Poets and poetry – Page 80

November 7, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Cover

Seven points in search of an argument

1.
Friday’s photo-essay about windows got me thinking about self-effacement, and how dangerous it can be. Think of guerrillas lying in ambush, or the CIA operative in deep cover. Then, too, privacy issues have been in the air lately with all the discussion about nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. I don’t know whether the Constitution contains an implicit right to privacy or not, but I’m pretty sure than any government that denies the existence of such a right for its citizens, while multiplying arguments for higher and higher levels of government secrecy, is one badly in need of being overthrown.

2.
I’ve also been following an exchange about blog privacy on a listserve I belong to, and feeling more and more baffled as one blogger after another talks about his or her fear of being read by the wrong person. They talk longingly about anonymous blogs where they would have complete freedom to say what they want.

What’s wrong with me that I don’t feel thwarted by my inability to say what cannot be said? I’d always thought that near the core of every relationship there lay a little bundle of forbidden things – those terrible words that, once uttered, can never be retracted. One’s consciousness of this (or any) taboo creates a kind of tension that is ultimately creative. For me, the challenge is to find the words behind or beyond those terrible ones, which in a certain sense are only fuel for the spark that enlivens and illuminates every authentic, I-Thou encounter. But maybe for others this just sounds like an argument for self-censorship.

3.
I’m wondering whether poetry might not serve as an outlet without which I, too, would feel terribly constrained. Growing up, I had the benefit of a stable and supportive family, where every creative effort, no matter how minor, received praise from one or both parents. But at the same time, we were (and are), like many WASPs, not much given to talking about our feelings. That’s not to say I didn’t emote much; far from it – I was a rage and self-pity junkie. I threw tantrums almost constantly up until the age of twelve, when I began to get good enough at writing poems that I could start channeling my affective energy into that instead.

And what is a poem, after all, if not an attempt to say what is otherwise unsayable? To pick a well-known example: if you want to tell someone you like them, but are afraid of making yourself too vulnerable by baldly saying so, what do you do but write a poem in their praise? Poetry allows us to elevate ordinary discourse, to turn our words into a gift. Writing at that level leads one to focus on something outside oneself. For me, writing is not and has never been about self-expression; I’m not even sure I know what that would entail. Even when I write in prose, my main motivation is to try and share my insights with other people. I’m not interested in anonymous publishing because I don’t think that my words have any value beyond whatever connections they help me forge with a reader.

4.
I must admit, the idea of writing in different, assumed personas or “heteronyms,” Fernando Pessoa-style, has some real attraction, adding another dimension to the game-like back-and-forth between author and audience. But otherwise, apart from the need to elude criticism-intolerant employers or censorious family members, I don’t understand why one would ever need a disguise more impenetrable than one’s given name. I’ve always had this sense that “Dave Bonta” was a completely arbitrary place-marker, and I guess that’s the primary reason why I don’t mind the thought of anyone finding the stuff I put up on the web. I honestly don’t think of it as mine in any essential way; a good poem belongs to itself. If someone tries to assert their own authorship of it, of course I’ll object. But if they tease me about writing it, I’m happy to join in. And if they want to lob brickbats, so much the better: there’s no writing so flawless that it wouldn’t benefit from a strong critique.

5.
I know the kinds of uncharitable things people say about each other behind their backs, and I assume that I must come in for a certain amount of that. On the other hand, I also assume that people have better things to do than to think or talk about me – and 98 percent of the time, I’m sure I’m right. Then I remember that, from 7th through 12th grade, I was more or less the class pariah, and it occurs to me that my outlook on being self-conscious may not be very helpful to anyone else. Basically, I just don’t give a shit whether anyone likes me or not. As long as I can keep churning out poems that please me, as long as I can keep finding excuses to immerse myself almost daily in the bliss of creation, I’m happier than I feel I have any legitimate right to be.

6.
I guess I’ve been influenced enough by my Christian heritage to believe that self-disclosure, confession, and vulnerability are valid, perhaps essential routes to spiritual understanding. To put it another way, it seems to me that whenever we buy into the modern materialist notion of the self as unique, independent, ideally impenetrable interior space, we are much more likely to forget the fragility of the rest of Creation and thereby participate in its abuse. In Christian terms, we go from the imitation of Christ to the imitation of Pilate. In Jewish terms, we resemble the smooth talker Aaron, ready to build a golden calf if our friends want us to, rather than the hesitant, tongue-tied Moses or the inspired Miriam. I very much fear that my shamelessness, thick skin and too-fluid words condemn me to ignorance of something I have little business even speculating about. My friends who, at first blush, strike me as being excessively wary of self-exposure, may in reality be close to some implausible quarry, some unicorn or behemoth, which I, through my heedless whistling and stomping about, have inadvertently frightened deep into cover.

