yaakov murchadha

2011-07-05T13:27:00.003-04:00

New! Arthur Vogelsang interview/review, "Digitalis" by Doug Logan. Review--Darcy Cummings' "The Artist as Alice"

Poems & Prose

Digitalis
By Doug Logan

The Morning's Birds
By Doug Logan

Bejeweled, Bothered and Bewildered
By Murchadha

Three Poems
By Therese Halscheid

Chaucer's Creative Destruction
By Murchadha

Variation on a Theme by W.S.
By Murchadha

Four Poems
By Darcy Cummings

First Wife
By Anne-Marie Levine

Remix (4)
By Murchadha

Contemplating His Mortality
By Murchadha

Extreme Weather
By Elaine Terranova

Four November 9ths
By Anne-Marie Levine

Mendocino Coast, 1967
By Dorothea Grossman

Not Again
By Dorothea Grossman

Mantis
By Elizabeth Brunazzi

Uniontown, 1980
By Doug Logan

Remix (3)
By Murchadha

Remix (2)
By Murchadha

Waiting on Hold for Tech Support
By Murchadha

Stink Bug
By Yaakov

60 Minutes
By Murchadha

Turtle Bay 1998
By Murchadha

Remix (1)
By Murchadha

Reviews & Interviews
Review: Darcy Cummings' "The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer's Life"
By Yaakov

Arthur Vogelsang--Interview Plus Review
By Elaine Terranova and Yaakov

Review: Louise Gluck's "A Village Life"
By Elaine Terranova

Review: Frederick Seidel's "Ooga-Booga"
By Elaine Terranova

Review: Rachel Loden's "Dick of the Dead"
By Elaine Terranova

Joshua Marie Wilkinson--Interview Plus Review
By Yaakov

Michael Burkard--An Appreciation
By Yaakov

A Poet Plain and Simple
By Murchadha

Observations & Commentary

Wallace Stevens, Philosopher
By Murchadha

Fairey Comment
By Murchadha

The Dance of Vowels and Consonants
By Murchadha

Representation
By Yaakov

A Language Discarded
By Yaakov

Langpo and Pedagogy
By Yaakov

Poetry Matrix
By Murchadha

Same Difference
By Murchadha

Short Thought/Long Thought
By Yaakov

Got Mlk?
By Murchadha

Poetryland
By Murchadha

Random Acts of Poetry
By Murchadha

It All Depends . . .
By Murchadha

On the V-Tec Shootings
By Yaakov

Review: Yaakov on Darcy Cummings' "The Artist As Alice: From a Photogrpaher's Life"

2011-07-05T13:23:00.003-04:00

“The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer’s Life” by Darcy Cummings
Reviewed by Yaakov

In "The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer’s Life" (Bright Hill Press, 2006), a biography of an imaginary Alice, Alice of Lewis Carroll’s famous tale, Darcy Cummings tells of the girl grown into wife, womanhood and motherhood, of her evolution into a professional life of her own as a photographer, of the dead and then resiliently of light and the living. Wonderfully, the book is rich and insightful as it works like a river of life through all of these transformations.

I love the way Carroll’s rabbit trespasses into patches of poems. As in the volume’s introductory poem, “Years Later, Alice Dreams of Rabbits,” where “…the infant at her breast/is whiskered and furred. Face quivering, it nibbles her berry stained fingers.” And where later in the poem she hears a snared rabbit squeal as it’s skinned. Intimations of the deaths of children and symbolically of the spiritual flaying of marriage. The implication is metaphorically profound: entering a new life stage is akin to descending the rabbit hole.

This is also a book featuring great diversity in its language and attitude toward form. Cummings provides sonnets and otherwise, poems buckled into punctuation and poems released therefrom, this perhaps a grammatical metaphor for Alice’s marriage. Compare the astringent sparseness of “The Séance”—“Husband, speak to me. Once you spoke/ice into my limbs, froze my steps,/stiffened my tongue. My dreams fled.”--and the remarkable aftermath poem, “How The Dreams Returned To Her Body,” to such engagements with natures as this selection from “Primipara”: “In May everything was green:/even the paths between fields were half/hidden in green: Creeping Thyme, Ajuga,/and all the miniature forests escaped/from kitchen gardens . . .”
The issue of Death of course figures largely, as it does in any life history, and here it finds voices ranging from consolatory to commercial. In this regard I especially enjoyed the anti-poetic “Photographing The Dead Infant: Instructions For The New Employee,” which is everything the title implies and serves as a welcome and indeed brilliant counterpoint to the poems facing grief head on, including the one immediately preceding it, “Making Arrangements,” in which Alice laments the lack of a photograph of her own lost first born.

The volume’s final sections convey a sense of Alice’s maturity, of having found peace and purpose in her chosen profession. There’s a sense of quiet triumph over things lived through. And of the deep self-esteem and willingness to endure that with luck arrive after pain and hard work. “Hand Portrait #5,” a poem about, among other things, the faithful reciprocity between the left and right hands, offers a poignant coda : “. . .Hand in late afternoon light somehow like/a crouching crab or a dense spider, weary, but willing/to resume work tomorrow, to spin out another day/like this one. . . “

Digitalis

2011-04-01T16:16:00.004-04:00

By Doug Logan

With GPS and text and tweet,
with Google search and Google maps
and zoomed-in views of every street
and all those other handy apps;

with 3G here and Wi-Fi there
and data packets streaming past
and Bluetooth transfer everywhere
and all the wikis filling fast,

we need no longer memorize
or plan, or wait, or understand;
we merely have to energize
and tap a screen with each demand.

Why trouble much to learn or know
more than the flick of find and fetch,
and where electric sockets grow,
and how far charging cords will stretch?

A comfort of our own kind around,
we stoke the rumors that we heed
and spurn all those who would confound
the dogged dogmas that we breed.

Connections thought to interrelate
but made in bilious density
turn out instead to separate,
fanning passionate intensity.

Not touching things that might leave scars,
not caring what disturbs and scares,
we're safe and svelte in cyber bars,
death dealt by joystick from our chairs.

Recall the brilliant foxglove plant
which tamed will tame the frantic heart,
but taken raw will trip a rant,
then stupefy and tear apart.

Doug Logan is a former editor of Sailing World and Practical Sailor, and has written about boats and the sea for a long time. He has also edited UCLA Healthy Years, a consumer newsletter. He worked in New York as an editor of novels, nautical books, and publications on U.S.-Soviet relations. He runs a blog on conservation and alternative energy at www.newenergywatch.com, and one with poems at www.burgoo.net.

Wallace Stevens, Philosopher

2011-03-23T14:52:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder, Yaakov, about the nature of reality and the reality of nature? You may not frame your thoughts in those terms. You may frame your thoughts like Jacob Needleman did in an article titled "An Awkward Question," which was published in the June 1981 issue of Science 81:

"Perhaps the wholeness of nature can never be seen by human beings who are not themselves whole. In physics, for example, every advance in observational technology yields a new crop of 'ultimate' particles and conflicting theories, leading to ever more sophisticated mathematical techniques. It is no longer clear whether theoretical physics is providing knowledge of the real world out there or only reports about the endless ramifications of conceptual logic in our own minds."

Or you may frame your thoughts like Wallace Stevens did, in his poetry, which to Stevens was a medium for understanding reality in its many guises.

For Stevens, the composition of poetry is the best means we have of initiating an inquiry into reality. "Poetry is the supreme fiction," he wrote in "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman." If reality is our conceptual fiction, as Needleman conjectured, then poetry is the best way to understand it. Why? Because we can only understand what we can put into words. "Description is revelation," Stevens wrote in "Description Without Place," and poetry is the highest form of description. Description . . .

. . . is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

America's most philosophical poet was born on October 2, 1879 in Reading, PA. His father was a country lawyer and his mother, of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, was a schoolteacher. He was educated at private schools and Lutheran church schools before going on to Reading Boys High School, a public school. He enrolled at Harvard in 1897 and, while there, published poetry and articles in the Harvard Advocate, a campus magazine.
Stevens left Harvard without a degree in 1900 and went to New York, where he worked as a reporter for the New York Tribune. He went to New York Law School, graduated in 1903 and was admitted to the bar the next year. He worked as an attorney for several New York firms and in 1916 he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Hartford, CT. Eventually he rose to the position of vice president in 1934 and worked for the company for the rest of his life.

Having become established in a career, he married Elsie Kachel Moll, a shop clerk from Reading. They had a daughter, Holly, in 1924. The marriage was said to be unhappy but stable, meaning that Stevens didn't play around. Elsie was fanatical in her housekeeping and Stevens both idealized her and rejected her narrow outlook on life.

Stevens was a very private man. He didn't receive literary acquaintances at his home in Hartford. He did, however, sometimes mix with writers and artists in the Greenwich Village circle of his Harvard classmate, the art collector Walter Arensberg. Picture it. Here was this reserved insurance executive in his gray flannel suit hanging out with Bohemians with a Bolshevik bent, to whom people like Stevens embodied the very bourgeois capitalism they railed against. As it happens, Stevens was a closet socialist during the 1930s even as New Masses, a Marxist journal, was criticizing his poetry for being indifferent to political and social issues.

In his day job Stevens examined and signed off on insurance claims. He once told an interviewer, "Poetry and surety claims aren't as unlikely a combination as they may seem. There's nothing perfunctory about them for each case is different."

But it was an unlikely combination to literary critics, who ignored Stevens for most of his career in poetry, perhaps because they couldn't imagine how such a conservative man could produce such innovative verse. At Harvard he was encouraged to write poetry by the philosopher George Santayana and for years he published poems in Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, which also gave space to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot during their formative years. He even had a verse drama produced at New York's Provincetown Playhouse in 1917, which was home to Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes. Harmonium, his first collection of poetry, was well received by fellow poets like Marianne Moore, but it sold all of 100 copies for lack of critical acceptance. As late as 1931, Percy Hutchison, critic for The New York Times, was dismissing this volume:

"From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering edifice of icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead."

Hutchison and other critics made the mistake of judging a book by its cover. Just because Stevens didn't look or act the part of a poet didn't mean he wasn't a poet. Harmonium, of course, now stands as one of the great works of American poetry. He was 44-years-old when it was published in 1923 and, contrary to conventional wisdom about people being most creative in their younger years, his best work was ahead of him. Yeats and Joyce also did their best work in their later years.

As a young poet Stevens, like Pound and Eliot, was influenced by the French symbolists Baudelaire and Mallarme, and by the way the French impressionist painters viewed reality as a matter of perception. Many of his early poems have titles that read like the titles of paintings. But Stevens was essentially an American poet, both in spirit and in disposition—he never traveled outside the country. When asked whether it was possible to distinguish an American poem from a British poem, he said that "the Americans are not British in sensibility . . . we live in two different physical worlds, and it is not nonsense to think that that matters."

It's not surprising that Stevens was inspired by Baudelaire and Mallarme, because they were inspired by that most American poet and writer Edgar Allan Poe, whose "Philosophy of Composition" became the foundation of the modernist aesthetic. Picasso would have been a nobody without Poe. Picasso, too, was indebted to the impressionist painters, whose preoccupation with perception as it organizes reality dates to Bishop Berkeley and, yes, to the ancient Greeks. Everything dates to ancient Greek philosophy. As German philosophers say, all else is commentary.

Commenting on Stevens the poet, I would say that he's in the first tier of American poets, along with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams. I would say that his best poems are "The Comedian as the Letter C," "Depression Before Spring," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" (his personal favorite), "Sunday Morning," which made his reputation as a poet, "To the One of Fictive Music," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "What We See Is What We Think," "The Plain Sense of Things" and "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself," a formula he borrowed from William Carlos Williams and a final recognition that reality exists outside of perception. My own favorite is "Description Without Place." Like Poe's "The Bells," it must be read aloud to hear its chimes.

Read these poems and you will see the progress of an honest person struggling with timeless philosophical issues. And you will come to understand, I think, that a person who goes through life without struggling with these issues is a person who hasn't really lived.

Stevens finally achieved critical acclaim in the last decade of his life. In 1949 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. He won a National Book Award for Auroras of Autumn in 1951. In 1955, the year he died, he won another National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems.

As he was dying in August 1955, Wallace Stevens converted to Catholicism. For me this deathbed conversion represents his understanding that in the end, all philosophical issues are at heart religious issues.

Arthur Vogelsang--Interview Plus Review

2011-03-05T16:15:00.024-05:00

Arthur Vogelsang—Interview Plus Review

The publication of Expedition: New & Selected Poems (Ashland, 2011) provides us the occasion to celebrate its author, Arthur Vogelsang, one of YM’s favorites. Vogelsang has won Pushcart Prizes, a few NEAs, the Juniper, and others, but perhaps the best testament to his value is his wide-ranging appeal: his credits go from The New Yorker to Volt, surely an achievement in a fragmented world. Elaine Terranova and YM double-team him in the following interview. Elaine Terranova is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Not To: New and Selected Poems and a chapbook, Elegiac: Footnotes to Rilke's Duino Elegies. She has published poetry and reviewed books by Louise Gluck, Frederick Seidel, and Rachel Loden at yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com.

INTERVIEW

Elaine Terranova: Can you think of a formative experience in your life that turned you toward poetry?

Arthur Vogelsang: As a child, I read before attending school, reading before the age of four, living in a house in Baltimore with six adults, relatives, minus my father who was in the Army in the European war since I was an infant, and who I remember meeting when he came home. I met my father. The adults in my house took turns reading to me and as there were many of them I believe I picked it up readily.

There were several difficult incidents I remember, living with the six adults during the war, besides the later one of meeting my father. One was some sort of lure or promise in the basement which one or two of the adults were amused by, since I feared going into the basement alone but forgot about that until I got down there, nearly every time, with semi-hysterical results. Yes, then you could fool me more than three times. I don’t remember my mother’s position on or reaction to the lone basement visits. Rather than a lure down there, promised by the adults, I suspect I may have fantasized on my own and insisted about something down there which didn’t exist, and that therefore I was the source of my fright. Another difficulty was the blackouts, practice air raid drills, with black curtains pulled down and city-wide sirens. In another case, I was allowed to test-smoke a cigar on someone’s lap, in response to my persistent, bothersome requests, became ill, and so did not smoke, even as a dare, even one puff, even marijuana, until I was 22. Every cloud has a silver lining. I think I, as the only child in the house during the war, was pleased and attended to by the six adults quite a bit, but that happiness seemed usual. As a formative experience that turned me toward poetry, perhaps I should have said and that happiness seemed usual. However, we all seemed to be waiting for something, obviously, especially my mother.

In school, I wanted to be a cowboy, a baseball player, or a writer. I don’t know why. I was told that as an adult one was paid for stories. I wrote them, in prose of course, about cowboys and baseball players. Until I was 14 or 15 I had delusions, or perhaps only illusions since I was somewhat athletic, of earning a living as a baseball player. At about that time I began to play against people my age who would indeed go on briefly to the major leagues, and the difference in ability was astounding, while at about the same time I began to read adult books – Sandburg, Hemingway, Elinor Wylie, Untermeyer’s two anthologies, Modern American Poetry and Modern British Poetry -- and was not only discouraged by my athletic competition but also bored with the game. Practicing bunting was no longer interesting. I also noticed that there were few maybe no girls at the thrice-weekly games and thrice-weekly practices, but that there were many girls in the junior high school’s library, the local branch library, and the huge Enoch Pratt Library. I began to write about imaginary relationships with them and with girls at school. I still believe the sexual impulse is hand-in-hand with the writing itch. I don’t know what female poets do about this, and few will discuss my idea with me. There’s a clue to something. Meanwhile, among my contemporaries now, I read significantly more women poets than men. For one thing, with the women there is less of an unwarranted assumption of wisdom, and their work is, oh, juicier aesthetically. Back to formative stuff, though I suppose that last digression had to do with formative-now. In high school I was incredibly lonely except for two literary friends, and had to rely on my imagination not only for sexual encounters but also for companionship. I also began to read on my own in libraries in a wider circle of writers – all of Joyce except Finnegans Wake, for instance. Yeats, Don Quixote, Eliot. Many others. In high school I didn’t care for Whitman, Dickinson, or Faulkner. No idea of the contemporaries of, say, 1950 – 1960. I had a great English teacher in high school, Frances Meginnis, who called on me in class so as to expose my interests, knowledge, and worth, and gave me the opportunity to read some of my short stories to the rest of the class, a radical happening in high school at the time. I had a brilliant teacher in college, Rudd Fleming, who Liam Rector also encountered a little later than me and wrote about. Dr. Fleming was able to speak about literature in a conversational language that included the best that had been thought and said. He encouraged dialogues with his students but I was nowhere near his level – it was difficult to ask questions or cause encounters of the mind or spirit – so I listened. He buttonholed me in the hallway a couple of times and emphasized that I was… hard to remember… emphasized the difference or specialness in me as a literary operative. Gave me the idea that I had a literary enterprise.

