Cosmopoetica

I met Lucille Clifton in 1990 at a reading I attended with my future wife/mother-of-my-children/ex-wife and a good friend I’d grown up with who was still smarting from the arm twisting I’d given him while convincing him to come along. My friend’s skepticism—part ignorance and part defense mechanism—was typical of young men like us, who had spent too much time growing up stunted by the tiny, anemic towns we lived in. I felt the same knee-jerk skepticism about most things I knew little or nothing about.

At the time, I had no idea who Clifton was. As also often happens with the parochialized when they get a glimpse of the fat world outside their blinders, my ignorance about poetry had by that time turned to nearly uncritical enthusiasm. Writing and reading were on their way to redeeming me, or so I thought. Naturally I assumed the two could do the same for anyone I cared about (that poetry might not be everyone else’s personal Jesus only occurred to me a few years later).

Clifton took over and had the crowd in her pocket within the first two minutes. She shone. She made everyone laugh and gasp and breathe in that slow contemplative breath one takes when someone says something that really makes you think, that makes you lose time for a second while you slowly realize that’s it.

My friend and I were, in different ways, dumbstruck. We weren’t exactly cosmopolitan: the small town we spent many years growing up in had exactly one black family in more than a decade… and they didn’t last long in that environment. Our town was also deeply divided among the racial lines of white and Alaska Native. So to have an older black woman captivate us with poems that included paeans to her hips and poems dedicated to her last period and her uterus was thrilling, amazing, and a little baffling.

I don’t want my description to sound reductive. The “feminine” poems Clifton read were just, for obvious reasons, the ones that challenged our perceptions most obviously. Clifton read poems of many different kinds that night. One of the difficulties of Clifton’s poetry—beyond the apparently simple surface that many readers glance off of—is how much of its life is lost, or at least obscured, without her voice and her generous presence to lift it off the page.

I had a chance to talk to Clifton after the reading. I was too tongue-tied to make much sense and don’t remember exactly how our conversation went except that I said something about wanting to write but not be an “Alaskan poet” (true) in the way she wasn’t a “Black poet” (stupid), to which she laughed and replied “But honey, I am.” And then she gave me some of the best, though not easiest to follow, advice I’ve ever been given: “Just write your poems down. They’ll know who you are… and they’ll tell you.”

I never met Lucille Clifton again. I never thought to thank her until now, when it’s too late. At an important time in my life she provided inspiration to write… and that it was OK to be the kind of writer for whom writing is the act of thinking, that it’s OK not to be sure where I am going when I start and to let the poems tell me where I’ve been. Clifton bears no responsibility for the bad poems I’ve written since, but she surely deserves some credit for the bit of good in me that has come about because of writing them.

And my aching-armed, non-poetry-reading friend? In the space of that hour or so he grew into that rarest of creatures: one who reads poetry with no desire to write any himself.

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Today is Bob Grumman’s birthday and I wish him (as ancient as he is) many more!

Bob is the owner/editor of Runaway Spoon Press.

Bob is a tireless advocate for visual and minimalist poetries.

Bob’s a creative… a visual poet, creator of wonderful poetry such as his Mathemaku. Here’s another one I like:

And other kinds of poetry too.

Bob is an inveterate coiner of terms, only a few of which are scattered around his Comprepoetica Dictionary (so far). If Bob didn’t actually coin Wilshberia, Wishberia, Knownstream and Burstnorm, he should (or could) have.

Bob’s a good interviewee.

Bob argues with me about poetry and poetics and sometimes in this way drives me to despair, drink and seclusion… but I always learn something. I admire his dedication, of course, but also his total honesty about what he believes and who he is. I’ve learned a lot from Bob. He’s opened my eyes and ears, bit by bit, to poetry I’d have otherwise dismissed and positions about aesthetics that I continue to learn from.

Thanks, Bob! And happy birthday!

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 7 Comments »

via a friend on a mailing list comes this blub by David Kirby for The Ecstacy of Capitulation, a book of poems (unknown to me) by Daniel Borzutzky:

“After I first read Daniel Borzutzky’s poems in magazines, I became a hellhound on his trail, pursuing him over the oceans (he was in Turkey at the time) until I ran him to earth and shook more poems out of him. I wanted my students to read those poems and to write like Borzutzky, yeah, but, more importantly, to think like him. There’s a divine foolishness to these poems, a knuckleheaded clarity that allows the poet to ask “Are Nudists Nuts?” (the question of our time, to my way of thinking) and to say “We approve of intersections but are opposed to streets in general” and “Out with mayors, in with majordomos” and “We have too many potholes. They should be filled with violets, or ideas.” The title of this book not only describes it but recommends it—far too many poetry books today are about the capitulation of ecstasy. I love these poems. Daniel Borzutzky for president.”

