tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71008430483501547512024-03-05T00:57:30.224-05:00yaakov murchadhamurchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-58072075453297474982013-02-13T14:00:00.000-05:002018-04-30T15:07:39.067-04:00<div style="margin: 0in;">
<strong><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Poems & Prose</span></strong></div>
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<a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2013/02/hand-in-hand-we-talk.html" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Hand-in-Hand We Talk</a><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha<br /><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2012/12/who-knew.html">Who knew . . .</a><br />By Murchadha</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2012/07/poemes-extraits-de-mystes.html">Poemes extraits de Mystes</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">By Matthieu Baumier<br />
<a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2012/03/remix-5.html">Remix (5)</a></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2011/04/digitalis.html">Digitalis</a><br />
By Doug Logan</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2010/07/mornings-birds.html">The Morning's Birds</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Doug Logan</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2010/05/now-it-can-be-told.html">Bejeweled, Bothered and Bewildered</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2010/05/three-poems-by-therese-halscheid.html">Three Poems</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Therese Halscheid</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2010/01/chaucers-creative-destruction.html">Chaucer's Creative Destruction</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/12/variation-on-theme-by-wm-shakespeare.html">Variation on a Theme by W.S.</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/07/four-poems-by-darcy-cummings.html">Four Poems</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Darcy Cummings</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/07/first-wife.html">First Wife</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Anne-Marie Levine</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/01/clippings-4.html">Remix (4)</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/11/contemplating-his-mortality.html">Contemplating His Mortality</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/01/extreme-weather.html">Extreme Weather</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Elaine Terranova</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/01/four-november-9ths.html">Four November 9ths</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Anne-Marie Levine</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/01/mendocino-coast-1967.html">Mendocino Coast, 1967</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Dorothea Grossman</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/01/not-again.html">Not Again</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Dorothea Grossman</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/01/mantis-by-elizabeth-brunazzi-terrier.html">Mantis</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Elizabeth Brunazzi</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/11/uniontown-1980.html">Uniontown, 1980</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Doug Logan</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/09/clippings-3.html">Remix (3)</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/09/clippings-2.html">Remix (2)</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/02/waiting-on-hold-for-tech-support.html">Waiting on Hold for Tech Support</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/11/stink-bug.html">Stink Bug</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/08/history-as-system.html">60 Minutes</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/09/turtle-bay-1998.html">Turtle Bay 1998</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/09/clippings-1.html">Remix (1)</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha<br />
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</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Reviews & Interviews</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: large;"></span></strong><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2012/09/michael-robins-interview-plus-review.html">Michael Robins--Interview Plus Review</a></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p>By Catherine Theis and Virginia Konchan</o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2011/07/review-yaakov-on-darcy-cummings-artist.html">Review: Darcy Cummings' "The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer's Life"<br />
</a>By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2011/03/arthur-vogelsand-interview-plus-review.html">Arthur Vogelsang--Interview Plus Review</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Elaine Terranova and Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2010/09/review-elaine-terranova-on-glucks.html">Review: Louise Gluck's "A Village Life"</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Elaine Terranova</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-frederick-seidel-problem-ooga-booga.html">Review: Frederick Seidel's "Ooga-Booga"</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Elaine Terranova</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/12/review-rachel-lodens-dick-of-dead.html">Review: Rachel Loden's "Dick of the Dead"</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Elaine Terranova</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/08/joshua-marie-wilkinsoninterview-plus.html">Joshua Marie Wilkinson--Interview Plus Review</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/07/michael-burkard-appreciation.html">Michael Burkard--An Appreciation</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/05/poet-plain-and-simple.html">A Poet Plain and Simple</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By Murchadha</span><br />
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</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Observations & Commentary</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: large;"></span></strong><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2012/12/tribute-to-dottie-grossman-la-poetry.html">Tribute to Dottie Grossman: L.A. Poetry & Jazz Trip</a></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By Elaine Terranova<br />
<a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2012/08/revolutionary-grammar.html">Revolutionary Grammar</a><br />By Murchadha</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2011/03/wallace-stevens-philosopher.html">Wallace Stevens, Philosopher</a></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2009/04/fairey-comment.html">Fairey Comment</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/12/dance-of-vowels-and-consonants.html">The Dance of Vowels and Consonants</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/05/representation.html">Representation</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2008/01/language-discarded.html">A Language Discarded</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/12/langpo-and-pedagogy.html">Langpo and Pedagogy</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/11/poetry-quadrant.html">Poetry Matrix</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/11/same-difference.html">Same Difference</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/11/short-thoughtlong-thought.html">Short Thought/Long Thought</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/10/archangel-of-soul.html">Got Mlk?</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/09/poetryland.html">Poetryland</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/09/best-poetry-site-on-web.html">Random Acts of Poetry</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/09/it-all-depends.html">It All Depends . . .</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Murchadha</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com/2007/09/on-v-tec-shootings.html">On the V-Tec Shootings</a></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">By Yaakov</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-21661302550896022122013-02-12T13:40:00.001-05:002013-05-06T15:03:23.816-04:00Hand-in-Hand We Talk<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hand-in-hand with steady steps we walk,<br /> And steady is our talk:<br /><br /> Look at this! Look at that!<br /> This paint's just wrong.<br /> That house was sold.<br /> The wind is strong.<br /> Are you still cold?<br /> I should have worn a hat.<br /><br />Talk of neighborhood and politics<br /> And families for sure,<br />Plain talk, quiet talk, small talk, steady talk,<br /> For all our ills a cure.<br /><br />We walk along our daily course<br />And language is our vital force.</span><br />
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
</span>murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-25657100918380023442012-12-31T10:43:00.000-05:002013-01-06T08:05:30.033-05:00Tribute to Dottie Grossman: L.A. Poetry & Jazz Trip, by Elaine Terranova<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I bet that skinny broken thing down there is a river.
Everything looks like a petroglyph from the air, some signal to the universe.
Traveling, I decide, is like living except that you are doing it in such a
restricted space. Everything you need is in the case that's beside you or under
the seat. Maybe it contains your ventriloquist dummy or your hoard of treasure.
But probably only the equipment you require, comb, soap, floss, to remain who
you are even under distressed circumstances.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I wonder as
we land, will I find the person who is meeting me, will they find me? And yes,
at the end of the secure area, while I am scarcely awake, shoes still untied,
just like in the movies there is someone holding a printed sign bearing my
name. It's Fred Fitzgerald, a stage-managing intern at CalArts, nice man with a
beard and pony tail and beautiful forearm tattoos, who drives me for the half
hour freeway ride to Bonnie's house, Mexican music on the SUV radio. It's 100
degrees and I take off my sweater quickly, not wanting to miss the view, palm
trees, treeless mountains, bald stone, gray-gold, oleander. I am here to read,
not my poems but my friend Dottie's. Dorothea Grossman, writing for 50 years
but just recently on the map of poetry, you could say, with a feature in <i>Poetry</i>
magazine and their Wood prize for 2010. Her first commercially published book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fun of</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Speaking English</i>, has come out from Coffeetown Press in June, a
month after her sudden death. And in October this Call and Response gig with
her poetry and jazz partner, trombonist Michael Vlatkovich, at CalArts Redcat
Theater in Disney Hall. They were scheduled on a joint bill with the avant
garde singer, Bonnie Barnett. Now Dottie's part will be a tribute and I will be
reading in her place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So many
jumbled emotions in me, foremost sadness, but also excitement, fatigue. And not
a little fear. Boy, they all drive so fast here, weaving in and out of lanes,
but Fred is unflappable and we get to Van Nuys, a little community trimmed with
flowering bushes, just fine. When I ask Bonnie later if that red stuff in front
of the houses is bougainvillea, she says, That sounds like the start of a poem
by Dottie. Bonnie's house is nestled in eucalyptus, why do different parts of
the country smell so different? Little white house, big leather living room
furniture, pretty calico maybe partly Siamese cat, Pooky. Bonnie greets me,
shows me to the little guest room recently vacated by the guitarist, Anders
Nilsson, who will accompany her at the gig. Nice firm single bed, books piled on
books, fantasy and mystery mostly, maybe inspiration for the invented syllables
of her musical pieces, boxes on boxes of cds, a lamp on a box. The bedroom door
is festooned with teenage memorabilia of Richard's, her partner's, daughter who
has left for college or somewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Bonnie and
I sit and talk. Richard Wood arrives, a friendly guy with a mop of black hair.
I'm a total stranger and a little nervous taking up residence here like this,
but they are both welcoming. I have been admiring the various CDs out and
around, mostly his, Bonnie tells me, Dylan, Joe Williams, Howling Wolf?,
Kerouac reciting his poems to a jazz accompaniment by Steve Allen, also a DVD
of Marshall McLuhan giving some talks. Richard is a sax and flute player and I
find out how good he is from the CD I take home with me, but today he has been
cooking. The Recession has hit pretty hard here, and he and Bonnie have lost
their long-time day jobs, hers as a legal secretary and his, chef at a
special-ed school. So he temps at the</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">cafeteria of the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech, which
sounds pretty interesting. He winds down with some wine and seems disappointed
when I don't join him, but I'm so jet lagged I think I would pass out.
Californians are so proud of their food and wine and for good reason. It's 4 by
now. I see I'm not going to make it to dinner and when Richard says, are you
hungry? I sit down to a delicious noodle dish already in their fridge, with
tofu he has smoked and a spice mixture ground by him. Also, California
avocadoes he takes out of his pocket, as if he is going to juggle them. He
tells me they are creamier than Mexican and they are. Richard's a kind of
autodidact genius, into all kinds of things. His cooking tips: scramble eggs
very slowly for an hour or two, stirring constantly; massage kale to make it
more edible. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Bonnie
apologizes for being a little withdrawn, says she always gets this way in the
days before a gig. She is a big woman with curly hair and a wide smile. She
reminds me of Dottie. She knew the pianist Richard Grossman, Dottie's husband,
performs with some of the same musicians. He was, she tells me, a kind of
legend in avant garde music in L.A. Bonnie is a jazz DJ and did a show on the
Grossmans after Dottie's death, playing some of their CD's and reading Dottie's
poems. She has sent me a CD of her own stuff and I'm pretty impressed with how
inventive she is, creating almost a new language of disconnected syllables and
electronic sounds. She says she loved Dottie's work and courted her friendship.
It took a while, Dottie kept to herself after Richard died, but she and Bonnie
got close. A year ago, they wrote the grant for this gig together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It's
Richard's (Bonnie's partner's) 61st birthday and after dinner Bonnie and I go
off to Whole Foods, which here is a sprawling hacienda. We buy some little
cakes to celebrate. Then I crash and go to bed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I discover
that Bonnie is a movie lover too and the next morning, we strike out to see the
film of the book I read on the plane, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Perks of Being a Wallflower</i>. We drive to the closest theatre, a 16-plex in
Burbank. The screen is gigantic, the huge theater has stadium seating, but
there are only a handful of people at the 11 a.m. show, all women, maybe
unemployed actresses. Bonnie says the size of the screen and theater are not
unusual, this is Hollywood. I bring a huge felafel back to her house from
Lusy's, their local middle Eastern place in a strip mall, and sit with my
really good sandwich and a Joe Williams CD while she goes off to have a
lubricating shot in her knee. Richard has left for his temp job at 4 a.m. but I
see him when he gets back.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I am
waiting for Lauren Pratt from CalArts to pick me up and take me to the hotel in
downtown L.A. Lauren is probably in her 50s, bright, efficient woman with a
beautiful tan, tennis player she tells me. She runs the performances at Redcat
Theater. She has done work toward a Ph.D. in English and studied with Helen
Vendler at Boston U., so we talk about poetry on the way, especially some ideas
she has about Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I mention the movie, <i>Margaret</i>,
derived from his "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child." She teaches in
the music program at CalArts and has courses that prepare performers for their
stage lives, like going for interviews and writing resumes. Also dealing with
agents. At Redcat, named for Roy and Edna Disney, no doubt funded by them, she
is a wonder. She works with stagehands and runs performers back and forth to
the hotel, the Standard, a few blocks away, one of the sponsors of the theater,
so everyone is booked there. Going to Disney Hall where Redcat is located from
the hotel is straight up a giant hill, hence the need for car rides. When
Lauren drops me off, she picks up a dapper Italian, Riccardo, to take back to
the theater (are all musicians named Richard?--because the drummer at our
performance also is, Rich West). She tells me I can come see him and his
partner, Tiziana, the Duo Alterno, at Redcat that evening. She will even pick
me up when she is picking up Tiziana. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I am glad
to go out again because the hotel room has aspects of a hospital room, mostly
plastic and sterile. I practice getting in and out of the bed a few times,
which is a mattress on a carpeted pedestal, and can't figure out how to
negotiate it, put my slippers on the floor then on the pedestal, and realize I
will fall getting down so put the little plastic chair against the bed and try
leaning on that as I rise. Later I realize that the other side of the bed is
where you are meant to get in and out because the mattress there is flush with
the pedestal, and it is almost like getting out of a regular bed. Other
questions are the sink faucet that squirts you in the eye, you have to turn it
on to a trickle, the blinking pale light of the bathroom, I discover where the
switch is, and that to shut the glass wall of the bathroom off from the bedroom
and the open blinds, you use the room-width white shower curtain. I think the
room should come with a set of instructions, but by the next day I figure it
out and even like it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I ride back
to the theater with Tiziana, a classical soprano, who is very beautiful in her
stage makeup. I get to the theater in time to eat at the Disney Hall cafeteria
where they make couscous with carob chips, not such a good idea. Then I walk
around the Gehry building inside and out, so like a ship, space or sea. The Duo
Alterno is fun. They perform Cage and Ives and</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">avant garde Italian composers. That night, Riccardo begins
with a Cage piece, "A Flower," that is played on a closed piano, the
pitch different on key cover and the board behind it. He gives explanations
between pieces in his careful, eccentric English. He is a scholar and critic as
well as a pianist, funny too, and he reminds me of Victor Borge. He's wearing a
dark, beautifully tailored polished cotton suit, which looks like leather.