7.
But poetry has taught me that disclosing one thing always entails concealing something else. To find is to lose, and vice versa; the eye remains invisible to itself. No single identity can encompass the mystery of who we are, whether as individuals or as nodes in social, political and ecological webs. Protecting privacy means, above all, preserving the freedom to become whoever we want. And a government that tries to assert the power to know every aspect of its citizens’ lives is one that, as we’ve seen, will stop at nothing to extract ultimately worthless confessions.

October 20, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

At the Charles Simic reading

The aging soundman saunters down front to fiddle with the mike and won’t leave, mimicking the famous poet they’ve all come to see. With his bad posture and offstage clothes, it’s a travesty, compounded by a highly questionable accent. “Well, you know – ” he’ll say, and improvise another droll story about his supposed life in New Hampshire or childhood in Belgrade during the war.

A few stray pieces of paper and two or three books have been left at the podium, and he picks them up one at a time and peers down quizzically, as if addressing several exceptional frogs at the bottom of a well. He ends each poem – if that’s what they are – with an audible sniff and consults his watch. It’s the modern kind, he explains – it doesn’t tick.

The imposter’s grin never quite leaves his face. He holds up the famous poet’s most famous book – printed in large type, you see, so as to take more room on the page – and claims it’s nothing but a doodle in the margins of his memoirs. A likely story! It’s boring to describe what really happened. A writer always prefers to make things up. So you say.

The overflow audience crowds the floor, up to within an arm’s length of his feet. Many of them are here by choice, it seems, and would have every right to feel cheated, but only a few people get up and leave. He goes on for forty-seven minutes, stops, and takes a few tentative steps away from the podium as applause breaks out, mingled with appreciative laughter for an almost fully credible performance.

October 15, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Robert Hass on poetry and activism

From the on-line environmental magazine Grist comes a brief but thought-provoking interview with California poet Robert Hass.

Q. You studied biology in college, but it seems like today colleges cast students as either science or literature people. In your class, do you find that people aren’t communicating between the two sides of their brain?

A. I think people do try to communicate between those two sides of their brain. I think part of the interest of the intelligent design/evolutionary biology debate is about how the implications of science talk to the rest of our feeling, affective selves. To try to figure out how to put those together is the fun of this class.

My partner, a science professor, gets the poetry people who are worried that they can’t get the science, and I get the science people who are worried they can’t do the poetry. So I’m sitting in my office with some really bright young people who can do neurobiology or astrophysics but say they can’t understand poetry. And I’m inclined to get down a poem off the shelf like Wordsworth’s sonnet, “All things that love the sun are out of doors,” and I say, what don’t you understand about that?

Can poetry save the world? Maybe – but it’s no substitute for activism, says Hass. In either case, we need to start by noticing what’s around us. I agree.

I found a longer, less focused interview with Hass, conducted right after his inaugural reading as Poet Laureate in 1997 and published in American Poetry Review, online here. At one point, Hass advances an argument that should be familiar to readers of this weblog:

I think that to praise or dispraise, to enchant or disenchant, both of which functions art has – you have to include a lot of the one if you’re going to do the other. I think poetry that says yes has to swallow great goblets of darkness; and poetry that says no has to say no in the face of the fact that there must be reasons why the poet has chosen to continue to live in order to say it. I always think in this connection of Monet because I read that his water lily paintings were begun as a response to reports he had read of the dead in the trenches in the first world war.

Grace Cavalieri: Have you used that in a poem?

Robert Hass: No I haven’t used it in a poem. I mean, I think it’s already there. It doesn’t need to be. But the reason those paintings seem to us so supremely great and not wallpaper is that they are full of the dead. They’re full of all those, all those colors, full of the colors of the bodies in the trenches as he imagined them. Poetry that praises the world has to have immense ballast.

August 31, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Arms and the poet

The political dimensions of warfare are rarely alluded to in [Aztec] poetry; instead, warfare is seen as an artistic act, and the warrior becomes a poet. There are, in fact, two ways to be reborn on earth: in poetry, and in warfare. It is in battle that nobles can achieve their true stature, and their greatest fame, by becoming “eagles and jaguars,” the names for orders of seasoned warriors:

Nobles and kings are sprouting as eagles, ripening as jaguars, in Mexico: Lord Ahuitzotl is singing arrows, singing shields.
Giver of life, let your flower not be gathered! …
You’ve adorned them in blaze flowers, shield flowers.