When I went to the Johns Hopkins Seminars and then Iowa City, having formative experiences was not the name of the game, um, the opposite of it. I met my wife Judy at Johns Hopkins, she was a fiction student and then became a filmmaker, and she’s been one formative experience in becoming the poet I am in numerous literary ways, and the formative experience in personal ways, once we met. I lived in New York for two years between those workshops, with Judy who was a New Yorker, and something overall happened there that was as formative as the conflicted childhood visits to the basement, nothing I can put my finger on, and all to the good. Probably it’s a city every poet should live in for two years with a native, when he or she is 24 – 26 as I was.

ET: You were an editor for many years. Did this help you form a poetic practice of your own? In what ways?

AV: No. Deciding editorially, plus the beautiful cacophony of contributors with their individual voices, plus doing administration, plus the off-key grating cacophony of contributors with their voices, plus networking, were all mushed together and it was more like a region of tribes in which it was the custom for the offspring to continue to live in the one tepee with the grandparents and parents and try to kill one and procreate with the other, and then with the offspring’s offspring living there too and trying to depose or mate any of their progenitors in the tepee. Meanwhile simultaneously they’d have to teach each other to gather berries, hunt, and make acorn mush. Imagine our society if that was the social custom, the biological imperative, and the economic structure. My poetry under such conditions was necessarily a separate tent.

ET: What is the influence of travel or great changes of scene in your work? I know you traveled between coasts regularly and your poems reflect this. You seem to have spent a lot of time on airplanes.

AV: The scenes in my work are changed, in the same poem as you suggest, for aesthetic reasons gathered around Homer’s practice of not staying in the same place for long as a reciter or staying in the setting of the poem for long without changing the setting, and his corollary practice of not doing the same thing twice in a small space and, if possible, giving the impression of never doing the same thing twice. I think my scenes, while many are described naturalistically, are psychic scenes, as when Brueghel has the Alps as an immediate background to a harbor and sea.

I traveled two to three times a year on airplanes coast to coast for decades, and some additional personal trips that far because Los Angeles is so far away from everything, especially the East Coast and its literary opportunities, and relatives. The trips taught me how to live in a pure and bitter and irrational fear for five hours.

ET: Teaching seems to be the usual default career for poets today. Have you taught a lot?

AV: I’ve taught one-semester graduate poetry workshops and/or seminars at USC (twice), once at Redlands, UNLV, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. Also a traveling workshop to 5 remote Kansas communities for the Kansas Arts Commission. Not much teaching in my life. It is always a serious pleasure, sometimes more than that if the students are exceptional. Rather than teaching, I purposely chose the editor route with APR in the early seventies because it seemed to be in touch with what was being written successfully in the immediate present, and had the practical, satisfying value of spreading that writing to a more general public than one department in the university community. Unlike the early 70s, there are now enormous numbers of aspiring writers graduating every year from programs, with book-length manuscripts in hand – someone connected with a service organization, someone who should know, told me 2,000 such graduates each year, and someone else who should know told me 5,000. Even if we cut the figures in half, or use one-third, it’s an unusual situation in literary history. A large, self-perpetuating engine, producing more poetry teachers and more programs. I think the teacher/poets actually like the classroom and conference sessions a lot. As I said, for me it’s a serious pleasure, sometimes more than that.

ET: The line seems to stretch out in your more recent work. Do you start out with a line length in mind?

AV: The long lines in my first four books, and my desire to avoid turnovers, were a problem for the designer, as they were in this fifth one, Expedition. I don’t have the impression of doing longer lines in recent work, but if you think so…. I don’t know, maybe we could measure them and count the long ones. To me a line is an abstract feeling and thought that becomes an actual thing once language occurs and then, to me, it contains something complete – one attitude, one idea, a certain definitive part of a scene, one feeling. Sometimes for the effect of disassociation, or disintegration, or the center not holding, or anything breaking in pieces, etcetera, I’ll purposely and I hope obviously for effect break a line disruptively and then begin a line disruptively. Putting the disruption on the next line, usually complete for another function, makes that next line longer. Several situations like that make for lots of long lines in my poetry. It isn’t a whim and it isn’t prose.

ET: Where did you grow up? Was childhood a thrilling experience?

AV: Baltimore. See the first answer about formative experience. Besides that portion of my life in the city in answer one, I should mention summers spent in rented houses on the Chesapeake Bay or near the ocean, which were idyllic and adventurous. I was allowed alone and unsupervised to use a rowboat, in a small harbor, when I was seven. We were evacuated three times from Fenwick Island in hurricanes. On various bays, there was a lot of crabbing with hand lines from shore and trot lines from a boat. If you are not already a devotee of catching and eating the Atlantic blue crab, explaining that acute and satisfying activity is usually boring, so I won’t.

ET: What did it mean to you to study and teach at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the first and probably most renowned graduate creative writing program in the U.S. of the 20th century? Any especially influential teachers or classmates?

AV: Teaching at Iowa was more like talking to other poets and writers than like talking to students, and was very relaxing. I taught one semester. I had been an MFA student there 18-20 years before. My wife Judy had been a student in the Film and TV Department then, and we considered staying for Phds mostly because we loved the town and the friends we had there in the Workshops and the Film Department, but didn’t stay to pursue the doctorate because we didn’t want to pursue academia. When I taught, it was quite moving to see the town and countryside after the long absence. That semester the permanent poetry faculty was away except for Marvin Bell, so filling the slots besides me were Ann Lauterbach and Ira Sadoff – getting to know all three poets well in close quarters was terrific.

ET: Do you have a favorite of your books? Which gave you the most satisfaction to write?

AV: Do you have a favorite of your children? Which gave you the most satisfaction to raise? I’m not being snarky here, forgive me, I’m making a point. Of course you are right in your two questions’ assumption, which is that they have answers, yes they do, and wouldn’t it be interesting (yes) to know the answers, or moreso to hear the poet’s reasoning, aesthetics, history, re the books. I just don’t feel like talking about it, it’s too personal. Also, this might be valuable for readers to know, answering these two questions in any detail would crystallize something significant to do with the next book I’m writing, so it, the something, wouldn’t be available as flexible, raw material to me. Even as to form.

ET: You’ve lived on both coasts, and these environments share a socio-political climate if not a real one. Is there a politics to your work or one you are trying to get down on paper for your readers? In at least one recent poem, “Komodo,” I get a strong sense of your sympathy with environmental concerns and a questioning of what we are doing technologically and humanly with such innovations as Google Earth.

AV: The socio-political climate, the earth’s deteriorating climate, technology coming to the front and the rear of the stage, are as much concerns of the poet now, me anyway, as the concerns of the individual human heart and spirit, or death, or romantic love have been in the past and continue to be – all of it side by side now. Man is still a wolf to man, love still means willingness to sacrifice for the other, death is puzzling or undeserved, people are cowards and are brave, same person sometimes, all this continuing beside new things like the possibility of a hideous worldwide plague from the earth being exhausted greedily and the probability of life being difficult soon from the earth being exhausted greedily. There may also be a devastating change in human nature from its obsession with technology and the immense everyday hours we put in cahoots with it (if you go to jail, you learn to be a criminal, or if you are already, you learn to be a better criminal).

ET: One good thing about a new and selected collection is that in a way it organizes itself. How important is it to have a strategy for arranging a book and has this varied for you from book to book? Are there purposeful shifts in form and tone from book to book?

AV: Urges, of course combined with what I’ve absorbed from all reading, urges when they yearn for form, for sequences of words, but urges nevertheless, make the shifts from book to book. You don’t plan it until it’s about to be manifest. Frost said the first line was a place where emotion and thought meet, or he almost said that and I have it wrong a little bit, and going from a book to the next book is a simple expansion and copying of that event of the first line and the condition of the poet just before the event.

When I’ve finished a book and am writing new poems, the new poems begin to cohere to each other, or stick like metal filings to a magnet, and I recognize that while it’s happening. The arrangement of a new book begins to happen then. I hold the possibilities in mind as I continue to write individual poems, but the individual poem rarely tries to have a date with the arrangement, since the arrangement is a kind of ghost under the stage. Finally there is a kind of satisfaction, or good exhaustion, at about the 40 – 60 poem point, and I try a few more poems – sometimes they work out and sometimes not – but in either case that’s the book. I don’t think it’s a matter of choice that so many poetry books by so many poets are the same size. I think there’s a strong element of biology to it. Then, sure, you start thinking about the order of the poems and perhaps make a kind of dramatic arc with your shuffling, but I don’t think it gets as involved as the denouments and first turn of the plot and so forth in plays and novels.

When I mention urges, good exhaustion, and biology, above, I’m speaking from the position that art is a necessary human activity for all humans, even if only an urge, and that the artist is the main figure in the landscape.

ET: Your poems sometimes have the feeling of dramatic monologues, say like Robert Browning’s. Have you invented a persona to narrate and is he always the same?

AV: Usually the narrator has several models sit for his portrait and then the portrait speaks. Same with most of the characters in my poems. Sometimes the narrator is only me. Jung says we’re each character in our dreams. OK, that too.

ET: Do movies, novels, theater, music affect your aesthetic? In what ways?

AV: Oddly, thinking about it thoroughly now almost for the first time, no. As a very general background, novels, yes, but the background is so deep and unattached to my poems, like the painted back screen on a stage becoming the whole world outside, as it often did in films, while we (I) must sit there in the audience and would be disillusioned if we went up on stage and tried to connect with what was happening by walking through the painted back screen. Just wouldn’t work. We’d be backstage, not in the whole world outside.

ET: Are you somebody who sets aside certain hours of the day for writing? Do you write on a computer or a big yellow tablet?

AV: I’ve written at different hours different times in my life. Now in the morning and mid-afternoon. Always with a pen (any kind) on paper (lined preferred, blank typing sheets ok). Never on a keyboard. Tried that occasionally and it read like a telegram. I need the pen and paper to handwrite to be able to think and feel at the same time. I like the convenience and speed of being able to change a word or line on the paper. Then I keyboard the first draft, which will have numerous handwritten edits, keyboard on the computer, print that out, and revise on that piece of paper. Then keyboard those changes, and so forth. I touch type at a brisk speed, like 50 – 55 words per minute, with few errors.

ET: A lot of poets don’t like to give readings while others find it a way to connect with readers and to get their books known. What are your feelings about the reading circuit?

AV: Wish there weren’t so many mediocre-to-bad poets getting monstrous sums while there are many more brilliant poets who get very little. Wish there weren’t so many boring poets giving a lot of readings. It is OK with me if a good poet promotes herself or himself by doing a lot of readings, more power to them.

As far as the reading itself, my readings, I’m mildly anxious before, but once up there I like it a lot. I attempt to experience the thought and emotion and syntax of each phrase while I’m reading, and to read in a conversational voice, heightened in the manner of a passionate, significant talk in a person’s life. Several people have had the nerve to tell me my poems are better at readings than on the page, and a few others that they are not difficult when heard at a reading, unlike on the page. I’ve heard recordings of Pound, Dylan Thomas, Eliot, and Sandburg, and think they are dreadful readers, emoting melodramatically, frantically or grandiosely pumping up speech, or deadpanning.

Yaakov Murchadha: How did you come to be where you are in your writing?

AV: Answered mostly in the first question about formative experiences, and in a few other places. Of course the movement between the four books is not covered in my first answer, or in much of the rest of the interview, except I’d like to apply or repeat something I said, which is that for me to talk now about the movements from book to book would crystallize something significant to do with the next book I’m writing at this moment, so it, the something, wouldn’t be available as flexible, raw material to me.

YM: What are your thoughts on the structure of the poetry world, where there seem to be many small hierarchies and many stars leading their modest followings? Do you agree with this description?

AV: Since I believe all poetry has value, I might put it differently than your question, but not enough to disagree with your general drift. I don’t know what to do about it. What would you do? There are some living poets who transcend your description. At the end of question-answer four, I mention the huge waves of degree-bearing, book-bearing people who enter “the poetry world” each year. These waves produce the vast population of “many small hierarchies and many stars leading their modest followings” that you speak of.

YM: Could you provide a list of favorites – poets, movies, prose writers . . .

AV: No. These lists come out periodically in print and online sporadically from individuals, and in response but privately I sometimes viciously and hilariously make my own lists which are bizarre, absurd, hurtful, and never shared with others. The list of lists would be a large number of topics with no items, for instance your 1,000 worst and 1,000 best topics, never listing the items. For instance, Movies a best topic among 999 others, but “Citizen Kane” nor any other movies mentioned. Kinds of Poop a worst topic. Or wait, maybe a best topic. Never would the various forms of poop be mentioned.

YM: Politics in your work seems located in gender scenarios, and it’s hard to imagine your wonderful voice conveying something like a political message. Comments?

AV: Thanks, this is a compliment. But I think in some to many of my poems gender scenarios and a political message are thrown in the same ring, with a narrator-referee, or put in a car together for a 40-minute trip, or however you want to put it. I think I have poems in which communities of two people, broader communities of families, widening out to communities of regions, countries, planets (yes), and even communities of what’s beyond us, are variously mixed or have encounters in my poems to try to make what isn’t a mixed metaphor. On the other hand, in some of my poems, politics seems located in gender scenarios, yes. You seem to portray my particular “wonderful voice” as being incompatible with a political message. Probably it would be if I tried to say the message directly, as other voices have so marvelously done – Bob Dylan or Auden, for example. I wouldn’t try that, no.

YM: Clayton Eshleman wrote in an essay about getting his thoughts on Bush and Rumsfeld into the “poetic record.” Does such a thing exist?

AV: It exists for Clayton. Possibly his archive is pre-sold to Buffalo. I like him and would begin to read the essay though I might not finish it.

AV (Question): I want to ask myself a question and then answer it, OK? Here it is: Let’s look at a previous question and answer again, here, and expand on it. The question was: “Your poems sometimes have the feeling of dramatic monologues, say like Robert Browning’s. Have you invented a persona to narrate and is he always the same?” And the answer was: “Usually the narrator has several models sit for his portrait and then the portrait speaks. Same with most of the characters in my poems. Sometimes the narrator is only me. Jung says we’re each character in our dreams. OK, that too.” Here’s my question to myself: Many of your poems seem bifurcated or with dual concerns that are frequently unresolved, or there is no conclusion, despite interaction between the polar concerns or between the two people or despite the conflicting activities of the drama heading toward an encounter in which something would be decided. Comments?

AV (Answer): On page 98 of my new book Expedition, there’s the poem “Raymond Chandler,” which is intended partially as an Aristotelian dialogue and I think is that, if not a complete Aristotelian encounter. In the sense of our usual definition of tragedy being identified with Oedipus Rex and Aristotle, the poem pursues that sense and may try to disintegrate it, or attempts a new modeling that is still the offspring of “our usual definition of tragedy.” The poem bounces back and forth from the Raymond Chandler world to the Aristotelian world like a ball in a handball court, so in those terms it was easy to write – when you hit one wall you just head toward the other and then come back without having to keep throwing. The ball will go into each wall several times from one throw. Each wall may then exist facing the other without destruction or diminution, in fact they have to, and the ball too is its essential self, in fact has to be. There are three central characters in the Raymond Chandler poem – Raymond Chandler, his generic hero, and me, the author. At least two of these characters are usually doing or saying what’s being said or done, and sometimes all three, at once. Sometimes only one of them is doing or saying what’s being said or done. Besides what’s said and done, there’s also the narration, and the same applies to that – any one of them, or two of them, or all of them, are narrating. So, when I, me, the poet, speaks to us directly at the end, and defines himself differently than the Chandler hero or the Chandler narrator, he is also able to speak about concerns broader than tragedy even, which are energy, disequilibrium, and equilibrium.

This poem, and all this I’ve just said about it, is a good approach to many of my poems. I hope there are other approaches.

REVIEW

As much as can be claimed for any group of poems, Arthur Vogelsang’s Expedition: New & Selected Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2011) may be good medicine for melancholy humans, and it may also be an energy source.

Superficially, from an agoraphobic’s point of view, it’s hard to think of a read potentially more disturbing than Vogelsang’s. Agoraphobics, who as a reading group presumably limit themselves to parlor-bound material, are confronted here with a startling variety of the non-routine and the far-away. Poems are almost always out of doors or in transit. Strange places and peoples are vividly evoked by name and description. An early example from “Poem,” from A Planet (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983):

"Here on Mars, it’s simple.
It’s clear. Books, horses and straight screwing
Go from left to right as in real life
And the weather is a sponge storm every time. . ."