Tiziana has three changes of clothes. She sings a work called Ophelia from a
poem by Heiner Muller that's odd and interesting, a little bloody, and some
Ennio Maricone, who is known for soundtracks to spaghetti westerns. Once, she
wraps herself in a feather boa and sits on the piano, showing off her legs .
Behind them is a screen which for one piece displays the texts and still camera
shots of Riccardo's <i>fotosuoni</i>, photos he took that inspire his own
compositions. The Duo Alterno has performed everywhere, even Mongolia, and my
favorite piece of his was composed in Beijing. It starts with recorded
crickets, morphs into ancient Chinese instruments, and then school children at
play, the sounds closely connected. Their finale is a concerto for Betty Boop
that ends with Tiziana attaching a tail and a leash to Riccardo as he sits at
the piano so he can play her dog, Boby, and he trails behind her on all fours
as she leads him off the stage. I'm enthusiastic on the ride home from the
theater and they are exhausted but grateful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When I wake
up on Wednesday, I grab a blueberry muffin from the only place around that
seems to know what a muffin is, Starbuck's, and head for the public library
that hovers on a hill above the hotel. It's a great art deco building. I want
to take a tour but can't find the guide, and just wander around on my own.
There is even art in the elevator. I go look at the outside, white in brilliant
sun. And just across the street, I walk up and up, sometimes taking an
escalator, a steep incline where there are buildings at each level. Dottie used
to send me e-mails about L.A. architecture, and we would spar about what was
art deco, moderne, or beaux art. It's hard to be here without a dialogue with
her running in my head. I've been looking for the Biltmore Hotel, which I know
she mentioned, isn't that famous old Hollywood? The streets are so wide, I know
it's only a block from the library, walk and walk and finally find it. There's
a noodle house--something we don't have in Phila.--Sai Sai is the name--with a
largely Asian clientele. I slurp udon, covering myself with napkins, having
first read the sign in the lobby: The state of California would like to inform
me that some of the ingredients in the dishes served may cause cancer and may
be especially dangerous to pregnant women. I see signs like this again wherever
I eat. You are always forewarned in California.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I get back
to the hotel as one of those famous L.A. car accidents is occurring just
outside. Two rough guys in silver cars tap each other on Flower St. The one in
front gets out and yells at the driver behind, Fag! The other opens his door
but sits where he is. Faggot! he yells even louder. Then they drive off, but
not before one of the uniformed parking attendants yells, Hey, Chrissake, <u>I'm</u>
gay! It's 2:30. I'm exhausted but just in time for Lauren to pick me up, with
Anders Nilsson, the guitarist who preceded me in Bonnie's single bed, and Ken
Filiano, a bassist who played with Richard Grossman and reveres him. He has a
cute white soul patch on his chin and talks really fast with his own brisk
cadence and a Martin Scorcese N.Y. accent. Anders is young, good looking, and
Swedish but speaks perfect English. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and throws
back his head to get his dirty-blond hair out of his eyes. On the ride over he
tells me how to pronounce Wallender, because I read those mysteries--with a V
and an accent on the second syllable. We're all going to Redcat for sound and
light checks. The theater hands there, at least half a dozen, wear shorts and
black shirts with the theater logo on them. They are really nice and look in
the semidarkness like forest creatures, you can see the whites of their eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I watch
Bonnie's check. She does this deep, guttural scat singing, a chant, loud and
with enormous power. She reminds me of an exotic singer from my childhood, Yma
Sumac. They used to say she invented her name by spelling her real name
backwards, Amy Camus, and that she was really from Queens. Bonnie reads passages
from Gary Snyder, appropriately, "Night Song of the Los Angeles
Basin," something by Lorca, and Gertrude Stein's "Love Story,"
all in the same strong, hypnotic voice, repeating words and phrases. I remember
the wife and cow lines from Stein. Her performance is an opera where she is the
cast and the orchestra at the same time. I can see how much effort it takes,
like an opera singer, and how she might get tired just thinking about a
performance. But she really meshes with the musicians. Anders is so animated, a
sort of 21st century Jimi Hendrix, and Ken, a classy guy, inventive and busy on
electric double bass and sound effects, both real pros and they, like the
musicians in the Dottie set, are totally improvisational yet completely in
synch with the reader/singer and one another. They play the way you do in jazz,
but they don't start with a standard and improvise. They improvise from the
beginning. Bonnie's back-up musicians accompany her, their music behind her as
she sings, so it sounds like a trio, while Dottie in performance read first and
then the music would come in, the way I'll do it tonight. Lauren has told me
that Bonnie is famous locally for performances of group hums, having done 83
with an audience of as many as 500 people who join her and just hum for an hour
or so. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When it's
our turn for the check, I sit on a stool and somebody adjusts the mike. I try
to make some sense but kind of sputter as I introduce the first poem of
Dottie's and say something about her. Michael Vlatkovich is a big, jovial,
courtly guy with a long pigtail, which may be fairly new because I don't think
he had it when I read with him and Dottie in a San Diego bookstore a few years
ago. He's the reason I'm here. He knew how close Dottie and I were. Michael has
a stand on the stage for his trombone, and mutes and plungers and some things I
can't identify are on a table near him. Tom McNally is the electric guitarist
in our set, a sweet young collegiate looking guy. He's made a kind of altar to
Dottie on a stool beside him. There is a picture of her and Richard, in a
psychedelic shirt, some incense, the silver flask of bourbon she always had
with her when she read, and a perfumed candle. After the check, the musicians
decide to go to L.A. Pizza for dinner and I try to tag along. Lauren has
another suggestion. She takes me aside, I think you should go back to the hotel
and rest, just get room service, decide what you're going to say.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I see the
wisdom of this and she drives me back to the hotel. Paul Rudd is coming out the
door with a bunch of other guys and that makes me glad I came back too. I sit
and check off poems to read. Dottie must have written a thousand. I know she
was able to send 200 when <i>Poetry</i> magazine asked to see them. So many
about N.Y. of course; that was the legendary place to us, growing up in
Philadelphia. Like that cartoon, where it's just New York City and then the
rest of the country. We went to N.Y. to see artists, poets, bands, also movies
that never seemed to come to Philadelphia. There in the '60s we spotted and
even spoke to Andy Warhol (he bummed a cigarette), Allen Ginsberg, Timothy
Leary, John Coltrane. But most of Dottie's poems are set in L.A., where she
spent half her life, really, featuring West Coast lures like Cary Grant and sun
at Christmas. Sometimes I think the Grossmans went to L.A. to find
hummingbirds. But the car, the cross-country trip, inspired Dottie too, gave
her material for "Dear Terre Haute," "The Two Times I Loved You
Most in a Car," and later, "Mendocino Coast." I'll read these
and decide what else, like how many little Henny Youngman poems at a time, what
to say about Dottie young, Dottie and Richard in Philadelphia. Then try to
figure out how to read. Not sad, I think, just jaunty, matter of fact, no
drama, the way Dottie would read her poems. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I will
return with Lauren at 7 in the pickup of Riccardo and Tiziana who need to do an
interview at the theater with the L.A. Times (they get a really good review),
and they stay to our performance, maybe so they can be driven to a hotel in
Valencia afterwards, near CalArts, where they will be performing the following
day. But it's good for them to hear Bonnie and they really like her. Dottie's
tribute is first on the bill. The drummer, Rich West, arrives. He's a book
dealer in his day life, loved Dottie, had a lot to talk to her about. He's
short and lively, with long brown hair. He spreads out behind me a drum set and
tin cans and some odder things. I realize I will not be able to turn around to
see him when we are on without falling off my stool. He tells me later he was
sad about this because I did look over at the other two musicians on either
side of me. I remember the half dozen e-mails about stage set up that I
received but didn't understand or pay attention to. Anyhow, I'm in front, flanked
by Michael's trombone and Tom's guitar, Rich behind us. What's a wonder to me,
since there's no script and I don't even know for sure which poems I will read,
is how tuned in the musicians are. They respond like voices in a conversation.
I read the words from one poem, "quiet as elephants," and when I
finish, Michael comes out with circus music and they riff on that. The poems
are short, maybe 30 seconds sometimes, and the musical answer can be a minute
or more. In the Henny Youngman poems, such as: At the bookstore,/ Henny
Youngman tells the sales clerk,/ 'I'm in a hurry,/ so I'll just have some
haiku', Dottie's imagined punch lines are repeated in the music. Sometimes the
drum gets the last word, sometimes the guitar, growling or trailing off. Once or
twice, I'm not sure the music's over, and there will be a last note lingering
that I cut off without meaning to. Michael usually begins and then the others
come in and take his theme someplace else. They are so inventive and
cooperative, giving each other room for little solos. The single spotlight that
covers us, just right for the pages I'm reading from, also makes it hard to see
the audience. I know there are people out there from the coughs and laughter,
but it's all black from here. I ask Michael, how full is the theater? as we
come on, and he says some of the audience may be masquerading as empty seats. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>After the
intermission and Bonnie's performance, Ellen Burr, Dottie's good friend, comes
up to me. She has short black hair and wears glasses. She's trim and peppy and
says my voice is so like Dottie's--the Phila. accent, I guess--that she can
close her eyes and imagine it is Dottie reading. Her husband has been filming
us. In the lobby there is Richard Wood with a Romney doll about the size of a
big cigar. I don't recognize who it's meant to be at first, and he kids me,
saying it's Karl Rove. He and some of the others have watched the first
Presidential debate. I like to think the audience would have been bigger if we
weren't competing with that. I don't find out how dispiriting the actual debate
was until I read the papers the next day, am glad in a way to have missed it.
With Richard is Chris Peditto, a writer from Philadelphia. He and I used to
read our poetry at the London Pub. He remembers me and shakes my hand. His
red-haired wife Barbara is a very well thought of blind artist. I have seen her
bright abstracts that feature letters of the alphabet on Bonnie and Richard's
walls. Barbara has a brother still in Philly, Elliott Levin, a saxophone
player. I know him because we both once had pieces performed on something
called New American Radio. Interesting how everything circles back to Philly,
like Dottie's life did.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Michael has
suggested a "celebratory nightcap" at the Standard. I am surely the
oldest woman at the Bavarian Garden rooftop bar, first time I've been to the
top storey, approached by a narrow stairway after the elevator ends. It is only
the 13th floor really, about waist high to the skyscrapers clustering around
but a great view of them and a cutout moon. I look around for our party but not
having any instruments to move, I'm the first here. A tall, muscular guy in
some kind of uniform, a bouncer, I guess, comes up because I probably look lost
and asks if he can help me. He tells me he's T.J. and wants to know my name,
takes my hand to shake it. "Where you from? Philly? Me too!" And wants
me to just say if I need anything. It's cooler out this evening, the heat spell
has finally broken. I see a table being vacated and grab a stool next to a heat
lamp. A waiter comes and brings the lamp even closer. Michael and a pretty
woman with a cane, Lisa, arrive. She has a poetry performance group in
Albuquerque Michael has played with. Ken and Rich West and Anders join us.
