On the Other Side of the Line

Although Levertov's exposition of measure as perception lacks clarity, her take on inspiration I think is sublime and answers the question why write poetry in no uncertain or futuristic terms.

I think it’s like this: First there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech. Suppose there’s the sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky, the sound of music from his radio, feelings of anger and love and amusement roused by a letter just received, the memory of some long ago thought or event associated with what’s seen or heard or felt, and an idea, a concept, he has been pondering, each qualifying the other; together with what he knows about history; and what he has been dreaming—whether or not he remembers it—working in him. This is only a rough outline of a possible moment in a life. But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross-section, or constellation, of experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this demand, the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate; words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes from "templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur." It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is "to keep the mind in a state of contemplation’’; its synonym is "to muse," and to muse comes from a word meaning "to stand with open mouth"not so comical if we think of "inspiration"—to breathe in.

So—as the poet stands openmouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the Poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs as words. If he forces a beginning before this point, it won’t work. These words sometimes remain the first, sometimes in the completed poem their eventual place may be elsewhere, or they may turn out to have been only forerunners, which fulfilled their function in bringing him to the words which are the actual beginning of the poem. It is faithful attention to the experience from the first moment of crystallization that allows those first or those forerunning words to rise to the surface: and with that same fidelity of attention the poet, from that moment of being let in to the possiblity of the poem, must follow through, letting the experience lead him through the world of the poem, its unique inscape revealing itself as he goes.

_________________
Previous "Twentieth-Century American Poetics" postings:
-That Line is Out of Focus (Denise Levertov)
-Buildings Built for Ghosts (Robert Creeley)

That Line is Out of Focus

More Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry by Dana Gioia (Editor), David Mason (Editor), Meg Schoerke (Editor).

Denise Levertov's "Some Notes on Organic Form."

In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds, acting together with the measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia—I,e., they imitate, not the sounds of an experience (which may be soundless, or to which sounds contribute only incidentally)—but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture. The varying speed and gait of different strands of perception within an experience (I think of strands of seaweed moving within a wave) result in counterpointed measures.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this: " In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception." Previously Levertov had described how an experience leads to a poem, a brilliant description of inspiration and its route towards written speech. But this definition of measure as an expression of perception is way too fuzzy and comes very close to being some meaningless New Age poetics.

_________________
Previous postings:
-Buildings Built for Ghosts (Robert Creeley)

Words on Mystery Hill

Beverly and I visited America’s Stonehenge yesterday. Located on a hill in southern NH, it’s an archaeological site complete with megaliths, an Oracle chamber, and a sacrificial table. Carbon dating indicates that some of the stone work may reach back to 4000BC. Supposedly the hill was used as an astronomical observation structure for both solar and lunar cycles. There’s much speculation on its origins, Amerindian, Celtic, European, or some other combination. Stone walls and carved rock interweave along the hill like lines of verse and ancient metaphors. But no one knows its meaning.

Abu Ghraib

I try to stay away from politics on this page but every now and then I need to speak, because I speak in these pages on other matters, so I need to know I've spoken on those critical issues when they arise, just to know I've spoken. Most issues of policy are beyond my authority, although I know what I believe and vote accordingly. But Abu Ghraib is beyond authority. It is evil and as a nation we must say so.

I've read so much from both sides of the political spectrum in the past few days that sicken me. And the madness is beyond the pale. It mostly follows this pattern: Abu Ghraib was wrong but...

There is no fucking "but" to this, and to even for one minute entertain that there is implicates your very soul in the madness. I don't care if you're Linda Chavez or Rush Limbaugh or Joe Lieberman. As a nation we cannot abide these actions. Every rationalization is a pebble in the beginning of an avalanche towards insanity.

I am proud that as a nation we are disgusted with these actions. I am proud that as a nation we wish to investigate and punish (and rehabilitate) the wrongdoers (and hope we don't stop at just some fall guys.) I am proud that there is a national sense of shame about these incidents. I am hopeful that as a nation we can recognize that the potential for evil is not just in the other, but even in ourselves.

But I worry we end our condemnations with "but." I worry about the future of our nation (and our children, [my daughter]) if we allow our national argument to include such rationalizations to enter its heated debate. As that great cartoon character Pogo (I date myself I know) once said: "we have met the enemy and he is us." Long live democracy (no irony intended.)

To all Iraquis and to the world, I am heartfully sorry and apologize. May God forgive us.

Wicked Good Bloggings this Week 19

awake at dawn on someone's couch on Billy Collin's defense of his popularity

Tooting what he calls "the loud horn of the vernacular" is a reaction to the kind of poetry he says he was writing in college. "I was brought up on the Mount Rushmore of modern giants." Anyone who has slogged through the allusions in Ezra Pound's Cantos or puzzled over the tangled knots of meaning in a Wallace Stevens poem will sympathize.

"I committed those sins of obscurity myself," he says. "I bought the connection between difficulty and value that was involved in these very difficult poets."

"It took to my 30s to get rid of this."

     and their concern with its implications

Not the first time in the last few months that an author has stepped into the podium and spoken FOR a bastardized populist literary agenda, and against the perceived "difficulty" of reading outside of one's comfort zone. I can say I feel certain this is NOT a good thing.

But also, probably, not entirely on the shoulders of these authors. If one is attacked for one's simple, approachable writing (as a sign of intellectual or academic failing), perhaps it's forgiveable to do a little lashing-out in return.

Languagehat on John Ashberry's poem (included in posting) in the 3/25 NYRB:

That's what gets to us all, if we have any feel for the world outside ourselves. It drives our comics to unwonted seriousness (Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, even Woody Allen, unable quite to extricate himself from his Upper East Side solipsism but somehow aware that Ingmar Bergman had access to something he would like to have for himself), and it's driven Ashbery to communicate with a directness he once might have raised an eyebrow at, appropriating the gravity of a Sophocles to his own ends.

HG Poetics comments on poetics held my interest this week:

yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.

The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.

On a political satirical note, Healing Iraq on the misunderstood media, Al-Jazeera and Fox News:

Is it because of its self-describing motto which says 'Opinion, and the other opinion' which is never ever the case? Is it because it claims to be objective and unbiased when it clearly refers to thugs and criminals in Iraq as 'resistance fighters'?

Is it because of its self-describing motto which says 'Fair and Balanced' which is never ever the case? Is it because it claims to be objective and unbiased when it clearly refers to mercenaries in Iraq as 'contractors'?

American Digest on Thom Gunn as a teacher:

I remember the craggy, pitted face easily moved to laughter and a sensibility moved to kind despair when he was forced to experience a particularly bad line. I remember that the class was formed of about 12 students and that on any given day at least ten were baked to a crisp. But that didn’t mean Gunn didn’t get our attention. How could he not? He was not only an elegant poet, an inheritor of the Tennysonian tradition in English poetry, but he was an elegant man.

And thanks to a fool in the forest for some comic relief:

hahahahahaovoidshahahahaha

3mt-6: The Poetry of Passaconaway

After the death and devastation from the Algonquin apocalypse, some of the Indian villages along the Merrimack River were completely wiped out and the ones that weren’t struggled to remain active communities. Maybe because of their distance from the coastal epicenter of disease, the Pennacook Indians, whose village was far upriver in what is now Manchester, NH, were less affected. Accordingly their chief, Passaconaway, became the great sachem of the entire Merrimack Valley, the first leader of what historians call The Pennacook Confederacy.