It’s tricky to get a sense of voice from a few lines, but there’s a kindly helpfulness-in-the-telling, a medicinal infectiousness in the above selection. Take my hand and come along, the voice seems to be saying. Notice the subtlety: the comparison isn’t between Mars and Earth, but between Mars and “real life,” which suggests that Mars isn’t a planet at all but a state of mind. Because of the broad self-deprecating humor, you tend to trust the speaker in places transcending literal fact.

Or take “Kugluktuk,” a poem in the new set, in which Vogelsang’s lines often run on and on, as if to evade mental confinement:

"I thought I’d go to Alberta and it would hurt less
And all I could think of was Calgary and Edmonton,
But a Canadian who happened to be in Los Angeles County
Said to me if it hurts why don’t you go to High Level because
Calgary or Edmonton, well it’ll hurt there like it does
In Pasadena but there’s no connect in High Level or wait
Go to Meander River where ho boy there’s no nothing,
It’s way up. If it hurts in Burbank which is not
Like the movies but like New Jersey, it won’t hurt
In Meander River for sure and probably not
In High Level either unless the hurt has
To do with something in which connect is not an
Issue if you know what I mean. Of course
I knew what he meant. … "

Per Wikipedia, Kugluktuk, meaning “place of moving water,” is a hamlet on the Coppermine River near the Northwest Territories in Canada. Of all the names in the poem (there are more of them than appear in the selection above), Kugluktuk is not among them. So let the title be fun in itself and share with the poem proper only a compass point. It’s noteworthy that the nature of the “hurt” goes unspecified, although it’s a pretty good bet that it’s emotional in some way, since “connect” may be an issue. And it’s a neat twist that the poem shares a rhetorical frame with those TV cell-phone network commercials boasting of coverage—connection—anywhere on earth you might happen to be. Enjoy the juxtaposition and overlay of themes. In sum: what an unsentimental and exhilarating way to write a poem about connection or lack of same, and how someone deals with the issue by finding a place to run away to, but not before finding someone to go along.
Vogelsang talks about the writing voice in “Brutal Lesson,” from Left Wing of A Bird (Sarabande Books, Inc., 2003):

". . . He advised, when you get into the big scenes
You don’t select objective correlatives, you just get your head right
And put in everything in that voice that blesses everything. . . "

Stopping the creative flow to come up with an appropriate figure is certainly a fine way to develop a blockage, mental and/or physical. And while “blesses everything” may be something of an ironic overstatement, the direction is nevertheless a going outward toward the world.

But even the sofa-bound are included, as in “Help,” from the ‘People’ section of the New Poems, and a recent Poetry Daily feature.

"Lay down beside me I signaled to my wolf
Three pats of the sofa in the early morn
Then two pats of the heart to say why.
It’s fun to see a wolf in the role of therapist, but this fun is vitally necessary, since,
A person might not want to absorb by touch another’s pain
. . . A wolf loves to . . ."

The world has been and continues to be obsessed with energy, its cost and scarcity, the kind that combusts to power pistons, the kind wrung from the wind by the big utilities. And the concept of energy is often associated with that of freedom: lack of energy would devastate our free economy/society/world. The point is that there is in the world of aesthetics an energy/freedom dipole analogous to the one in political economy, except that it may operate in reverse, freedom produces imaginative energy. The associated feeling may be exhilaration, not hysteria or mania, not undocked from restraint and reason.

For example, exploding a cliché, like any other explosion, requires energy. (The abovementioned wolf is not in sheep’s clothing or at the door.) Nothing impairs imaginative freedom like a cliché, and in Vogelsang I have a hard time finding any of them. Creating a poem’s logic, without resorting to logic off the shelf, also requires energy. And self-reliance and courage.

In the aptly named “Freedom,” also from the People section of the New Poems, the speaker is trying to unravel a question of “connection”—who is his best friend: his best friend or his best friend’s girlfriend? The poem veers into irrelevancies—such as the climatology of the city they all happen to be in and the city’s “pushy” architecture—which is exactly what many minds do when confronted with the complexities of human relationships. The principals do a lot of talking, want to escape, even make plans, but can’t. Then the realization:

"It was not something you could talk through,
You just had to get in your truck and go.
You had to be like the planes or the birds
Quick in the canyon-like avenues,
Examples right in front of our noses each day."

Returning to most poems after spending time with ones by Vogelsang is unfortunately like having half the oxygen sucked out of your brain. Your imagination gears down to slow its descent through atmospheres thick with sentimentality or cleverness, you have a sick feeling of imminent confinement, you are entering a speed trap.

Let’s wrap up with what we should have perhaps begun. Expedition collects work from two volumes in addition to the two mentioned previously: Twentieth Century Women, 1988, published in the Contemporary Poetry Series by the University of Georgia Press, and Cities and Towns, 1996, the Juniper Prize winner published by the University of Massachusetts Press. It might or might not be possible to trace stylistic and/or thematic arcs over the four separate volumes, but it seems safe to say that each blends poems with personal focus and others with a more general scope, and maybe even to hazard that the middle books’ poems seem in general to develop along straighter lines, both in terms of language and idea. Compare, for instance, “The Palace at the Hearst Ranch” (from A Planet ) and “Lee” (from Twentieth Century Women), the former being a meditation conflating the themes of artistic celebrity, politics and mortality in a series of remarkable images, including this:

"Hearst dove long and shallow like a fat arrow
And Chaplin walked around toward his agent in a normal gait,
The walk of a mailman, which some were shocked to see.
While the latter consists of a magical childhood reminiscence about an afternoon on the bay with mother and her best friend, much of the magic emanating from “a lone house set in the sea:”
Glass flashed in the water gliding under my hand, panes
Attached to some of it. . ."

Note the renovation of the water as glass image. Another cliché exploded.

Review: Elaine Terranova on Gluck's "A Village Life"

2010-09-19T12:49:00.002-04:00

A Village Life byLouise Glűck
reviewed by Elaine Terranova

A Louise Glűck poem is unmistakable. Brilliantly honed, gem-like, always with an unexpected turn. Simple but elusive. Personal but not confessional, so sure in itself, not a plea for sympathy. Often heart-wrenching, devastating poems, and even then, with an edge of humor, like what schadenfreude should mean but doesn’t. Ten books of them, and now an 11th. Taken individually, each collection has an arc—you wouldn’t mistake an ending poem—and yet there’s a forward-going motion: an impulse that surfaces in one book is likely to spill over into a later one. For instance, you can follow the trail of flowers. "Brenende Liebe" in The House on Marshland foreshadows roses again in Ararat’s "Birthday," in which the flowers keep arriving ten years after the sender’s death. And then a whole book where flowers have their say, The Wild Iris, Glűck’s Book of Hours, reminiscent of medieval prayer books illuminated with foliage and blossoms. Some of the poems are framed as matins and vespers, appropriate to the time of day, beseeching or thankful. In others, flowers explain themselves and give advice; the life cycles of flowers, after all, can be measured in hours. God answers the prayers, sometimes in the voice of an impatient parent: "you were like very young children,/always waiting for a story./And I’d been through it all too many times;/I was tired of telling stories."
The Triumph of Achilles too begins with a flower. "Mock Orange" reads like a cry in the night. So narrow side to side, yet it turns like a gyre, examining every aspect of the situation. It can be taken as a great poem of female consciousness, suggesting the trade-off in yielding to sexual desire, "the man’s mouth/sealing my mouth," which brings to mind a line from "Dedication to Hunger" (Descending Figure): his kiss "might as well have been/his hand over her mouth." If in "Mock Orange" the speaker is more complicit, the intoxication of the flower is partly to blame. But not just the woman, we are told, both parties are affected by the lie, that there can be true union. The Triumph of Achilles might in fact be chronicling the course of a honeymoon, with its sensuality and dreaminess, the scenes of a marketplace and other associations to travel, "couples ahead/choosing souvenirs." As the setting changes, the myths of the place emerge, Daphne and Apollo, for one, and in the title poem, Achilles’ hollow triumph, reinforcing the danger involved in loving.
Only the earliest books, Firstborn and The House on Marshland, can be thought of as collections of individual poems. Descending Figure is more associative. With its poems relating to the mirrors of sister, lover, child, it's a study in identity and self-presentation. And at least as erotically charged as The Triumph of Achilles:
Today above the gull’s call
I heard you waking me again…
I feel its hunger
As your hand inside me,
a cry
so common, unmusical—

In fact, Descending Figure uses the f word before The New Yorker thought of doing so. Still, the poems develop in the short, tight lines of Glűck 's work thus far. With The Triumph of Achilles though, a whole world opens up. Myth becomes a major strategy. The lines begin to expand and contract, an accordion of consciousness. And from that time, a grand design seems to be established: each book with a different purpose, following a different literary model. Ararat is biblical, a postdeluvian family narrative, wife and daughters, into the next generation, still vying for the love of the dead father. In Meadowlands, the mock epic breakup of a marriage is enacted against a backdrop of the Odyssey. And Vita Nova invokes Dante’s long poem about starting a new life. The book ends with these self-referential, tongue-in-cheek lines, "I thought my life was over and my heart was broken./Then I moved to Cambridge."
In the collection Meadowlands, the couple’s relationship, even in the end stage, is cemented by talk because it’s how you know the other person, even in the dark. Funny, bitter little dialogues occur:
Look what you did—
you made the cat move.

But I didn’t want your hand there.
I wanted your hand here.

You find such poems as well in Vita Nova, "Timor Mortis," "Mutable Earth," and "Inferno," but in that book, it is the self questioning itself, no indentations showing character change needed. A Village Life moves from dialogue to dramatic monologue, and with its pastoral theme, brings to mind Virgil’s Eclogues. Glűck’s lines here are more consistently long, like the Latin, and the poet appears from time to time, as Virgil does, a figure apart who has assembled the narratives of villagers, sets the scene, and keeps watch. In an interview, Glűck says of A Village Life, "There’s something in these poems that I’ve been unable to put my finger on….And it strikes me that the book has something in common with 'Landscape,' a poem in Averno." The first section of "Landscape" pictures a traveler, his horse, a dog, and an uncertain future. The configuration is reminiscent of Dürer’s etching, "The Knight, Death, and the Devil"; behind are mountains, and within range, the narrator, who appears in the poem but is not involved in the action, in fact is separate from it, placed here almost accidentally. She might be looking at an etching. "Landscape." It already has the idea of art. The close description yet undocumented connection are aspects of ekphrastic poetry, and I can understand how Glűck connects it to A Village Life for likewise, the poems in this book might be taken from scenes in a family album.
Up until now, description has not seemed so important to Glűck. In their immediacy, her poems have the impact of an electric current. Analytical and psychologically oriented, they delve into the unconscious, and going deep enough, hit myth. When the rare simile or metaphor seems necessary, Glűck is likely to produce it by paring down to the exact and indisputable word: in "Illuminations" (Descending Figure), "my son squats in the snow in his blue snowsuit. All around him stubble, the brown/degraded bushes"—clearly, what winter does is degrade. This technique appears as well in A Village Life. In "March," for instance, "the season of discoveries/is beginning. Always the same discoveries, but to the dog,/intoxicating and new, not duplicitous." That word "duplicitous," looking both ways, promising but not delivering. And the poem’s last word, "You ask the sea, what can you promise me/and it speaks the truth; it says erasure." Yet, generally, the poems of A Village Life are more leisurely and descriptive— Glűck is so much not at a fever pitch here—
This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills,
The thyme and rosemary that grew there,
Crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks
And, lower down, where there was real dirt,
Competing with other things, blueberries and currants
("Sunrise")
Although the villagers share a boundary, they are people you'd find around you anywhere, neighbors, workers in auto body shops, on farms, in factories. A Village Life is a working class life. In its way sociological, even political, the book takes into consideration the relationship these people have to power: employers ("Olive Trees"), husbands ("Marriage"), priests ("Confession"), doctors ("A Slip of Paper"), anyone who can control their fate. As in a folktale or a story by Dűrrenmatt, the population is born and grows up in the village, then is likely harvested to the city, moving away in necessity or disgrace, with that incentive to return in triumph, to show "them." A democratic story, an American story of a hundred years ago. And just where is this village? I don't picture it Japanese, despite the cover painting. It's a Manchurian Candidate of villages. Everyone can see his/her family's ancestral home, where an earlier generation peeled off to make a new beginning. Mine is a shtetl in Hungary, so I place it in Mitteleuropa. Glűck might too. In "Legend," from The Triumph of Achilles, a grandfather leaves a village in Hungary for New York: "From the factory, like sad birds his dreams/flew to Dhlua, grasping in their beaks/…scattered images, loose bits of the village." Glűck knows village life herself. From "Paradise" (Ararat), "I grew up in a village: now/it’s almost a city." Even the word "village" is steeped in nostalgia. It conjures a sense of longing.
But the village can also be where you remain, the endpoint, like the goal or finish in a game. It might be the global village Mac Luan predicted—which has practically come about. Or a reference to that mysterious TV show The Prisoner, where the hero, No. 6, awakens in the Village over and over without knowing where he is, except that it's a prison. Gluck’s village can be too. Again, in "March," "fate…locked her up in the hills, where no one escapes," where the person is confined as well as protected. Potemkin village, model for a train set, but the poet's eye is like a train tracking the enclave. As in Freud's "uncanny," Glűck plays with uncertainty, a world behind the world. "Heimlich" (homey) as the village is, its odd juxtapositions of time and place take us away from the real or what we can know for sure, the familiar and the unfamiliar coexisting. Yet, or perhaps because of this, the book captures the essence of "village."
In a similar way, the young people in the poem "Midsummer" lose their identity when they strip off their clothes and their ordinary lives, and are recast in water like molten metal, effigies of themselves, hardened into something new. The poem begins with a statement, "On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry." I picture a sepia photo, old-fashioned summer clothes thrown off and crowning the slope leading down to the pool. The boys devise a game to take off the girls clothes, "the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer/and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones/leaping off the high rocks/bodies crowding the water." That turning and turning over the idea, as in "Mock Orange." "And" and "but," adding information or taking it away: "AND the girls cooperating," "AND they wanted to exhibit them." "The rocks were dangerous,/BUT in another way it was all dangerous." The unpopular ones would "pretend to go off with each other like the rest,/BUT what could they do there, in the woods?" There are sound echoes here, the iambs and anapests rocking and then running ahead. And the longer lines are likely to come down on a short one where something is explained or emphasized: "buildings in cities far away," "fate would be a different fate," "wanting the heat to break." And cadenced repetitions, "buildings…/buildings," "nights…/nights," "After…/after," "terrible…/terrible" leading us on, sound and sense shaping the idea, like the "r" sounds of the fourth stanza: "we were all together./After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed," the murmur of summer.
The unexpected smoking of cigarettes brings the scene closer to the present. Buck bathing in Vermont? But the terrible,terrible consequence, the baby coming out "of all that kissing," that's ubiquitous. The biblical "ands" and the peach, like forbidden fruit, that the boys and girls eat on the front steps in the evening, tasting so good, "it seemed an honor to have a mouth." The poem goes on,
You will leave the village where you were born,
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you
can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.