In these lines, as in many of the war poems, images of natural fertility and harmony are linked to the beauty of art, with shields adorning the warrior in the same way that poems adorn the poet. By this means, the battlefield itself, seemingly a place of death and destruction, is represented as a place of beauty, growth, and fertility. … Singers in the imperial period seem to have vied with each other to create ever more striking images to link beauty and terror…

– David Damrosch, “The Aesthetics of Conquest: Aztec Poetry Before and After Cortez,” Representations Vol. 0, No. 33

If history, as it comes through the historian, retains, analyzes, and connects significant events, in contrast, what poets insist on is the history of “unimportant” events. In place of historian’s “distance,” I want to experience the vulnerability of those participating in tragic events. In other words, Sappho rather than Homer as model. His sacred times, the time of myth, versus her time, which is the moment, forever irreversible. Beginning with Sappho’s insomnia, there’s a tradition of the poem which says “I exist” in the face of all abstractions and cosmos and history, a poem of a passionate desire for accuracy for the here and now in its miraculous presence. I am not talking about confession. The best poetry of this kind is conspicuous by the absence of ego. The most reliable “histories” are told by first-person pronouns who remain subordinate, even anonymous. History teaches humility. My own physical and spiritual discomfort is nothing in comparison to that of those being imprisoned and tortured tonight all over the world.

– Charles Simic, “Notes on Poetry and History”

I came out first as a political poet, even before The Dream of a Common Language, under the taboo against so-called political poetry in the US, which was comparable to the taboo against homosexuality. In other words, it wasn’t done. And this is, of course, the only country in the world where that has been true. Go to Latin America, to the Middle East, to Asia, to Africa, to Europe, and you find the political poet and a poetry that addresses public affairs and public discourse, conflict, oppression, and resistance. That poetry is seen as normal. And it is honored. …

I keep on not wanting to know what I know — Matthew Shepard, James Byrd Jr., the schoolyard massacres. There keep being things I absolutely don’t want to know, and must know — and we as a society must know. I explore the whole idea in a poem in Midnight Salvage called “Camino Real,” while driving this road to Los Angeles, thinking about [accounts of] abuses that I had been reading by people who actually went back to where they had their human rights violated. And how that coexists in the poem with what is for me a journey of happiness. …

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative — that we’re now just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different — [that] this is human destiny, this is human nature. A poem can add its grain to all the other grains and that is, I think, a rather important thing to do. …

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two. Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected — pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do. …

One of the things I have to say about this demon of the personal — and I have to take responsibility for my part in helping create this demon, as part of a women’s movement in which we celebrated personal experience and personal feelings — is that it has become a horribly commoditized version of humanity. It’s almost as though the personal life has been taken hostage in some way, and I’m shying away more and more from anything that would contribute to that.

– Adrienne Rich, 1999 interview with Michael Klein

The larva of the tortoise beetle has the neat habit of collecting its droppings and exfoliated skin into a little packet that it carries over its back when it is out in the open. If it were not for this fecal shield, it would lie naked before its enemies.

– Stanley Kunitz, “Three Small Parables for My Poet Friends” (#2)

July 17, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Henri Cole: poet of the in-between

The May/June 2004 issue of American Poetry Review (Vol. 33, No. 3) contains five poems and an interview with Henri Cole, a prominent American poet I hadn’t spent any time with until now. Finding the poems excellent, I waded through the interview, which presented a stark contrast between an eager-to-impress and full-of-himself interviewer and the very straightforward and humble-sounding Cole. Here are a few quotes that particularly impressed me, followed by a poem.

Sometimes, I prefer the company of animals and flowers to humans, who are often not what they appear to be. But is it possible that male and female desire, including gay and straight desire, is all the same thing? That when we lie in the grass and look at the moon or at the face of the loved one, we (man or woman, gay or straight) see the same thing, which is love – an element as pure as oxygen?

* * * *

I have many artist friends. I envy them the physicality of their work. I admire their wonder and horror before the universe. I love the sensuality of their color. “As is painting, so is poetry,” Horace said. At home and faraway, I see all the paintings I can, not to take something from them, but to try to bring more power to my language. Or to put it in another way, I want to borrow from the concrete world and project it into the realm of the abstract, where the lyric exists. My artist friends constantly challenge me to see in an unformulaic, unsentimental way. I’d trade words for paint in a minute, if I thought I would be any good.

* * * *

Why I write when I do remains a mystery and an adventure – even after twenty-five years. The silences in-between are a greater mystery and, also, a source of anxiety. The two biggest influences on my work are sleeping and reading. I wish I could do them simultaneously. They make the little hamster of the unconscious run wild on its wheel. Szymborska says, “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.'” I like the sound of that.

* * * *

The women poets writing today are stronger than the men. This just seems so obvious. We men have written ourselves into a little narrative corner, where we write very confident, professional poems with all the affects of poetry, but the reader feels no explosion of consciousness. This, in my view, is the most dreaded destiny.

* * * *

In my 20’s and 30’s, Allen Ginsberg and James Merrill were gay models of the Dionysian and Apollonian. They were like opposing magnets, and it seemed to me there was nothing in between. Though as a young poet I drank happily from the cup of the Apollonians, as I’ve matured, I’ve sought a hybrid of the two. How to be Apollonian in body and Dionysian in spirit – that is my quest.