William Wood in his "New England Prospect" describes Passaconaway’s extraordinary talents:

The Indians report of one Passaconawaw, that hee can make water burne, the rocks move, the trees dance, metamorphise himself into a flaming man. Hee Will do more; for in Winter, when there are no green leaves to be got, hee will burne an old one to ashes and putting these into 'water, produce a new green leaf, which you shall not only see but substantially handle and carrie away; and make a dead snake's skin a living snake, both to be seen, felt, and heard. This I write but on the report of the Indians, who confidentially affirm stranger things.

This may be the mythological world view of the Algonquin, but nevertheless it describes a powerful man, yet one who could not resist the European invasion. Charles Edward Beals, Jr. relates in his “Passaconaway in the White Mountains” the great man’s final speech:

Hearken to the words of your father. I am an old oak that has withstood the storms of more than an hundred winters. Leaves and branches have been stripped from me by the winds and frosts-my eyes are dim-my limbs totter― must soon fall! But when young and sturdy, when my bow-no young man of the Pennacooks could bend it-when my arrow would pierce a deer at an hundred yards-and I could bury my hatchet in a sapling to the eye-no wigwam had so many furs-no pole so many scalps as Passaconaway's! Then I delighted in war. The whoop of the Pennacooks was heard upon the Mohawk―and no voice so loud as Passaconaway's. The scalps upon the pole of my wigwam told the story of Mohawk suffering.

The English came, they seized our lands; I sat me down at Pennacook. They followed upon my footsteps; I made war upon them, but they fought with fire and thunder; my young men were swept down before me, when no one was near them. I tried sorcery against them, but they still increased and prevailed over me and mine, and I gave place to them and retired to my beautiful island of Natticook. I that can make the dry leaf turn green and live again―I that can take the rattlesnake in my palm as I would a worm, without harm―I who have had communion with the Great Spirit dreaming and awake-I am powerless before the Pale Faces.

The oak will soon break before the whirlwind―it shivers and shakes even now; soon its trunk will be prostrate―the ant and worm will sport upon it Then think, my children, of what I say; I commune with the Great Spirit. He whispers me now―'Tell your peopie, Peace, Peace, is the only hope of your race. I have given fire and thunder to the pale faces for weapons―I have made them plentier than the leaves of the forest, and still shall they increase! These meadows they shall turn with the plow―these forests shall fail by the ax―the pale faces shall live upon your hunting grounds, and make their villages upon your fishing places!' The Great Spirit says this, and it must be so! We are few and powerless before them! We must bend before the storm! The wind blows hard! The old oak trembles! Its branches are gone! Its sap is frozen! It bends! It falls! Peace, Peace, with the white men-is the command of the Great Spirit―and the wish―the last wish―of Passaconaway.

Although there is some doubt as to whether these are actually the words of Passaconaway, there is little doubt they were his sentiments. And so fell a mighty oak that dwarfed our maple trees.

_____________
three maple trees
-part one
-part two
-part three a
-part three b
-part four
-part five

But Isn't Brad Pitt a god

I was really looking forward to the movie "Troy" although I realized there was a very good chance it could be a bomb. After all, there was Brad Pitt dressed in his best Rambo. But Orlando Bloom was running a lucky streak with Lord of the Rings so I allowed myself to think optimistic thoughts. But reviews are beginning to appear (the movie gets released May14) and things just don't sound too good. Now I understand that reviews are merely personal opinions but the Iliad without the gods! From Reuters:

"Troy" is "inspired" by "The Iliad," Homer's epic poem about the Greek siege of Troy. The filmmakers chose that word carefully. Not only does much of their story derive from ancient literary sources other than Homer and the script often take extreme liberties with Greek mythology, but Petersen and writer David Benioff jettison Zeus and the whole Olympian cosmos. Yes, this version of "The Iliad" is godless.

Admittedly, it's virtually impossible to simulate onscreen the wildly dysfunctional family of self-centered immortals that compose Greek polytheism. But to remove the gods from what is, after all, a Greek myth is to gut your story. By playing down the divine, you lose the story's sense of fate, destiny and tragedy.

These people believe in their gods. When a hero fights "like a god," many genuinely wonder if he might not be born of a god and therefore undefeatable. And a leader who heeds seers and omens looks foolish rather than wise, as he does in Homer. This is a key element of the ancients' psychology, and it turns up missing here.

I guess I'll have to wait for the sequel: Odysseus' Most Excellent Adventure.

eXTReMe Tracking Poem

From top 15 keywords in search engine referrer totals for this blog (in descending order)

the poetry sunshine
eternal pope
alexander rocas

las poem spotless
mind your grenacha
san alejandro

Buildings Built for Ghosts

In my quest to lead my poetry to water, I’ve been reading Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry by Dana Gioia (Editor), David Mason (Editor), Meg Schoerke (Editor). I first came across this work at the Powow Poets workshop: an essay by Rhina is featured in the book. I perused the table of contents and was intrigued by its breadth and scope. So I purchased it. Warning: I might be commenting on some of the essays as I read them, not in any manner of analytical review but merely in a note-taking and questioning way.

Robert Creeley in ‘Poems are a Complex’:

I think I first felt a poem to be what might exist in words as primarily the fact of its own activity. Later, of course, I did see that poems might comment on many things, and reveal many attitudes and qualifications. Still, it was never what they said about things that interested me. I wanted the poem itself to exist and that could never be possible as long as some subject significantly elsewhere was resolved. There had to be an independence derived from the very fact that words are things too. (p279)

I guess this is the fork in the road. The poem no longer is an extension of human communication, no longer attempts to sing in words what cannot be said in words. It is now an object first and foremost created from things. Comments (not communications) are secondary. Architecture has it lucky. No matter how modern or postmodern it needs to get, people still have to inhabit the building in some fashion.

Henry V in Baghdad

Josh Marshall brings Shakespeare into the national political conversation:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

So Dawn Goes Down to Day

Oi! Already spring declines and leaf subsides into leaf while the peepers in the wetlands consider closing shop on all that razz for yet another season. Boats are gathering in the Merrimack and just this weekend humidity paid a visit for a couple of days scouting out locations for its inevitable summer run. And tonight Robert Frost called. What a wanker. “Nothing gold can stay,” he said. “Bugger off,” I answered in my best impersonation, and hung up loudly. I can’t listen to him right this minute go on and on about her early leaf's a flower but only so an hour. Yadda yadda yadda. Rubbish I’d say. Look at all the red maples blooming on the Point and talk to me next week when Main Street’s paved in the bloody things. Look I got to go and watch some BBC America; ‘The Office’ is on. The previews said that Eden sank to grief while Gareth pondered seconds and David discovered that vibration is her hardest hue to hold. I wonder: do they even have spring in Slough and if nature's first green was gold in Swindon, what's first gold? 300 quid? But yeah, I agree with that philosopher, our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we spring.

One of the Oldest and Most IntensivelyStudied Forests in North America

In Harvard Forest, trees
eye each passerby
in silent scholastic gloom—
such focus could petrify
the strongest folk that walk
this earth—and when they talk

they sway the continents
in every branch of life.
They carve initials on
our breath with just the knife
of photosynthetic science.
Their roots in self-reliance

turn worlds green with envy,
driving arms to the axe
—there’s nothing left to do
but raise the property tax
on every acre of wood.
There goes the neighborhood.

~Gregory Perry 2004

mepoetics 1

mepoetics is all about me (an amateur poet attempts to answer the voices in his head)

Why I Will Never Be a Strict Formalist

So what is it about formalist poetry that stops me from embracing it with all my soul? Is it me? Is it the Groucho Marx syndrome, the Hawkeye Pierce pattern, the Abbie Hoffman disorder, the Walter Mitty condition, the Maynard G. Krebbs disease, or a number of other clinical issues that I carry around with me in my everyday common and uninteresting psyche? Is it political, or some socio-economic dysfunction? Or is it just the rules?