The collection includes two poems titled "Bats," two titled "Earthworm," and two, "Burning Leaves." Glűck has done this before, in Averno, for instance. They could be considered "takes," as in a movie or a jazz performance, another way of exploring similar material, of creating resonance. In The Triumph of Achilles, "Song of the River" tells us, "Once we were happy, we had no memories,/For all the repetition, nothing happened twice." And nothing happens twice in A Village Life. The second poem of the same name or reuse of a word or phrase is a lament, a commentary, not the same thing again at all.
The human speech in Village is informal, marked by contractions. The higher diction belongs to the bats and the earthworms. They are more prescient; you could think of them as our monitors. The bat instructs us how to see the world, how to pick up signals that provide superior intelligence. In a similar fashion, the earthworm poems show what's underneath our world, what awaits us. The earthworm speaks to tell our fortune. The first "Earthworm" explores the body/mind dichotomy. The second brings in Buddhism and foreshadows the Zen koan in the title poem at the end of the book. If the people are busy doing things, kissing, having babies, tilling soil, assembling goods, the earthworm is busy undoing. So many de- and dis- words: dichotomy, delusional, devoid, detached, disdain, destroy, declines. Like the flowers in The Wild Iris, the bat and the earthworm know more than we can. They fathom our motives and our weaknesses; creatures of darkness, like Tiresias, they see without the need of eyes. With their sophisticated diction, they are the philosophers:
There is a path you cannot see, beyond the eye's reach, the philosophers have called
the via negativa: to make a place for light the mystic shuts his eyes—illumination
of the kind he seeks destroys creatures who depend on things

which is what we are.
In "Noon," the sun is shining down but the heat isn’t intense yet. The couple here are still children, not really a couple. It’s summer. "School’s over." The two children are free, meaning separate from each other, as well as at liberty. Glűck characterizes adolescence as so indeterminate it gives them the choice: "They know at some point you stop being children, and at that point/you become strangers." The long line explaining, the short line following, aphoristic, a punch line. What ties the children together is talk, not yet touching, which they both fear.
In "Threshing," Glűck creates a scene of genial male camaraderie, maybe a kind of bravura, the joking and competition, where the sexes seem as separate as the rhythms of the day. It's time for lunch. The workers are clearly delineated, in the sun, pausing at their labor. Threshing is after all meant to separate wheat from chaff, what is important from what is not; thus, the reality of the workday is separate from the illusion of love, which is a mystery of night, a dream. Haven’t we seen villages structured this way, in Sicily, in Greece or Turkey, or farther East, the men in the sun, in public places, the women, cloistered, as if held in reserve?
The predominant mood of the collection, loss and longing, is struck in "Before the Storm," which comes early in the book. The poem announces incipient danger. An imprecation, maybe the Bible is speaking here, "Better look at the fields now." We are reminded that nature is stronger than a creature’s designs, that it unmoors you, even after you've gone "home to the village," as in "Noon," to get your bearings. Mice, a fox appear, presentiments of change, threats. A sheep is lost, "and not just any sheep—the ram,"— Glűck never wastes words—"the whole future." The ram, the male principle, instrument of increase. And isn’t that the intent of the pastoral, to make more? "Everything’s settled now," we are told, "the world as it was cannot return."
The village is gone, over, history. All Glűck’s books taken together chart the course of a life. The last, Averno, opens the seam of the underworld. A Village Life can be thought of as a look back at a lost world. How can you confront these vivid tableaux vivants and not want to go home—wherever that is? You see yourself in the predicament of the villagers, stubbornly human despite the indifference and finality of nature. In A Village Life Glűck extends that personal searchlight into the soul (she is one of the few poets since Rilke who can use the word "soul" convincingly) like a novelist or playwright, entering the lives of others. She might be saying, this is the way the earth will seem as you leave it, with all its miniaturized attractions. The motion of this powerful book is backwards, toward a return or reconciliation, but you want more of this voice, more of this conversation.

This Morning's Birds

2010-07-14T14:32:00.007-04:00

By Doug Logan

Two party birds,
Cheeba Cheeba and Jubilee,
and one that sings like a Radio Flyer
with a squeaky axle
being pulled down the street.
You, here in the kitchen,
and me too, me too, me too.

There's a cowbird somewhere,
sounding the rising wheeee
of a capacitor in an old flash camera,
and the sparrows and jays,
bounce between squirrels,
nipping up the seed that
we, the beneficent, have strewn.

The squirrels now bang at the door
when the seed runs out,
after hectoring each other
over the last of it.
Our friends' cat hides in the ivy
on the rock sloping down to the porch
to make sure of the food chain;

when we toss water at her
she runs, turns, sits, and stares
with patient disdain.
In the marsh the ospreys wheel
high above the backwaters
north of the old sluice,
but no matter how we smile at them

and beam our fellowship aloft,
they give us the old
hew hew hew hew hew,
as if with their keen vision
they can see predation in our eyes
and betrayal lurking at the
corners of our mouths.

If I ever hear a rail
out there saying E-E-Owww
as the sun goes down in spring,
I might ask to ride it out of town
to find my own home in the high marsh,
a hollow lined with fibergreen fleece,
shielded from skunk and sky,

and there lie beady-eyed
on the brink of extinction.
The growl of the backhoe near the road,
and the outboard motor downstream
would just be noise to me.
But the rail is rightly shy
and rarely seen.

Doug Logan is a former editor of Sailing World and Practical Sailor, and has written about boats and the sea for a long time. He has also edited UCLA Healthy Years, a consumer newsletter. He worked in New York as an editor of novels, nautical books, and publications on U.S.-Soviet relations. He runs a blog on conservation and alternative energy at www.newenergywatch.com, and one with poems at www.burgoo.net.

Bejeweled, Bothered and Bewildered

2010-05-28T17:40:00.003-04:00

Now it can be told,
And Behrle tells it cold,
In words unminced and bold:

     No American poet
          can be a cultural force
               without a guitar.

Three Poems by Therese Halscheid

2010-05-09T13:05:00.002-04:00

Trash Day

This is how it really looked long ago….

This is myself back in time, a girl
with sallow skin, dragging metal cans to the curb
notice how I stand for awhile that far from our house
watch how my lips, bright as scars, are parting
open with words, so the great air can take them
out of their mystery ─
see how my thoughts form the storms, how the morning sky
fills with dark sentences,

always something about aphasia, his dementia,
something always about my father caught
so quiet inside me

that would rise in the wind to become
something readable.

I am only fourteen. But you can tell I look old
as if life is ending. Notice how the limbs droop so
willow-like over the trash, see how the cans
are all packed with food, know I am starving myself, I am
that full of my father….

These are our neighbors, each turning in their sleep as they wake,
each waking as they turn from their room to the window
watching the weather above them.

And this is an image of the whole town in shock.
See how they dread my gray hovering grief, just watch
as they walk, how they carry on with the endless clouds
I made weekly, correctly, so very awful and coming
into their eyes.

The Walk Home

Each day the curtains part from each home we pass

and without clearly seeing them,
I can sense the widening eyes of mothers, I can feel
their thoughts through the windows
and it is all about the way
my father and I look
to them.

It is about it being late Spring and the fact that
he and I wear woolen coats and gloves
as we are always cold, as our lives are so dark
not even the sun can
save us.

It is about my looking
less than human, brittle-boned, slumped over,
I am that thin ─

and certainly, it is the sight of my father beside me
who is near blind and brain damaged,
someone behaving in ways that one might find
in mental wards.

Sometimes, their curtains are torn far apart
so fast as if fate landed an illusion, something
that never should be, and nothing appears real
except for their manicured lawns
and the distance the sidewalks allow
each afternoon, at 3:00, as we shuffle past this
place of groomed grass and the scent of
immediate flowers.

Above us are always the
overhanging trees whose blossoming
leaves spread glorious and are just like
a wedding arbor.

So perfect, I think, for this really is
what we are married to ─

this aisle, this arm-in-arm walk
after school from my aunt’s house to ours
this street like an obvious map of us,
pointing things out that
we cannot escape.

Currents

The idea of a river suffering
from its reflection

intrigues me
and is, I think,

what might happen should you
ever see well enough

to notice yourself, or be given
new eyes ─

or the mindflow
to use any breeze

that would force
your mirrored image into action

up out of its murkiness

the damaged
brain, and then

watch how your limbs might take on
a certain kind of fluidity

begin waving me
near you again

calling me daughter

while I cry like high tide
as you continue speaking

in the slow manner
of ancient waters ─

that I would want
to wade

to the voice,
father, into your rippling arms.

Therese Halscheid's latest book of poetry, Uncommon Geography (Carpenter Gothic), received a Finalist Award for the Paterson Poetry Book Prize. She also received a Greatest Hits award by Pudding House Publications. Other titles are Without Home (Kells) and Powertalk. Her poetry and prose have appeared in such magazines as Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, The Dos Passos Review, Philadelphia Stories and Rhino. Aside from publication, she received fellowships from NJ State Council on the Arts. She teaches writing workshops locally and in unusual locales such as an Eskimo village, the Ural Mountains of Russia, as well as leading a group of American women writers to join South African writers in an exchange. Since 1993, she has been a transient writer, living nomadically by way of house-sitting. Simplicity has connected her to the natural world and has been the focus of many poems. She is currently working on a manuscript of her father. Website: ThereseHalscheid.com.

Review: Elaine Terranova on Seidel's "Ooga-Booga"

2010-03-20T14:17:00.001-04:00

My Frederick Seidel Problem: Ooga-Booga
by Elaine Terranova

What? "A naked [what?] my age is a total [what?]" and in case I'm seething so much I miss it, he tells me again in the second line, “A naked woman my age is a nightmare.” The poem is “Broadway Melody,” ironic allusion to the lighthearted song and dance movies of the '30s.
Doesn’t the poet want to add "a naked man"? Isn’t the speaker staring in the mirror of a possible partner his own age, sagging you-name-it staring back? In another poem, Seidel’s a lot gentler on the old Casanova, maybe because he sees his own reflection here. I’m reminded of that instruction in freshman comp: get the reader’s attention. Disarm him, her. Maybe this turn away from the older body, someone else’s, represents an icky fastidiousness on the speaker’s part. Or payback for rejection by an old (former) girl friend, wife, on the poet's. Otherwise this is a kind of brutal porn maybe anchored in a porn culture, where view and point of view count, and a woman is always the outsider, not included in the joke. We might consider the "my age" a softening of the blow. "My age" is not a good thing to be. And the end of the poem has old couples spilling out of a diner onto Broadway on walkers, as ready for death as love. So then, is euthanasia the recommendation?
This is rant poetry. We're familiar with rants. But a rant is like an itch. Something can be done about it. Being old is not fixable.
Seidel's polemics disturb the reader’s placid linear involvement in a set series of pages. Or is Frederick Seidel a persona as Stephen Colbert is for the ultimate wrong-headed character, the other other? Adorno said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Seidel's first poem in Ooga-Booga, his latest collection, "Kill Poem," takes this one step further. It deals with the British blood sport and its objects, the fox, the deer. But it does not neglect the American blood sport of the '60s, with the death of our leaders, King, Kennedy I, Kennedy II.
The title is Kill Poetry
And in the book poetry kills.
In the poem, the stag at bay weeps, literally….
Get rid of poetry. Kill poetry.

That could be what Seidel is trying to do. If poetry softens, humanizes, it spoils the erection. O.K. Then I have to think of what his or any poetry is meant to be. Whether it needs to be lofty. Whether it can't be nonsense strung together out of nightmare, spinning out, teeth clenching on a rhyme. What is the worst thing you can say or even think and how do I put it in a poem?
Maybe Seidel is looking for a more virile poetry, without sentiment. "The moon stops by my table/To tell me./I will cut your heart out." That he doesn't want to be vulnerable. Poets now do seem to fear sentimentality. Or maybe what he writes is rhyming Tourette’s. Read "Dick and Fred" for a mix of sex and politics, a free association of dirty words. Seidel has a couple of Fred Astaire poems, alternately fascinated and horrified by the actor/dancer, his grace, his toupee. One is titled, "Death." "My own poetry I find incomprehensible," he says, in a poem.
Robert Lowell chose Seidel for a poetry prize when he was just out of Harvard. That prize was never given. The poems entered--undoubtedly too hot to handle--became part of his first book, Final Solution (the title should tell you something) and he didn't publish another for 17 years. Dan Chiasson, in the New York Review, notes Lowell's influence on Seidel, and I can see that undercutting of sentiment and adherence to rhyme as inspiration. But rhyme is a disease with Seidel. He can’t help himself. I’m reminded of a little autistic boy with this same compulsion, but gentle, sweet, who called down poems from a tree at a school where I once taught.
For many poets rhyme becomes a lingua franca. Say it as prose but just come down in measured lines on the echo. But that isn't what Seidel's doing. He's too good a poet for that, switching metaphor, identity, in midstream. The line lengths vary. Expectation is belied. An inventive poetry. A poetry of aphorism, of paradox. "A rapist's kisses tear the leaves off." Winter "Takes off the lovely summer frock/And lies down on the bed naked/Freezing white, so we can make death." Of puns,-uns, as in undoing. "Laudatio" is an ode to John Weitz, a—yes—Jewish SS officer and later, glamorous New Yorker and Warhol cohort, who is "full of goy."
"An indescribable act." This is one definition of Ooga-Booga, the title Seidel has chosen, as found in the on-line Urban Dictionary. There's also an Australian rock group that goes by a plural version of that name. More commonly we know it as an expression designed to scare someone, a threat of the primeval—you yell it as you jump out from behind a tree.

Despite the primitive connotations, Seidel is a sophisticate, a city poet, frequently riding in a taxi in the rain or with an apartment in a doorman building. In “Breast Cancer” the disease is sited amid side streets and sidewalks, sidestepped, you might say. The much older man you love, the second breast, repetitious. Wait, I read this book. It’s by Philip Roth. An elegy for a woman friend with Alzheimer’s, “Cloclo,” though, has a genuine tenderness. She has died and is remembered as a beautiful houseguest fallen asleep on his doorstep in a white mink coat. Is it beauty Seidel is trying to recall in so many poems, the stranded beauty of youth? Or maybe he wants to scare us with those bugaboos, old age, death. Ooga-booga!

The motorcycle is Seidel's vehicle of choice for tripping into the wild. It cuts through jungle. What is more virile than a man on a motorcycle? The poem "Bologna" starts in a Fifth Avenue apartment that has a "Negro" doorman wearing a "nearly Nazi uniform" who turns into a motorcycle with a "fat smooth black shine." Offensive enough? The poem moves on to Bologna, where the Cadillac of motorcycles, the Bugati is made. I've read that Seidel owns four.
You need a danger to be safe in
Except in the African bush where you don't,
You do.

I believe it, travel is a danger to be safe in. And the speaker is safely returned to NYC—what a whirl—"The only problem is the bongo drums at night."

There’s more darkness and jungle in “The White Tiger.” Like a nursery tale, a child’s darkness, where the wild things are, but also pointing outward to the world, political.
The Israelis and the Palestinians are by no means exaggerating.
The carcass is hanging from the darkness, waiting.
The building is a million human stories high
The moonlight is going to die.
In the corners of our little room,
The large-bore guns go boom boom.

The attitudes expressed, conservative to the point of reactionary—strike that, outrageous—can't be characterized as traditionally conservative, Republican, that is. George is representative of the bush, the uncivilized, the jungle. This is how Seidel characterizes living under the Bush administration:

I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel.
I am too cheery to be well.
George Bush is cheery as well.
I am cheeriest
Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass
And pretending I am eating broken glass.
Then I throw up the pasture.

Painful nursery rhymes. No impulse control. But who would deny Seidel is in full control of his peculiar poetry? Captured, you keep reading as he twists the knife. He makes you uncomfortable. Isn't that, in a way, what poetry is supposed to do? Glare out at you from the cover of a book? Dare you? Riding on the back of that bike is scary.
The ooga-booga, loose in the world, is coming after everyone.
The sunlight doesn’t go away.
It causes cancer while they play.
Precancerous will turn out bad.
I had an ice pick for a dad.

Chaucer's Creative Destruction

2010-01-04T15:43:00.000-05:00

Treasure the thought
That lines he wrought
Plowed as well as planted.

Review: Rachel Loden's "Dick of the Dead"

2009-12-13T15:03:00.002-05:00

By Elaine Terranova

"You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." Isn't that what he said as he left office? But after the recycling of the Frost-Nixon tapes and the continuing invention of all those other gates, it looks like we'll always have Nixon to kick around.

Rachel Loden's Dick of the Dead is a resurrection in poetry. I weigh a new book in my hand and flip through back to front like reading Hebrew. I open to "My Angels, Their Pink Wings," that paraphrases the Duino Elegies, "Who, if I pitched a hissy fit, would even/ blink a powdered eyelid// among the angelic orders?" Loden mixes elegy and irony, as you could say Rilke does too. The 20th century is just crammed with ironies, funereal and political, for Loden's delectation, wars cold and hot, and the earth's interference with the moon.

And that's Richard Nixon, our guide to the underworld and the past, recognizable from the quarter of his face on the cover. We're in a time warp here, turned around and coming forward to Bush/Cheney. The title poem is a dialog that ends with Nixon's invocation, "Cheney's heart is flying toward me." Later, the statue of Leonid Brezhnev appears, Nixon's Russian counterpart, rising like the Commendatore of Don Giovanni. His "white torso stands here dreaming/ in the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments." But as the poem points out, "Today not a single statue of Dick Nixon// stands astride an American City." We have to remember him from the monument of news footage.

Loden is in some ways a formal poet, she hits every form, and she does dazzle, though there's a sense she's just getting her exercise with these. There are other, strong and mysterious poems that she seems really to mean, one, "Often, I am Permitted to Return to a Station," consolidates hospital, terminus, Holocaust. "Epitaph" too is poignant, an homage to the Desnos poem of the same name.