* * * *

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH HORNETS

Hornets, two hornets buzz over my head;
I’m napping and I cannot keep my eyes open.
Do you come from far away? I ask, dozing off.
My gums are dry when I wake. A morning breeze
rakes the treetops. I can smell the earth.
The two hornets are puzzling over
something sticky on the night table,
wiping their gold heads with their arms.
Little things are like symbols. My eyes are watery
and blurred. Then I lose myself again.
I’m walking slowly in a heat haze,
my vision contracted to a tiny porthole,
drawing me to it, like flourishing palms.
I can feel blood draining out of my face.

I can feel my heart beating inside my heart,
the self receding from the center of the picture.
I can taste sugar under my tongue.
All the usual human plots of ascent
and triumph appear disrupted.
Crossing my ankles, I watch the day
vibrate around me, watch the geraniums
climb toward the little mountains
where I was born, watch the black worm
wiggling out of the window box,
hiding its head from the pale sun
that lies down on everything,
purifying it. Lord, teach me to live.
Teach me to love. Lie down on me.

– Henri Cole

June 28, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The art of reading

Reading something for the second time is so much more satisfying than that first read-through. So many books withhold their full treasures from the first-time reader. Not that the first time can’t be special too, of course: surfaces are beautiful, and not to be taken lightly. During that first, heady encounter with a text, it is not merely the words that entrance us. The typefont, the design, the texture of the paper, the look and feel of covers and slipcovers, even the smell of the bindings – if new – or the patina that comes with good use: these too are manifest occasions for pleasure and surprise.

But few of us possess the skill as readers to avoid succumbing to that first-time excitement and finishing the book too soon. And to lay it aside at that point, never to return, would constitute not simply callousness but profound disrespect. Unless the book at hand be some cheap, manupulative thing, in which case even a single reading amounts to little more than “an expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” as Shakespeare once said about something else entirely.

As a reader, I must always aspire to do better next time and never become satisfied with my current techniques. If I know that my first time through a book tends to be a bit on the shallow side, I may change strategies and begin by lightly skimming through what look like the best spots, or re-visiting it at unexpected times and places, dipping into it just enough to whet my appetite for the first, prolonged session. But by then the first reading is really the second, or the third – it doesn’t matter. I’m no longer keeping score.

The kinds of books I enjoy most don’t necessarily need to be sampled in a set order, and sometimes I like to start with the last poem or chapter and work my way slowly toward the front. Or sometimes it’s fun to start in the middle and work toward both ends, alternating between the front half and the back. Hence, I suppose, my disdain for tightly plotted novels that insist on rigid conformity with standard procedure. Plus, given my addictive personality, I hate to get sucked into a book like that because I know I won’t be able to sleep, eat or do much of anything else until it’s done. Ten or twenty hours later I’ll emerge from the novel as if from a parallel universe, shaking with adrenaline and ready to drop from exhaustion at the same time. After an experience like that, it will take me several days to undo the spell and fully return to my own, familiar weltanschauung.

There was a time in my youth when I thought that kind of full-throttle excitement was indispensable to the enjoyment of a book. But as I near the threshold of maturity I find myself craving a calmer and – I would argue – deeper form of immersion. This doesn’t rule out novels altogether, but it does definitely favor the second reading over the too-hasty first one. The plot once exposed for the artful contrivance that it is, one is free to take one’s time and relish the writing for its own sake. All goals have been abandoned aside from the most general: to advance in pleasure through insight – or is it vice versa? Unless one has some ghoulish analytic project to complete, some heartless application of the whips and restraints of academic theory, one can dwell within the garden of the text almost indefinitely for the colors and the scent alone. The mind explores gently and almost by instinct now, enfolded in a matrix where word, image and meaning are coterminous and virtually indistinguishable. The senses return to an almost Edenic innocence. Freed of judgements and distances, the patient reader at last attains a kind of high plateau, every pore fully open and flooded with the clearest, coolest light.

What the writer finally wants to save,
laboring into the white afternoon
at her kitchen table,
adrift in drafts,
ringed in scraps for
the compost, is just this savoring
of time’s luxuriant spread.

May 29, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Ergonaut

I dream a ghost-body, heavy on top of mine. At first I am aroused, then frightened. It sits on my chest the way my big brother used to sometimes when we were kids, though it doesn’t taunt, doesn’t speak a word. I snort loudly to wake myself, find only my own arm sprawled across my ribs. I drift back to sleep and into a new dream, in which a psychopath smiles ingratiatingly and explains that he really couldn’t help murdering over 200 members of a small, isolated community in the mountains. I try to talk the others into locking him up, but we’re not able to reach consensus. The only suitable jail is the old springhouse, damp and cold, where I once imprisoned my little brother for several hours. I find myself joining the others to plead for his human rights. When the cops come, it is not to apprehend him but to interrogate us. “Have you seen a suit like this?” one of them asks each of us in turn, displaying a child’s plastic model of a gangster, furred in what someone informs me is meant to represent a zoot suit. I realize there is no right way to answer. I look at the handcuffs that I found in the basement and decide they really belong around my own wrists. “If they take me to jail, I’ll be safe from the murderer,” I think.