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[CC photo (larger view)  by Tony the Misfit]

Today is the birthday of E. E. Cummings, born on this day in 1894. In a letter, Robert Lowell remarked about Cummings:

“He [Cummings] is a razor-blade without the handle.”

(Side note: the common belief that Cummings preferred his name to be printed in all lower-case is an enduring myth.)

A friend related a sad story on a mailing list this morning. A huge fan of Cummings as a college student, this friend worked on an Honors project intending to defend Cummings’ poetry. By the time he was done, he found himself agreeing with the critics about Cummings’ sentimentality and originality. He concluded:

“Haven’t been able to read Cummings much since, beyond the occasional anthology gem.  I long ago sold his Complete Poems.”

I remarked that this was a sad tale… and not for Cummings. Despite occasionally using the term myself, I’ve never managed to come up with a sufficient explanation of “sentimentality.” I know the dictionary definition and understand the general idea that it’s “unearned emotion” or “cheap shots” (as one of the list denizens remarked), but in practice it often seems to be a way of dismissing the work rather than acknowledge a failure on the part of the reader. I’ve not yet found a way to know if a poem or song or story is sentimental or if it’s just that the reader has lost the capacity he or she once had to appreciate it in the same way that, as we age (and learn), we lost the ability to appreciate so many things.

If developing a sophisticated poetry palate means dismissing Cummings, I’ll remain a troglodyte and continue to enjoy his “sentimental” writing. In honor of Cummings birthday, I’m including here few poems (excluding one I posted here before: “maggie and millie and molly and may”).

First, a poem I read as part of a custom wedding ceremony I wrote and performed for a friend:

“somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond”

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

I love Cummings’ phrasing: “unbeautiful … furnished souls” and, of course, the final lines (Cummings had a great knack for closure, an effect intensified by the miniature chaos of his typography):

“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things-
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps.   While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
….the Cambridge ladies do not care,above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

And sometimes the typography and punctuation is just so perfectly suited that I’ll hear that “click of the lid of a well-made box” in the middle of one of Cummings’ poems:

“Buffalo Bill”

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Continuing with worldly matters, Cummings wasn’t afraid to get it on either:

“I like my body”

I like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh…And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new

And while some of Cummings’ political poems are probably the easiest to attack, my mind flashes to this poem often when I hear news about our current combat activities, maimed soldiers, dead civilians and no good end in sight:

“i sing of Olaf glad and big”

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but–though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments–
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but–though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion    
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat–
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified    
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

These are mostly well-anthologized poems, which isn’t surprising given Cummings’ consistent popularity (and there are many even more anthologized than these… I leave that to your Google-Fu). The best poems have naturally been recognized many times. But I’ll close with one I don’t see very often:

sonnet entitled how to run the world)

A always don’t there B being no such thing
for C can’t casts no shadow D drink and

E eat of her voice in whose silence the music of spring
lives F feel opens but shuts understand
G gladly forget little having less

with every least each most remembering
H highest fly only the flag that’s furled

(sestet entitled grass is flesh or swim
who can and bathe who must or any dream
means more than sleep as more than know means guess)

I item i immaculately owe
dying one life and will my rest to these

children building a rainman out of snow

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 2 Comments »

Though most of the resulting discussion has been about the virtues of collecteds vs. selecteds, which would be interesting had I not just engaged in my share of angel-counting on the NewPoetry mailing list, Joel Brouwer asks an interesting question at the end of his latest Harriet post:

“Here’d be the discussion question: Have you ever fallen out of love with a poet? Grown to love one you couldn’t stand at first? Have you ever changed your tune about a poet? Has your conception of a given poet ever undergone radical transformation? If so, circumstances, please.”

Anyone who starts reading poetry as an adolescent or earlier as inevitably witnessed a transformation in their thinking about a poet. For me that generally takes the form of a sequence: loving a poet without really knowing why, loving a poet and thinking I know why, and finally loving (or giving up on) a poet despite having given up any hope of understanding. The sequence is most obvious for me with poets like Hopkins and Keats.