Loden can also be thought of as a surrealist. What is more surreal than the hereafter? So you will find list poems such as, "What the Gravedigger Needs," where the one indispensible is "board to prevent mourners from falling in." You will find a recipe, an index, a library search, and a cento of movie titles called "I was a Communist for the FBI." And a whole catalog of poets in disguise: T. S., Sylvia, Allen, Ezra, Creeley, Frost, Ashbery. Popular culture in the form of Seinfeld and George Costanza show up too. But the tour de force and the comedy mask the real intent, a fresh, harsh, personal look at a history she more or less lived through.

She knows where the devils lie. From the opening poem, "Miss October--Playboy," we are assured that death is coming even to Hugh Hefner, playmate month by playmate month.

Variation on a Theme by W.S.

2009-12-07T16:07:00.004-05:00

Don't let winter's ragged hand deface
What you had planted with such skill
On sweet spring day in public place
To please the eye and heart to thrill.

Allay my fear, leave me assured
That cruelest weather will be cured.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson—Interview Plus Review

2009-08-23T21:40:00.003-04:00

Joshua Marie Wilkinson books include Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball Publishing, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa Press, 2006), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Noah Eli Gordon; Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007), 12x12: Conversations in 21st Century Poetry & Poetics, Co-edited with Christina Mengert (U of Iowa Press, 2009), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo Press, 2009), which is reviewed below. Wilkinson is an experimentalist and a risk taker, his work rooted in the material earth and in the profoundly human. Risks are rewarded in language that’s a supple pure imaginative flow. Many thanks to Elaine Terranova for bringing him to our attention.

INTERVIEW

Yaakov Murchadha: Your self-imposed constraints in the composing of The Book of Whispering . . . : how did they factor into the psychology of the creative process, that is, their impact on writer's anxiety, fear of failure?

Joshua Marie Wilkinson: Well, because the constraint was novel—to sit in my kitchen in Denver and write a certain number of pages for each of five days—it was more of a strain just to physically sit down and do it, since I had never composed on a laptop before. I don’t think I had a clear picture of what the book would look like, as I hadn’t before with either of my earlier books; I didn’t know it would be a book at all. I just wanted it to be prose, and the fragments I worked out later. It was exciting enough (read: frustrating and unfamiliar) that I didn’t worry too much about “the book” as such. I found it arresting to write in big, long prose sentences that the process itself carried me—that and returning to Charles Brockden Brown’s work a lot on the porch when I’d hit a wall. As for anxiety, I think it goes hand in hand with writing. I don’t mean this in some romantic sense. Anxiety for me (if not maddening and blockade-like) is actually generative. It heightens the adrenalin of making, I suppose. And black coffee helps. If only I was a smoker. My two best friends who are writers are smokers, and this seems to aid them. You can step outside and reflect mid-process before returning to the work. As it is, I walk my dog.

YM: There are many fine poets writing now. Who do you think are the great ones? The most neglected?

JMW: Off the top of my head, I’m an avid follower and reader of Aaron Kunin, Tan Lin, Renee Gladman, Myung Mi Kim, Anselm Berrigan, Jay Wright, Bhanu Kapil, C.S. Giscombe, Stephanie Young, Farid Matuk, Hoa Nguyen, Fred Moten, and lots of others. Of the dead, I’ve recently been rocked by Mandelstam, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Yi Sang, Pasolini, and Donald Revell’s new Rimbaud translations. As far as neglected contemporaries, it’s a miracle if you get any attention at all with how many folks are trying to publish their work. Honestly, I think if a book of poems sells 500 copies and gets a couple of reviews, it’s been recognized. Many will see this as sad, but I think it’s terrific that something like underground poetry—a very difficult thing for capital to assimilate into its normative operations—can radiate out through the channels it does.

YM: The Book of Whispering…took shape on a kitchen table. Do you think where you write influences what or how you write?

JMW: Yeah, it probably does. My hope is that writing in new places changes things up, but it’s just a ruse to get me back writing again. I’m a very inconsistent writer; the moment I think I know what I do, it changes. Or the old ways don’t work, and I have to trick myself back into the work, usually by doing something new. Even with the process, there’s no predictability. Perhaps there will be at some point.

YM: By way of analogy, who is the poet closer to, a film's director or cinematographer?

JMW: My first thought was to say director, but now I think cinematographer. I think because I don’t direct the language so much as follow it as it’s revealed. There is directing, I suppose, when I’m editing and re-working a text—but even still it’s a combination of simultaneously following the language while generating it. I’m not sure how much control I have, even when I think I have control of it. I try not to overwork it, even though I’m returning to it over months and years. It’s a hauntology, a taking dictation, in Ronell’s sense. It’s hard not to hear Breton here: even if it’s not exactly the “absence of any control exercised by reason,” the exercise of reason is always trembling, I’d say, in relation to what it casts its dim light on. Better yet, here’s Inger Christensen: “The gift is that you are forced to put much more of the world into the poem. Sometimes it feels as though the poem is carrying you along. You have access to a universe that begins to carry you…into something that you would never have been able to see or write.”

YM: Are you concerned with labels, how they might or might not be applied to your work? How would you classify it?

JMW: I’m not worried about labels. I want to think that our era is less concerned about labels (but then elliptical, experimental, second-generation, post-avant, flarf, con-po, slow poetry, quietude, the new brutalism, etc., all just popped to mind). Maybe it’s because most the poets I know don’t sit around thinking up a name for what they do—perhaps because our work is too disparate from one to the other? As you might imagine, I’m reluctant to fashion one myself, let alone classify it. Even Zukofsky kept the quotes around “Objectivists,” I suppose. However, I would like to revive the Black Mountain School—not so much the name, but the school itself. Is that too much to ask? Course, I’d like to share a pitcher of beer with the Oppens, too. When folks—usually those who are unfamiliar with poetry beyond the laureates (the laureati?)—ask how I characterize the poetry (by school or style or whatever), I just describe the processes by which I make texts: ekphrasis, the epistolary, fragmentation, collaboration, collage, the various tricks and techniques (responding to Polaroids, drawings, films, music) I’ve utilized in my writing. That seems to go over alright, usually quoting Stevens again: the poem as “the act of finding.” I naively thought I was working all alone, but each project—I’ve come to realize—is a collaboration or conversation of one kind or another.

YM: How do you see the contemporary poetry scene, in terms of schools and characteristics? Is it important to have a sense of affiliation with one, or more?

JMW: I think I’m still learning about contemporary poetry. For me, this means trying to figure out, too, what I like about what I’m drawn to (and stunned by) and what I dislike about what repels me. There are a number of writers (mentioned above) whose work astounds and excites me. For me, it’s not important to have any “affiliation” with a school, per se. Though I try to do things for poetry beyond just writing and publishing my own poems. I’ve edited a book of conversations and poetry with Christina Mengert, and on my own I’ve gathered nearly 100 essays that will come out next year as Poets on Teaching from Iowa. The engagement is in every part of my life: attending readings, reading journals, subscribing to presses, teaching collections of poems, publishing others’ books and chapbooks, running a house reading series (Cathy Wagner, Tyrone Williams, and Dana Ward are reading at our apartment next weekend) and a visiting author series at school, letting poets stay at my apartment when I’m traveling, editing a journal, filming and recording and interviewing other poets, writing the occasional review or introduction or blurb, lending and recommending books to friends and students, buying chapbooks, bringing poets as visitors into my classes, sewing chapbooks while watching The Wire with Lily, supporting little bookshops, etc. In this sense, “affiliation” is crucial. Not by name, but by practice and engagement. Though, as with Antin and deconstruction, when I hear the word “community” I usually reach for my pillow.
I confess, however, that I find most poetry these days pretty dull. I notice people mention this frequently in passing, but I don’t want to bluff, so I’ll say a little about it. There are at least two or three types of poetry out there that weary me: on the one hand, what I call “synonym poetry”: A poem whose world is an ordinary one, but its diction is replete with “writerly,” pithy—often heightened—alternate words in order (apparently) to become “poetic.” These poems are balanced, “tasteful,” well-behaved, unsurprising in their “surprises.” They tend to draw praise (if occasional “tweaks”) in traditional workshops. These poems have little at stake formally, and their voices and speakers are polite variations on Frost or Bishop, as though other modernists never picked up a pen. “Craft” is the key word for this poetics; I don’t mean that “craft” is somehow inherently evil, like “community”—only that these words can get used as though they reflect some self-evident world of “well-executed” poetry. As with the rhetoric of excellence in Bill Readings’s work, or the discourse of “community” in Miranda Joseph’s work. On the other hand, I notice a lot of poems that are vague and bland abstracted “postmodern” experiments. They use white space; they’re gestural. Their guts seem vacuumed out, and we’re left with a sort of lifeless—and quickly forgotten—“fog.” I call this poetry “foggerel.” It’s empty, unmusical, and thrives under the auspices of first appearing grave or even “philosophical.” So long as it looks a bit like projective verse, has an erudite epigraph, and often uses heavy puns, dramatic verbs, and dull juxtaposition. Like watered-down Olson, H.D. without the mythology or combat, O’Hara without the antsy leaps and sardonic blade—or even like a Duncan poem devoid of its mysticism or radical romanticism. I like Levertov’s sense that “We need a poetry not of direct statement but of direct evocation.” Foggerel, I suppose, is “indirect evocation.” I guess a third kind is “soft-surrealist cotton candy” (in Jon Woodward’s phrase). It’s not Breton or Artaud; it’s Stevens’s parody of surrealism, (paraphrasing here) that anybody can have an avocado play a harmonica. I think young poets might learn something from folks like Andrew Joron, Wen Yiduo, Francis Ponge, Desnos, Rankine, Michaux, Giscombe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Joseph Donahue, and Sawako Nakayasu.

YM: Finding/developing a voice is an issue for a lot of writers. Is it for you? How does writing in a minimal form, eg fragments, bear on the issue? I'm thinking of someone like Lance Phillips, where the minimalism is so extreme that voice seems to have been eradicated. But is this the objective?

JMW: I’m trying to find lots of voices. All the poems in The Book of Whispering… have disparate voices to me, even if they seem to overlap. I’m sure there are writers who bank on finding their one “voice”—are beginning writers still told to go in search of this?—and some (Kafka and Dickinson, two favorites spring to mind) seem to me sort of “unified” in tone throughout their work, to the point that it’s uncanny (facile as this sounds, now that I’m typing it). Dorothea Lasky’s poetry is like this, too, to me; the tone and sensibility, diction and cadences seem “unified” in a striking way. In terms of fragments, I think voices do come across—the effect of human utterance, a ghostly verisimilitude of what’s spoken. Even in Sappho (translated over how many millennia?) there seems to be a voice, or voices…Maybe I’m just suspicious of “voice” if it means stable, recognizable, knowable subjectivity. Nevertheless—and I’m acknowledging my contradictions here, very well then—I love when there seems to be an absolute, living personality speaking through the letters: I’m thinking here of Jennifer Moxley’s The Middle Room, Basho’s travel sketches, and even some of Creeley’s later poems: “Look at / that mother-fucking smoke stack // pointing / straight up.” Probably Blaser’s Moth Poem is what splits the difference for me in the most compelling way: the voice is as uncannily “there” as it is a sort of ghostly presence. I wish somebody would write a book about this on the aforementioned with Ceravalo, Wieners, Kaufman, and Guest.

YM: Do you have any long range plans or goals, forms you want to try, subjects you want to write about?

JMW: I’ve been writing a single long poem divided into five books for the last several years. I’d like to complete that, as I’m just now finished with a working draft of book three, which is haibun. The first is a small collaboration with the Polaroids of Tim Rutili that’s nearly complete—it’s called Selenography. I’m excited for that.

REVIEW. . . The Book of Whispering . . .

The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo Press, 2009) is, among other things, a fascinating, energy-giving dance with the notion of constraint, how it plays out in both physical and psychological realms.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson composed Whispering under the following self-imposed constraints: complete a first draft in no more than five days (subsequent editing/revising permitted and actually lasting several years); and compose it of alternating prose poems and lyric fragments, the object being a rhetorical role reversal, where each form takes on characteristics of the other. This topic, as well as others bearing on the creation of Whispering, are considered in an excellent Reader’s Companion, downloadable from the Tupelo website, http://www.tupelopress.org/.

In his introduction to Whispering, which is included in the Companion, Wilkinson notes, “Perhaps my exploration of an obsession, as with my obsession with nouns and images, is only an articulation of that obsession.” Yes, and it is especially the images that relate to constraint that are most significant, obsessing the poet and soon enough the reader.

In a feat of creative alchemy, external regulation becomes subject matter, and the general concept of constraint explodes into an array of wonderfully evocative particulars. There is, for example, an exploration of constraint in the sense of physically holding still, where the act of holding still evinces a range of emotional values, as in the macabre “A boy holds so/still in the wax/museum//his skin takes/on the ceiling’s/perfume,” and in the sublime “. . . You can unlearn the earth’s/spinning//if you//lie down on your back/in the goatfield” (both quotations from the Whispering’s second section, also titled “The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth”).

And, from the prose poem “a brief history of the developer,” this gorgeous specimen: “. . . This happened before the fire took the trees to charcoal, before the white fish were locked in the ice of the fountain.” Interesting to note here is the white/back visual duality, which running as an image stream is significant throughout. Finally, many of the prose poems are titled still lives, for example, “still life with satellite, radish garden, mailboxes & deer.”

If one side of constraint is enforced stillness, the other involves impulsive escape, release, rupture. This aspect is explored as well. Things are broken or breached, as material as rabbit flesh (“Another snared rabbit speaks through a cut in its neck,” from “light blew open the hutch & a boy saw it”) or as sheer as the membrane of vision (“How memory or loss bores holes into your eyes, but backwards like projectorlight,” from “memory does a few more unpardonable things to you”).

The importance of the breach of constraint is discussed by Wilkinson in his introduction. There the context is a film, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, where the camera captures an unscripted, undirected—and therefore authentic—reaction of a little girl, the film’s best moment.

Wilkinson emphasizes the point –the importance of the constraint to what is allowed to escape it—in “poem,” a brief prose work, “How long/did the wooden/horse last after/the boys/carved out/its belly?” Here the idea seems to be the oneness of the constraint and its breach, their symbiosis, and perhaps it isn’t stretching the point to suggest that ultimately in Whispering constraint equals ego, with this psychological sense of organic benign constraint serving as the book’s overall structuring metaphor.

Indeed, the sequence of poems seems readable as an imagistic bildungsroman. There are early suggestions of a difficult threatening world (suicide, lynching) in which a boy must hold still in every sense in order to survive, and then in the later sections a sense of freedom and animation. Consider the self-knowledge implicit in “Even though there are sixty-five people inside of you, each of them is listening for the hinge to whine when you drift off in the rowboat” (from “on certainty & perfumes”). And the sense of parental relation in “Will you/fall//out of my footsteps?” (from “The Book of the Umbrella”).

Not to push the issue—this is just one vein of value in an extremely valuable book.

Four Poems. . . by Darcy Cummings

2009-07-29T19:41:00.004-04:00

Dark Room I

Here, waiting for images to rise
in trays of fixative. Under the dim red light
appear angles of sun and shadow,
the structure of bone and muscle,
motion of willows. After hours in the garden,
along the shore, on shabby city streets, trying
to fix the faint pulse of blood and unease,
I come to the dark room again, again, hoping
to find a photograph that stuns me, an image
that reveals a complete autopsy of language.

Alice In Mourning

My head is a lead bell
The muffled tongue
Strikes soundless
And strikes and strikes
A bell vibrating

My hands gnarled clapper claws

O my poor child:
Soon they'll take him away
Wrap him
In his best blanket

My boy

I can't leave the parlor
I stroke and stroke your cold face
My feet rooted in floor boards

My head an empty chamber
My heart a dry well pulsing with briars
O my boy
My teeth notched and broken
My tongue
A bleeding lead bar
Welded to my jaw

From "Photographing the Dead"
3.
Still Life: Sophie

Small alabaster hands
clutch violets that are just beginning
to wilt. I smooth the lace dress
over small still feet. Her lips,
slightly ajar after the last soft breath.

We plump the pillows,
cradling her between
clock tick and peach bruise.

This morning I heard
the passing of rabbits--
rabbits on the lawn. One sat
alert, like a statue with brilliant glass eyes.

Someone is stripping her room
of bedding and toys,
then Tom will whitewash.
In the barn, a saw rasps.

We had no cards to scatter their warning,
no potion to win her return.
Tomorrow, we will gather to bless her.
Tomorrow, beyond dreaming,
she will fall into the earth.