It’s only at the end of their all-day hike, as they begin to pitch camp beside the wilderness trout stream, that they realize they forgot to pack the bag that contained half their fishing gear. Time to improvise, says the engineer, while his friend the poet rummages around for the dime-bag of pot. A half an hour later they’re good and stoned. The engineer begins shaving willow wands for the basket trap he sees as clearly as a lure flashing in a sunlit pool. The poet rolls up his pants and wades out into the stream. He feels the hair rustling all over his body, follicles suddenly standing at attention.

I finally succumb to curiosity and install a free site meter from statcounter.com. I realize that it won’t be terribly accurate, since many regular readers use an aggregator such as Bloglines. I’m primarily interested in the search strings people use to get here, but the visit length data is fascinating, too. In two days, 83% of all visitors alighted here for less than five seconds. On the other hand, four people spent more than an hour with their browser open to Via Negativa. What sort of masochists are these? Here’s someone who’s been back five times already, and visited thirteen separate pages! And good grief, he lives in the same town and uses the same server as I do. Same browser, same operating system, everything. Unbelievable.

But what were they looking for, those less-than-five-second visitors? Two searched for the via negativa, poor souls. All the other Google searches were unique, and included the following (Via Negativa’s order in each search result is given in parentheses):

“bird calls” birdy birdy (5)
“origin of words” “spelunker” (3)
ADDIS ABABA FOAM &A PLASTIC FACTORY (3)
tribesman “man essence” (1 [!])
william stafford methow valley poems (4)
“The Recorded Sayings of Ch’an Master Lin-chi Hui-chao of Chen Prefecture” (4)
coon dong (2)
raccoons sex (4)
bestseller “baghdad burning” (3 [?!])
The word Hammock originates from a Haitian word (7)
THEODORE ROETHKE,DOLOR,analysis or explanation (2 – a Yahoo search)
lion fucked (2 [!])
Zuni vulture (5)

“But how many people actually remember seeing Barney Google in a comic strip?” asks Toonopedia. Indeed. While the search engine that bears his name seems omnipresent, he of the goo-goo-googly eyes and his once-famous steed Sparky have been mysteriously absent for half a century. There was no celluloid finish, no riding off into a sunset. One pictures instead some repudiation or return to sanity, as with Don Quixote. Except that Sancho – or Snuffy Smith – doesn’t buy it. It’s all too real to him, this epic snipe hunt, this been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me. “What’s so funny?” he wants to know. He’s still out there in his lonesome hollow, hunched over a keypad, typing outlandish search strings in the gathering dusk.

Late afternoon isn’t always the best time to read poetry, I find. The book is Katha Pollitt’s Antarctic Traveller, her first. After a while, I decide to jot down some of my accidental misreadings:

…sphincters [splinters] of glass and pottery…

…the world [word] that widens
until it becomes the word [world].

…the orchid,
which signifies the virtues of the noble man:
reticence, calm, clarity of wind [mind].

…now you’ve travelled half the world and seen
the ergo [ego] glinting at the heart of things…

Pollitt’s poems are wonderfully luminous; this is one of the best first books I’ve ever read. Its language is strange the way all truthful language should be. If my slips seem even stranger, perhaps that’s simply a measure of the mind’s difficulty in assimilating unfamiliar truths. We hear what we want to hear, reverse-engineer the worlds that come out of our mouths and call the results logic: the ergo glinting at the heart of things, just so much wind from a glass sphincter.

April 14, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

International Poetry Month, sponsored by us

Yesterday, I think it was, or maybe the day before, I saw a reference to National Poetry Month and went, “Oh yeah, that’s right. Nuts!” That’s how it is every year. If I’d only remembered, I could have arranged a reading at some local venue, but it’s too late now. I mean, I suppose I still could do a last minute thing, run off a bunch of flyers, send out an all-points bulletin via e-mail – you know – but, well, my calendar’s already pretty full, and I’m betting yours is too, right? I mean, it’s April – not necessarily the cruelest but possibly the most hectic month for meetings, conferences, banquets, weddings, gardening, spring birding, spring wildflower walks, invasive species removals, trash cleanup day, trout season opener, Little League… you name it, it’s happening. And then, whoops, here’s National Poetry Month, strategically announced – if this year is like all previous years – with a full-page ad from the Academy of American Poets in the inside back cover of American Poetry Review. I’m looking at last year’s ad (a friend passes on APR, so I read it one year late) and I am marveling anew at the sheer lack of imagination on display. Ooh, let’s all get together and list our names as co-sponsors! What exactly are we sponsoring, other than this full-page ad? Who the hell knows! But isn’t it nifty how the size of the type diminishes the farther down the page you go, the less money you give? Oh, to be in the Chairman’s Circle, now that spring is here! Western wind, when wilt thou blow, the small names down can name…