I’m fine with the technical aspects of meter, especially as outlined by Timothy Steele. Meter operates on the micro level and to me is much like the notes of music. It’s a rhythmic tool. But those established forms and their strict regulations, whether it be some pantoum, sestina, or even sonnet: I can’t abide by them. I can read them and appreciate some, but I can’t make myself write them. I’ve tried. But when I do, I really don’t. My sonnets aren’t really sonnets.

Not that I don’t write in form. I’ve played with the idea and discovered schemes that make sense to me, forms that answer my needs in writing, or my plain ideas concerning poetry: the Dylanesque Sestet, the Desolation Sonnet, the Gregorian Sonnet. But I’m certainly not a literary theorist; my forays in that field never take themselves too seriously. These nonce forms of mine are really small-f forms.

But Forms: they’re much too much like religions to me. Ah! That’s it: the lapsed Catholic complaint.

To Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, Dana

Beneath the Quabbin Reservoir, four towns
no longer meet each spring to regulate
their rainbow trout, or tax that flow which drowns
the valley in its undercurrent state
of long-forgotten history. Let’s drink
their health from rusty taps we’ve filtered first,
before we finish the dishes in the sink.
There’s something in that blood to quench our thirst.

~Gregory Perry 2004

The Weight of Water

Beverly and I visited the Quabbin Reservoir on Saturday. It’s located in Central Massachusetts and is the water supply for Greater Boston. The reservoir was created in the late thirties by damming the Swift River and letting the valley fill. It was quite an engineering feat. One thing though: four towns were literally dismantled and the populations resettled to make way for its creation. The area around the Quabbin is park land now and home for all kinds of wildlife including eagles, but every time I visit, I think of those towns and how they were erased from the map of Massachusetts by the fine thirsty citizens of Boston. Talk about audacity.

Beneath the Quabbin reservoir, four towns
no longer meet each spring to regulate
their rainbow trout or tax that flow which drowns
the valley in its undercurrent state.

That's the beginning of a work in progress.

And Now Today's Sermon

Sunday sermons should require brevity (reminds me of an associate’s comment this week concerning a new slogan for meetings: brevity not levity!)

Speaking of sermons, I pulled a Munch a couple of days ago on Eric Ormsby's state of poetry piece in the New Criterion. Mike Snider commented yesterday on Poetry's editor Christian Wiman's comments on the

dire condition of both poetry and our culture at large, about whether poetry can survive in the image-ridden, short-attention span mess television has made of our world. It's a version of the argument recently made by Camille Paglia, and supposedly leant some scientific rigor by this study, in which five questions on a survey diagnose attention problems. I'm not impressed by any of it.

Me neither (it's ironic that Wiman is concerned that "the great bulk of our experience... come from the top down. It is institutionalized, generic, and monolithic." and then seems to be searching in the heavens for that "great poet--to shock us out of the bad habits.") But I was impressed with one thing concerning Hank Lazer's opinings on the state of the art in Boston Review:

The critics have a point. Contemporary American poetry is atomized, decentralized, and multi-faceted, and the range of poetries and audiences is too varied to capture in a compact or singular history. It is difficult to know exactly what’s going on now in American poetry. But maybe this dispersion, this so-called loss of direction is a good thing. Perhaps, contrary to the laments, we are now living through a particularly rich time in American poetry—an era of radically democratized poetry.

I may not agree with any of the selections he praises, but that's his point (and prerogative) after all. It's the same point people make when extolling the democratizing influences of the internet. And since I happen to be participating in that effort by blogging this in the first place, I think he's onto something. This optimism may be a result of my recent self-induced purging due to that Ormsby horror, but I hope not. Go in peace.

You Turn Me On I’m a Radio

This week I’ve been listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Hissing of Summer Lawns”. It’s an oldie but a goodie, although of course to me it sounds like yesterday. I can remember listening to it in late 1975; at the time I had been disappointed with its music. It had been almost 2 years since “Court and Spark” had been released, a record I must have worn out playing it several times a day (ah my old Dual turntable and Advent loudspeakers,) and a work that still qualifies as one of my favorite all-time records. If I created a top-five list of pop albums it would need to be included.

But Joni Mitchell has never been an artist willing to stand still, and she was in the middle of her seventies transition from folk to rock to jazz-influenced music and 'Hissing' was a beginning in the turning of that corner. I wasn't, but that's another story. On re-visiting it this week, I was impressed not only with the music, but the lyrics. They are sensitive yet astound. There’s a feminist thread running through the work, especially in titles such as “Edith and the Kingpin”, “Shades of Scarlet Conquering,” “Harry’s House,” the title song, and “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow.”

That last one has taken up residence in my mind this week. I’ve been repeating “Anima rising” and “He says ‘We walked on the moon / You be polite.’” over and over and over (I’m doing it now in fact.) I know that lyrics separated from music do not do them justice (there’s a great bass line that leads you through the meter in an alluring serpentine rhythm.) But still these are some fine lyrics and deserve a reading:

DON'T INTERRUPT THE SORROW

Don't interrupt the sorrow
Darn right
In flames our prophet witches
Be polite
A room full of glasses
He says "Your notches liberation doll"
And he chains me with that serpent
To that Ethiopian wall

Anima rising
Queen of Queens
Wash my guilt of Eden
Wash and balance me
Anima rising
Uprising in me tonight
She's a vengeful little goddess
With an ancient crown to fight

Truth goes up in vapors
The steeples lean
Winds of change patriarchs
Snug in your bible belt dreams
God goes up the chimney
Like childhood Santa Claus
The good slaves love the good book
A rebel loves a cause

I'm leaving on the 1:15
You're darn right
Since I was seventeen
I've had no one over me
He says "Anima rising-
So what-
Petrified wood process
Tall timber down to rock!"

Don't interrupt the sorrow
Darn right
He says "We walked on the moon
You be polite."
Don't let up the sorrow
Death and birth and death and birth
He says "Bring that bottle kindly
And I'll pad your purse-
I've got a head full of quandary
And a mighty, mighty, thirst."

Seventeen glasses
Rhine wine
Milk of the Madonna
Clandestine
He don't let up the sorrow
He lies and he cheats
It takes a heart like Mary's these days
When your man gets weak

Wicked Good Bloggings This Week

John Ettore transcribes an almost-perfect paragraph from an NPR story on Seattle Mariner's Ichiro Suzuki:

The author explained how Ichiro's dad, a serious Buddhist, purchased the young Ichiro the best, most-expensive glove he could buy at the time, to his wife's initial horror. How could you spend so much on a toy? she wanted to know. 'It's not a toy, it's a tool of education,' he calmly responded. And he taught his son to treat it as such, respecting it, oiling it regularly and otherwise tending to it as he might a central tool of his trade (which of course it soon would become). After having learned in childhood to treat his glove with so much respect, the author concluded his story, "it makes it hard for (Ichiro) to come into the dugout now, put it on the seat, and watch Brett Boone sit on it."

Some intriguing concepts of irony and postmodernism and cover songs from Jane Dark:

What I want to suggest is that the particular form of irony we'll call "cover irony" is indeed deeply relevant to the postmodern, but often as a counter-strategy. That is to say, by producing a form which refuses the literal meanings of the original lyrics and/or/via a shift in the understood emtoional tenor of the original sounds (Frente's "Bizarre Love Triangle" would one example), it's a strong assertion of, rather than an effacement of, authorial power.