Anders hasn't brought a jacket and gets even closer to the heat lamp than I
have been, until the edges of his ears turn red. Ken has posted a great piece
about Dottie on Mark Webber's website dedicated to her. He says now he's
writing something longer. It's 12:30, I have to leave at 6:00 a.m. for the
airport, so sort of fade out. Michael is somehow stuck with the tab, $8 for my
ginger ale alone, but won't take money from anyone. He talks about working with
poets--I can see that performing with Dottie has meant so much to him all these
years--and how he likes it because it makes him think, and the others agree
that it gives them musical ideas. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-70684295958150534522012-12-03T13:44:00.000-05:002013-02-23T14:18:14.480-05:00Who knew . . .<br />
. . . that no language is intrinsically poetic?<br />
. . . that mere lineation is a creative act?<br />
. . . that poetry proceeds from imagination?<br />. . . that <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/philosophy-and-the-poetic-imagination/">found poetry has a philosophical undercarriage</a>?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/biographia-literaria/13/">STC knew</a>, is who.<br />
<br />
<br />murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-88788772038763973582012-09-01T16:25:00.000-04:002012-09-09T16:36:40.886-04:00Michael Robins--Interview Plus Review<span style="font-family: inherit;">Michael Robins’ <i>The
Next Settlement</i> (UNT 2007) received the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. His <i>Ladies &</i> <i>Gentlemen</i> (Saturnalia 2011), reviewed below, mixes an imaginative
richness with a precise yet wide-ranging exploration of kindness and
conscience. Catherine Theis conducted the interview. Virginia Konchan wrote the review.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b> </b><span style="line-height: 115%;"><b>INTERVIEW</b><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
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</div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Catherine
Theis</span></i></b></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">: I’ve
been reading your latest book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies
& Gentleman</i> (Saturnalia Books, 2011), and I can’t help but feel the
presence of Wallace Stevens, especially since the use of couplets reminds me of
Stevens’ own obsession with dualities—mind versus body, nature versus
civilization, presence versus absence. I’m curious, is Stevens an influence?
What’s your favorite poem of his?<br /><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Michael
Robins</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: These
are great opening questions–you’re not the first to pair my work with Wallace
Stevens–yet I struggle with the comparison: I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">want</i> to be influenced by Stevens, want to say that his work has, at
some point, unveiled all that’s possible in poetry, and I want to join those
whose work I admire and who’ve cited him as a central influence. I’ve
consciously struggled with memory since I was a boy: I lose much of the day
before and, many times, I can’t retrieve what I’ve read or possibly discover in
what recess the poems and stories have hibernated, if indeed they still reside
anywhere. One weekend, long ago at my grandparents’ house, I sped through the
pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe</i>, fairly proud of my accomplishment. My brother, skeptic to my
bragging, asked about a specific moment in the plot and I couldn’t respond. I
swore that I’d actually read the novel, but where was my proof?<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">When
you ask about Stevens, I turn to my library—a poor substitute for memory—and
open Stevens’ collected poems. There’s a smallish, yellow sheet of lined paper
that lists the page numbers of a dozen or so poems I once considered for a
wedding ceremony: “Two at Norfolk,” “Idiom of the Hero,” “On the Road Home,” “A
Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” “Wild Ducks, People and Distances,” etc. In
retrospect, ten years after making the list, I recognize there are some odd
choices; no doubt I was hunting for a poem appropriate for the pairing of two human
beings, offering imaginative possibility with a good deal of grounding by the
frank reality of the challenges inherit in relationships, in marriage, and in
living. I return often to Stevens’ assertion that “the imagination loses
vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real,” and I’m deeply invested in
this exchange, especially the pull from reality that nears the point of
breaking.<br /><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Stevens’
poetry is strange and stalwart, and there are too many flooring moments to note
a favorite poem. Perhaps a better way of answering a “what’s-your-favorite”
question is to say that, at any moment, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">any</i>
Stevens poem might become my favorite. I’m fairly confident I didn’t read much
Stevens until graduate school (memory fails again; perhaps <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Collected Poems</i> was assigned), and his work carries enough
resonance that I made two attempts (the second attempt, at last, successful) to
visit his grave in Hartford… I remember lots of sunlight, Katherine Hepburn’s
stone not terribly far away, and Samuel and Elizabeth Colt (think Robyn
Schiff’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Revolver</i>)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>a little farther on. There were, of
course, thousands more headstones of those who aren’t remembered for anything.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: I’m also interested in this
idea that seems to be cultivated throughout your book of a story that leads nowhere,
and what that might mean for us as readers—to sit in silence, to sit in
mystery. Stevens’ jar upon a hill is retranslated into “a billboard that reads
/Redneck Steakhouse.” Or how, “[w]e moved like statues.” I love this kind of
transformative power that results when we use stillness as a kind of measure.
Are you fascinated with stillness? With form?<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">:</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> I love that some poems create
meaning and order from the experiences of life; most of my own experiences,
however, don’t conclude in convenient epiphanies. Maybe it’s my wiring. Too
many things happen simultaneously, in fragments and half-developed episodes,
convoluted always by complex emotions and skepticism. I want to reflect this
particular experience of the world, yet I’m guilty too of reaching for
solidity, cohesion, and meaning. Ideally, those couplets that you mentioned
ease the reader through the sometimes dense imagery and figurative language of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies & Gentlemen</i>, providing the
reader another opportunity for silence and contemplation. Your reflection on
stillness immediately brings to mind Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings.” Let us not forget that this overflow is also “recollected
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tranquility</i>.” When the creation of
a new poem hits its stride, that stillness or tranquility feels like a hearth
radiating in my chest. The few truly harmonious moments in my life—that is to
say the instances when I’ve felt an ecstatic peace with my place in the cosmos
(Kerouac’s “be in love with your life”) and was ready, right then and there, to
leave this world behind—were moments of stillness and very much connected to an
image. Immersing myself in an artist’s work is another kind of stillness, as is
the simple pleasure of spending the day on the beach, far from the everyday
nonsense and commotion.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Am I
fascinated with form? The shape of the poem is hugely important to me, and
you’ve probably noticed that the lines of each individual poem in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies & Gentlemen</i> (except the two
prose poems) are nearly the same length. I say nearly, because the lines of
each couplet are purposefully <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i>the
same length. After September 11, 2001, during my second year in the MFA Program
at UMass-Amherst, my language utterly failed in the wake of the events that
day. Months of creative silence passed until, eventually, I found myself
writing a sonnet that subtly alluded to all that had happened. Then I quickly
began a second sonnet, as if at last the formal constraint gave an organizing
structure to what I needed to voice. Of course I love Emily Dickinson’s “After
great pain, a formal feeling comes—,”and it seems fitting that my own formal
response arose while living down the street from the Dickinson house in
Amherst. Anyway, eventually the single stanza of the sonnet gave way to
couplets, and for me that’s another kind of formality, much in the way that
rhyme or line lengths can serve as a stabilizing force in a poem.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You
know, one of the many things I admire about your own book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fraud of Good Sleep </i>(Salt, 2011), is the assortment of shape
and style, and how variety can become a type of consistency in an individual
collection. There are short and extended poems in your book, lineation and
prose, punctuation and poems without, some poems that adhere to the left margin
and others that take advantage of the page. Have you always written with this
kind of multiplicity? How do you determine the form of an individual poem?<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: Yes, I’ve always written this
way. The voice of the poem tells me what to do. I don’t have a choice, really.
I make sense of things by going through all possible permutations before I make
up my mind. Even outside the experience of the poem, I don’t want to be “the
bird,” I want to be a flock of birds. I think it keeps me sufficiently
delusional. I think you need that delusion in order to be a writer. More
simply, the multiplicity of forms in my work reflects the way I think and the
way I feel; I’m never perfectly aligned, no matter how I try. I’m constantly at
war with myself and, at the same time, with the world.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Poets
like Emily Dickinson are curious to me; such singularity of voice! Lately I’ve
been fascinated with “The drop that wrestles in the Sea—,” and in thinking
about individuality and the Cosmos, and how we are all part of something much
larger; a something that most always fails (in the best way) especially when
it’s so full. In many of your poems, there’s an overflowing fullness, a ripe-rottenness
of “[e]very fruit, rather, wasting in the trees.” Can you talk about this
ripeness in your work? How does it work alongside or against ideas of restraint
or order? What happens in “the chill shadow of the cherry tree?”<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: Who wants to waste their time
with art that isn’t ripe? Every fullness of the world, inevitably, becomes
decay. As you know, my wife and I have a daughter who just turned nine months
old, and while I don’t want to sound crass or indifferent, I’m fully aware that
someday she too will vanish. That inevitability is never far from my thoughts,
as frightening as that can be. In my imagination I see cars missing stop signs,
El trains leaning from their tracks, engines aflame after leaving the runway.
Are my constant thoughts and scenarios of mortality debilitating? I don’t
believe so. Death is very much persistent and present, whether we’re willing to
be aware of that presence or not. Most of us do a damn fine job pushing death
away, especially in the United States, where we’ve managed to even place
boundaries on the behavior of grief. In his poem “Montgomery Hollow,” Richard
Hugo writes, “People die in cites. Unless it’s war / you never see the bodies.”