Oh, but wait – there’s a web address. Maybe everything’s explained online. Let’s see. Front and center is a spooky calendar, with empty dresses marking dates for the National Poetry Month: 10 Years/10 Cities reading series. Below that, in order, I find links to a poem-a-day e-mail thing; a listing of new spring books; a poetry book club; a National Poetry Month poster gallery; and “Poetry and the Creative Mind, the Academy’s Annual Benefit,” which was held on April 5 in New York City. The blue sidebar, which is headed “Get Involved,” in descending order includes: Join the Academy; Save the Date! (April 21 is Poem in Your Pocket Day – another NYC event); Adopt-a-Poet (they make wonderful pets!); New on DVD (John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht, and W.S. Merwin. One word: yowza); Look for Poetry Month Events in Your Area (I did. There weren’t any. Though that’s as much my fault as anyone’s); Sale! $10 – Purchase the official National Poetry Month T-Shirt today. (“Official?”)

I click on the link to the T-shirt, and find it features a moderately funny New Yorker cartoon. Wear this official T-shirt and people will know that, while you may like poetry, you’re sophisticated enough to be humorously self-deprecating about it. Which, come to think of it, seems to be the point of the strange calendar with the empty dresses and the classically agoraphobic quote by Dickinson (“Nature is a haunted house – but Art – a house that tries to be haunted”). The Academy may at one time have been about Art with a capital A, but now, they want you to know, they’re all about “Art.” If you’re as hip as they are, you’ll recognize the ghostly, invisible quotes. No unseemly enthusiasm, please! Rumi and Neruda are dead. (Over at Slate magazine, they’re celebrating the month with “Poems Against Poetry.” That is so hip.)

I’m a little troubled by the implication that National Poetry Month is a wholly owned, corporate-sponsored subsidiary of the Academy. Let’s see if Google bears that out. Hmm, well they certainly don’t have much competition for the top slot. Infoplease has an informative web guide to poets and poetics, but the swarm of pop-ups doesn’t tempt me to explore further. Next down is a guide to NPM-related materials and events for school kids, from Scholastic. The fourth result is Charles Bernstein’s dyspeptic take on National Poetry Month, which I usually end up chuckling over every year around this time.

As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People.

The motto of ARF’s National Poetry Month is: “Poetry’s not so bad, really.”

National Poetry Month is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, an organization that uses its mainstream status to exclude from its promotional activities much of the formally innovative and “otherstream” poetries that form the inchoate heart of the art of poetry. The Academy’s activities on behalf of National Poetry Month tend to focus on the most conventional of contemporary poetry; perhaps a more accurate name for the project might be National Mainstream Poetry Month. Then perhaps we could designate August as National Unpopular Poetry Month.

So while the Academy may strike stick-in-the-mud poets like me as being insufferably elitist, to a formally innovative, “otherstream” poet like Bernstein, it’s much too populist. But of course, what most Americans mean by “popular,” as Bernstein suggests, is “best selling” – which, if you know anything about how the book, music or entertainment industries operate, has more to do with promotion and marketing than any genuine populist appeal. Truly popular poets will continue to be read and quoted and committed to memory regardless of marketing.

But for some reason, a whole lot of people do seem to want to know what other people are reading, watching and listening to so they can read, watch and listen to the same things. National Poetry Month is clearly intended to take advantage of our sheep-like tendencies, rather than to celebrate – as good poetry must – whatever is truly original, startling, rare. That’s what really bothers me about the whole business, hence my suggestion (see below). But first:

The fifth Google result for National Poetry Month is from The League of Canadian Poets. It’s Canada’s National Poetry month too, so declared and officially sponsored by the League since 1999. So the whole goddamn thing is a misnomer. (Aren’t poets supposed to be careful with language?) It’s really International Poetry Month, folks!

But we need a new way to celebrate it. Like it or not, in our society, poetry appreciation is a largely private affair; public readings aren’t for everyone. Not every good poet is a good public reader – and vice versa. Not all fans of poetry enjoy going to readings. To my mind – and y’all know I’m a huge fan of oral culture – poetry is mostly about books.