Being a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I thoroughly enjoyed Paula's House of Toast's thorough thrashing of Mitt Romney and his blatant sucking-up to the right wing:

I had no idea I was such a miscreant. We're talking three strikes you're out territory here. I, by all accounts, am a habitual criminal. I'm planning to turn myself in later today, to throw myself upon the mercy of the Great And General Court of Massachusetts, oyez oyez, God Save the Governor, God Save the Commonwealth from the Governor, but first I will make a public confession.

A fellow Massachusettsan, Jim Behrle, uses his considerable drawing talents to render the Stages of a Poetry Reading. Since I can't replicate the drawings, consider these symbols as depiction enough:

?!? &&& **%% (!+&=!!!)

George Wallace wrote one of the better eulogies for Thom Gunn:

Some poets -- Dryden springs to mind -- emerge as primary eyewitnesses to their period. It was Thom Gunn's fate, surely unlooked for, to become one of the foremost chroniclers of the AIDS pandemic as it had its way with countless friends and acquaintances in the San Francisco gay community. The poems from that time -- most notably in his 1992 collection The Man With Night Sweats (also included in the "Collected") -- tie in to the centuries-long line of English elegists.

There are many others that I've failed to list here, like lime tree's continuing series. I'm not sure if Jonathan Mayhew was referring to these when he wrote "I could do close readings of individual poems on my blog too. If I've avoided that, it might have something to do with the notion that this is considered by many to be a fairly routine skill." That may be true for those with PhDs and MFAs but there are those of us with only MAs in American History who lack that particular skill and appreciate it in others, especially when involving a genre of poetry they may know almost nothing of. And I'm sure Jonathan's close readings would be anything but routine.

FormX and the Z Street Band (Boston Comment 4)

The last question in the Boston Comment roundtable: "If the avant-garde points us toward the future of the poem, describe the direction you see." Oren Izenberg's response echoes many of the notions I've been thinking as I read through this entire discussion.

As a general rule, critical and poetic partisans, bent on consolidating, celebrating, claiming or extending one tradition take note of the other (if they take note of it) just long enough to deride—and such derision is a reflexive reaction rather than an analytic one.

I've certainly been guilty of this charge on these pages in the past. I’m sorry for that. One of the positive aspects of blogging these past couple of months has been the exposure I’ve had to different personalities and beliefs much more varied than the ones in the poetic world I’ve inhabited.

The result is that poets are cut off from fully half of the history of what ought to be their art. We read less, or we think tendentiously; and so we write from less, or our writing begins with self-blinding.

I've been playing with some poems in the past couple of postings that were somewhat experimental (for me) although somewhat satirical (my feeble attempt.) I know they would neither satisfy the avant-garde nor formalist concepts of poetry, but I believe their source is a legitimate one, for me, as I look to the future of my own poetry.

If there is a wish for poetry's future in these scattered observations, it is that poets cease to nurture their shame about recurrent or perennial features of experience, and relinquish some of their terror in the face of invariances.

In a posting of Jonathan Mayhew’s concerning Thom Gunn (rest in peace), he says "My hypothesis is that meter pushes some poets into a rhetorical mode that prevents them from saying what they really want and need to say." I will agree that this will happen from time to time. But there are also other times when meter, and especially rhyme, have taken me to places where I had not known I needed to go. For these reasons and more, I believe such different modes of writing are valuable in and of themselves, and not necessarily exclusive modes for inspiration. But only in FormX shall the poet integrate the best of all worlds (he said with tongue only partially in cheek) and therefore know the future born to run.

Indeed, if there is a slogan for the “experimental” way of thinking about poetry that I have been advocating here, it isn't so much “anything goes” but rather “take it where you can get it.” And why shouldn't we be interested in thinking, wherever we find it?

"Just wrap your legs around these velvet rims / and strap your hands across my engines."


______________________________________________
-FormX and Spiral Dynamics (Boston Comment 3)
-FormX (Boston Comment and Indeterminacy)
-Boston Comment Question One

Thom Gunn has Died

New York Times obituary

Tangled Up in Blue

Which Bob Dylan song are you? Thanks to a fool in the forest.

I took the short test despite the fact that wine was not an option for my favorite drink.

FormX and Spiral Dynamics (Boston Comment 3)

The third question in the Boston Comment roundtable was one I've wondered of some: "do you enjoy reading a collection of individual, unconnected lines?" It's a pointed question, of course. But I think Kent Johnson showed up to play, in other words honestly attempt to answer the question in order to explain and possibly enlighten, rather than merely belittle or goof. I have to admit his response is intriguing:

Anyway, different reading formations will naturally have different backgrounds, aims, and expectations—particularly so, I'd say, where the matter of “pleasure” is concerned. Renga is an example: A typical sequence will likely be complete non-syllogistic nonsense to the reader coming at it without training or context, yet the same poem will unfold the most fractal and beautiful semantic textures to someone seriously engaged with the practice. And this is a genre of “individual, unconnected lines” that goes back more than 800 years. Viva la Avant-garde!

No, it's common sense that there are different ways of making sense, and poems that radically depart from narrative, anecdotal, scenic means of telling--be they from the Tsukubashu anthology or from In the American Tree-- often show how “sense” may be a more complex and dimensioned field than the partisans of expository, “plain language” poetry (traditionally metered or not) would often have it. As Stein says, a poem may be “not unordered in not resembling.”

There is a third way of course. FormX is a second-tier poetics integrating the previous scientific, mythic, and relativistic consciousnesses into a transcendent understanding of all previous poetics. And in that vein, it is not an end in itself but a necessary door into the holistic poetics that await us on the other side. No manifestos are needed though; it just is.

Connect the Dots

A voice is setting in
the east; beneath its warm
inflections gentle waves
create this shore. A storm
will be approaching soon.
Its thunder wakes the moon.

The river stretches on
the wakes of power boats.
The current water-skis
between anchors and floats.
The riverbanks foreclose
its smooth and fluid prose.

I can hear the loons
somewhere on the lake
crying something crazy.
I once was at a wake
and heard such kindred grief
arise in disbelief.

Gregory Perry 2004

FormX (Boston Comment and Indeterminacy)

That second question (concerning indeterminacy) in the Boston Comment roundtable was like throwing a slow underhanded pitch to Barry Bonds. I guess Oren Izenberg said all that was going to be said. And it was a lead-off first-swing first-paragraph homerun.

It is neither true nor is it untrue that the poetic avant-garde of the past quarter century has had a reverence for indeterminacy. Or perhaps: what one poet who reveres indeterminacy reveres may or not be the same thing that another poet who reveres indeterminacy reveres, and it may be that neither one reveres indeterminacy.

It's tough sometimes batting after Barry. Like fifth wheel. Still I thought I'd give the question a shot in this experimental formalist avant-garde work written in the style of, and from this point on to be known as, "The School of Formal Experimentation," or FormX, for short.

In Determined Nations

An oyster washed his face
with music but the wind
cried out for saints; my Greek
was poor and I had sinned:
that sentence was too long
to lose. Monroe was wrong;

our doctrine means that no
magnetic charge in North
Dakota will be doctored.
I know about one-fourth
of all directions: west
will soon be manifest

to shipping lanes that split
apart from meaningful
interpretations. No
incomprehensible
physician ever wrote
a vital antidote.

Gregory Perry 2004

Speaking of Photographs

I've read much about the photographs of flag-draped coffins en route from Iraq but Timothy Yu says it all. A photograph can say a thousand words but sometimes words can speak a photograph:

I very much doubt that the woman who took the photograph* did so with the intention of rousing the forces of opposition to the war. Instead, the photograph has been politicized by a government's desire to suppress it, which tells us that the only absolute truth about war--people die--is itself a threat to the ideology that promotes war. This is the same government that has no qualms about using 9/11's images of death to trumpet its own achievements.