Stevens (and Eliot) are poets I’ve come to appreciate, though in both cases there were individual poems I couldn’t help but love from the very first time I read them. With Wordsworth I’ve moved in reverse… I continue to admire a few of his poems—and his presence is a critical part in the chain that drives my aesthetics—but I read him now as mostly a prissy, wordy, egotistical, hypocrite.

I’m generally reluctant to give up on poems that have moved me once, even if I’m now in a place to see their flaws. And while I recognize that the coincidence of certain events in my life has had a direct bearing on my appreciation of many poems and poets, I usually cherish them for what they gave me at the time even if it’s only a memory now…

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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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[photo by Pascal B]

Sad news… poet Deborah Digges has (apparently) committed suicide. A poem of Deborah’s:

“The Leaves”

I can bless a death this human, this leaf
the size of my hand. From the life-line spreads

a sapped, distended jaundice
toward the edges, still green.

I’ve seen the sick starve out beyond
the grip of their disease.

They sleep for days, their stomachs gone,
the bones in their hands

seeming to rise to the hour
that will receive them.

Sometimes on their last evening, they sit up
and ask for food,

their faces bloodless, almost golden,
they inquire about the future.

*

One August I drove the back roads,
the dust wheeling behind me.

I wandered through the ruins of sharecrop farms
and saw the weeds in the sun frames

opening the floorboards.
Once behind what must have been an outhouse

the way wild yellow roses bunched and climbed
the sweaty walls, I found a pile of letters,

fire-scarred, urinous.
All afternoon the sun brought the field to me.

The insects hushed as I approached.
I read how the world had failed who ever lived behind

the page, behind the misquoted Bible verses,
that awkward backhand trying to explain deliverance.

*

The morning Keats left Guys Hospital’s cadaver rooms
for the last time, he said he was afraid.

This was the future, this corning down a stairway
under the elms’ summer green,

passing the barber shops along the avenue that still
performed the surgeries, still dumped

blood caught in sand from porcelain washtubs
into the road-side sewer. From those windows,

from a distance, he could have been anyone
taking in the trees, mistaking the muse for this new

warmth around his heart—the first symptom
of his illness—that so swelled the look of things,

it made leaves into poems, though he’d write later
he had not grieved, not loved enough to claim them.

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image “borrowed” from stlog

Donald Finkel is one of those poets I’ve yet to get around to seriously reading but whose poems stand out enough that I actually remember them long after serendipitously discovering them in journals such as The Paris Review and The Chicago Review. Finkel’s name also comes up regularly in conversations and interviews with poets, courtesy of his reputation as a fine, fine teacher and his long-term association with Washington University.

Recordings (Part 1 and Part 2) of a tribute to Finkel are fun to listen to and give you a glimpse at the high esteem in which Finkel was held. Also of interest are profiles of Finkel in STLtoday and the St. Louis Beacon.

Here are a few of his poems:

“Burden”

Nouns were the first to slip away.
Was it because they were easier to forget,
or the most dispensable?
Funerals back then were milling
with nouns whose names he’d forgotten,
if he’d ever met them.
Evidently, somewhere out there
a swarm of improper nouns
had prospered and multiplied.
Odd nouns came knocking every day
looking for work, till the old bard
left off answering the door.
Verbs were beasts of another persuasion.
For a while some stayed behind,
pacing the halls or curled on the living room sofa.
But they had to be fed. Some nights
they sank their claws in his thigh
when they were hungry.
As the last syllable crept away,
he felt a peculiar lightness,
like the wisp that rises,
from a smoldering wick—
as if words were the burden
he’d been bearing, all his life.

–Donald Finkel
From: Cortland Review

“The Invention of Meaning”

In the beginning was the hand
and the poem of the hand,
a breathless trope, a floating hieroglyph,
seamless as water.

Then the hand spoke, and the hand said
“Let there be meaning,” and the meaning sang:
“Let there be love,” and the hand
shaped itself another hand of clay.

Now, where there had been
but one meaning, there were two.
So the hands wrestled all night
till they saw it was pointless.

So together they shaped themselves
a cunning tongue, to arbitrate.
Now, where there had been two meanings,
there were three.

And the hands wrung one another,
abashed, and the tongue took over.