So here’s my suggestion. For International Poetry Month, why not go to your local bookstore or library and buy or borrow a book of poems by someone you’ve never heard of before? (I advise opening books at random and slowly reading whichever poem you open to – just one poem for each book – until you find one that grabs you by the throat.) Take it home and read it thoroughly and lovingly, preferably more than once. Then blog about it. Or read out loud from it on the subway. Photocopy pages from it and distribute them anonymously at work or school. Type your favorite poem(s) from the book into an e-mail and spam everyone in your address book (extra points if you can incorporate “International Poetry Month” and “V1AGRA” into the subject line). Slip the book under your pillow once or twice and see if gives you any strange dreams. Then find someone else who’s doing the same thing, and trade books.

Oh, and one other thing: after reading and sharing a book or two in this manner, please write at least one poem of your own in response. This is important. Especially if you don’t think of yourself as a poet, and have no particular aspirations to publish. You don’t have to show the poem to anyone if you don’t want to.

Screw the Academy of American Poets and their sponsors. Screw the League of Canadian Poets. Screw the poets, even – the whole nasty, fractious, backbiting lot of them (present company not necessarily excluded). Let’s make International Poetry Month be about poetry.
__________

Tomorrow: Practicing what I preach.

March 14, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Air quotes

You know a poetry reading is going to suck when the very first words out of the first reader’s mouth are “O.K., so…”

You are confirmed in this belief when the reader proceeds to spend half of his allotted time reading from a densely theoretical introduction to his poems that he himself has written. It is full of ironically employed clichés, such as “Progress goes forward,” & “I have never read this poem the same way twice & think it would be impossible to do so.”

The main thing, you gather, is that meaning is not merely suspect but wholly fraudulent. The work in question consists entirely of one-stanza “poems” each of which may be taken as an interpretation of the one-word title, “Progress” (in which this avant-garde poet does not, of course, believe). “Meaning discovers a method,” he says. Therefore his method is anti-methodical. “Every stanza is modular,” he continues, & you shiver, remembering the German medievalist Uwe Poerksen’s analysis of contemporary linguistic malaise: The tyranny of a modular language.

He reads in a flat monotone enlivened only by the slight falls in intonation at the ends of “sentences.” Anything more, you realize, would betray enthusiasm: etymologically, the possession by a god or spirit & therefore the ultimate heresy for those who believe in the vacuity of belief.

There are very few active verbs. “Anything named is to be tilted,” he intones. “Around each of these states is a periphery of mixed states without syntax.” (A periphery around? Isn’t that redundant?) “The way things work is not a projection of syntax.” You are reminded of the child’s fantasy of disappearing by eating his own body parts, one by one – a fantasy only made possible, of course, by the invention of the flush toilet.

The second reader is more interesting because her incomprehensibility is more genuine. She walks with the help of a cane & speaks in brief, clipped phrases painfully delivered: a stroke two & a half years ago, she explains, has led to “a problem with speech production.” Thus, she says, she virtually embodies what had been said earlier that day about the gap. You divine that she is not talking about the clothing store.

All of these poets are participants in a weekend-long conference at the adjacent university. None of them bother to introduce themselves, clearly assuming that everyone in the small audience is part of their circle. You sip a hot beverage along with the others. You find you are one of three people taking notes.

Each difficult phrase endures a difficult birth. “Small stars in the shape of proverbs,” she says. You rather like that. But was the lyricism intended, or merely the affect of a defective ear?

Her last poem is in memoriam Jacques Derrida. Ironic self-parody, or unselfconscious cliché? Son of man, you cannot tell. “It carries an epigram,” she announces, & reads the epigram, whose author you fail to note: “There is no wasteland.” Bull fucking shit, lady! you want to shout.

The poem in memory of Jacques Derrida features a one-line refrain: “I kid you not.” Audience members exchange knowing looks. “Apocalypse – or a part of the body?” wonders the “poet.” Her infirmity prevents her from making frequent quotes in the air with her fingers as the others do. Her rigidity lends her a certain iconic quality, like Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo – a comparison to which, you suspect, she wouldn’t take a shine. That she can still smile, can still read, seems frankly heroic.

And her speech impediment actually enhances her delivery, like George Burns with his frequent pauses to puff on a cigar. “The clock chimes midnight: bong, bong, bong, et cetera.” At this, the audience cracks up.

She, too, adheres strictly to her ten-minute time limit. At least these people are brief, you think, remembering open-mike readings where embarrassingly bad poets chortled their way through half their life’s work.

The third reader is actually understandable. You almost weep with gratitude. She reads selections from a lengthy midrash – as she calls it – on Adorno’s famous line, “After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry.” Why was poetry singled out from among all the other arts, she wonders? It smacks of the way the Nazis singled out Jews, Gypsies, intellectuals, homosexuals – she runs down the list.

Her conclusion seems on-target, if somewhat obvious: for Adorno, a literary critic, “It is an act of mourning for him to cut off what was important to him,” like Abraham binding his beloved Isaac for the sacrifice. But in her lengthy questioning of Adorno’s motives, has she not placed herself in the position of an avatar of transcendent meaning, like the angel who carried God’s commands to Abraham? “Have I been taken in the role of angel? I should not write poetry,” her poem bravely concludes.