When death <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does</i> arrives at the
doorstep of someone for whom we care deeply, we’re devastated. And then it’s
expected that we adjust and get on with our lives. This is what happens in “the
chill shadow of the cherry tree.” You and I are standing in that shadow always,
and I’d rather acknowledge the fact and be less ruined when the things I love
dearly disappear. I like how the French refer to the orgasm as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">la petite mort</i> (the little death). The
“ripeness” of living is as much related to desire and goes hand-in-hand with
our gradual and sudden releases of what we call a soul.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: There’s a section in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies & Gentleman</i> called “Circus”
that opens up a conversation about U.S. politics, including war and its
destruction. Can you talk about citizenship as it relates to this implied
spectatorship of a circus production?<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: “Circus” began as a group of
individually-titled prose poems, but those titles (“Personations of Mother
Goose,” for example) and their prose form were shed during some unexpected and
exciting revisions. The section in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies
& Gentlemen </i>begins with an epigraph from Abraham Lincoln: “If
destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Lincoln
and I share a birthday, and his emblematic character—the honest, model
citizen—has been in some ways inextricable from my own life. I wanted his
presence to inform the structure of “Circus,” so each page of the poem consists
of couplets totaling a dozen lines, and these numbers reflect our birth
(February 12<span style="font-size: small;"><sup>th</sup>). Plus, the series’ sixteen poems are a nod to
Lincoln’s position as sixteenth president, and then there are the appropriated
fragments of the Gettysburg Address, delivered, incidentally, near Marianne
Moore’s future resting place at Evergreen Cemetery.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I was
born a citizen of the United States and, therefore, know intimately no other
experience of citizenship. Despite the struggles and our country’s current
economic hardships, U.S. citizens are undeniably privileged—I’m very aware
these days of the luxury that is my kitchen tap!—and most of those living here
would choose to be a citizen of no other country. But as a citizen of a world
power, I can’t ignore the shortcomings of our particular democracy, nor can I
avoid my own complicity in the actions of the United States on the world’s
stage. In the short of it, the vast majority of us <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> spectators, including myself, and nearly as many are resigned
to the news of casualties—allies as well as those of enemy X, Y, or Z—and the
double-standard by which our country (be it drones or occupation) has acted
unilaterally to infringe the sovereignty of other countries.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A
rather unnerving example of this spectatorship came with the news of Osama bin
Laden’s death. The morning news included, yes, footage of Obama’s press
conference, but his statements were supplemented by the video of spectators in
a baseball stadium pointing to American flags, applauding or pumping their
fists, and chanting “U.S.A.” The overzealous jubilation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i> felt similar to those rare but widely televised celebrations
after the attacks of September 11<span style="font-size: small;"><sup>th</sup>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Those</i> celebrations are often mistaken as a representation of the
entire Arab world, but Americans often fail to recognize how the world views
their own actions, which include not only the invasion of other lands, but this
country’s failure to take a larger role in slowing down the destruction of the
environment.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: The dead deer—“more alive to
you now”—that shows up at the beginning and toward the end of your book, any
relation to William Stafford’s deer in “<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Traveling
through the Dark</span>”? There seems to be a resemblance, no?<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: I grew up in Portland and
began reading poetry while living there, so it wasn’t easy to evade “Traveling
Through the Dark” and the influence that Stafford has had on the poetry of the
Pacific Northwest. At various times I’ve repositioned my feelings about
narrative poetry; honestly, I believe I’ve always maintained a narrative thread
in my writing, however thin that thread may wear. Behind the dead deer in
“Sleep Is Not Unlike a Waiting Room” is my first-hand encounter while
hitchhiking Highway 1 from San Louis Obispo, through Big Sur, and up to
Monterey. This was many years ago. When my luck ran low and the rides were few,
I walked. Somewhere along the way, the highway’s shoulder became too narrow to
continue safely, so I crossed the guardrail and continued on the other side
where, suddenly, my downward gaze landed near the body of a gorgeous fawn,
almost startled from her sleep albeit her round, still eye staring up at the
sky. I was shaken, then taken by a forceful sadness. She’d been struck maybe
the night before, and although I didn’t literally take a photograph of her body
with the Pentax I had in my backpack, I “blinked a broken thing” as the poem
describes, and that single image is connected to many images woven into the
poem, including Stafford’s deer and those jumpers whose final moments were
documented on September 11<span style="font-size: small;"><sup>th</sup>.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: What are you working on right
now? What are you thinking about in your work?<br /><br /><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: I have an embarrassingly
large backlog of poems and several book-length projects that deserve my
ever-decreasing time. Lately, I’m no longer able to rationalize my insistence
on the couplet form. There’s a documentary about the making of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Darkness on the Edge of Town</i>, Bruce
Springsteen’s fourth and less commercial album, and in it Springsteen says that
beginning artists create by instinct, but at some point that instinct becomes
informed by intelligence. I’d like to believe I’m working in that second mode
at this point in my artistic life, although I miss the imaginative capacity of
my youth and the enthusiasms I had toward the world ten or twelve years ago.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For my
writing, this intelligence now means an accuracy in lineation and in the use of
added white space between lines and stanzas. This past March, in New York City,
I met Andrea Baker, a fine poet whose first book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Like Wind Loves a Window</i> (Slope Editions, 2005), is positively
fantastic. She’d heard me read from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies
& Gentlemen</i> and was genuinely surprised to learn that those poems are
anchored by the use of well-measured couplets. Her surprise, I soon realized
myself, was warranted. Since writing the poems of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies & Gentlemen</i>, I’ve attempted to move away from the
couplet, specifically through a book-length series of poems titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Match</i>. Currently, I’m working on poems
that try to explore the wonder of fatherhood, poems that focus on lineation to
accurately reflect the pacing and pausing of the language.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: You mean, the language of
fatherhood? I can’t even imagine what the pacing of Fatherhood Language is
like. Strange things happen when you move between prose and verse. Is this what
you’re up to?<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: Well, over the past few
years, Adam Clay and I have exchanged daily poems, beginning in April and
concluding whenever we’ve run out of steam. These newest pieces are from our
exchange this past spring. They’re much more sparse and take advantage of the
page in a way that’s new to my writing. Becoming a parent has introduced its
unique pace in my life, yes, although the pacing of the poems remains anchored
in a meditative gesture. In addition to poetry, I’ve kept a separate journal,
in which I embrace cliché and sentimentality more readily. Writing about the
utterly unique experiences of parenthood seems 100% worthwhile, and part of my
aim in the poetry and prose is to preserve some of what I’ve felt these past
eight months. Photography and video don’t do justice. I’m still in the process
of revising this work, so I hesitate in saying too much in fear of articulating
what the poems still need to discover.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What
about you? What are you working on these days?<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: I just finished revising a
play called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Medea</i>. I couldn’t figure
out how to fix the ending until it figured itself out. Patience! As I may have
shared with you, I’m taking the entire summer off from my day job. I’m homeless
but writing a lot. Titles include “The Sabbatical,” “The Sunbather,” “A Work of
Art,” and “Lunchtime Special, Or Aphorisms.” I write each morning in long hand
or on my manual typewriter. I spend a lot of time at the beach. Even though I
use 50+ sunscreen, I’m pretty tan. I keep forgetting how old I really am. (Only
the sun knows.) I’m reading writers’ notebooks. I just read a Sam Shepard play.
I’m not in love with revision right now. I’m falling in love with contemporary
Italian poetry. I’m drinking lots of coffee. I’m secretly meeting someone,
which always helps my writing. This poem is called “Rinascimento.” I can’t stop
thinking about the diary, the dialogue, and the aphorism form. At night, I plug
in an old TV and watch movies. Last night, I watched Antonioni’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’Avventura</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What
other arts influence you? Painting? Music? What’s your writing habit look like
these days? Has it changed? I know you teach a lot of young writers, what kind
of stories do you tell them when they ask about setting up their own writing
practices?<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: I’m smitten by visual art and
images in general. I consider myself an amateur photographer, although due to
constraints of time and energy, it’s been several months since I’ve used my
manual camera. I’ve a fondness for small doses of Edward Hopper (whose grave I
visited in Nyack, New York), less so in larger exhibition settings. One of my
favorite things is to enter a room at random inside the Art Institute of
Chicago, survey the work quickly, then choose just one painting or photograph
or artifact to really see at length before moving on to the next room and
repeating the process. Cornell’s boxes, a large handful of which are at the Art
Institute, are imbued with a reinvention of the ordinary and produce a
childlike sense of possibility. If you have the chance, you should visit his
red plastic lobsters (“A Pantry Ballet”) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas
City. Other artists whose work I admire include Joe Brainard and Giacometti,
and I feel the need to mention the ultra-slow motion videos by Bill Viola,
which have left me devastated twice. As an artist working with wholly different
materials, I leave the spaces of Viola’s screenings and seriously consider why
I bother using language. I have very little formal education when it comes to
painting or sculpture, for example, but I appreciate how the visual arts can
appeal to a wide audience.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One of
many reasons I appreciate working in language, however, is the fact that the
materials (a pencil, a scrap of paper) are inexpensive, widely available, and
ready for use anywhere. This isn’t the case with most visual arts. My writing
habits seem to evolve monthly, which may very well mean I don’t have a
disciplined practice at all right now. This is especially true as summer winds
to a close. I’m a full-time father with a full-time teaching schedule, and
although I’m incredibly grateful for both of these things, so much of what was
previously “leisure” is now spent preparing for classes and tending to the
needs and curiosities of an infant. I can take some consolation in my backlog
of poems, although nearly all of this work is in need of revision, reshaping,
and (in too many cases) recycling. Revising isn’t as exciting as producing a
brand new poem, and I have some tough decisions ahead in determining whether or
not to abandon large swaths of my writing from the last few years.<br /><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As far
as offering advice to young writers, of course I tell them to write each and
every day, even if for only thirty or forty minutes. To carry a pen and a
notebook (or a place on their smartphones) to jot down the world when it
presents itself. I tell them that I don’t subscribe to writer’s block; instead,
I give myself the time and space and wait. This involves patience, yes, and if
the beginning of a poem doesn’t present itself right away, they can always read
and read and read. Poets, especially young poets, sometimes overlook the fact
that there’s a long tradition behind every poem written, and a steady reading
practice can only help us write the next good poem, which is a poet’s primary
job. Sometimes the difference between a successful and less successful poem
feels indefinable, but back to Dickinson, the top of your head just might
remove itself when the real thing comes along. Lew Welch, who disappeared in
1971 and has no grave, once described an ecstasy so great that, in the middle
of writing his poem “Ring of Bone,” he got an erection. This was at
Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Big Sur. When he finished the poem, Welch walked to an
open window, unbuckled his pants, and climaxed right then and there. For the
record, that hasn’t yet happened to me.<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">CT</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: I never knew how much you
liked grave visiting. It’s much more common in Europe than it is here. I
suppose it speaks to your willingness “to be less ruined” when the cycles of
life cycle. In both of your books, I read of bridges, circles, planks, circumferences—potential
frames, really, that position the speaker and reader into a “crossing over” of
sorts. Where are you taking us, Michael?<br /><br /> <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">MR</span></i></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">: Cemeteries are wonderful.
They ground me and serve as a poignant reminder of the dead-end this life
becomes. It’s humbling to see the names of those who once walked the same
streets and fields, and it’s even more humbling to see the worn stones that are
already illegible after just a few hundred years. Embarrassing to admit, but I
remember embracing the gravestone of a stranger, late at night, drunk in my
early 20s and stumbling toward home. Fittingly, Charles Bukowski was my first
literary grave (the Yellow Pages ad noted: “The only cemetery in Los Angeles
with a view of the Pacific”), and my ever-growing list includes Ezra Pound and
Joseph Brodsky in faraway Venice, Bertolt Brecht in Berlin (all those “b”s), as
well as the graves of Anne Sexton and E. E. Cummings, who I recently visited in
Forest Hills Cemetery outside of Boston, followed an hour later by the graves
of Longfellow, Amy Lowell, and Robert Creeley in Cambridge. There are no more
poems from these poets, no more author to breathe the original voice into the
work. By visiting the graves of these poets, I want to acknowledge the
achievement and importance of their work, all the while half-believing that my
presence is recognized.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have
a difficult time living happily in the moment, which can be frustrating or, at
the very least, frustrating for those around me. I’m far less glum than I was
as an undergraduate, and my hope is that there’s fuller joy ahead. That’s
actually a bit hard to imagine as my body begins to show signs of its own
failure. Thankfully, poetry doesn’t rely on its author’s physical strength, and
I’d like to believe that my poems venture into the past, the present (already
the past!), the future, and the imaginative possibilities of all three. Time is
terribly fleeting and, just as our personal and collective histories inform the
present, I believe the present can also inform the past. Someone fancier than
me once said that the best poetry is timeless, and that’s nearly the truth.</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Click
here <</span><a href="http://www.michaelrobins.org/graves"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit;">www.michaelrobins.org/graves</span></span></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">> to view a selection of the
graves that the author has visited.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /><i>Catherine
Theis </i></span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;">is
a poet and playwright living in Chicago</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><i>. She is the recipient of an Individual Artists
Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and is a graduate of the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop. Catherine’s first book is </i>The Fraud of Good Sleep <span style="font-style: italic;">(Salt Publishing <</span></span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://www.saltpublishing.com/%3e%20"><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.saltpublishing.com/></span></span></a></span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;"> , 2011)</span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;">. </span><span style="color: #262626; line-height: 115%;"><i>Her latest chapbook, </i>The June Cuckold</span><span style="color: #262626; font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;">, a tragedy in verse, is
published by Covulsive Editions <</span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://www.convulsive-editions.org/"><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Grande"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.convulsive-editions.org/</span></span></a></span><span style="color: #262626; font-style: italic; line-height: 115%;">>.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
________________________________________________
</div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">REVIEW</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ladies
& Gentlemen</span></span></i><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br /></i>By
Michael Robins</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Saturnalia
Books</span><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">,
2011<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reviewed
by Virginia Konchan</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An
if/then statement is a basic building-block for deductive reasoning, as well as