–Donald Finkel
From: Natural Bridge

 

“The Ape Who Painted”

Toward the end of his painting career, Congo was
producing excellent circles, but nearly always filled them
in immediately.
     –Alexander Alland, Jr., The Artistic Animal

from time to time he would pause
to examine an apple, turning it
in his long, sensitive fingers, or fish
a dust-mouse gently from under his bed
not a hair displaced
or moon for hours, sprawled on his favorite tire
praying to his thumb
how fortunate we are to have captured on film
this miraculous thumb, in full career
sweeping in a great assured acc from left to right
trailing a gleaming Indian Red parabola
counterclockwise, following its own law
tailing up again, toward its beginning
deftly dividing out from in
then filling carefully the bowl of zero
with precious red, horizon to horizon
toward the end, the painter’s cage was strewn
with fallen suns, great bloody periods
pages from some cosmic calendar
while he grew more taciturn than ever.

–Donald Finkel
From: What Manner of Beast

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[photo shamelessly cadged from this profile of Carruth]

“I think that Hayden’s idea of a livable life is a life that has affection in it– a life, to give it the fullest scope of his art, in which the things you love are properly praised and properly mourned. What I most value Hayden for and most thank him for (in this age of deniability, when the merest public honesty is made doctrinally tentative) is his wholehearted, unabashed, unapologetic affection: affection for women and men, for neighbors, friends, other poets, jazz musicians, wild creatures, beloved places, the weather. If you know his work, you know you can find dislike in it and anger too. Even so, he is a poet of affection. If he dislikes, that is because he likes. If he is angry, that is because of damage to what he loves. His affection is capacious and generous; everything worthy is at home in it. As he knows, everything worthy is fragile and under threat, is prey to time and invisible to power, and yet affection keeps the accounting in the black. Worthy things, invested with affection, pass into “the now / which is eternal.” I don’t know how this can be, and I don’t think Hayden knows. And yet I believe that it is so; I believe that Hayden believes that it is so.”

From Wendell Berry’s moving remembrance of his friend, the late Hayden Carruth.

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(about poetry and being a poet)

1. A word assemblage isn’t a poem just because someone says it is; no one really knows what a poem is.

2. Most readers of poetry are poets; no one reads poetry anymore.

3. Calling oneself a poet is to call attention to how one doesn’t fit; poets are one of the varieties of misfit that can’t be fixed.

4. Form is an obsolete means by which the academic old-guard have tried to control the world of poetry to their advantage; writing with forms is one of the most freeing experiences a poet can hope for.

5. It’s more fun to call attention to the poems you like than to rant at the poems you don’t (and it hurts less); ranting will always attract more readers than poems.

6. Poets are solipsistic navel-gazing introverts of the highest order, dreawing the curtains around themselves tighter and tighter; poets have egos like bodybuilders have biceps.

7. Poetry speaks and says what nothing else can; silence is poetry.

[following Aaron, Tad, James, & Deborah]

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Mlinko asks:

Why does this feel like some sort of joke at the expense of poets, from beginning to end?

Or am I reading too much into another meaningless non sequitur of a role for interchangeable starlets?

I answer, in order: “because you’re part of that group of overly-sensitive, post-avant, Sillimanite poets who are so often predictable in their responses to the mainstream” and “yes.”

The danger in putting oneself too much into the frame is that you run the risk of making the piece all about you. And this assessment of Keillor’s film is all about Ange Mlinko (and, to no small extent, putting her adolescent poetic self on a pedestal).

But, and this is an important note, Ange’s poetry is generally awesome.

Posted in: Uncategorized 1 Comment »

What a bizarre interpretation of Gioia and Oliver. Has he read any of their poetry? How about the poets each has championed? I’m guessing not. Yes, they both feel that form has been given a bum rap in the contemporary scene, but it’s far from the ONLY kind of poetry they are supporting. The essence of each seems to be: don’t forget about form even when writing “free” verse because free verse is really a misnomer when it’s done well; don’t over-privilege “free” verse; if the poetry really is free (rather than “free”) and without the mechanics of form even divorced from a formalist package, then it’s probably a rather shallow poem by an ignorant or shallow poet.

In fact, I think they are in direct agreement with much of what Quackenbush has to say (though the argument against form based on the language is a red herring– English has a long, long history of formalism despite the supposed lack of available devices).

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From an interview with Billy Collins in Guernica:

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn’t know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life. I was committing these acts of literature—there was no wiring that was connected to thought, feeling, or experience—it was purely literary. And I think I kind of bought into the assumption that poetry had to be extremely gloomy and incomprehensible, or nearly so. And when I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

The change came I would say when I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand…

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