You like this reader. Not only does she read with expression, her patter between poems is funny: “The devil sold me his soul,” she says. You chuckle along with the others. “At the crossroads?” someone shouts.

“I am a phantom, sacred and secular, beginning not to disbelieve in ghosts,” she concludes one poem. “Beginning not to disbelieve”: does that make her the reactionary of the group? Another poem ends with the line, “Therefore it is scrupulous even to listen to shadows.” But you wonder: After Paul Celan, isn’t it a little barbaric to keep playing around with fractured syntax, as if your life, too, depended on it?

The last two readers of the evening also seem likeable, though once again you are reminded of the lines from that angry outsider poem by Antonio Machado: …Pedatones al paño / que miran, callan y piensan / que saben, porque no beben / el vino de las tabernas. “Academics in offstage clothes, who watch, say nothing, and think they know, because they don’t drink wine in the ordinary bars,” in Robert Bly’s translation. They are like dogs, you think, publicly licking their own genitals without shame.

You find yourself paying close attention to the noises from the front of the store. Every time the cash register dings, it sounds like an arch commentary on the reading. But a lengthy gargle from the espresso machine makes you think that maybe they’re all in on the joke. This is not, after all, one of the ordinary bars.

But perhaps you are the one who should be ashamed. “Juxtaposition is a kind of melodrama,” says the last reader. He repeats this phrase, or variations thereof, often enough to let you know that he’s almost serious. In place of a left hand he wears a pirate’s metal hook – or rather, a pair of pinchers – & you have a hard time taking your eyes off it. When he uses it to signal quotation marks, you think: it’s perfect.

“Juxtaposition is a kind of melodrama.” Juxtaposition is almost the whole of my art as a writer, you mutter to yourself.

Afterwards, sitting at the bar in the local brewery, your desire for a pint of porter is entirely sincere – or should we say post-ironic? Here’s where spending the last hour and fifteen minutes listening to “poetry” pays off. Beer & French fries have never tasted better than they do at this moment.

March 1, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Whatever you do, don’t eat the rosebush

[Image of hungry juniper eaten by ImageShack]

Is there a via negativa for writers? Mark Twain: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” Jamaica Kincaid: “What I don’t write is as important as what I write.” And best of all, Anaís Nin: “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

A possibly mis-remembered and not altogether memorable incident from a few years back.

“X’s poems certainly are . . . well-crafted,” I said, trying to think of something nice to say about a local academic poet who, I secretly felt, had very little to say.

“Well, we are all in pursuit of excellence!” said Y, semi-facetiously.

I wasn’t sure if she meant all local poets, or just those associated with the MFA program. “Not me,” I lied. “I just want to get laid!”

The woman at the next table – another writing instructor – choked on her coffee.

Sometimes when I’m feeling blue, I like to try saying “dude” in the voices of Great American Poets of the 20th Century, as preserved by the Library of Congress Recording Laboratory. Just imagining Edna St. Vincent Millay saying “dude” brightens my mood considerably.

Writers are always giving each other all kinds of swell advice. To wit: Get it down. Good advice for someone with a large pill to swallow. Of course, nothing says you can’t take it as a suppository.

Get it down. Then beat it senseless.

Show, don’t tell. Look but don’t touch. Put your hands up where I can see them.

Keep a journal. Write every day. Do you realize how much fuel is needed for the complete incineration of a corpse?

Write as if your life depended on it, not as if you’re a pathetic loser who can’t figure out a real way to make a living.

There is no one, right way to write a poem. But there are many, many wrong ways. So let’s talk about them instead.

No ideas but in things. This brick, for example, gives me several ideas, most of them bad.

No ideas but in things. No discovery but in dissection.

Write for yourself. Or, failing that, write for your colleagues across the hall. You know, the ones who are all into critical theory. Don’t you want them to dig you?

Be sure to subscribe to at least some of the magazines you submit to, so they can continue to serve vital communities of ambitious writers, their spouses, and a couple hundred academic libraries.

Public readings of your own poetry are a great way to reach a wider audience, most members of which probably wish you’d shut the fuck up so the bartender can turn the game back on.

Try to cultivate awareness. Pay attention to everything around you. Then discover just how difficult that is for someone with a writer’s ego. Cultivate irony instead.

Learn goddamn grammar, people.

Write what you know: nothing. You know nothing, puny mortal! Turn yourself into a word processor for the gods.

O.K., so write what you don’t know. “If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy” (Nikki Giovanni). And a few writers even do research!

Make it new. Or at least scrape the mold off before you serve it.

Make it new. Old is bad!

Make it new. Blog.

My friend the Sylph wonders, “At what point does water in a bottle become bottled water?”