being one of the most basic control flow statements in many computer
programming languages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Michael
Robins’ second full-length collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies
& Gentleman</i>, however, this structure is subverted by the continued
pressure the poet puts on the propositional part of the statement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is a suspension of causality
wherein not just the imaginary but the fantastic reigns free.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From “The Last Movie Made in Kansas”: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“If women knit the air past her window,/ if in
a dream a neighbor sends her news.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Again from “Your Voice is as Much a Kind of River”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“If at night the rain slips past, I saw
you.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And lastly, from “Off the Shoulder
of Orion”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“If we turn a key the finch
will rotate,/ sing ideas like a tumbrel end to end . . . ”<br /></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In
a world where causality is, as it were, suspended, we enter a world—as
introduced in Robins’ masterful first collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Next Settlement</i>—set in a theatrical milieu occasionally
punctured by a deeper interiority than that of performance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“For a time I left the interior scene, what/
nesting place surrendered for the curtain,/ greatest show from my seat.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From this profoundly ocular interior beyond
or within the stage comes a strange subset of poems which remember, and,
through remembering, reassemble a socio-political landscape wherein ceremonial
rites like marriage become humanized, if not naturalized, again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poems in this vein include “When It Snows in
Boston it Snows Everywhere” which levels a beautiful patina of couplets at the
reader (“Your hand in my hand,/ we love, we name our failure of orchids/ like
we might souvenirs”) before again showing the zeal of public proclamation to be
a hairsbreadth away from that of the personal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the case of “When It Snows in Boston it Snows Everywhere” we have the
poetic issuance (so, hypothetical?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Hyperreal?) of a marriage proposal:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the delicately strung line between public and private speech acts here,
attenuates before collapsing.<br /></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
couplet is this collection’s high wire, and the speaker’s fraught
articulations, the at times “hopelessly hopeful” (from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Next Settlement</i>), at times poignantly despairing (“like a train
you stared into the sunrise./<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every
fruit, rather, wasting in the trees”) high wire acrobatics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the third section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies & Gentlemen</i>, entitled
“Circus”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A circus is not god,/ nor is
the menagerie, nor will those dead// train for war anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I forget such wars./<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I beam, leave the young me sleeping,
asleep.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parades, movie houses, music,
and war:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this collection, and this poem
in particular, hone in on the odd interfacing of peacetime and wartime, of
spectacle and reality, and of concordance and discordance—often within one
couplet or a single line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “great
civil war” alluded to in “Circus” represents the historical stage in flux:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>because there is no site, the borders between
outside and inside, and between friend and enemy, sparkle and fade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speaker offers up to this end one of many
different “kind[s] of war”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I hated
you/ less than I loved myself for hating you.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rarely, though, is enmity the form of pathos that structures <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies & Gentlemen</i>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that would be love—both in its chimerical and
absolute incarnations.<br /><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">From
“All Our Pretty Songs”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“She is
fragments of bread/ that could lead me to love . . . ”;</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">From
“His Passion is Doves”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Should he love,
our idea of love must end . . . ”; and</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">From
“When It Snows in Boston it Snows Everywhere”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“a miracle that one could maybe love/ enough . . . ”<br /></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Navigating
a national topography of place, writ large, this ranging speaker moves through
the cities and states blasted or left alone by the wrecking ball of any number
of wars, drifting from Massachusetts Bay to the Mississippi to Maryland and
Kentucky, showing the reader also to be both victim and perpetrator of a kind
of ideological devastation wherein both humans and wild animals find themselves
without habitats in which to dwell (the displacement felt by humans being just
as seismic, if not incommensurably so, than that of creatures).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From “Answering the Roll Call”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“To begin the century, to say my name or
hers/ from California again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s done
is done,/ so I want to leave a note for the joy of life./<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In bed, under the covers, she says do I ever/
wish for death seriously./<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I say nothing
worse/ than country that was our home . . . ”<br /><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Elsewhere,
the poet makes the equally devastating argument that the teleos of the natural
world and the failure of language (to signify, or to deliver meaning)
coincide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Early I learned the rules/ of
language failing, not so much in church/ as in the timbre of a creek,
upstream,/ by which I prefer to swim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So
what use/ are these rivers, of what use the oceans?”<br /></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is
there an outside to a police state?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To a
nation state?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To family?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How can one approach one’s country and its
goods and its citizens from a non-proprietary perspective, which is to say,
openly?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And is to do so risking
everything, when “those of my nation are not/ as they were,” and to believe in
one’s fellow citizen is to risk finding “arrows, the feather in your back”?<br /></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If
the birth or development of national consciousness is connected to that of
political consciousness, a reader of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ladies
& Gentlemen</i> is that much the wiser upon reading this collection of
quiet probity, its lyrics wrested (and occasionally, beautifully, torn) from
the bodies that issue them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As to what
to do with this consciousness, look no further than “What I Was Doing About the
War,” a perfect poem in which the speaker searches for an iconic image that
would capture the historical moment (“smoke signal,” “weather & forecast,”
“the satellites/ that pin the speck of beauty to a point,” “the mourning dove
alone struck clean/ like glass” and “the stubborn mule tied to a sad piano”) as
well as a sound that could reverse the entropic movement from cry to
explanation, returning us to “our song, our only song . . . lofty as flame.”<br /></span></span><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Virginia Konchan’s
poems have appeared in <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The New Yorker,
Best New Poets 2011, </span>the <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Believer</span>,
and <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The New Republic,</span> among
other places. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Vermont Studio
Center, Ox Bow, and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, she lives in Chicago,
where she is a Ph.D student in the Program for Writers at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-63240337039458159102012-08-10T14:51:00.002-04:002012-08-17T14:52:21.684-04:00Revolutionary Grammar<span style="font-family: inherit;">Poets sometimes violate grammar rules for effect but <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">songwriters often ignore grammar simply to please the ear. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Consider two familiar lyrics: </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span>
</span><br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: inherit;"> <b> </b> Daniel my brother you are older than <i style="font-weight: bold;">me </i>(Bernie Taupin)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">
</span>
</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I wish I <i><b>was</b></i> / Homeward bound (Paul Simon)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span>
</span><br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: inherit;">I think it's this casual indifference to grammatical correctness that drives language change, as opposed to an ostentatious defiance of grammatical strictures that stands for social consciousness in any number of poets who seek to tweak the establishment as they see it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Lyricists and poets share much technique, but it's the former who are the effective revolutionaries. </span>The <a href="http://www.poetsbrigade.blogspot.com/">Revolutionary Poets Brigade</a> might take note.</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">
</span></span>murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-41356906600402847522012-07-04T06:55:00.000-04:002012-08-11T10:58:44.844-04:00Poèmes extraits de Mystes<b style="line-height: 200%;"><span lang="FR" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By Matthieu Baumier</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"><b>Translated from the French by Elizabeth Brunazzi</b></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">1<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></b>We have gone to the earth,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> We have gone beneath the oak,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Facing the stillness of</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The winged speech of the world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p> </o:p>The oak is inscribed on the earth, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The wings of the world folded within, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Nothing moves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p> </o:p>In that place stones and trees converse,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> In that place stars and clouds empty out</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The unmoving crease of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have gone toward the eye</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Of the sun,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> We have gone inside the bark </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Of the silver birch,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> And the wild cherry trees. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> In the silence of the heart, the immobility</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Of the tree,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> We have gone there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p> </o:p>In places far off from men, without language,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Vanity, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> We have gone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <strong> 2</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: right;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 115%;"> To the memory of René Char<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span>I am writing from this instant</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> the aftertime of the world’s end. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">There where</i>,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Tears of rain flow </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Where words take the secret shapes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Of indecipherable vigils.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I am living through the passage of the soul</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> There where,</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Stones inscribe</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The landscape in flames.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I am living in the wake of phantom armies </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> And my eye comprehends only this silence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I am writing from this instant the aftertime of the world’s end</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> And I assume a smile</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Torn from the blood of stars.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> say this: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Let prose go silent now </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 1em 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> And let the spirit of water spring forth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">* * *</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Translator’s Notes</span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The title of these poems, Mystes, has no exact translation in English.
I like to think of them as a series of masks assumed by the poet inspired by
classical initiation rites and ceremonies, played forward in the modernist,
Rimbaldian version of the poet as voyant, seer, visionary and spiritual guide
for our times. Each is an epiphany on a moment converging with a text, as in
the sampling, “In memory of Ren<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span>
Char.” I like the confrontation of these solemn styles adopted by young
neo-symbolist French poets with famously narrative, episodic American “cool.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am grateful to Paris founder of the Festival of Franco-English poetry
and editor of the Franco-English poetry anthology La Traductière Jacques Rancourt for introducing me
to Matthieu Baumier and his co-editor Gwen Garnier-Duguy. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">* * *</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Born in 1968, Matthieu Baumier is a French author of novels, essays and poetry. His poetry is featured in many French and European reviews and magazines, including Agora (Spain), Polja (Serbia), The French Literary Review (U.K.) and Poezija (Croatia). He has recently published his poetry in English translation in Word Riot<b> </b>and Poetry Quarterly (USA). He is currently the chief editor of the online magazine Recours au Po</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ème, launched on May 15<sup>th</sup>, 2012.</span></i></div>
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<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />
<br />
<i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Elizabeth Brunazzi is
a poet, fiction writer, translator and essayist. Her poetry has been published
in bilingual versions in Le Nouveau
Recueil and La Traductiere.
She was awarded residency status under the French government "Competences
et Talents" program for research in France in 2011. She has recently held
teaching appointments in Comparative Literature at Rutgers and Creative Writing
at George Washington University.</i></div>
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<br /></div>yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-91109007666912753712012-03-03T10:51:00.000-05:002012-03-04T11:37:46.547-05:00Remix (5)<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.samuel-beckett.net/w_ho.htm">Beckett</a> observes:<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hand in hand with equal plod they go. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the free hands - no. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Free empty hands.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hold the old holding hand. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hold and be held.<br />
<br />
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Plod on and never recede. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Slowly with never a pause</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Plod on and never recede. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Backs turned. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Both bowed.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Joined by held joining hands. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Plod on as one. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One shade. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another shade.</span><span style="font-family: Times, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span>murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-1263853702593817222011-07-03T13:23:00.000-04:002012-03-04T11:22:06.588-05:00Review: Yaakov on Darcy Cummings' "The Artist As Alice: From a Photographer's Life"“The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer’s Life” by Darcy Cummings<br />
Reviewed by Yaakov<br />
<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
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 . . .”<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
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. . . “yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-83700134082835595072011-04-01T16:16:00.004-04:002011-04-01T16:26:37.559-04:00Digitalis<a href="http://www.burgoo.net/">By Doug Logan</a><br />
<br />
With GPS and text and tweet,<br />
with Google search and Google maps<br />
