizations of those who “throw around the term fascist at the drop of a hat” or are “prideful bag men and women for a Christ whose teachings they have perverted.”

The problem here is simple: whatever it was Chris Danielson wrote, it wasn’t a review. It was part polemic and part homage… and all about his friend Kent (ironic given that Chris seems to understand the idea of fetishism). There’s not a word about the poetry other than a lot of meaningless abstraction that serves only to reinforce the idea that Chris loves Kent and– by extension– Kent’s work. Please, show me ANYTHING concrete in that piece about the poems themselves! I defy you to find one meaningful statement about the poetry by which a reader who hasn’t yet read them could get any idea what these poems are all about. There are the seeds of an interesting analysis of the poetry here, and certainly a moving bulletin board post about one’s friend… but not much of a review.

At any rate, I think Gary Sullivan’s being unfairly ganged up on here. Given the pieces that I’ve seen so far, though, you shouldn’t let that– or the useless “review”– keep them from reading the book and deciding for themselves. And hopefully, for the sake of the rest of us, one of those people will post a real review!

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An interesting project using Flash to score and animate the Marvin Bell poem “Why Do You Stay Up So Late?”

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So the semi-notorious Lon Silliman who inhabits Ron Silliman’s comment boxes, agitating from within, is actually the bit-more-notorious Joe Green, who I remember fondly from back in the pre-blog days of USENET and rec.arts.books and rec.arts.poems

Ron should be thankful that Joe appears to have mellowed a bit…

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I can’t tell from Ron’s hot post whether or not he actually likes Jack Gilbert’s work. Views of Jeopardy may well have vaulted into first place on my list of all-time favorite volumes of poetry. Unfortunately, Ron’s take on Auden is pretty clear and that’s dominating the conversation over there.

I’ve been meaning to write about Gilbert, but I really don’t know how to put into words the effect his poems (especially the early ones) have on me. Somehow what I want to say is all bound up in some of the same things Kasey has been talking about when it comes to the disposability and durability of poetry in our aesthetics. I’m still mulling it over.

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