Boston Comment Question One

I've been reading the Boston Comment roundtable discussion on the avant garde. I think Kent Johnson, of all the participants, addresses each question with clarity and with some effort to communicate. This particular passage in response to the initial question concerning the existence of an American avant garde cuts through much of the posturing.

Language poetry, along with its various second-generation satellite formations, now stands as an experimentalist, but respectful and loyal, opposition within the Parliament of Academic poetry. The “post-avant” is the mode that ambitious young MFA'ers study; it is the creative writing “style” scores of publishers are seeking; it is the aesthetic pedigree rising numbers of awards are prizing; it is the criticism and theory that prestigious university presses are publishing; it is the “subversive poetics” the current President of the Modern Language Association has made her reputation promoting.

Call it what you want but don't try to dress it in some cool 'alternative' beret and cape. Alternative's gone mainstream too.

Question Two tomorrow.

Sox Sweep Yanks in NY!!!

These are the weekends Sox fans live for. Pedro shuts out the Yankees today to clinch the 3 game sweep. And yesterday's win was statistical poetry:

winning a baseball game despite going 0 for 19 with runners in scoring position. To gauge the magnitude of the 0-fer, consider that no other major league team has won a game with such a show of futility in the 30 years since statistics were first kept for batting with runners in scoring position.

Destiny 2004.

Henry, Ralph, and me

We visited Author’s Ridge today in Concord and saw Thoreau’s and Emerson’s gravestones. They couldn’t be any different. Henry’s is a plain tiny stone that simply says “Henry” while Ralph’s is a large unpolished raw boulder of marble with an inset plaque. Each is quite appropriate and leads one to think great thoughts. And simple ones; please, my ashes are to be spread in Acadia: one-third in Frenchman Bay, one-third in Sargent Mountain Pond, and one-third at Otter Cliffs. Such thoughts for a Sunday. Amen.

Put it up to eleven

Two band mates arguing over a chord. True story and probably one repeated every night at some rehearsal somewhere. It’s the temperament of art. I like 'em metrical with a little rhyme and the next poet wants them prosy and disjunctive. But imagine if we were writing poems together. Poet bands across America arguing over an iamb. Fighting over a line beak. Walking out over a fragmented sentence. It probably happens every night.

Disbanding Number One

They bicker over chords.
The singer hears the C
like crafts that brave the plains
before idolatry
nailed the golden spikes.
It’s not that he dislikes

this unpretentious G
the lead guitarist plays
with Warren Harding pluck,
but that was yesterday’s
administrative style.
It’s time the mercantile

appointments followed suit.
He’ll run an inside straight
against a pair of Jacks
and let the second-rate
profess their misery.
He needs no harmony.

Something took hold of me on this one and I went along for the ride, enjoying it tremendously. It’s been some time that I let my imagination take free rein within a metrical framework. The formalism of form has been chafing at me lately. Too many workshop priests and not enough sinners. I understand their arguments and all. The sonnet requires its volta. But I need some voltage sometimes. "Eleven. Exactly. One louder."

Wicked good bloggings this week

Lime Tree's analysis of poems. These are great. They're giving me an understanding of the other side in another way. Almost a fan's view, rather than some theoretical explanation that requires me to read a dozen other analytical books that each require me to read another dozen analytical books and so on. Not to mention I just love Ted Baxter.

But one of the things I find most brilliant about the poem’s “joke” (and it is essentially structured as a joke) is the way it springs the punchline on you without fully working out the allegory it insinuates. In fact, if you even start to try to work through the logic—like, OK, Ted is Bush, but how does Lou figure in then, and who are we, and why would we want to make commercials in the first place and what if anything does that represent—it quickly becomes clear that there isn’t really much logic here. The end of the poem is a shock (or a pleasure, or both) because it brings home an irrational, emotional truth, and it makes it seem, absurdly, as though the best possible vehicle for the figural expression of this truth is an old episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show. However tenuously, it makes the conceit seem necessary rather than arbitrary.

Neal Pollack's take on Bush's new version of an old prayer:

Heavenly Father, give me the power to try to change what I cannot, and to not change what I can. Give me the strength to believe what is obviously false. And grant me the lack of wisdom not to know the difference.

This isn't from a blog post but several people have been blogging about a conversation on the avant garde in Boston Comment. The discussion is beyond my understanding at this point, but the resume of one of the participants, Joe Amato is an absolute hoot:

Joe Amato's many failures include two tenure denials; a Fortune 500 pink slip; a nonunion construction boot off the job site (provoked); and failing his first road test.

This quote from Maud Newton's Blog taken from an article she read about a "copy editor/ghostwriter/ad designer for a series of gay porn magazines and three straight porn publications aimed at a more mature audience."

There was the flamboyant gay editor who could barely speak English—let alone use grammar correctly; the standard office whore; and a bitter old copy editor who had been with the company for decades. His office doubled as the storeroom, and every time he saw me he screamed, "I hope you know The Chicago Manual of Style! We don't use that pussy New York one!"

Poem about nothing

Am I boring you with all this Acadia writing? I apologize. But I’ve been unblocked and I can’t help myself. Listen. I was on the carriage road. It runs along a rockslide beneath Penobscot Mt., above Jordan Pond. I sat on one of the large rocks that border the road, to rest. Listen. That sound you hear is absolutely nothing.

Sonic Break

Beneath a russet cliff
this twisting gravel road
is balanced on a rock
slide. My episode
of trail-descending done,
I’ll break here as the sun

continues its decline.
There’s not a single sound:
no flow nor waterfall;
no squirrels stir the ground;
no birdsong nor jet plane;
no buzz, no breeze, no rain.

All glaciers have slipped north
and engineers spun home.
Summer is still to rise
while spring is yet to roam.
A crow beats overhead;
its wings would wake the dead.

Donald Davie and Li Po again, but this time someone else showed up in the background. I don’t rightly know his name, but he’s responsible for S1,L3 and S3,L1-2. He’s asking for a bit more leeway. I may have to let him have his way. He can be such a spoiled brat.

Galapagos Green

What's your color?

A pond is a pond is a pond

One of my favorite places in Acadia National Park is Sargent Mountain Pond. It is accessible only by mountain trail, and lies between two open granite summits: Penobscot and Sargent. There's such a variation in environment compared to that of the long southern ridge of Penobscot, an open slope exposed to wind and sun and expansive ocean views. The pond is small and surrounded by trees. The wind is almost nonexistent in the col, and on a summer day, the proliferation of life there is such a contrast with the mountain's. Dragonflies and frogs are just the more obvious dwellers on this threshold. This Sunday was the first time I had ever seen the pond iced-over. It was such a change, but yet it wasn’t. That’s what this poem tries to relate.

Pondering the Medium

That Sargent Mountain Pond
lolls lushly in a col,
amid stark mountaintops,
provides the wherewithal
in place to call it mystic.
There’s such a pantheistic

conception to this spot.
Neither stream nor rill
supplies its source; it is.
Imagine if you will
this slight round pond no more
than fifty yards from shore

to shore and circumscribed
by birch and evergreen…
This April though I saw
its surface opaline
with ice, and pondered why
I deemed it still July.