and zoomed-in views of every street<br />
and all those other handy apps;<br />
<br />
with 3G here and Wi-Fi there<br />
and data packets streaming past<br />
and Bluetooth transfer everywhere<br />
and all the wikis filling fast,<br />
<br />
we need no longer memorize<br />
or plan, or wait, or understand;<br />
we merely have to energize<br />
and tap a screen with each demand.<br />
<br />
Why trouble much to learn or know<br />
more than the flick of find and fetch,<br />
and where electric sockets grow,<br />
and how far charging cords will stretch?<br />
<br />
A comfort of our own kind around,<br />
we stoke the rumors that we heed<br />
and spurn all those who would confound<br />
the dogged dogmas that we breed.<br />
<br />
Connections thought to interrelate<br />
but made in bilious density<br />
turn out instead to separate,<br />
fanning passionate intensity.<br />
<br />
Not touching things that might leave scars,<br />
not caring what disturbs and scares,<br />
we're safe and svelte in cyber bars,<br />
death dealt by joystick from our chairs.<br />
<br />
Recall the brilliant foxglove plant<br />
which tamed will tame the frantic heart,<br />
but taken raw will trip a rant,<br />
then stupefy and tear apart.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Doug Logan is a former editor of</em> Sailing World <em>and</em> Practical Sailor<em>, and has written about boats and the sea for a long time. He has also edited</em> UCLA Healthy Years<em>, 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 </em></span><a href="http://www.newenergywatch.com/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em><span style="color: #4d469c;">www.newenergywatch.com</span></em></span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>, and one with poems at </em></span><a href="http://www.burgoo.net/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em><span style="color: #4d469c;">www.burgoo.net</span></em></span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>.</em> </span>murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-82575538953895101422011-03-23T14:52:00.000-04:002011-03-23T14:52:02.275-04:00Wallace Stevens, PhilosopherEver 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: <br />
<br />
"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."<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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 . . .<br />
<br />
. . . is the theory of the word for those<br />
For whom the word is the making of the world,<br />
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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. <em>Harmonium</em>, 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:<br />
<br />
"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." <br />
<br />
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. <em>Harmonium</em>, 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. <br />
<br />
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."<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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 <em>Auroras of Autumn</em> in 1951. In 1955, the year he died, he won another National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his <em>Collected Poems</em>. <br />
<br />
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.murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-87143473072387062262011-03-05T16:15:00.024-05:002011-03-16T19:47:10.855-04:00Arthur Vogelsang--Interview Plus Review<strong>Arthur Vogelsang—Interview Plus Review</strong><br /><br /><br />The publication of <em>Expedition: New & Selected Poems</em> (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 <em>Not To: New and Selected Poems</em> and a chapbook, <em>Elegiac: Footnotes to Rilke's Duino Elegies</em>. She has published poetry and reviewed books by Louise Gluck, Frederick Seidel, and Rachel Loden at yaakovmurchadha.blogspot.com.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />INTERVIEW<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>Elaine Terranova:</em></strong> Can you think of a formative experience in your life that turned you toward poetry?<br /><br /><strong><em>Arthur Vogelsang:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> You were an editor for many years. Did this help you form a poetic practice of your own? In what ways?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> Teaching seems to be the usual default career for poets today. Have you taught a lot?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> The line seems to stretch out in your more recent work. Do you start out with a line length in mind?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> Where did you grow up? Was childhood a thrilling experience?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> 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?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> Do you have a favorite of your books? Which gave you the most satisfaction to write?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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).<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> 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?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> 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?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> Do movies, novels, theater, music affect your aesthetic? In what ways?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> Are you somebody who sets aside certain hours of the day for writing? Do you write on a computer or a big yellow tablet?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>ET:</em></strong> 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?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>Yaakov Murchadha:</em></strong> How did you come to be where you are in your writing?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>YM:</em></strong> 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?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>YM:</em></strong> Could you provide a list of favorites – poets, movies, prose writers . . .<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>YM:</em></strong> 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?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>YM:</em></strong> Clayton Eshleman wrote in an essay about getting his thoughts on Bush and Rumsfeld into the “poetic record.” Does such a thing exist?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV:</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>AV (Question):</em></strong> 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?<br /><br /><strong><em>AV (Answer):</em></strong> 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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />REVIEW<br /><br /><br />As much as can be claimed for any group of poems, Arthur Vogelsang’s <em>Expedition: New & Selected</em> <em>Poems</em> (Ashland Poetry Press, 2011) may be good medicine for melancholy humans, and it may also be an energy source.<br /><br />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 <em>A Planet</em> (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983):<br /><br />"Here on Mars, it’s simple.<br />It’s clear. Books, horses and straight screwing<br />Go from left to right as in real life<br />And the weather is a sponge storm every time. . ."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"I thought I’d go to Alberta and it would hurt less<br />And all I could think of was Calgary and Edmonton,<br />But a Canadian who happened to be in Los Angeles County<br />Said to me if it hurts why don’t you go to High Level because<br />Calgary or Edmonton, well it’ll hurt there like it does<br />In Pasadena but there’s no connect in High Level or wait<br />Go to Meander River where ho boy there’s no nothing,<br />It’s way up. If it hurts in Burbank which is not<br />Like the movies but like New Jersey, it won’t hurt<br />In Meander River for sure and probably not<br />In High Level either unless the hurt has<br />To do with something in which connect is not an<br />Issue if you know what I mean. Of course<br />I knew what he meant. … "<br /><br />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.<br />Vogelsang talks about the writing voice in “Brutal Lesson,” from <em>Left Wing of A Bird</em> (Sarabande Books, Inc., 2003):<br /><br /><br />". . . He advised, when you get into the big scenes<br />You don’t select objective correlatives, you just get your head right<br />And put in everything in that voice that blesses everything. . . "<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br />But even the sofa-bound are included, as in “Help,” from the ‘People’ section of the New Poems, and a recent Poetry Daily feature.<br /><br /><br />"Lay down beside me I signaled to my wolf<br />Three pats of the sofa in the early morn<br />Then two pats of the heart to say why.<br />It’s fun to see a wolf in the role of therapist, but this fun is vitally necessary, since,<br />A person might not want to absorb by touch another’s pain<br />. . . A wolf loves to . . ."<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"It was not something you could talk through,<br />You just had to get in your truck and go.<br />You had to be like the planes or the birds<br />Quick in the canyon-like avenues,<br />Examples right in front of our noses each day."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><br />"Hearst dove long and shallow like a fat arrow<br />And Chaplin walked around toward his agent in a normal gait,<br />The walk of a mailman, which some were shocked to see.<br />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:”<br />Glass flashed in the water gliding under my hand, panes<br />Attached to some of it. . ."<br /><br />Note the renovation of the water as glass image. Another cliché exploded.yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-2300533760336445232010-09-19T12:49:00.002-04:002012-12-22T08:10:23.160-05:00Review: Elaine Terranova on Gluck's "A Village Life"A Village Life byLouise Glűck<br />
reviewed by Elaine Terranova<br />
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<br />
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." <br />
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. <br />
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:<br />
Today above the gull’s call<br />
I heard you waking me again…<br />
I feel its hunger<br />
As your hand inside me,<br />
a cry<br />
so common, unmusical—<br />
<br />
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." <br />
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:<br />
Look what you did—<br />
you made the cat move.<br />
<br />
But I didn’t want your hand there.<br />
I wanted your hand here.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
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—<br />
This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills,<br />
The thyme and rosemary that grew there,<br />
Crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks<br />
And, lower down, where there was real dirt,<br />
Competing with other things, blueberries and currants<br />
("Sunrise")<br />
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.<br />
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 McLuhan 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."<br />
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. <br />
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,<br />
You will leave the village where you were born,<br />
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,<br />
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you<br />
can’t say what it was,<br />
and eventually you will return to seek it.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
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:<br />
There is a path you cannot see, beyond the eye's reach, the philosophers have called<br />
the via negativa: to make a place for light the mystic shuts his eyes—illumination<br />
of the kind he seeks destroys creatures who depend on things<br />
<br />
which is what we are.<br />
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.<br />
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?<br />
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."<br />
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.yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-1911177222851238032010-07-14T14:32:00.007-04:002011-03-26T21:46:42.162-04:00This Morning's Birds<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By </span><a href="http://www.loganeditorial.com/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Doug Logan</span></a><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two party birds,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cheeba Cheeba and Jubilee, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and one that sings like a Radio Flyer</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">with a squeaky axle</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">being pulled down the street.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You, here in the kitchen,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and me too, me too, me too. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's a cowbird somewhere, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">sounding the rising wheeee</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">of a capacitor in an old flash camera,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and the sparrows and jays, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">bounce between squirrels,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">nipping up the seed that</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">we, the beneficent, have strewn. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The squirrels now bang at the door</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">when the seed runs out, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">after hectoring each other</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">over the last of it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our friends' cat hides in the ivy</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">on the rock sloping down to the porch</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to make sure of the food chain; </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">when we toss water at her</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">she runs, turns, sits, and stares</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">with patient disdain.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the marsh the ospreys wheel</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">high above the backwaters </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">north of the old sluice,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">but no matter how we smile at them </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and beam our fellowship aloft,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">they give us the old</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">hew hew hew hew hew,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">as if with their keen vision</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">they can see predation in our eyes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and betrayal lurking at the</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">corners of our mouths. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If I ever hear a rail </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">out there saying E-E-Owww</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">as the sun goes down in spring,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I might ask to ride it out of town</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to find my own home in the high marsh,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">a hollow lined with fibergreen fleece,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">shielded from skunk and sky,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and there lie beady-eyed</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">on the brink of extinction.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The growl of the backhoe near the road, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and the outboard motor downstream </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">would just be noise to me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the rail is rightly shy</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and rarely seen.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Doug Logan is a former editor of</em> Sailing World <em>and</em> Practical Sailor<em>, and has written about boats and the sea for a long time. He has also edited</em> UCLA Healthy Years<em>, 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 </em></span><a href="http://www.newenergywatch.com/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>www.newenergywatch.com</em></span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>, and one with poems at </em></span><a href="http://www.burgoo.net/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>www.burgoo.net</em></span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>.</em> </span>murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-51601148413919115592010-05-28T17:40:00.003-04:002010-05-29T17:59:14.274-04:00Bejeweled, Bothered and BewilderedNow it can be told,<br />
And <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238942">Behrle tells it cold,</a><br />
In words unminced and bold:<br />
<br />
No American poet <br />
can be a cultural force<br />