Alice’s Daughter Watches:
What The Dying Dream

Rising and sinking in a morphine wash
sometimes she’s startled back by desire or pain
to the room I wait in. Her astonished eyes
stare beyond my vigil.

Early this week her hands frantically tore her chest
snatching away insects. Beetles, she cried,
Rabbits. Hallucinations, the nurse says--
she’ll settle soon. Just drug dreams.

What do the dying dream?
Is it all a delirium screen
then brief escape, a small waking between dreams
and burning at the gut or brain?

She’s dreaming of the smell of chemicals and
the darkroom, of negatives rising to light
or of the green stone of a filigreed ring,
or the faded scar across her throat.
The white line reverses, brightens,
livid and ridged, the stitches burning
clear down to the fire in her chest.

My arm, my arm, she mutters.
I rub her arm, her back:
touch helps, or the morphine.
Her cries fall to a low word: rabbits.

She dreams of touch,
arms lifting her to a lit candle,
the pat of an infant on her breast,
the tug of strong arms loosening her skin.

Now only skin and the pressure
of one body on another enter her dreams.
A nine month fetus
she’s straining and thrumming against the skin of time.
My hands are midwives.

Darcy Cummings's poems have been published in journals in the United States and England. Her book, The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer's Life (2006), where the four poems above first appeared, won the Bright Hills Press Award. She has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation., Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Currently she is teaching creative writing at Rutgers University in Camden, where she is also studying non-fiction writing, memoirs and essays, in the M.F.A. program.

Michael Burkard--An Appreciation

2009-07-04T18:01:00.005-04:00

One of our most admired poets here at YM is Michael Burkard. Burkard’s award-winning work has influenced many. His writing over the course of the years spans an arc from an almost language poetry suggestiveness to a time-and-place grounded-ness. Throughout, the self is a key issue, and in the earlier work it is represented by a subliminal verbal structuring, the kind of pre-logic you apprehend when the mind freed from the requirements of wakefulness is looking inward. Form, certainly traditional form, never seems important; his work has great lyrical power and beauty, the music not deriving from arrangements of well-known emotion as consciously experienced, but from the more profound, unsettling cadence of pre logic.

As in The Wharf, which appeared originally in None, River (1979) and which is re-printed in the excellent Envelope of Night, Selected and Uncollected Poems 1966-1990, from Nightboat Books, Cold Spring, New York, 2008:

When it’s Sunday I read to him. I do this every Sunday.
A ruby hangs in the middle of my room. It’s
A planetary ruby. First of all you envision
nothing but their voices, and a linear train,
looking for spiders. I’ve read to him twice:
“When was it when I first imagined the wharf, this
untouchable center.” Like an admiration: it’s a breath
and a jar. In the jar a shot to the head
is like the veil of the dead aunt. Paper
measuring breath. I told no one of the soft kerosene
lamps on the boat when I was five. When I was.
The wharf.

Among other things, Burkard’s work raises the question of literal representation, especially as his later work embraces it in the spirit of personal narrative. In the early work, as in The Wharf above, much is extra-literal. But the extra-literal (“a linear train,/looking for spiders”) imagery exerts a kind of gravity in the community of poems in Envelope of Night, pulling toward it and making resonate literal images. And of course this gravity works in single poems as well.

The Passerby

Now that you’re dead
I can’t ask you for a recommendation,
my possible employment at the pharmacy
is kaput.

Now that you’re dead
I’ve developed a slight stutter—
I hope you’re proud of yourself
in your snowless light.

Ah—this isn’t fair,
How that I’m alive
are you bored with my enthusiasm
already?, do you want to play
hearts?

Mine, mine—
Harbor in a name.
Dead passerby, dead name,

You’re not listed in my address book,
I’m on a bridge,
out of matches.

Now that you’re dead
surrender is a forgiven sound—
the end of smoke,
the beginning of smoke

when you memory
temporarily returns.

(From Envelope)

First Wife

2009-07-04T17:53:00.004-04:00

He asked me so I said I would
He asked would I go through his dying with him
and I said yes, I said yes because what else could I say,
How could I say no

Afterwards I woke up crying every night
in the middle of the night and Bill,
Bill would hold me, wordlessly, there were never any words,
but I was crying for the parents,
I was imagining their grief and I took on their grief
and I thought I cried only for them

He asked would I go through it with him and I said yes
for me it was not so bad it was terrible
I lived through his death as my own so I knew
what it was I knew it long before it would happen
to me I was only forty I figured now I knew

He called once would I come
and I went to the hospital and in the elvator
I met his wife and Why don’t you go home she said
and I said I would go once he knew that I had come
When we met in his room he played us off
one against the other, not the least bit embarrassed
he was tickled silly to have us both there

When he died he was out of his mind, he was drugged
he was not unhappy he was listening to Mozart,
the violin/piano sonatas played by Szymon Goldberg
and Lili Kraus, and he was pointing to a square of
paranoia on a spot opposite the bed, a spot where two walls met

It scared me to see him that way so I cried
but my crying scared the others so I left
If he had been clear-headed I could have stayed longer

He asked me to go there with him and I said yes
If he had been clear-headed I could have gone farther
I went as far as I could

--Anne-Marie Levine, from Bus Ride to a Blue Movie, 2003

Fairey comment

2009-04-23T14:25:00.048-04:00

Is Shepard Fairey a crook? Not according to Steven Heller, who regards the Obama poster artist as a brand manager rather than a plagiarist. Backhanded compliment, that.

Still, it's an interesting question: when does artistic appropriation pass into plagiarism? The visual arts have accepted collage since when, Braque and Picasso? Nouveau Réalisme reversed the process with décollage but the result was the same, an appropriation of reality. Music, too, has a rich history of sampling. Think of Tchaikovsky and the anthems he appropriated in the 1812 Overture. Fast forward and appreciate Danger Mouse and marvel at Girl Talk. In the 1980s Sherrie Levine made a career as an "appropriation artist" rephotographing Walker Evans photographs. In literature, where would Chaucer and Shakespeare have been without Boccaccio and Holinshed? Plots and themes and archetypes have always been up for grabs, else genre studies wouldn't be very rewarding. In this era of mashups, augmented reality and 3D printing, anything digital seems ripe for appropriation.

My own sense is that appropriation isn't plagiarism so long as the source is acknowledged and what's appropriated doesn't represent the sum and substance of the original work. In this sense, appropriation is comparable to "fair use" in copyright law, although copyright law is incoherent when it comes to poetry and is altogether a contentious subject these days, often honored in the breach by news aggregation sites, by tabloid gossip columnists who retail uncredited snippets from sundry sources (you know who you are), by respected newspapers made desperate by a business model unable to adapt to the times, and by an insouciant songwriter otherwise stamped by genius.

Fairey failed to acknowledge his source; indeed, he lied about it. I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell would offer Fairey the same sympathy he extended to Bryony Lavery, who plagiarized him.

But perhaps our concepts of ownership and originality need reexamination. How can you plagiarize what is, after all, a cultural artifact, meaning it's produced by the culture--isn't it also "owned" by the culture? What individual can claim sole ownership of any intellectual property? Or what corporation? It's hard to swallow how Disney has claimed ownership of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book, "a legacy of cultural sampling" as Jonathan Lethem plagiarized it from Lawrence Lessig, "that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind."

And how can any work be "original"? Innovation has a dialectical relationship to what already exists. You cannot think of an innovation without thinking of what it differs from. It's representational art that gives abstract art its context and meaning.

“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said the German novelist Helene Hegemann, who seems to have come of age artistically as well as generationally on the Internet. Edgar Allan Poe would have taken issue with Hegemann. The "broad assertion that no such thing as plagiarism exists," he wrote, "is a sotticism." Yet on American college campuses, the concept of originality simply doesn't hold the same meaning for students as it does for their teachers, even at the graduate level, where 80 percent of dissertations evidence plagiarism. I suspect this variance may vanish in a generation. Maybe sooner if a distinguished educator can persuasively explain plagiarism as a breach of decorum, not morality, and compare it to a violation of the rules of golf.

Remix (4)

2009-01-27T10:46:00.007-05:00

Joyce laments:

O bitter ending!
I'll slip away before they're up.
They'll never see.
Nor know.
Nor miss me.

And it's old and old
It's sad and old
It's sad and weary
I go back to you,
My cold father,
My cold mad father,
My cold mad feary father.

Contemplating His Mortality

2009-01-16T14:55:00.004-05:00

Contemplating his mortality,
Richard Rorty turned to poetry,
His pragmatism undefiled,
And somewhere Matthew Arnold smiled.

Extreme Weather

2009-01-04T20:55:00.003-05:00

By Elaine Terranova

Remember the man
describing a typhoon?
“It was like being sucked down
into a giant garbage disposal.”

You take his word for it,
you take it with you
into sleep, like your own last words.

That’s how it is with you.
Then every day you wake and go out
and move things around.

Quiet falls in beside you
like those Swedes in rabbit-fur boots,
the slanting church spire, snow.

On TV a young woman
embraces the weather, gathers it
from a large chalk board.

Sunny tonight, she says, warmer,
which gives us all hope
for the lengthening shadows.

Galileo was the first to look up
at the stars and know they were
being born and decaying all at once,

because in the long run
time didn’t matter, heaven changed,
it wasn’t reliable.

And at the equator, bulging waist
of the planet, think how it feels
with a sunburn at night—
like staring out from neon.

Elaine Terranova’s most recent book is Not To: New and Selected Poems. She has new work appearing in Pleiades, Ploughshares, and Cincinnati Review. She won the Walt Whitman Award for her first book of poems, The Cult of The Right Hand. She has been Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College and has received an NEA Fellowship in Literature. In 2006 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Poetry. She teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia and in the Rutgers, Camden MFA Creative Writing Program.

Four November 9ths

2009-01-03T17:59:00.008-05:00

By Anne-Marie Levine

My family expected I would be born on Armistice Day,
November 11, and that would be one thing,
that would have been something to joke about
in those days. But I came into being two days earlier,
on November 9, in the evening, and that was another thing,
it was not a joke, and it was evidently not a thing
to be remembered or told,
because I was not made aware of the coincidence
of my birth until several months before my 50th birthday,
which coincided with, and was commemorated and announced as,
the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
So there I was, and even more than that here I am,
quite surprised, not to mention still unprepared,
and quite unable to avoid thinking about both at once.
The reminders since then have been constant and grim.
Coincidence: the visible traces of invisible principles.

And now my friend Gottfried Wagner,
who since the day he discovered the date
has never forgotten my birthday,
has informed me that there are four November 9ths
in history, that it is a very big day in the history of Germany
in this century. There is even a book written,
it is called The Four November 9ths.
I can’t read the book, it is written in German,
but I have done some research, and as far as I can tell

The first November 9 was 1918;
it was a revolution in which the Kaiser abdicated,
which culminated in the Proclamation of the Republic in Berlin
on November 9. The above-mentioned Armistice
between the Allies and Germany
followed on the 11th.

The second November 9 was 1923;
it was Hitler’s abortive “Beer Hall Putsch”
against the Bavarian government in Munich.
Hitler, who was at first imprisoned, eventually emerged
as the undisputed leader of the radical right.

The third November 9 was, as you know, My November 9th,
Kristallnacht.

And on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

So there you are and here we are, on my birthday,
and all of this is to say what Gertrude Stein has already said,
what can I teach you about history -- history teaches.

It is not a simple matter, the birthday, or the telling.

Anne-Marie Levine was born in Belgium, raised in Beverly Hills, lives in New York City. A poet, scholar and visual artist who began to write while touring as a concert pianist, she's the author of three collections of poetry: Euphorbia, Bus Ride to a Blue Movie, and Oral History: A Monologue. Her work also appears in anthologies such as Poetry After 9/11 and Literature as Meaning (Penguin). She has published essays on Gertrude Stein's politics, on art and trauma, and on context, and has received grants from the NYFA, Puffin and Vogelstein Foundations for this work. She often performs solo theater pieces based on her poems and is currently at work on a commonplace book. Levine has had solo shows of her paintings most recently at Sarah Lawrence College and at The Cherry Art Center (CA), and her work will soon be on view (Feb. 3-28, 2009) at The Cornelia Street Café. Four November 9ths appeared in Poetry After 9/11 and Bus Ride to a Blue Movie. Please visit the author at her Web site, http://www.annemarielevine.com/.

Mendocino Coast, 1967

2009-01-02T17:55:00.000-05:00

By Dorothea Grossman

Inland, where the grasses and grapes lived,
we could not have imagined
the rocks, the cold clouds --
the surf that would surround us
like a headache,
and those long tubes of kelp
like noodles
from another world
where, with the music of foghorns
and wind chimes,
even the kind moon
seemed dangerous.

Not Again

2009-01-02T17:48:00.000-05:00

By Dorothea Grossman

As if I needed
another reminder
of you
in winter,
when the lights dance
on the bridges
and a tune on the piano
draws blood.
You have invaded
my small country
expertly,
like a bullet.

Allen Ginsberg called Dorothea Grossman's poetry "clear, odd, personal, funny or wild-weird, curious and lucid." The award-winning poet lives, works and writes in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and collections, and she has published four books: Cuttings: Selected Poetry 1978-1988, Poems from Cave 17, Museum of Rain and The First Time I Ate Sushi.

Mantis

2009-01-01T12:28:00.001-05:00

By Elizabeth Brunazzi

The terrier found it before I did. He had started to play with it like a cat with a toy. I suppose it had just walked into the garage for the warmth and the black flies, so plentiful at that time of year, just before the first frost.

I don’t know whether the dog broke its front right arm, one of the ones like crabs’ pincers it uses to grab its prey. The appendage was folded up under it, and its long reedy body was turned on its side. It couldn’t right itself.

I remembered the one looking up at me from the white bathtub that year in Washington. It looked huge standing there, bright spring green in the white tub, a half a foot or so. Maybe it really was unusually large. This one seemed smaller, and I imagined it as older, too.

But the face was the same. The head and face and eyes that look so much the way we imagine extraterrestrial life. Somehow I think of these creatures, landing in bathtubs and garages, as the real ET’s, definite proof. An infinite number of life forms are out there, somewhere, coming and going, beyond our puny earth.

I decided it should have a dignified death and burial. I didn’t think of it really as giving it a fighting chance, as they say. I chose a plastic quart container as its chamber, a hospital room of sorts. I thought it would like the gentle, milky light through the translucent plastic, the cylindrical, tunnel shape. No right angles. No corners. I put it out under a huge Maple tree that was shedding its leaves, leaves big as plates, to die.

It turned out it was the night of the first frost but nowhere near a hard freeze. The sun was out, and it had already started to warm up when I took my coffee out and thought to check on it. It had turned itself upright but it looked quite stiff. I picked up a twig and slid it back and forth a few times. No response. No movement. For sure, it was dead, finally kicked off in the cold of the night. They say things just go to sleep in the cold. I picked up the container and took it back in the garage, put it on a shelf, to dispose of later, and forgot about it. I don’t know why I didn’t just dump it in the garbage container at the same time. It was a foot away from the shelf, and the washer and dryer.

When I went back down later to put in a load of laundry I glanced over at the shelf and the plastic container. It seemed to me the head was in a different position, that it was looking up. I waved my hand in front of it, outside the sepulcher. It lifted its spindly right back leg slightly. It was not dead, though undoubtedly near death, when I brought it in from the cold in the morning. The warmth had revived it. The injured pincer was still folded up at an odd angle to its body and turning yellow.

It had to eat. Everything has to eat. I thought I remembered that PMs ate only live prey. I decided to try some of the still freshly dead flies lying in such abundance along the window sills in my apartment. I scooped up three. I put one right in front of the PM’s head, and left a couple just outside the lip of the plastic tunnel, to tempt it forward and out. And I moistened a paper tissue, gently swiped it along its mouth, and left a trail of droplets leading to the flies. I imagined that it continued to look at me. It could see me. It knew I was trying to save it.

I checked it again, three times. The first time it had brought the fly up by its head, and the uninjured pincer. The injured, yellowing pincer seemed more correctly poised but useless. The water was gone, perhaps evaporated. I waved. It waved back. The second time it also lifted the right back leg it had lifted before, then the smaller, front leg. It seemed like progress.

PM had lived almost two days since I put it in the white plastic container and brought it in from the cold. The third time its head seemed slightly lower, but still erect, and the eyes a bit duller. The fly was still there by its head and green pincer. Uneaten. I took a spatula and tapped around it several times. At least it was still upright. It had not fallen over again. It was not on its back. The head still looked straight out of the cylinder, as if it could still see, what it had seen just before the end, just before the light failed completely, and everything went dark. It had seen me, for a time. We had made gestures to each other across time and evolution and species, across interstellar time. He is still there. Specimen, ornament, companion, teacher. The shell perhaps an image something like a photo or a hologram to remember him by. Maybe they did come to get him.