Again I’m using language shorn of most imagery, kind of Donald Davie meets Li Po, tempered by my own inadequate dexterity. Having been blocked for many weeks though, I will take whatever comes my way. This was one that I needed to write in order to understand my own reactions to this frozen pond. My first was one of simple surprise. But there was an underlying sense of wonder which I felt yet could not verbalize. Why, despite the presence of ice, was there still a palpable warmth to the place?

p23s5

To those of you who have been playing the page 23, sentence 5 meme, there's a thorough autopsy from LaughingMeme that attempts to determine its point of origin.

A little research showed that this particular contagion had been raging for nearly a full week in the meme prone LiveJournal community before we saw it on blogs (spreading at an astonishing rate no doubt due to the extreme proximity that the members of that community operate in, though it might also signal a dangerous lack of mimetic diversity to have the entire population so susceptible). The key inflection point for the blog community seems to be the April 11th posting on caterina.net; the highly connected nature of an "A-list" blogger pushing the population of exposed individual over the density threshold from isolated cases to epidemic.

The comment section is worthy of perusing also.

Hawking an Acadian Poem

After I saw the ten hawks in the sky I knew I had to write a poem. But I had no idea where it would lead me until I started writing it. After I wrote the first line, I knew I needed to go somewhere mathematical with it. It wasn’t just the fact that I had seen a number of hawks in the sky. It was that number: ten. It's so accurate, precise. I've attempted to be somewhat the same in the language, which for me, in an Acadian poem, is an experience in itself.

Metrics of Hawks and Me

Ten hawks pass overhead
in random order, just
a temporary sum,
a magnitude that must
decline if hawks are true
to being hawks. A few

will start to separate
in circles like a cell
dividing from itself
itself, in parallel
geometries of chance,
a reckoned elegance

that leads me to this one
experience of flight.
Much later, on a peak
of granite, I will sight
a single hawk below
and measure vertigo.

If it had been three, maybe the poem would have gone on some spiritual journey. If it had been four, maybe it would have had more direction or at least some earth tones in it. If seven, maybe I would have been more fortunate with the outcome (although to be truthful I kind of like where it ended.) But ten cries for metrics, in content as well as form. So on this one I let the rhythm and the rhymes take me to where they wanted to go, which was to that other hawk sighting in a completely different manner.

Sounds of Pretentiousness

From Mercury News:

Blender magazine has rated We Built This City as the worst single ever constructed in its list "The 50 Worst Songs Ever".

[paragraphs omitted]

But the inclusion most likely to spark calls of blasphemy is the listing of the Simon and Garfunkel ballad The Sounds of Silence.

"It's the poetry meaningfulness that got our goat," said Blender editor Craig Marks. "With self-important lyrics like, 'Hear my words that I might teach you', it's almost a parody of pretentious '60s folk rock."

Returning

Returning from a weekend of walkabouts is always a disorienting thing. There is a spriritual aspect to these hikes that sometimes take a spell. In time, I may even be able to verbalize it. Until then, here's a stanza from a poem begun last year while on Connor's Nubble.

Scrambling over rocky stretches,
I gain the windswept summit.
All perspectives look ecstatic
despite the modest heights.
Each direction is a course in essence,
some spirit world of mountain, lake, and sea.

Sunday Hike

It begins at the shores of Jordan Pond, a one-mile long lake surrounded by mountains. Then it continues along a carriage road through spruce-pine forest with occasional teasing ocean views. At one point the road crosses a stone bridge which spans a small rushing brook. A cliff wall looms into view and then the trail which skirts that same cliff wall appears: stone stairs, a short rock scramble, a walk along a ledge guarded by a wooden railing, a short wooden bridge, another walk along the cliff side, and a final long climb around the overhang. The granite southern ridge of Penobscot appears. It navigates a mile-long course marked by small inukshuk-shaped cairns for more than a mile: sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean; a multitude of islands; bays, harbors; mainland mountains; blue sky; April sun; to the summit marked by a large rockpile and sign. The trail then descends into a wooded col between Penobscot and Sargent Mountains: a small secret round pond, still frozen. The trail then declines along a brook, iced-over in some areas, water running beneath: rocks, roots, dead leaves. The trail ends at a different carriage road, the brook is a frozen waterfall now disappearing beneath another stone bridge. The road runs along the base of the mountain above Jordan Pond, and returns to the shores.

Hawks Over Eagle Lake

While walking the carriage road this afternoon, large shadows crossed my path. I looked up and counted ten hawks passing by. Later, while on Connor's Nubble, two hawks made a number of drive-bys. It's always thrilling to watch a hawk soaring BELOW you. While nestled in the cranny of a clff, I started writing this little ditty:

Hawks Over Eagle Lake

Two hawks come roiling by,
their wings a sandstone brown
and scalloped like the teeth
of plows. They shovel down
within the wind and lift
the air, letting it sift
between their feathered grates
seeking a golden prey,
prospecting far-flung sky
while turning ground away.

Eagle Lake

The last two years I’ve walked the carriage road around Eagle Lake for my first hike of the season, and today marked the third. The older I get, the wiser it seems to begin slow. It’s more than a five mile walk on a gravel road (limited to hikers and bicyclists) with a small climb off-road to the top of Connor’s Nubble. That trail is short but includes some nice rock-scrambling, and the view from the top is exhilarating. The mountains of Acadia ring the southern perspective and Frenchman Bay and distant blue mountains of Maine, the northern. Directly below, Eagle Lake stretches more than two miles in length. Seen from above it looks quite phallic. Maybe that’s why it’s such an invigorating start for the season.

Dateline Acadia

Beverly and I have traveled up to Acadia National Park, and we are staying in Bar Harbor for the long weekend (Patriots Day is somewhat of a holiday in Massachusetts and of course is otherwise known as Marathon Monday) in search of transcendental hiking and relaxation.

Frenchman Bay is right outside our balcony door. Listen. The waves are noisy at night. From the balcony, you can see the length of the Bay from the harbor out to Egg Rock Lighthouse and beyond to infinite ocean. When we arrived the sun was just setting. The sky directly above was overcast, but the western sky remained clear at the very margin. The sunlight shot onto the Porcupine Islands directly opposite our balcony and tinted the trees with a goldien hue.

This island touches my soul like no other place I know. All my normal defenses come down. Inhibitions melt away. And the spirit that lies still all winter long begins to flow.

Today I'll hike some trail that skirts a waterfall, ambles along a rushing brook, climbs a granite overhang, to reach a peak of intermittent island views and endless ocean vistas. Or maybe take it easy and ramble on a carriage trail around the circumference of Eagle Pond. I'll let you know tonight.

Blogging the Blues

Dave Bonta in Via Negativa today drives home a great blues blog riff both surreal and down-to-earth:

Son of House, you knew only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats. But they sure sounded great coming out of that steel guitar! Not to mention the bottle's severed neck riding on your littlest finger. That afterthought, that fifth wheel. Good for nothing but trouble -

When I start to walkin' I'm gonna walk from sun-to-sun, / ain't gonna quit walkin' till my journey's done.

Synchronicity

Ivy's playing a game today. Follow the meme.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

My turn. From Introduction to Supply Chain Management by Handfield and Nichols:

This leads to an information “no man’s land.”

I am not making this up. I'm at work and that book was closest to my reach.

R. S. Gwynn 101

No Word of Farewell dropped in the other day. Purchased on ABE, it took only a few days to make it here. R. S. Gwynn is one of the more muscular formalist poets out there through his use of contemporary language and dark humor. In the introduction to the book, Dana Gioia compares Gwynn to Thomas Hardy:

Both poets have a naturally democratic outlook, and they are fascinated by ordinary lives, especially when viewed at extraordinary moments. Both are deeply skeptical, even cynical observers of the human scene, who cannot mock their subjects without soon feeling a common human sympathy.