without a guitar.murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-65026099366275107782010-05-09T13:05:00.002-04:002010-05-09T13:47:15.457-04:00Three Poems by Therese Halscheid<strong>Trash Day</strong><br /><br />This is how it really looked long ago….<br /><br />This is myself back in time, a girl<br />with sallow skin, dragging metal cans to the curb<br />notice how I stand for awhile that far from our house<br />watch how my lips, bright as scars, are parting<br />open with words, so the great air can take them<br />out of their mystery ─<br />see how my thoughts form the storms, how the morning sky<br />fills with dark sentences,<br /><br />always something about aphasia, his dementia,<br />something always about my father caught<br />so quiet inside me<br /><br />that would rise in the wind to become<br />something readable.<br /><br />I am only fourteen. But you can tell I look old<br />as if life is ending. Notice how the limbs droop so<br />willow-like over the trash, see how the cans<br />are all packed with food, know I am starving myself, I am<br />that full of my father….<br /><br />These are our neighbors, each turning in their sleep as they wake,<br />each waking as they turn from their room to the window<br />watching the weather above them.<br /><br />And this is an image of the whole town in shock.<br />See how they dread my gray hovering grief, just watch<br />as they walk, how they carry on with the endless clouds<br />I made weekly, correctly, so very awful and coming<br />into their eyes.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>The Walk Home</strong><br /><br />Each day the curtains part from each home we pass<br /><br />and without clearly seeing them,<br />I can sense the widening eyes of mothers, I can feel<br />their thoughts through the windows<br />and it is all about the way<br />my father and I look<br />to them.<br /><br />It is about it being late Spring and the fact that<br />he and I wear woolen coats and gloves<br />as we are always cold, as our lives are so dark<br />not even the sun can<br />save us.<br /><br />It is about my looking<br />less than human, brittle-boned, slumped over,<br />I am that thin ─<br /><br />and certainly, it is the sight of my father beside me<br />who is near blind and brain damaged,<br />someone behaving in ways that one might find<br />in mental wards.<br /><br />Sometimes, their curtains are torn far apart<br />so fast as if fate landed an illusion, something<br />that never should be, and nothing appears real<br />except for their manicured lawns<br />and the distance the sidewalks allow<br />each afternoon, at 3:00, as we shuffle past this<br />place of groomed grass and the scent of<br />immediate flowers.<br /><br />Above us are always the<br />overhanging trees whose blossoming<br />leaves spread glorious and are just like<br />a wedding arbor.<br /><br />So perfect, I think, for this really is<br />what we are married to ─<br /><br />this aisle, this arm-in-arm walk<br />after school from my aunt’s house to ours<br />this street like an obvious map of us,<br />pointing things out that<br />we cannot escape.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Currents</strong><br /><br />The idea of a river suffering<br />from its reflection<br /><br />intrigues me<br />and is, I think,<br /><br />what might happen should you<br />ever see well enough<br /><br />to notice yourself, or be given<br />new eyes ─<br /><br />or the mindflow<br />to use any breeze<br /><br />that would force<br />your mirrored image into action<br /><br />up out of its murkiness<br /><br />the damaged<br />brain, and then<br /><br />watch how your limbs might take on<br />a certain kind of fluidity<br /><br />begin waving me<br />near you again<br /><br />calling me daughter<br /><br />while I cry like high tide<br />as you continue speaking<br /><br />in the slow manner<br />of ancient waters ─<br /><br />that I would want<br />to wade<br /><br />to the voice,<br />father, into your rippling arms.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><em>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.</em>yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-45940073465371357412010-03-20T14:17:00.001-04:002010-03-20T14:26:35.410-04:00Review: Elaine Terranova on Seidel's "Ooga-Booga"My Frederick Seidel Problem: Ooga-Booga<br />by Elaine Terranova<br /><br />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. <br />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?<br /> 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. <br />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.<br />The title is Kill Poetry<br />And in the book poetry kills.<br />In the poem, the stag at bay weeps, literally….<br />Get rid of poetry. Kill poetry.<br /><br />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?<br />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. <br />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. <br />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."<br /> "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.<br /><br />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!<br /> <br /> 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. <br />You need a danger to be safe in<br />Except in the African bush where you don't,<br />You do.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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. <br />The Israelis and the Palestinians are by no means exaggerating.<br />The carcass is hanging from the darkness, waiting.<br />The building is a million human stories high<br />The moonlight is going to die.<br />In the corners of our little room,<br />The large-bore guns go boom boom.<br /><br />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: <br /><br />I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel.<br />I am too cheery to be well.<br />George Bush is cheery as well.<br />I am cheeriest<br />Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass<br />And pretending I am eating broken glass.<br />Then I throw up the pasture.<br /><br />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.<br />The ooga-booga, loose in the world, is coming after everyone.<br /> The sunlight doesn’t go away.<br />It causes cancer while they play.<br />Precancerous will turn out bad.<br />I had an ice pick for a dad.yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-60446791944425114232010-01-04T15:43:00.000-05:002010-01-05T15:51:02.805-05:00Chaucer's Creative DestructionTreasure the thought<br />
That lines he wrought<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/books/01book.html?ref=books">Plowed as well as planted</a>.murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-33096574804366489582009-12-13T15:03:00.002-05:002009-12-13T15:09:34.950-05:00Review: Rachel Loden's "Dick of the Dead"<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By <a href="http://pplpoetpodcast.wordpress.com/2007/04/09/elaine-terranova/">Elaine Terranova</a></span><br />
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"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. <br />
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Rachel Loden's <em>Dick of the Dead</em> 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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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.murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-14486380820088502312009-12-07T16:07:00.004-05:002012-12-15T10:19:52.823-05:00Variation on a Theme by W.S.Let not winter's ragged hand deface<br />
What you had planted with such skill<br />
On sweet spring day in public place<br />
To please the eye and heart to thrill.<br />
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Allay my fear, leave me assured<br />
That this cruel weather will be cured.murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-1344093485300256382009-08-23T21:40:00.003-04:002009-08-27T10:41:44.627-04:00Joshua Marie Wilkinson—Interview Plus ReviewJoshua Marie Wilkinson books include <em>Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms</em> (Pinball Publishing, 2005), <em>Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk</em> (U of Iowa Press, 2006), <em>Figures for a Darkroom Voice</em> (with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Eli_Gordon" title="Noah Eli Gordon">Noah Eli Gordon</a>; Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007), <em>12x12:</em> <em>Conversations in 21st Century Poetry & Poetics,</em> Co-edited with Christina Mengert (U of Iowa Press, 2009), and <em>The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth</em> (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.<br />
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<strong>INTERVIEW</strong><br />
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<strong><em>Yaakov Murchadha</em>:</strong> Your self-imposed constraints in the composing of <em>The Book of Whispering . . . </em>: how did they factor into the psychology of the creative process, that is, their impact on writer's anxiety, fear of failure?<br />
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<strong><em>Joshua Marie Wilkinson</em>:</strong> 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.<br />
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<strong><em>YM</em>:</strong> There are many fine poets writing now. Who do you think are the great ones? The most neglected?<br />
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<strong><em>JMW</em>:</strong> 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.<br />
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<strong><em>YM</em>:</strong> <em>The Book of Whispering</em>…took shape on a kitchen table. Do you think where you write influences what or how you write?<br />
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<strong><em>JMW</em>:</strong> 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.<br />
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<strong><em>YM</em>:</strong> By way of analogy, who is the poet closer to, a film's director or cinematographer?<br />
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<strong><em>JMW</em>:</strong> 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.”<br />
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<strong><em>YM</em>:</strong> Are you concerned with labels, how they might or might not be applied to your work? How would you classify it?<br />
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<strong><em>JMW</em>:</strong> 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.<br />
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<strong><em>YM</em>:</strong> 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?<br />
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<strong><em>JMW</em>:</strong> 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 <em>Poets on Teaching</em> 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 <em>The Wire</em> 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.<br />
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.<br />
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<strong><em>YM</em>:</strong> 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?<br />
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<strong><em>JMW</em>:</strong> I’m trying to find lots of voices. All the poems in <em>The Book of Whispering…</em> 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 <em>The Middle</em> <em>Room,</em> 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 <em>Moth Poem</em> 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.<br />
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<strong><em>YM</em>:</strong> Do you have any long range plans or goals, forms you want to try, subjects you want to write about?<br />
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<strong><em>JMW</em>:</strong> 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 <em>Selenography</em>. I’m excited for that.<br />
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<br />
<strong>REVIEW</strong>. . . <em>The Book of Whispering . . .<br />
</em><br />
<em>The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth</em> (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.<br />
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Joshua Marie Wilkinson composed <em>Whispering</em> 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 <em>Whispering</em>, are considered in an excellent Reader’s Companion, downloadable from the Tupelo website, <a href="http://www.tupelopress.org/">http://www.tupelopress.org/</a>.<br />
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In his introduction to <em>Whispering</em>, 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.<br />
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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”).<br />
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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.”<br />
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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”).<br />
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The importance of the breach of constraint is discussed by Wilkinson in his introduction. There the context is a film, Victor Erice’s <em>The Spirit of the Beehive</em>, where the camera captures an unscripted, undirected—and therefore authentic—reaction of a little girl, the film’s best moment.<br />
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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.<br />
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Indeed, the sequence of poems seems readable as an imagistic <em>bildungsroman</em>. 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”).<br />
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Not to push the issue—this is just one vein of value in an extremely valuable book.yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-76807304221648256242009-07-29T19:41:00.004-04:002009-07-29T19:53:23.717-04:00Four Poems. . . by Darcy Cummings<strong>Dark Room I</strong><br /><strong><br /><br /></strong>Here, waiting for images to rise<br />in trays of fixative. Under the dim red light<br />appear angles of sun and shadow,<br />the structure of bone and muscle,<br />motion of willows. After hours in the garden,<br />along the shore, on shabby city streets, trying<br />to fix the faint pulse of blood and unease,<br />I come to the dark room again, again, hoping<br />to find a photograph that stuns me, an image<br />that reveals a complete autopsy of language.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Alice In Mourning</strong><br /><br />My head is a lead bell<br />The muffled tongue<br />Strikes soundless<br />And strikes and strikes<br />A bell vibrating<br /><br />My hands gnarled clapper claws<br /><br />O my poor child:<br />Soon they'll take him away<br />Wrap him<br />In his best blanket<br /><br />My boy<br /><br />I can't leave the parlor<br />I stroke and stroke your cold face<br />My feet rooted in floor boards<br /><br />My head an empty chamber<br />My heart a dry well pulsing with briars<br />O my boy<br />My teeth notched and broken<br />My tongue<br />A bleeding lead bar<br />Welded to my jaw<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>From "Photographing the Dead"<br />3.<br />Still Life: Sophie</strong><br /><strong><br /></strong><br />Small alabaster hands<br />clutch violets that are just beginning<br />to wilt. I smooth the lace dress<br />over small still feet. Her lips,<br />slightly ajar after the last soft breath.<br /><br />We plump the pillows,<br />cradling her between<br />clock tick and peach bruise.<br /><br />This morning I heard<br />the passing of rabbits--<br />rabbits on the lawn. One sat<br />alert, like a statue with brilliant glass eyes.<br /><br />Someone is stripping her room<br />of bedding and toys,<br />then Tom will whitewash.<br />In the barn, a saw rasps.<br /><br />We had no cards to scatter their warning,<br />no potion to win her return.<br />Tomorrow, we will gather to bless her.<br />Tomorrow, beyond dreaming,<br />she will fall into the earth.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Alice’s Daughter Watches:<br />What The Dying Dream</strong><br /><strong><br /></strong><br />Rising and sinking in a morphine wash<br />sometimes she’s startled back by desire or pain<br />to the room I wait in. Her astonished eyes<br />stare beyond my vigil.<br /><br />Early this week her hands frantically tore her chest<br />snatching away insects. Beetles, she cried,<br />Rabbits. Hallucinations, the nurse says--<br />she’ll settle soon. Just drug dreams.<br /><br />What do the dying dream?<br />Is it all a delirium screen<br />then brief escape, a small waking between dreams<br />and burning at the gut or brain?<br /><br />She’s dreaming of the smell of chemicals and<br />the darkroom, of negatives rising to light<br />or of the green stone of a filigreed ring,<br />or the faded scar across her throat.<br />The white line reverses, brightens,<br />livid and ridged, the stitches burning<br />clear down to the fire in her chest.<br /><br />My arm, my arm, she mutters.<br />I rub her arm, her back:<br />touch helps, or the morphine.<br />Her cries fall to a low word: rabbits.<br /><br />She dreams of touch,<br />arms lifting her to a lit candle,<br />the pat of an infant on her breast,<br />the tug of strong arms loosening her skin.<br /><br />Now only skin and the pressure<br />of one body on another enter her dreams.<br />A nine month fetus<br />she’s straining and thrumming against the skin of time.<br />My hands are midwives.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><em>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.</em>yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-48108160384470456742009-07-04T18:01:00.005-04:002009-07-14T15:58:17.108-04:00Michael Burkard--An AppreciationOne 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.<br /><br />As in <strong>The Wharf</strong>, which appeared originally in <em>None, River</em> (1979) and which is re-printed in the excellent <em>Envelope of Night, Selected and Uncollected Poems 1966-1990</em>, from Nightboat Books, Cold Spring, New York, 2008:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-family:georgia;">When it’s Sunday I read to him. I do this every Sunday.<br />A ruby hangs in the middle of my room. It’s<br />A planetary ruby. First of all you envision<br />nothing but their voices, and a linear train,<br />looking for spiders. I’ve read to him twice:<br />“When was it when I first imagined the wharf, this<br />untouchable center.” Like an admiration: it’s a breath<br />and a jar. In the jar a shot to the head<br /></span></span><span style="font-family:georgia;">is like the veil of the dead aunt. Paper<br />measuring breath. I told no one of the soft kerosene<br />lamps on the boat when I was five. When I was.<br />The wharf.<br /></span><br />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 <strong>The Wharf</strong> 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 <em>Envelope of Night</em>, pulling toward it and making resonate literal images. And of course this gravity works in single poems as well.<br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><strong>The Passerby</strong><br /><br />Now that you’re dead<br />I can’t ask you for a recommendation,<br />my possible employment at the pharmacy<br />is kaput.<br /><br />Now that you’re dead<br />I’ve developed a slight stutter—<br />I hope you’re proud of yourself<br />in your snowless light.<br /><br />Ah—this isn’t fair,<br />How that I’m alive<br />are you bored with my enthusiasm<br />already?, do you want to play<br />hearts?<br /><br />Mine, mine—<br />Harbor in a name.<br />Dead passerby, dead name,<br /><br />You’re not listed in my address book,<br />I’m on a bridge,<br />out of matches.<br /><br />Now that you’re dead<br />surrender is a forgiven sound—<br />the end of smoke,<br />the beginning of smoke<br /><br />when you memory<br />temporarily returns.<br /></span><br />(From <em>Envelope)</em>yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-40774230157463751442009-07-04T17:53:00.004-04:002009-07-14T15:55:18.561-04:00First WifeHe asked me so I said I would<br />He asked would I go through his dying with him<br />and I said yes, I said yes because what else could I say,<br />How could I say no<br /><br />Afterwards I woke up crying every night<br />in the middle of the night and Bill,<br />Bill would hold me, wordlessly, there were never any words,<br />but I was crying for the parents,<br />I was imagining their grief and I took on their grief<br />and I thought I cried only for them<br /><br />He asked would I go through it with him and I said yes<br />for me it was not so bad it was terrible<br />I lived through his death as my own so I knew<br />what it was I knew it long before it would happen<br />to me I was only forty I figured now I knew<br /><br />He called once would I come<br />and I went to the hospital and in the elvator<br />I met his wife and Why don’t you go home she said<br />and I said I would go once he knew that I had come<br />When we met in his room he played us off<br />one against the other, not the least bit embarrassed<br />he was tickled silly to have us both there<br /><br />When he died he was out of his mind, he was drugged<br />he was not unhappy he was listening to Mozart,<br />the violin/piano sonatas played by Szymon Goldberg<br />and Lili Kraus, and he was pointing to a square of<br />paranoia on a spot opposite the bed, a spot where two walls met<br /><br />It scared me to see him that way so I cried<br />but my crying scared the others so I left<br />If he had been clear-headed I could have stayed longer<br /><br />He asked me to go there with him and I said yes<br />If he had been clear-headed I could have gone farther<br />I went as far as I could<br /><br />--Anne-Marie Levine, from <em>Bus Ride to a Blue Movie</em>, 2003yaakovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12356536100449506793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100843048350154751.post-77551571819723839592009-04-23T14:25:00.055-04:002017-06-18T09:35:10.204-04:00Fairey comment<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Is Shepard Fairey a crook? Not according to <a href="http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/graphic-content-shepard-fairey-is-not-a-crook/">Steven Heller</a>, who regards the Obama poster artist as a brand manager rather than a plagiarist. Backhanded compliment, that, for the artist who created "the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2009/02/23/090223craw_artworld_schjeldahl">most efficacious American political illustration</a> since 'Uncle Sam Wants You.'"</span><br />
