Cosmopoetica

[Shared by Ed Byrne, an apt poem for Pi Day]

“Pythagoras Goes to Work”

Triangulate the sun’s ascent. Two oaks
the baseline on this steel-chill winter’s day.
Diversion, suddenly now, in the way
a hawk bisects low triangle of sky
as if she lectures on geometry
to clouds that hover close. The more he looks
the more he calculates a feathered Pi
that multiplied by gold reveals the light
the hawk explains in her wind-scything flight
to audience of fluff and haze. But soon,
no warning, hawk dives for its prey below,
a transitory scholar only; now
a blur of angling talons, wings; that’s how
the mind is ruled by blood. The dawn’s lesson.

–Lee Slonimsky
from Valparaiso Poetry Review (v7, n1)

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The Storialist features a new poem each work day inspired by (and linking to) a photograph or work of art found on the web. Good idea and some great poems. Check it out.

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“Untitled”

Stranger and stranger to one another
waitress on her hands and knees to brush
the carpet underneath a booth. You know–
crawling around on all fours like a dog

underneath a human booth etcetera
to be human—to crawl—to

walk through broken glass with gory feet.

People crying on airplanes,
weeping seven miles above the ground,
the grief
taller than Mt. Everest:

People on the street thinking:
I wanted this. And now it’s a cloud of chalk.

A pile of blood and guts and torn bones thinking
how beautiful is the tiger who killed me

the shit/ of days

–Denis Johnson
found in The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets

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[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)

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“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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“When people praise a poem that I can’t understand I always think they’re lying.”

[Boy do I understand this suspicion]

–Stephen Dunn

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All night long
sitting alongside
my dead friend
(he with white teeth
gnashed in a grin
at the pale moon
he with stiff hands
reaching for
the darkest zone
of my own silence)
        I have been writing
        love letters.

I have never
felt so much
        alive.

(after the Italian of Giuseppe Ungaretti)

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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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I know this comment was a compliment… yet it illustrates the fundamental divide in the person I once was (and want to be again) and the person I’ve become, despite my efforts. No poetry.

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This is big news for poetry readers… Jacket magazine is being retired, to be succeeded by Jacket2, in coordination with PennSound:

Dear friends:

We are writing with news of a transition we both deem very exciting.

By the end of 2010, John Tranter and Pam Brown will have put out 40 issues of Jacket. It began in what John recalls as “a rash moment” in 1997 — an early all-online magazine, one of the earliest in the world of poetry and poetics, and quite rare for its consistency over the years. “The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental.” (So said The Guardian.)

After issue 40, John will retire from thirteen years of intense every-single-day involvement with Jacket, and the entire archive of thousands of web pages will move intact to servers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where it will of course be available on the internet to everyone, for free, as always. But the magazine is not ceasing publication: quite the opposite.

Starting with the first issue in 2011, Jacket will have a new home, extra staff and a vigorous future as Jacket2. Jacket and its continuation, Jacket2, will be hosted by the Kelly Writers House and PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.

The connection with PennSound, a vast and growing archive of audio recordings of poetry performance, discussion and criticism, is seen as a valuable additional facet of the new magazine, as is the relationship with busy Kelly Writers House, a lively venue for day-to-day poetic interchange of all kinds. The synergy in this three-way relationship has great potential.

Al will become Publisher and Jessica Lowenthal, Director of the Writers House, will be Associate Publisher. The new Editor will be Michael S. Hennessey (currently Managing Editor of PennSound) and the new Managing Editor will be Julia Bloch. John will be available as Founding Editor, and Pam will continue as Associate Editor.

More news about Jacket2 in the weeks and months to come. Meantime, the Jacket2 folks extend gratitude — as many in the world of poetics do — to John and to Pam Brown for the extraordinary work they’ve done. And John, for his part, is mightily pleased that Jacket will be preserved and will continue and grow in a somewhat new mode but with a continuous mission and approach.

— John Tranter and Al Filreis

Informative links:

• The University of Pennsylvania & PennSound
• Al Filreis
• Kelly Writers House
• Kelly Writers House Director: Jessica Lowenthal
• Michael S. Hennessey
• Julia Bloch
• Pam Brown
• John Tranter

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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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“Captaincy”

Captain Ahab, Captain Nemo and Captain Kirk
walk into a bar: this was before all their troubles.
Ahab has both of his legs;
Nemo’s wife and two children
are alive in the palace in India;
Kirk is slender, his features are sharp,
his sideburns point front toward the future.
He wears his dress pajamas;
his decorations shine, a young man’s medals:
Marksmanship, Good Conduct, the Glorious Battle of Earth.
Still to be earned, duller badges:
for Missing the Mark,
for Conduct Unbecoming,
for The Shameful Surrender of Space.

The bar floor is sticky, the dank air sour and stale,
Ahab is oblivious, for whaleships are deck-foul and stink
to the wind-god’s highest heaven,
but Nemo, an aesthete, wrinkles his nose.
With nearly invisible gesture he summons
six crewmen; commanding them
in a quiet and unchristian tongue.
They scatter, returning in moments with holystone,
bucket and swab. A salt breeze freshens the room.
Watching this, Kirk takes a vow:
Someday I will run the tightest ship in the sky.