It’s such democratic cynicism that drew me to Gwynn’s work in the first place. Yet after reading a large helping of the poems, I’m a little disenchanted. The wordplay is remarkable and his mastery of form is an exercise in subtle control, but there’s an ostentatious aspect to much of the work that is frankly overwhelming when taken in large dosages. Poems like “1-800” and “Among Philistines” taken by themselves are charismatic, but when read en masse, with others like them, they become loud and excessive.

Still, they are far from quiet, full of life, and moving in the right direction.

We talk of taxes

Sonnet I

We talk of taxes, and I call you friend;
Well, such you are,--but well enough we know
How thick about us root, how rankly grow
Those subtle weeds no man has need to tend,
That flourish through neglect, and soon must send
Perfume too sweet upon us and overthrow
Our steady senses; how such matters go
We are aware, and how such matters end.
Yet shall be told no meagre passion here;
With lovers such as we forevermore
Isolde drinks the draught, and Guinevere
Receives the Table's ruin through her door,
Francesca, with the loud surf at her ear,
Lets fall the colored book upon the floor.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

3mt-5: The Merrimack River Before 1620

Before European Contact, the Merrimack River was part of a network of riverways and trails for a 'nation' of Indian villages, consisting of families interconnected with other villages through intermarriage and social commerce centering around agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Over thousands of years these communities developed in ways now lost to history. What we do know is that between the years 1617 and 1619, historians estimate that between 75% to 90% of the Indian population of New England died in an epidemic of viral hepatitis or chicken pox passed on by ailing European sailors. Thomas Morton described a village near Massachusetts Bay in his “New English Canaan”:

For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive, to tell what became of the rest, the livinge being (as it seems) not able to bury the dead, they were left for Crowes, Kites, and vermin to pray upon. And the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations, made such a spectacle after my coming into those partes, that as I travailed in the Forrest, nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new found Golgotha.

For the Pawtucket Indians on the Merrimack River, this “Algonquin apocalypse” left them vulnerable to attacks by their Eastern enemy, the Tarrantines. The Pawtucket chief Nanepashemet at that time held together the largest confederacy in New England. Their center was at Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack (now Lowell) but their territory extended south to the Mystic River, west to the Concord River, and east to the coast. David Stewart-Smith writes in his doctoral dissertation:

The Merrimack was deeply underpopulated with some villages abandoned. The Tarrantine came in raiding parties from their new location at Penobscot, to bring home corn, captives, and plunder.

And somewhere near Malden, Mass, in 1619, Nanepashemet made his last stand against the Tarrantine, and was killed. Such devastation was precursor to European settlement beginning with Plimoth Plantation 1620. Life on the Merrimack would never be the same.

_____________
three maple trees
-part one
-part two
-part three a
-part three b
-part four

Discovering Franz Wright's Feelings

There's an article in the NY Times about Franz Wright, the recent winner of the Pulitzer for Poetry. He's lived an amazing soap opera complete with famous father, abusive step-father, alcohol, depression, and much more. Yet at the same time his story is one of salvation (figuratively and literally.) I haven't read much of Franz Wright's poetry except for some works I found on-line after he won the Pulitzer. But the story is worth reading if only for its human interest, and this snippet from the famous lives of poets:

He grew up in a milieu of poets. John Berryman, another drunk, was a friend of his father's when they taught at the University of Minnesota. "That didn't help much with the alcoholism," Mr. Wright said. Theodore Roethke, a manic-depressive, jiggling his big belly, recited his children's poems to young Franz: "There Once was a cow with a Double Udder/When I think of it now, I just have to Shudder!"

Mr. Wright observed, "I thought that all adults were insane drunks and chain smokers."

And they're not?

PEx #2

Work #1

The workplace reels with covert
spreadsheets, ropes, and pull
toys. In the cambered office,
rich mahogany
is overwhelmed by crimson
ink from sacrifices
made to Nasdaq. Down

the hall an engineer
is crafting treatises
on self-adhesive gaskets
and twisted applications
for the bottom line.
Outside, the parking lot
has cleared and roads go roaming.

Gregory Perry 2004

PEx #1

Working Class Hero: a serial novel(Chapter 5: People)

Every night when I returned home from work, I took off my shoes and left them in the hallway, per the dictates of my mother. They were encrusted with the dyes and grime of work and there was no way she’d allow that muck on her carpets. So every afternoon, before I went to work, I sat on the stairway of our second floor apartment and put on cold shoes, preparing to face another night of routine.

At the end of my second month at the mill, Howard returned from his absence, and despite the bandage wrapped on his arm, he acted as if nothing had ever happened. The first thing he said upon walking in the door was of course another one of his dim-witted malapropisms. “I’m like Superman, the iron man. I’m deconstructable.” Ralph paid him no attention, acting as if Howard had been working next to us the past five weeks as normal. I laughed as usual.

At first I found Howard to be a welcome relief from Ralph’s bitter all-work attitude, but after a few days, his general levity and laziness began to wear on me. I mentioned this to Ralph on Thursday after Howard had conveniently disappeared during our preparations of a large mixture of purple number 11.

“Howard’s gone AWOL again” I said while scooping red powder into a bucket.

“Yeah. Probably sleeping on the bales of cloth next door.” Ralph matter-of-factly replied. He was preparing the acid solution.

“Sometimes I wish Howard wasn’t so damned lazy.” I said. “We have a job to do here.” I needed more red dye. The container was empty, so I searched the extra containers beneath the table.

Ralph stopped and waited until I rose again, a new container in my hands. He looked at me with sharp eyes. “Save your Puritan work ethic for Leon, will ya.”

“Hey, I’m just saying.” I said.

“Well, I’m just saying too. Lay off Howard.” Ralph replied.

“You can’t exactly say he’s much of a help.” I answered, as I struggled to open the new container.

“Well, you didn’t miss him much when he was gone, man, so why should you miss him now when’s he gone?” Ralph asked with a sardonic sneer. Or it could have been a wince; the acid had a loathsome smell.

“It’s the principle,” I answered with a groan. The container would just not open. “We gotta work so he should work too.”

“So you have it all figured it out. College boy, eh? Well you know the saying: until you’ve walked in someone else’s shoes.”

I looked down at my own shoes. “Well these are getting dirty while his are resting nicely.” I finally got the container open and powder had spilled onto the floor, and on me. “Look, I like Howard too, but you have to admit he’s a clown.”

Ralph stopped mixing the solution. “Look man, you don’t even know Howard.”

“Oh I know Howard, “ I laughed. “He’s loud, lazy, and brainless.” I scooped more red dye into the bucket.

Ralph threw down the stick he was using to stir. “Look, Howard’s had a raw deal, OK. He’ll never tell you anything about this shit, but I will. Just never say I told you.”

I stopped and looked at Ralph. This wasn’t banter any longer. Not even banter with an edge. Ralph looked like he was about to tell me some ghost story, standing around the acids and dye powders. I never saw him like that before. His face was drawn of any humor or anger.

“Howard and his wife tried for a long time to have a kid,” he began his story. “Howard would laugh that it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t shooting blanks. Of course, he didn’t say ‘blanks’. He wasn’t shooting any ‘blacks’, is what he’d say. And of course I’d scream at him, ‘blanks, blanks, you’re not shooting any blanks.’ And of course Howard would say ‘hey that’s what I told my wife too.’ Ralph was smiling now.

“Man, he’s always confusing his words.” I laughed.

“That’s Howard. Anyways Howard and Diana finally had a baby boy, and you never saw Howard as happy then. Man, talk about your jokes. He even gave away exploding cigars.”