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Still, it's an interesting question: when does artistic appropriation pass into plagiarism? The visual arts have accepted <i>collage</i> since when, Braque and Picasso? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_r%C3%A9alisme">Nouveau Réalisme</a> reversed the process with <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"><i>décollage</i></span> but the form still depended on appropriating somebody else's work. Van Gogh compared his <a href="http://www.vggallery.com/influences/millet/main.htm">ransacking of Millet</a> to musical interpretation. <span style="line-height: 115%;">"If someone plays Beethoven, he adds his
own personal interpretation; in the music, especially in the singing, the </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">interpretation
also counts and the composer doesn't have to be the only one to perform his
compositions," he wrote. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Music itself has a rich history of sampling. Think of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_Overture">Tchaikovsky</a> and the French and Russian anthems he appropriated in the <em>1812 Overture. </em>The Gregorian melody "Dies Irae"<em> </em>has been sampled by, in alphabetical order, Alkan, Bloch, Berlioz, Crumb, Daugherty,
Dallapiccola, <span style="background-color: white;">Galás</span>,
Grantham, Gounod, Haydn, Holst, Honegger, Liszt, Mahler, Myaskovsky, Rachmaninoff,
<span style="background-color: white;">Saint-Saëns</span>, Shostakovich, Sondheim, Sorabji and, yes, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ysa%C3%BFe" title="Eugène Ysaÿe"><span style="color: windowtext;">Ysaÿe</span></a>, in addition to Tchaikovsky.<span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span>Fast forward and appreciate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Mouse">Danger Mouse</a> and marvel at <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/magazine/09GirlTalk-t.html">Girl Talk</a>. The canny Philip Glass actually <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/magazine/philip-glass-and-beck-discuss-collaborating-on-rework.html">invited Beck</a> to remix his works. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em.</span><br />
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In literature, plagiarism is a mark of excellence by T.S. Eliot's lights: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal," <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw11.html">he wrote</a>. Where would Chaucer, Shakespeare and Sterne have been without Boccaccio, Holinshed and Rabelais? Coleridge was a <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/speak-memory/">literary kleptomaniac</a>, with whole passages of the <i>Biographia</i> lifted from Schelling. The teenage Dylan Thomas </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1496834.ece">learned to versify by</a></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1496834.ece"> plagiarizing</a> Edith Bunker's favorite poet, <a href="http://www.trivia-library.com/b/biography-of-english-american-poet-edgar-guest-part-1.htm">Edgar Guest</a>. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Plots and themes and archetypes have always been up for grabs, else genre studies wouldn't be very rewarding. And w</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">hen Samuel Beckett and Brian Moore were "putting their stories together, working out the details,
mixing memory and desire, they had no qualms, no problems about appropriating
what they pleased," <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/what-is-real-is-imagined/">according to Colm Toibin,</a> writing from his own experience and recalling that Beckett once used a letter from a dead cousin and Moore appropriated his own father for a novel. "</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">They used what they needed; they changed what they used. Their soft hearts
became stony," Toibin explained with a tincture of self-justification. But this is s</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">mall beer next to the </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">plagio con brio</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> by Mostly Other People Do the Killing: a </span><a href="http://jazztimes.com/articles/143615-the-gig-mostly-other-people-do-the-killing-s-controversial-miles-remake" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">twofer appropration</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> of Miles Davis and Jorge Luis Borges.</span><br />
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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. I'd say that it's comparable to "fair use" in copyright law except that copyright law is<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/opinion/when-quoting-verse-one-must-be-terse.html"> incoherent when it comes to poetry</a>. In general copyright law is a wretched <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/21/hollywood-should-not-decide-our-copyright-laws/">legal muddle</a> and an all-around <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/books/review/Douthat-t.html?ref=books">contentious subject </a>these days, often honored in the breach by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/magazine/mag-13lede-t.html">news aggregation sites</a> that like to call themselves "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/business/media/guidelines-proposed-for-content-aggregation-online.html">curators</a>"; by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/pinterest-tumblr-and-the-trouble-with-curation.html">online photo galleries</a> mounted with other people's photos; by tabloid gossip columnists who retail uncredited snippets from press releases about boldface names (they know who they are); by <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/lehrer-apologizes-for-recycling-work-while-new-yorker-says-it-wont-happen-again/">self-appropriating journalists</a> who offer their old work as new; by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/business/media/20paper.html?ref=media">respected newspapers</a> made desperate by a business model unable to adapt to the times; by <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2012/07/06/how-the-byline-beast-was-born/">op-ed writers</a> who aren't actually the writers; by <a href="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/time-magazine-to-examine-plagiarism-accusation-against-zakaria/">overextended pundits</a> who recast the writing of historians; by code-copying <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/us/computer-science-cheating.html" target="_blank">computer-science students</a>; and, alas, by an insouciant<a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/questions-raised-about-dylan-show-at-gagosian/"> songwriter</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/14/did-bob-dylan-crib-from-sparknotes-for-his-nobel-lecture/" target="_blank">Nobelist</a> otherwise acclaimed as the genuine article. In general, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverherzfeld/2016/05/26/fair-use-in-the-age-of-social-media/#4abc1bdb26cd">social media</a> have notoriously rewritten fair use practices. </span><br />
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Fairey failed to acknowledge his source; indeed, <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/judge-rules-shepard-fairey-can-get-new-lawyer/">he lied about it</a>. It's said that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. Hmmm. I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell would offer Fairey the same <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/22/041122fa_fact?currentPage=all">sympathy he extended to Bryony Lavery</a>, who plagiarized him. Sympathy was certainly not Christian Ward's desert when Sandra Beasley<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/books/review/nice-poem-ill-take-it.html"> pilloried</a> the serial plagiarist in the pages of The New York Times Book Review. </span><br />
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Nevermind. Our concepts of ownership and originality may need <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/the-love-culture?page=0,0">reexamination</a>. 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?</span><br />
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Or what corporation? It's hard to swallow how Disney has claimed ownership of <i>Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone </i>and<i> The Jungle Book, </i>"a legacy of cultural sampling <span style="background-color: white;">that Shakespeare, or</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_La_Soul">De La Soul</a><span style="background-color: white;">, could get behind," as Jonathan Lethem put it, <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387">plagiarizing</a> verbatim from Lawrence Lessig. (Lethem/Lessig may be calling on the wrong witness: Kipling himself <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10084068/Rudyard-Kipling-letter-admits-plagiarising-parts-of-the-Law-of-the-Jungle.html">admitted</a> to plagiarizing parts of "The Law of the Jungle.")</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">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 often its meaning. Try thinking of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/books/review/thomas-hart-benton-by-justin-wolff.html">Jackson Pollock without thinking of his mentor Thomas Hart Benton</a>, whose nativist realism was, for Pollock, "something against which to react very strongly," a vivid instance in which this dialectic plays out as Harold Bloom's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence">anxiety of influence</a>.</span></span><br />
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Originality is the notion that justifies Pollock's art as something more than large-scale doodling. To <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/andy-warhol-and-the-persistence-of-modernism/">a postmodernist critic</a>, this notion seems "ridiculous when you are staring at a Warhol Brillo box, a Lichtenstein comic strip, or a Jenny Holzer text." But it's in the self-interest of art institutions, galleries and people who pay big bucks for Pollocks to insist on originality as an aesthetic principle. Except when it's not. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/02/the-multimillion-dollar-magazine-illustration.html">Ripoff artist Glenn Brown</a> was nominated for a Turner Prize in 2000 and the Turner Prize jury's chairman, Nicholas Serota, justified the artist’s <i>oeuvre</i> thus: “He uses other artists’ work, but that doesn't mean to say you could possibly mistake his work for theirs . . . he takes the image, he transforms it, he gives it a completely different scale.” Which means he takes somebody's magazine illustration and enlarges it to hang in a gallery. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Assessing the compilations of photographs assembled from the Internet by Penelope Umbrico, Eric Oglander, Joachim Schmid, Dina Kelberman and Erik Kessels, photography critic <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/a-visual-remix.html">Teju Cole asserts</a> that "The real trouble is rarely about whether something
counts as art—if the question comes up, the answer is almost always yes—but
whether the art in question is startling, moving or productively
discomfiting." But which of these seemingly arbitrary criteria came into play when MoMA enshrined Elaine Sturtevant's copycat art in a </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/arts/sturtevant-double-trouble-a-career-retrospective-at-moma.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">career-affirming retrospective</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. </span><br />
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“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said the German novelist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html?hp">Helene Hegemann</a>, who seems to have come of age artistically as well as generationally on the Internet. Edgar Allan Poe might have taken issue with Hegemann. The "broad assertion that no such thing as plagiarism exists," <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=an1KAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA333&lpg=PA333&dq=To+attempt+the+rebutting+of+a+charge+of+plagiarism+by+the+broad+assertion+that+no+such+thing+as+plagiarism+exists,+is+a+sotticism,+and+no+more.&source=bl&ots=vwO5_GGyGe&sig=xT8nL2hSv_-BcXgwcE1lgeWdYFY&hl=en&ei=peTgTtCOFaXs0gHeveyIBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=To%20attempt%20the%20rebutting%20of%20a%20charge%20of%20plagiarism%20by%20the%20broad%20assertion%20that%20no%20such%20thing%20as%20plagiarism%20exists%2C%20is%20a%20sotticism%2C%20and%20no%20more.&f=false">he wrote</a>, "is a sotticism." German<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/world/europe/german-education-chief-quits-in-scandal-reflecting-fascination-with-titles.html"> politicians</a>, however, may find her words exculpatory, and ditto their <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/politics/montana-senator-john-walsh-plagiarized-thesis.html">American counterparts</a>. And if Hegemann can't sustain a career as a novelist she could always<a href="http://www.pouredwithpleasure.com/?p=496"> review wines</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/arts/lee-israel-a-writer-proudest-of-her-literary-forgeries-dies-at-75.html">forge letters</a>, <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/monica-crowley-plagiarism-phd-dissertation-columbia-214612?mod=djemCMOToday" target="_blank">work for the National Security Council</a>, sit on the <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/gorsuch-writings-supreme-court-236891" target="_blank">Supreme Court</a>, run for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/world/europe/france-election-le-pen-fillon-plagiarism.html" target="_blank">French</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/us/politics/donald-trump-institute-plagiarism.html" target="_blank">American</a> president (or at least <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/us/politics/melania-trump-speech.html" target="_blank">First Lady</a>). There are many ways to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/opinion/nocera-how-to-monetize-plagiarism.html">monetize plagiarism</a>. Consider: works by the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/fair-use-art-swiss-cheese-and-me.html">Pictures Generation</a> fetch millions. In the 1980s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherrie_Levine">Sherrie Levine</a> made a career as an "appropriation artist" rephotographing Walker Evans photographs. Today the Sherrie Levines are <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/photographers-can-protect-work">legion</a> on the Internet and plagiarists run <a href="http://tktk.gawker.com/plagiarist-of-the-day-mic-news-director-jared-keller-1684959192">sites</a> designed for millennials, who apparently <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2008-12-10/news/25244354_1_millennial-generation-students-rise-universities">couldn't care less</a>.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So it's unsurprising that on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?_r=1&hpw">American college campuses</a> the notion of originality simply doesn't hold the same meaning for students as it might for their teachers, even at the graduate level, where <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/thinking-cap-the-seemingly-persistent-rise-of-plagiarism/">80 percent of dissertations</a> evidence plagiarism. I suspect this variance between teacher and student may vanish in a generation. Well, sooner at Penn, where Kenneth Goldsmith teaches a class on "<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Uncreative-Writing/128908/">Uncreative Writing</a>," in which "students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing." It should be noted that Goldsmith is merely <a href="http://www.waunakee.k12.wi.us/hs/departments/lmtc/Assignments/McConnellScenarios/AcadHonesty_4Article.pdf">recognizing</a></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.waunakee.k12.wi.us/hs/departments/lmtc/Assignments/McConnellScenarios/AcadHonesty_4Article.pdf"> reality</a>. Again, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em. </span><br />
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Is this so big a deal? Not if a <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/plagiarism-is-not-a-big-moral-deal/">distinguished educator</a> can persuasively explain plagiarism as a breach of decorum, not morality, and compare it to a violation of the rules of golf. Who doesn't take a mulligan now and again? </span><br />
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As Obama <a href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/">might have said</a>, the arc of the universe bends toward poetic justice, and Shepard Fairey's poster has become a visual <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme">meme</a>, plagiarized by political <a href="https://www.google.com/search?site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=775&q=obama+hope+cartoon&oq=obama+hope+cartoon&gs_l=img.3..0.7531.25160.0.25410.36.26.10.0.0.1.198.2772.6j20.26.0.chm_pq_signedout%2Chmss2%3Dfalse%2Chmmql%3D2...0.0..1.1.20.img.K3wOqBlFG3k">cartoonists</a> and <a href="http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/yes-we-can-to-yes-we-scan/">activists</a> the world over.</span>murchadhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13254234641426756195noreply@blogger.com0