At table the three call for drinks.
Ahab wants lime juice in grog,
Nemo a grand cru Bordeaux.
Kirk in pajamas craves cookies and milk
that he keeps in his own private berth,
but here he must act like a man;
here we must all act like men,
there is nothing more important
than acting like men, and Jim Kirk,
alone of the three, is an actor
and knows what to say: What’s on tap?
Narragansett? Gimme a ‘Gansett.
Nemo wrinkles his nose.

The drinks arrive. Kirk proposes a toast
he learned at Academy,
a Navy tradition for Sunday:
 To absent friends and ships at sea.
Ahab scowls; he has never had friends.
Nemo has many but does not need them,
or miss them very much; still he is a gentleman,
he lifts up his glass and all three captains drink.
Kirk, encouraged, slogs on through the week:
A bloody war and a sickly season.
A willing foe and sea room.
To our wives and sweethearts,
may they never meet.
Ahab imagines his girl-wife at home,
Nemo thrice blesses his princess, his bride,
Kirk remembers his mother.

Men will sit with men and drink,
but they would rather be elsewhere.
Drinking with men, it might as well be work,
and so much work waits to be done.

They fabricate errands. Ahab mumbles a pretext,
he needs a new harpooner.
Nemo remembers a mile of electrical thread
that must be on board by high tide,
and withdraws with a deep courtly bow.

Kirk sits alone. He has no errands to run.
He will be in port for weeks.
He is tired of being a captain,
still more of being a man.
He spills his last beer on the floor.

–by David Weinstock <david.weinstock@gmail.com>

More of David’s poems can be found in Salt River Review #6 and #13, Riding the Meridian, Agnieszka’s Dowry, and The Blue Moon Review

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“Kitchen Corridor”

Things seem already to be settling.

Standing in front of the microwave waiting for gravy toast to finish–
tongue-and-groove, egg-and-dart, classical shapes of fit-this-to-that.
                                       I was brought casseroles

and KFC and was invited to church and said no-thank-you.
Several more obituaries. My mother’s was only one of them.

On the drive back down the coast I passed   (but who could stop at)
The Retarded Children’s Thrift Store,
                                       down the block from The Battered
Women’s Thrift Store,
toys and cans of Chun King in their windows.

My first thought is to kill it, the moth fluttering beneath the microwave–
increase the ordinary speed at which I move my hands.

A satisfied sound from the cat, instead. The furies for now in a safe envelope.

–Collier Nogues
found in Pleiades, v30 n1, 2010

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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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“Prelude VIII”

there’s somebody else here, and it’s
you if you’d
listen: tune, if only could, to those tenuous
frequencies. you who aren’t, who
would, who, in

languishing in the vibratory fields of the
in-
cipient, had cherished, so doing, the
treble-

headed insects.  isn’t anatomy but antecedent, the
cells but seeds to
such

premonitory expanses?  would thin as you
went, wrap as you did to that
shroud of
balanced shadow.  for
only there, there where the full scale’s worked to a

tremor, might you kneel, and in
kneeling, suckle, at
last, the first
resonant drop.

–Gustaf Sobin
from The Places as Preludes

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“After dusk we go out. The dark powerful paw of the cape lies thrown out into the sea. We walk in swirls of human beings, we are cuffed around kindly, among soft tyrannies, everyone chatters excitedly in the foreign tongue. "No man is an island." We gain strength from them, but also from ourselves. From what is inside that the other person can’t see. That which can only meet itself. The innermost paradox, the underground garage flowers, the vent toward the good dark. A drink that bubbles in an empty glass. An amplifier that magnifies silence. A path that grows over after every step. A book that can only be read in the dark.”

– Tomas Tranströmer
found in The Half-Finished Heaven
(Translated by Robert Bly)

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“The rind (also called the skin) of the lemon is difficult to
        understand
It goes around itself in an oval quite unlike the orange which, as
        anyone can tell, is a fruit easily to be eaten.
It can be crushed in canneries into all sorts of extracts which are
        still not lemons. Oranges have no such fate. They’re pretty
        much the same as they were. Culls become frozen orange
        juice. The best oranges are eaten.
It’s the shape of the lemon, I guess that causes trouble. It’s
        ovalness, it’s rind. This is where my love, somehow, stops.”

–Jack Spicer
from “Six Poems for Poetry Chicago”

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“Muses do exist, but now I know that they are not afraid to dirty their hands with explication – that they are patient with truth and commentary as long as it doesn’t get into the poem, that they whisper (if you let yourself really hear them), “Talk all you want, baby, but then let’s go to bed.”

[…]

Are not these poems all things to all men, like Rorschach ink blots or whores? Are they anything better than a kind of mirror?

In themselves, no. Each one of them is a mirror, dedicated to the person that I particularly want to look into it. But mirrors can be arranged. The frightening hall of mirrors in a fun house is universal beyond each particular reflection.

This letter is to you because you are my publisher and because the poem I wrote for you gives the most distorted reflection in the whole promenade. Mirror makers know the secret – one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror.”

–Jack Spicer
from “First Letter”

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