“Cool.” I replied.

“Yeah, Howard can actually be funny on purpose sometimes,” Ralph laughed. Then he turned somber again. “Well things went great for three months. But Diana was always tired and angry, and I could tell things weren’t going too well between them. But he’d talk about the baby this and the baby that and to tell you the truth, I got a little tired of it, but hey, he was a father. What are you going to do.”

“I can’t picture Howard a father.” I replied.

“Yeah, that’s the thing. The baby died. In the crib, in his sleep. Howard went to wake him in the morning, and he was lying on his stomach, not breathing.”

“My God.” I answered.

“My effing God exactly. Howard didn’t come to work for weeks after that. And when he did come back, he never spoke a word about the baby. Still hasn’t to this day. We only found out through Diana, and that was something I’d never want to listen to again. She was crying in between every goddamned word.”

“He’s never mentioned it at all?” I asked.

“Not a fucking word, Calvin. And when he came back to work he didn’t say a single word period. He just worked. He must have been like that for months. When he talked all we’d talk about was work and only if we had to. But one day, he let out one of his Howardisms, ‘I need another relief pitcher of blues number two.’ He began laughing and I began laughing until we both were laughing tears. Literally I mean tears. We didn’t say anything, but we laughed. And after that Howard was just Howard again.”

“He certainly is an individual.” I replied as I started scooping some blue powder into the bucket.

“He certainly is.” Ralph returned to the acid solution. “So maybe you can understand why I’m happy just seeing Howard being himself.”

“Sure. But I didn’t know” I replied.

“Calvin, you’re going to find out that despite your mother-effing college education, there’s a lot you don’t know.” He was silent for a minute. “People,” he sighed.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing; just people.”

_________________
Chapter 1: Life Span
Chapter 2: An Academic Dialogue
Chapter 3: On-the-Job Training
Chapter 4: Dreamwork

Fagles on Virgil on....

Maybe Maher can read this one night to POTUS. From a N.Y. Times article on Robert Fagles and his new translation of the Aeneid:

" 'The Aeneid' is a cautionary tale," he said. "It is one we need to read today. It speaks of the terrible price of victory in war, for Virgil knew that victory is finally impossible, that it always lies out of reach. He saw the unforeseen aftermath, the way war could all go wrong whether from poor planning or because of the gods on high. He knew the sheer accumulation of death, the destruction, the pain we inflict when we use force to create empire."

Enough said.

The Poetics of Fundamentalism

American Poetry is a world unto its own where a variety of religions thrive and fight, each with God on their side. Every religion consists of many churches, each of which has its own cardinals and bishops and priests. All believe in the infallibility of their word and in the wrong-headed ways of the infidels that preach another creed. Although I have been attending the church of the neoformalists for the past ten years, I have never been baptized. I’m agnostic and resemble Groucho Marx in more ways than one; I guess I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member either. Bob Grumman has put together a directory of the schools of American Poetry. Here are the eight main religions as he see them:

-Mainstream Poetry
-Easy-Stream Poetry
-Language Poetry
-Contra-Genteel Poetry
-Neoformalist Poetry
-Pluraesthetic Poetry
-Infraverbal Poetry
-Hypertextual Poetry

In the coming weeks, I’ll try to understand these religions and their various archdioceses, using Grumman’s list as my rough course outline. In the meanwhile, to paraphrase a prayer I’ve heard: Word, if you are, forgive me. Word, if you are not, be.

Farrelly Brothers Explicate Three Stooges

I was not aware that the Farrelly brothers were planning to film a Three Stooges movie, but I guess I'm not surprised. After all, Moe, Larry, and Curly were the original Dumb, Dumber, and Dumberest. An article in this week's New Yorker explains the creative process behind their efforts, both Farrellys' and Stooges', as well as this demographic thesis,

Peter has a theory of Stooge appreciation, based upon his own changing allegiances: “Growing up, first you watched Curly, then Moe, and then your eyes got to Larry. He’s the reactor, the most vulnerable. Five to fourteen, Curly; fourteen to twenty-one, Moe. Anyone out of college, if you’re not looking at Larry, you don’t have a good brain.”

and pyschological anlysis,

“We decided that Moe’s anger has to do with the fact that the three of them were put in an orphanage and Moe had a chance to go out and make it on his own, but he thought, I can’t leave these knuckleheads behind. He comes back and he feels that he gave up everything to stay and be the leader of these Stooges—because as bad as they are with him, in his eyes they’re sunk without him.”

Now, if only someone could deconstruct "nyuk, nyuk, nyuk," then one question for the ages would at long last be answered.

My precious, on April 12

Gandalf reaches Hobbiton to warn Frodo about the Ring, and so begins their quest to destroy that all-powerful icon for evil. If Middle Earth translated to our age, I wonder what that ring would be? Is it money, the root of all evil, which we must take to the nearest incinerator and destroy like so many leaves of autumn? Is it the worldwide arsenal of nuclear weapons and its dark threshold of nihilistic possibility? Or is it something even deeper and much more unforgiving? Like self-knowledge of death and the resultant need for an eternal love potion of power. Ah, this is much too deep for me. Like my old downstairs neighbor Jim, a retired fireman who had fought one too many fires, would say, I need "a shot of cheap hot whiskey" after all this foolosophizing.

Peacock exposed by bookslut

Chris Murray today lets us know the latest issue of bookslut is out and in so doing tells us that it includes an interview with Molly Peacock. So I clicked right over and read one of the most unassuming and refreshing takes on the sonnet and Formalist vis-a-vis Language Poetry in the modern history of American politics (oops, I just morphed into John Kerry.) It's not a long interview and the questions concerning the sonnet form and formalism in general, though telling, are few. But here's one taste anyways:

I tend to let the rhyme shift, like I might start off abab, and then suddenly I have cddc and I know that there is some unconscious emotional pulse that’s pulling it and I let that happen. And then what if I got effg, I’ll let that happen too, and I’ll just keep picking it up. I really love the unconscious surges that control the music. Music in poetry is both the least conscious aspect and the most consciously manipulatable part of it. I love being astonished by that play, I feel the significance of something taking over and I obey it. I don’t try to wrench the poem back into some kind of stricture. I am not Jesuitical about my sonnet form.

And to think I had her Selected in my hands on Saturday and decided at the last moment not to purchase it. Well, until I do, I'll read this and this and this and this.

3mt-4: nuclear family

Before John Greenleaf Whittier strolled along the road through Pleasant Valley, and before the first ferry transported travelers from Boston to points north, and before the first Europeans settled the banks of the Merrimack River, bands of Central Abenakis settled on its shores from the Atlantic to Lake Winnepesaukee. They were called the Pennacook Indians, a loose confederation of tribes held together by family interrelationships and the river. The Pawtucket tribe lived on the southern part of the Merrimack, from Haverhill to Newburyport, and would have called the surrounding area home. It’s since changed:

Still, some places once occupied by Indians are now unrecognizable as such. A site where Pawtucket Indians once carefully buried their dead today is a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, N.H. Other former Indian encampments are now a trash incinerator in Haverhill, the Plaistow, N.H., dump and a construction company in Kingston, N.H.

So much for three downed maple trees.

_____________
three maple trees
-part one
-part two
-part three a
-part three b

and drink wine salt...

Easter Day

The silver trumpets rang across the Dome:
 The people knelt upon the ground with awe:
 And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,
 And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,
 Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head:
In splendour and in light the Pope passed home.
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
 To One who wandered by a lonely sea,
 And sought in vain for any place of rest:
“Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest,
 I, only I, must wander wearily,
 And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.”

-Oscar Wilde