Elizabeth Brunazzi is a poet, fiction writer and translator. Her work has been published in reviews and anthologies in the US and France, including Mudfish, Clara Venus and Fulva Flava (Red Hand Press) Le Nouveau Recueil and La Traductiere. She was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is currently in Washington, D.C. where she will teach Creative Writing at George Washington University in the spring, 2009.

Uniontown, 1980

2008-11-05T13:02:00.005-05:00

By Doug Logan

Old Ed dined on Saltines and water
and the waitresses took turns being kind
when he yelled, “Over here, honey,”
because he’d lost his wife and daughter
and, along the way, his mind.
He put a flower behind one ear
and sat down to his cracker stew,
gruff and glowering and without money,
and the girls winked, as they came near,
because winking was the
extra bit that they could do.

Doug Logan is a former editor of Practical Sailor, and has written about boats and the sea for a long time. He began his work in New York as an editor of novels, nautical books, and works on U.S.-Soviet relations. He runs a blog on conservation and alternative energy at www.newenergywatch.com, and one with poems at www.burgoo.net.

Remix (3)

2008-09-19T23:51:00.007-04:00

Momaday recalls:

Tortoises crawl about on the red earth,
Going nowhere in the plenty of time.
Loneliness is an aspect of the land.
All things are isolated.
There is no confusion of objects in the eye,
But one hill, one tree, one man.

Remix (2)

2008-09-18T23:40:00.004-04:00

Millman listens:

Finn McCool and the Fianna
Were using up food and drink together
When a giant
Dressed in the skins of a beast
Walked in on them
Without passing a blessing on them.

He had thick
Legs and thick
Hair matted and
Crawling with worms
And he spoke in a fierce voice.

Bald Conan rose up
Always a bold fellow
Without any sense
And when he rose up
He scattered the chessmen
On the grass.

Conan hit the giant
On his jawbone.

Then Finn himself rose and
Himself put the blame on Conan
Because he hit a stranger
Without any reason.

(Michael Jack of Inishbofin
keeps the last shanachie's tongue
preserved in a tin of Three Nuns.)

Waiting on Hold for Tech Support

2008-08-20T17:00:00.002-04:00

As I was waiting on hold for tech support
I was browsing The New Yorker's site
and found an MP3 file
with Paul Muldoon speaking
about "rock and roll and the state of poetry"
for seventeen minutes
and a couple seconds.

He's the magazine's poetry editor
and he talks about the submission process.

He's no Pound
but he's not averse to editing a line
"to get my hands dirty," he says.

He also talks about poetic form
or its lack.
It matters not to him.
"I belong to the school that is against schools,"
he says with some conviction.

In writing lyrics for his rock band
he aims to write the kind of lyrics
found in pop music prior to rock
(Gershwin and Porter are cited)
and in country music
and rap.

Perhaps not wanting to give offense,
he gingerly allows that rock music
"has tended not to foreground the lyrics,"
curious predication
no doubt carried from his days
producing boob tube
for the Beeb.

His judgment of American poetry:
it's "very, very various"
with no single mode
or poet
"to the fore."

Just like America itself, I thought.
Everyone's aft,
and the devil take the hindmost.

He finds that "really healthy."

But why should I report
when you can listen too?

Stink Bug

2008-08-19T10:33:00.000-04:00

Let’s bumble into someone’s sunrise

Nest in a drawer between two spoons

Or burrow in a towel’s thick nap

How we’ll shock

That fined tuned focus

Those swaddled minds

Common sense extended

Like antennae

60 Minutes

2008-08-18T12:37:00.002-04:00

(June 5, 1977)

On the last run
Of the Orient Express
Morley Safer met
An Arab prince
And three bodyguards
Traveling incognito
To Istanbul
And on to Syria
To hunt swans
With a chrome-plated
Submachinegun.

Mike Wallace interviewed
Cancer patients.

Dan Rather insulted
A Presidential aide.

Shana and Jack
Slugged it out
Over gay liberation.

And a viewer
Or two
Wrote in.

Turtle Bay 1998

2008-08-17T17:39:00.000-04:00

     “I’m an American,” he said flatly.
     Her voice insisted: “You’re Armenian, Grigor.”
     “Born and bred in the good old U.S. of A.”
     “Not bred,” she said. “You weren’t bred that way.”
     “For God’s sake, I need the money.” He said it rashly.
     “I’ll send you money.”
     “Absolutely not. What would you think of me?”
     “How much do you need?”
     “Nothing. I’m not exactly starving here. Doing pretty well, in fact.”
     “Don’t do it.” Her voice was less insistent now, but it wasn’t pleading. She wouldn’t beg her son. Greg stood up and walked to the window and stared out into the night. “It’s just another job,” he said.
     “Just don’t do it,” the insistence back again.
     “ It isn’t permanent. Couple months, is all.”
     She fell silent. He adopted a different tone, lonesome and false. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” he crooned. When that didn’t elicit a response, he stage-whispered: “I’ll bring you something nice.” Finally, in the voice he used at home, at her table, “Can you give me a hint what you’d like? Something just for you, now, not the house.”
     “Not with blood money, you won’t buy me any presents,” she said, but he could tell that she wasn’t angry and her cross words were tinged with sadness. He wanted to end the conversation but he didn’t want to leave it on this note.
     “C’mon, Mom, it’s a job. I’m not betraying anything here. This is America. This is New York. In New York, people from all over the world . . .”
     It was no use and he left it hanging. “I’ll let you get back to your show,” he said. “I love you.” She didn’t respond. “Bye,” he said.

     Greg put the handset on the sill and opened the window and was assaulted by the noise of the city. Manhattan was bejeweled at night and his view was unobstructed up the East Side, the New York of a Woody Allen film, except Gershwin couldn’t be heard above the din from below and beyond. The incessant noise, and the dirt blown in by the wind off the East River. The dirt and the noise and the smells, they constituted his first impression of New York and it remained with him even after four years. But he liked the city all the same.
     He looked down and across and into the home and the life of a family he watched at night from time to time. A heavyset man was sprawled on a stuffed chair, his features blinking on and off erratically in the TV glow. A small child stood next to him, pawing at his shirtsleeve for attention that wasn’t forthcoming. He seemed transfixed by whatever he was watching. Or he was asleep, Greg couldn’t tell without his binoculars. The mother was a stationary shadow against a lighted curtain in what Greg assumed was the bathroom because the window was always curtained. He had seen her in the living room often, heavyset herself, talking to the husband or getting the child ready for bed, the kid plump too, or just watching television. The TV was on every night. They were deep-seated viewers, Greg chuckled to himself, and not very interesting to watch. Jimmy Stewart would have been bored out of his skull.
     Greg had known full well that his mother would object and that he’d take the job anyway. He wanted to let her have her say before accepting. Simple courtesy, and a salve for his conscience. He went to his desk and booted his laptop. He emailed a reply to Donaghy. Will do. Lunch tomorrow, 12:30 at the Dog. GS, he initialed it, unnecessarily because his email utility added his business card: Gregory Shugar. Have Laptop, Will Travel. No, actually it read: Web Publishing Consultant. But he was something of a hired gun and he had toyed with the Paladin motto before rejecting it as entirely unprofessional and probably beyond the ken of most people he would email. Who else watched TV Land? Deep-seated, indeed.
     Greg had given Donaghy no alternative but to meet him at the White Dog at 12:30. Greg was in the driver’s seat in their business relationship. Donaghy needed him more than he needed Donaghy, even though Donaghy paid the bills. Greg had an arrangement that was not at all unusual in his business. He was a consultant to a consultant, and as he emerged from the subway with the Saturday shoppers on lower Broadway he felt good about the arrangement and the job at hand and his decision to take it even though he knew he’d get shit from his mom. He felt good about the arrangement because he liked Timmy Donaghy and Donaghy always paid for lunch. Donaghy was at the bar.
     “A bus stops and two Italian men get on,” Donaghy said. “They seat themselves, and engage in animated conversation.”
     “Stop,” Greg said.
     Donaghy went on. “The lady sitting behind them ignores their conversation at first, but her attention is galvanized when she hears one of the men . . . ”
     “Stop,” Greg said again.
     Donaghy didn’t stop. “. . . say, ‘Emma come first. Den I come. Two asses, dey come together. I come again. Two asses, dey come together again. I come again and pee twice. Then I come once-a-more.’”
     Greg rolled his eyes. Donaghy continued in a falsetto. “‘You foul-mouthed swine,’ retorted the lady indignantly. ‘In this country we don't talk about our sex lives in public!’”
     Greg had it figured out by now but let Donaghy deliver the punchline. “‘Hey, coola down lady,’ said the man. ‘Imma just tellin my friend howa to spella Mississippi.’”
     “Dumb, Timmy.” Greg was grinning out of fondness for his employer as he said this. “You spend too much fucking time reading stupid email jokes.”
     “You don’t get it,” Donaghy said with a serious face. “An admittedly dumb joke like that takes on new meaning with that crap going on in Washington. These days we do talk about our sex lives in public.”
     “Making fun of Italians in public ain’t PC.” Greg pointedly scanned the barroom. At the tables the seats were stuffed in equal proportion with patrons and shopping bags.
     “I wasn’t making fun of Italians in public,” Donaghy said. “I only make fun of Eye-talians in private.”
     “Italians haven’t talked like that since Chico Marx.”
     “Chico Marx wasn’t Italian.”
     “Exactly.”
     Greg sipped from his beer and lit a cigarette. Donaghy stubbed one out and lit another. They ate at the bar so they could smoke in peace. The two of them constituted a conspiracy of smokers in a city that pilloried addicts of all sorts. Greg ordered his usual burger and Donaghy, watching his weight, ordered a salad. “Speak,” Greg said.
     “Looks like a six-month gig to me,” Donaghy said. “They want soup-to-nuts. They have a site now but they know it sucks and they’ve come to understand like the rest of the world is coming to understand that a good site is important to your image. And they do have an image problem, you know.”
     “What’s their image problem?”
     “Greeks hate their guts.”
     “That all?” What Greg was thinking was, Greeks aren’t the only ones. But he didn’t expect Donaghy to know that and Donaghy didn’t disappoint him.
     “That’s enough in this city. Where they gonna eat, Greeks own all the restaurants?”
     “They only own the restaurants you frequent, Mr. Donaghy, the diners that serve prunes.”
     “Whatever. Fact is, the Turks feel they have an image problem and they want to improve it. They want a site that brags about their culture, does the tourist thing, lets people contact them, and so on and so forth. What they got now is press releases, speeches, propaganda.”
     “They want to tart it up a little? That won’t take six months.”
     “They want more. They want us to do a template for all their sites, every embassy and consulate and tourist office all over the world. Tie them all together. Give them a uniform look and feel. Let people apply for visas and stuff, download the applications. They want to sell things.”
     “Turkish taffy?” Greg couldn’t imagine what a country might sell online.
     “Whatever. They know you can sell things and they want to do it. They want the works. They’re putting cash into this, real dollars.”
     “You said tie all their sites together. Extranet?”
     “That’s what they really want but they don’t know the word and we have to teach it to them.”
     Greg was doubtful that Turkey would expose itself to security issues presented by giving outsiders direct network access. Donaghy was getting ahead of his client as he tended to do in his enthusiasm for taking innocent inquiries and turning them into gold-plated proposals. He bit into his hamburger and the grease dripped out onto his fingers. He resisted licking them and instead wiped them on his napkin.
     “I’m game,” Greg said. “How do we get started? When can I meet with some people, find out what it is they really want?”
     “I told you what they really want.”
     “You told me what you’d like them to want. You’re an excellent salesman, Timmy. Please, never change. But I have to execute your promises and I want to talk with the client before sketching out a plan that everyone will be happy with. They want an extranet, why don’t they do this in Turkey? Why did they pick you out of the phonebook?”
     “First, Turkey lacks the skill set. Second, I went after them. Guy at Burson-Marsteller mentioned they needed help to a lawyer friend, who told Hammy at NYNMA. Who called me, since we did that work for the Nigerians. You know how this goes.”
     “I get it. Nigerians and Turks, same difference.” Greg bit into the pickle. “You went in over the transom?”
     “More or less. I purposely ran into their PR woman at a trade show they had going on at the Marriott in Times Square. We got to talking and next thing I know I’m sitting there in the lounge with this thick-necked dude from the consulate and after a few rounds I naturally got the business.”
     “You only think you have the business.”
     “I’m fairly certain. They have to sign off on the plan you’re gonna do, of course.”
     “The plan without an extranet.”
     “Maybe you’re right, not an extranet. Make it complicated and they’ll have second thoughts. However this guy, Bozlak, he was pretty specific about wanting a first-rate site and about tying all their sites together. He’s been reading the papers, I guess, buying into the hype.”
     “Well, we’ll nail it down. What’s his position, Boslak?”
     “Bozlak with a Z. That was spelled on his badge that he wore, one of those crossed foreign Zs, which is why I remember. Osman Bozlak. Osman with an S. Mr. Bozlak to you.”
     “What’s his position?” Greg asked again.
     “Some kind of trade official with a mumbo-jumbo diplomatic title. The woman, Ms. Salman to you, introduced him but I didn’t quite get what she said or she said it so fast and so low that I wasn’t supposed to get it.”
     “Does he have the authority to hire you? What did you make of him?”
     “Seemed very fit, is what I made of him. Good, strong American handshake for a fella who stays out late partying all the time, chatting up importers. Works out, that guy, I’d put money on it. Very alert to his surroundings, too, eyes darting around the lounge we were in the whole time we’re talking. Accent you could cut with a knife. Not the polished type you meet at trade shows.”
     “The type you meet in dark alleys—probably a spy.” Greg was half serious. He didn’t discount the possibility.
     “Sure,” Donaghy said. “Every diplomat does spy duty when he’s not tearing up parking tickets. Part of the job description, report on what you hear and see, friend or foe it doesn’t matter.”
     “We’ll nail it down, what they want. Let me know when and where we’ll meet.”
     “I’ll get back to you. Figure on the tail-end of next week.”
     “Now let’s talk turkey,” Greg said. Donaghy smiled. “I’ll give you Boston and two, five bucks.”
     “Tie I win.”
     “Tie you lose.”
     “That’s Boston and one, then. The way the Yanks are playing . . .”
     “It’s in Fenway. Whaddya want from me?”
     “Tie I win.”
     “You got it.”
     “You’re taking advantage of me,” Donaghy said. “You know I’m soft for the Sox.” He signed for the tab and both men slid off their barstools. “Thanks for lunch,” Greg said. “You go on. I need to wash my hands.”
     “Gotta pick up some groceries. Where will you be next week?”
     “Just email me,” Greg said and he threaded the crowd toward the men’s room.

     At 33 Gregory Shugar didn’t know where he was, let alone where he would be. His life was on automatic pilot to a destination that he never charted and couldn’t fathom even if he put the effort into it, which he resolutely didn’t. Cruelly, he thought, his mother told him he still didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up. He moved from one job to the next and was thankful that Donaghy kept them coming often enough to pay the rent. He would take an assignment and dive into his work night and day. His personal life was nonexistent. Between gigs he was a loner in a strangely lonely city, wandering the streets, haunting public spaces and hanging out in one or two bars when he wasn’t at home riveted to his computer, surfing the Web like the news junkie he was, or zoning out on television, passively imbibing old sitcoms and older movies. It wasn’t what he had intended when he graduated USC, a film major with dreams of Hollywood fame and fortune. He had certainly never guessed he’d be living close to the edge in New York. Lucas and Spielberg were his role models, not Scorsese or Lumet. He was a Californian, after all.
     He fell into his profession instead of choosing it. An electronic-game company needed somebody to write storyboards and he needed the money. He was good at it, and prospered modestly from stock options. He learned the technical side of the business as authoring tools became simple enough for his nontechnical mind. He didn’t consider himself a techie but he knew more than he would have thought possible the first time he watched a developer write code. Then it was all very mysterious to him, a priestly art. Now it was a matter of clicking and dragging and filling in blanks in plain English.
     The marriage lasted a little less than two years. No progeny, which made the breakup infinitely easier. That’s when he went east for good, to escape the associations, to start over. Previous generations of Americans went west to start over. Californians were reversing this pattern as the Millennium loomed. As he drove east in 1994 he had been struck by the number of U-Hauls with California plates struggling up steep grades on I-70, latter-day Joads but assuredly better-fixed, cashing in their inflated California home equity for ranchettes on the Front Range in Colorado, the new Golden State.
     That was his second drive east. His first, in 1990, was an extended vacation and, it was apparent now, a scouting expedition. But then it was meant to be a head-clearing drive, some downtime to concentrate on how he really felt about Lisa, who had taken to praising coworkers with the balls to make commitments. That time it was late summer and the interstate was packed with military convoys, all heading in his direction but destined for short-lived glory farther east. The 7th Cavalry with running lights, riding out of Ft. Riley to the rescue of American oil interests in Kuwait.
     In the end he felt it was his mother who made the actual decision. She liked Lisa and early on in their relationship his mother treated their eventual marriage as a foregone conclusion. But he knew that blaming Mom was a refuge for scoundrels and only sons. Besides, Lisa was hard not to like. Even now he bore no ill-feelings toward her. It didn’t work out, that’s all. Still, the memories lingered and he had a vague sense of guilt. For the most part he determined not to think about it.
     Unlucky in love, in New York he was unlucky in work. The Internet was beginning to explode and in succession he got involved in two startups that consecutively went bust after burning their seed money. A third startup was rolled up into a larger company that already had a very talented and articulate woman in his position. He met Donaghy at a beer party sponsored by the New Media Association, which he had joined in order to network with people who wore black. Donaghy persuaded him that he could make a wonderful living as a free agent. Of course he saw through Donaghy right away: no overhead, no FICA, no benefits. But Donaghy was on to something. It was a new economy, Donaghy said, and Fast Company was the name of the magazine he showed Greg to prove it. It was an economy, the magazine said, that was predicated on a mobile knowledge-based workforce that rejected career ladders and organizational charts and instead went with the flow, the flow of money. In this economy a technology professional would be foolish to sign an employment contract. In six months another company would be knocking on the door, upping the base salary and promising IPO riches. “Resist the temptation,” Donaghy had said at the time. “Don’t sign anything if it doesn’t leave you with an out.”
     So Greg went with the flow. Or rather, he postponed making a decision where he would go and what he would do. In the meantime, Donaghy kept him busy. He was grateful and resentful at the same time.

Remix (1)

2008-08-16T23:35:00.000-04:00

Pinsky assays:

. . . in time, a sentimental evasion
Of experience under the guise
Of irregular stanzas and
Personal material or deep
Images of a certain kind.

On the whole, in other words,
The change from the earlier
Phase to the later one
Has worked for these poets.

The dance of vowels and consonants

2008-08-15T14:25:00.000-04:00

Milton scholar Stanley Fish considers a new prose translation of Paradise Lost and concisely demonstrates an essential difference between prose and poetry: while prose can be artfully formed into a dance of vowels and consonants (see Finnegans Wake), it doesn't depend on sonic choreography. Poetry, on the other hand, is ill-formed without it. To misappropriate Göran Sonnevi, "only through listening, seeing, speaking-singing can it work."

A poet plain and simple

2008-05-20T20:04:00.006-04:00

Not just representation, Yaakov: I think we're moving toward a plainspokenness in poetry in a way that we haven't seen in poets of stature since Robert Frost.

By this I mean that what you read is what you get with Frost—there’s little subtext and no stylistic jujitsu. The words are plain on the page. For this reason, among 20th-century American poets Frost is the most universal in his appeal. He’s like the painter Andrew Wyeth. People just like his work no matter what critics might say, although increasingly they’ve been saying good things as they’ve come to appreciate what he achieved.

Frost’s grandest achievement is a powerful impact on Irish poetry over the past 40 years. Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon have both been influenced by Frost. In his Nobel lecture Heaney said, “I love Robert Frost for his farmer’s accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness,” which describes Heaney’s work as well. And in a interview Muldoon cited Frost as “one of my favorite poets,” demonstrating his favor by cutting-and-pasting bits of Frost into his own poems and praising Frost in his literary criticism for traits that he himself is noted for. After these two great poets acknowledged their debts to Frost, literary critics had no choice but to fall in line lest they fall into irrelevance.

The language of Frost’s poetry isn’t poetic so much as it is vernacular. Just as Wyeth painted representational art in an age that valued abstraction, Frost wrote “language really used by men,” as he once said, and most often in traditional blank verse in an age that valued avant garde experiments in diction and form, novelty over tradition.

I’m referring to the age of modernism in art and literature, spanning the years 1880 to 1950 or thereabouts in literature (modernism dominated art until the early 1980s). Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, but only biographically could he be considered a man of his age. Temperamentally he was an outlier like Wyeth.

Frost was born in San Francisco but he’s known as a poet of New England because he lived there most of his life and chose its rural life as his principal subject. Heaney’s description of Frost’s poetry was apt: Frost did own a couple farms in New England. But Frost was never much of a farmer and supported his family largely through teaching and public readings—as a popular poet he drew good, paying audiences.

Frost is beloved by readers for his plainspokenness but he’s admired by critics today for his refusal to romanticize rural life or find transcendence in nature where there’s only nature, coldblooded and red in tooth, like the frenzied sharks in Moby-Dick. Consider the sense of foreboding in one of Frost’s most beloved poems:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

It’s this deep darkness, I think, that appeals to Heaney, whose own poetry can be gothic in its sense of foreboding.

Frost was keenly aware that early critics dismissed his poetry as mere sentiment dressed in traditional versification—“calendar poetry,” one critic called it. In 1916 he defended his poetry on his own terms, with a little parable that generations of readers have taken to heart:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

This is a parable about his choice to save avant garde experiments for another day, a day that likely wouldn't come. The key line is the penultimate “I took the one less traveled by,” meaning the one more traveled (“by” negates “less,” i.e., fewer travelers bypass the road). He took the road that was grassy and inviting, not the one that bent ominously in the undergrowth.

The key word is “sigh” in the first line of the last stanza. It’s a word that can signal either bliss or sorrow. Its ambiguity suggests that Frost is satisfied with his choice but concedes he may regret it one day, although that day is ages and ages hence, and that’s what makes all the difference. To borrow a homely adage that Frost himself might have used: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Frost’s refusal to romanticize rural life may stem from personal experience. He endured more than his share of sorrow. His father died of tuberculosis when he was just 11, leaving the family with $8 to their name. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister, Jeanie, to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later.

Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression. They had six children all told: son Elliot (1896-1904) died of cholera, son Carol (1902-1940) committed suicide, daughter Marjorie (1905-1934) died from puerperal fever after childbirth, and daughter Elinor Bettina died three days after birth in 1907. Only daughter Lesley and the institutionalized Irma outlived their father. Elinor had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1938.

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life,” Frost said. “It goes on.”

He earned his dark sense of foreboding.

Representation

2008-05-18T12:50:00.002-04:00

Inspired by two books by Michio Kaku, Beyond Einstein and Hyperspace, both helpfully acquainting the laymen with current ideas in theoretical physics (such as the possibility of physical dimensions beyond the usual three), I began to think of poetry in a kind of scientific way; it occurred to me that the farther one departs from representation in a poem, the less stable metaphor (and the other standard figures and tropes) become. For example, "Richard is a lion" has the familiar metaphorical ring to the extent the phrase retains the values of the culture (ours) from which it comes. But when representation becomes idiosyncratic so that the link is loosened between writer and reader values, then metaphor (for example) perhaps morphs into symbol, whose significance must then be identified by reference to work itself, as a whole and self contained. All of the above is by way of saying how valuable the work of Michael Burkard is. The recently published Envelope of Night (Nightboat Books, 2008), a selection of work from 1966-1990, is a clear and excellent demonstration of a career arc toward representation, of a poetic that over time phases into known dimensions. We enter the current period with a strange commingling of relief and loss.

A Language Discarded

2008-01-26T12:27:00.000-05:00

Although Fence has yet to accept a Yaakov poem for publication, Yaakov nevertheless enjoys this adventurous journal, usually finding himself energized and in a way stabilized after reading an issue. The Fall/Winter2007-08 entry has a lot to offer, featuring work by Wenderoth, Armantrout and Salamun, among many notable others. The subject of this brief posting is a line from May Burger's prose poem "Necessay," which goes: "I discarded a language behind the language that was more present and less conflicted." What a knowing, insightful, canny remark! It summarizes a process that surely every writing act comprehends. Doesn't a writer, after much revising and second-thinking, ultimately settle on the "more present" language, in the sense of being most present to the "subject"? And as for conflict--imagine the conflicts that a language resolves as it proceeds to realization: between depth and surface, cadence and meaning, clarity and embodiment.

Langpo and pedagogy

2007-12-09T11:24:00.000-05:00

Nice work, Murchadha, on your descriptive matrix. It is always useful to shine a clear light, that is, managment consulting, onto something as inherently in shadows as art. But let's go even further, say to the elementary school classroom, where young Miss Wonderpants is trying to teach her roomful of nine year olds not how to read, but how to read language poetry. What does she say? What are the rules? Not this is what "anticipation" means, but this is what it means to the dominant culture of which you may one day choose not to be a part. And how does she explain conjunctions, such as "and" or "but"--the problem being that such words are used to carry forward some type of logic, but what if the logic is absent intentionally or so idiosyncratic that everyday conjunctions are turned on their poor heads. And what about the overall issue of meaning, because isn't that why we are taught to read, to extract, eat, devour information that will be useful, at least as soon as the SAT. How is she to tell her class that meaning, after all, is up to the children, the reading learners?

Poetry matrix

2007-11-23T10:03:00.005-05:00

Consider this matrix. It’s a technique for categorizing poems. It’s not judgmental—it’s merely descriptive. Toward what end I’m not quite sure.

This technique is frequently used in management consulting. Upper right quadrant is superior to lower left quadrant, and the “maturity” or capability of something (e.g., the functionality of a software application) is judged by its position within the matrix. It’s used to assist business decisions about competing products or processes.

I think the technique could be used to discover relationships between poets that might not otherwise be noticed. Maybe. I have one qualification and one reservation:

I think it's better to categorize poems and not poets, as suggested in the matrix above. How in the world would you categorize an eclectic poet like Paul Muldoon?

And the idea of categorizing (pigeonholing?) poetry gives me pause. As soon as a poet puts pen to paper comparisons are invited, and the nature of comparison is associative, which breeches the boundaries of any conceivable set of quadrants. Critic Muldoon can begin with Emily Dickinson’s “I Tried to Think a Lonelier Thing” and wind up contemplating Emerson's essay "Fate."

Nevertheless, it could be a worthwhile exercise to flesh out a chart like this just to see where it might lead.

* * *

Not incidentally, I think the Guardian reviewer linked above misunderstands what Muldoon is about. As a poet and a critic Muldoon is willing to take risks and is happy to share his enthusiasms. So Muldoon is criticized because his oeuvre doesn’t cohere. It’s disjointed, in pieces. Not the individual poems but his body of work, even major segments of it: there are no themes to his books of poetry, no consistent style, no informing aesthetic, no supervenient worldview, no nothing.

What’s the difference between incoherence and eclecticism?

I suppose you could call Muldoon's work an exercise in poetic diversity. Every poem has an equal claim. (None should be disparaged lest it lose self-esteem?)

What unifies Muldoon’s work is the way he curates the language, as if he’s trying to preserve arcane words by writing them down in poems he’s (self-)confident will last. Cormac McCarthy, another egotist, shares this trait. Muldoon curates conceptual words and McCarthy curates the names of things, the parts of the world his characters inhabit. But he’s American and Muldoon isn’t. For Americans, the thing’s the thing, or as William Carlos Williams put it, “no ideas but in things.”

Maybe it's a reaction to an intellectually regressive culture playing out in txt msgs, in presentation bullet points, political soundbites and compressed YouTube videos. Dabs of thought all, Yaakov.

Then again, curating language seems to be an Irish trait. George V. Higgins curated idiom, especially the contractions employed in everyday speech: "That seemed to've put a stop to that . . . More's the fools they are . . . She knew for sure my life'd turned out dreary . . . they really couldn't've afforded it . . . how well their sons're all doing . . ." and, with syntactic brio, "Dad--and of course, Mother--'d shielded me from it."

Yes, and Yeats intentionally and purposefully curated the names of people by writing them out in a verse: "MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse."

Come to think of it, Higgins was a lawyer, an egotist by profession, and Yeats' rivals knew the arch-poet as an egotist. Maybe it's egotism that's an Irish trait?

Nah, it's a necessary condition for art, is all.

Who knows what really motivates an artist, Yaakov? Surely not the artist. All I know is that I can’t read Muldoon or McCarthy without a good dictionary at hand.

Come to think of it, Picasso was incoherent too. Schools tried to claim him but even cubism was just another assignation for him, like one of his numerous trysts. Picasso was a curator of painterly subjects. Aside from being an egotist.

If you want to know what Muldoon is about, revisit Picasso.

Same difference

2007-11-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

Speaking of Ashbery and impressionists, Yaakov, what is the difference between language poetry and the art of Lawrence Weiner? In Silence, John Cage questioned what difference exists between the sound of an expertly played violin and the sound of an expertly driven truck. Same difference?

I wonder if Cage influenced Weiner. Cage's "Four Statements on the Dance" could have been stenciled on those gallery walls and nobody would know the difference.

And think about that queer idiom, "same difference." It's a poem in itself, isn't it?

Short thought/Long thought

2007-11-11T17:26:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most basic conceptual tool with which to understand a poem is thought length. What is a thought? A package of words that says one thing, this one thing consisting at times of a hierarchy of thought for example in Donne. Someone like Ashbury, on the other hand, uses dabs of thought similar (thank you Murchadha) to the impressionistic aesthetic. The reader in a sense steps back and sees, maybe enjoys, the landscape for what it is. But note that it is the connections among thoughts that create the illusion of one or many, such linkages determined by common sense as formed within a culture, a reassuring sense of literalness, of what can actually happen in the world.

Got mlk?

2007-10-05T14:05:00.001-04:00

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Hear Allen Ginsberg, who "scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish," read "Howl" in a 1959 recording.

And hear the voice of Whitman:

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

Poetryland

2007-09-29T14:56:00.000-04:00

So it has come to pass that the Poetry Society of America has been rent asunder by the decision to pin this year's Frost Medal on John Hollander's beard. What Henry Kissinger said about academia is doubly true of Poetryland: disputes are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Besides, what's not to like about somebody who appreciates the vastly underappreciated Jay Wright?

Random Acts of Poetry

2007-09-16T23:20:00.002-04:00

Poem du jour. Simply delightful. Tristan Tsara would have loved it. Catch Ralph Fiennes reading Auden.

It all depends . . .

2007-09-16T17:26:00.002-04:00

At the risk of sounding relativistic, I don't think there are any right/wrong answers to your questions, Yaakov.

You seem to be arguing that Lessing's decorum applies to poets as well as poetry--that the poet must suit the subject biographically whether or not the poem suits it stylistically. Let me respond with an example in which a poet didn't fit the subject, yet produced an elegy that not only captured the moment but also captured the imagination of a world contemplating a different albeit eerily similar moment.

I'm talking about Auden and "September 1, 1939." Seamus Heaney has dismissed Auden as "a writer of perfect light verse," yet there's no better contextualiztion of the Nazi invasion of Poland than as the outcome of "a low dishonest decade," and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more forceful jeremiad against narcissistic self-regard. It's unsurprising that this poem spread like wildfire in cyberspace in the weeks following 9/11. In their guts people immediately understood the relationship between the two September days.

It would have surprised Auden. He left this poem out of his collections--I remember reading it on a handout in graduate school. Simply put, Auden's readers overruled him. (Screenwriters too: this poem is quoted in the 2008 terror thriller Body of Lies.)

You're right, Yaakov. Poems come by themselves. But readers don't "describe the effect." They absorb it, they internalize it, they complete it.

On the V-Tec Shootings

2007-09-16T16:52:00.000-04:00

Does caution precede exploitation? Talk about being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time. Suppose you teach in the Virginia Tech creative writing program and the shootings have just occurred and the shooter was a student of yours. And more. You’re a poet whose style is breezy and free associational and clever but rarely in a cloying way, and what your poems tend to embrace are not mass murders committed by psychotic adolescents—indeed how does one fit language to such an event—but rather love and nature, what happens every day.

How do you apply your style, your wit, your voice to that departure into darkness? But you try, you do apply it because writing poems is what you do, and poems after all in a real sense come by themselves. But how does a reader describe the effects?

Is it a matter of a tenor trying to hit a note below his natural register, or worse, is it a self-indulgent venture by a happy voice into a terrible region, a kind of colonization, an opportunity to contemplate shocked silence, an empty gun, bereaved parents, and report the results nationally?