Poets and poetry – Page 85

May 9, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Undone

The more attenuated my longing, the less I see. Clear root of appetite, filament, figure against whatever suppositional ground: only in your sturdy grosgrain can one resist the constant impulse to diversion. What originates as a kind of shorthand for desire soon becomes the single most combustible fuel for turning desire into ash and shadow into hollow glare. Something goes awry in our looking that has nothing to do with the seen, like a fruit bred to be free of any seed.
__________

Built around the first ten words generated for me by the Random Prompt Generator at Poetry Thursday: attenuated, root, figure, grosgrain, shorthand, single, combustible, shadow, awry, seed.

I must say, though, the word “prompt” itself is stranger and more intriguing to me than any of these. Hmmm…

May 2, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Down to earth

Trees in the Concrete, the 11th — and first themed — edition of the Festival of the Trees, appeared yesterday morning at Flatbush Gardener. Xris did a great job of finding articles and blog posts to fit his theme. Also, I and the Bird #48 — “A Field Guide to the Bird Posts” — is fresh this morning at Greg Laden’s blog. (The next edition of I and the Bird will be right here at Via Negativa on May 17! Those of you who know me personally can wipe the coffee off your computer screens now.)

And as long as I’m posting links: fans of my mother’s nature writing can find three new posts from her at the Marcia Bonta and Plummer’s Hollow sites — Saving the Future; Spring wildflowers: back on track; and April Journal Highlights (2).

Almost every morning I have a choice: stay inside and write, or go for a walk. Yesterday, I went for a walk. I was rewarded with a rare daytime sighting of a southern flying squirrel, supposedly our most abundant tree squirrel species here in Pennsylvania but seldom seen because of its nocturnal habits. This one was fleeing a pair of gray squirrels — it wasn’t clear how the altercation started — and landed on a big black locust tree right beside the road.

I didn’t get going until around 10:00 o’clock, but I did so with a great sense of accomplishment, having just solved a fairly complex coding problem on my own. This had to do with the way my recently revamped Shadow Cabinet site displayed in Internet Explorer. In essence, post titles were being messed up by the next page and previous page navigation links, and the fix involved pandering to a proprietary IE property known as “hasLayout,” which I’d never heard of until yesterday and still barely understand. But it occurred to me afterwards, as I started off through the woods, that the feeling of getting way in over my head is very similar to what I experience when I write a poem. In both cases, I really have no idea what I’m doing; I just keep trying different things until something works. The process (or stylesheet) may not be pretty, but as long as the product looks good, who cares?

WordPress has this dumb little slogan, “Code is Poetry.” No, it isn’t. The elegance and simplicity that WordPress coders pride themselves on may possess a certain kind of aesthetic appeal, but they are borne of an utter lack of nuance and ambiguity. Good poetry, by contrast, may or may not adhere to a minimalist aesthetic, but is almost always dedicated to exploring nuance and ambiguity, rather than eliminating it. Such devices as metaphors or puns have no equivalent in the necessarily literalist language of code (although there is a new form of poetry that depends on a detailed knowledge of scripting). All of this probably seems fairly obvious, but the slogan bothers me because it suggests that poetry is, in turn, a type of code — and in fact, I’ll bet that a sizable majority of people who state that they “just don’t understand poetry” are reacting to this very misperception. “Why can’t the poet just say what s/he means?”

Writing code and writing poetry may have a few things in common, though. In both, there’s almost always more than one way of saying something, and the trick is to find the best one. A concern of conscientious web designers these days is to “futureproof” their work: to try and anticipate which tags will fall out of favor as web standards evolve, and to avoid using them so that the page they’re working on will still render properly five or ten years down the road. For poets, something akin to futureproofing occurs when we weigh the extent to which the appreciation of our works depends on a knowledge of local conditions, ephemeral slang expressions, or current events. The anticipated shelf-life for poetry may be a bit longer than for software or web pages, but at some level we must realize that there are no true universals; even the concept of romantic love is a little over 800 years old, and might not be very well understood a millennium from now.

This realization ought to bring us down to earth, but somehow most poets — like many computer geeks — still tend to be rather full of themselves. The power of language at its most suggestive (poetry) and at its most tool-like (commands of any sort) is intoxicating, and power tends to turn people into assholes.

While stalking an ovenbird yesterday morning, I almost stepped on this box turtle. Both creatures are very well camouflaged for a lifetime spent on, near, or — as seems to have been the case with this turtle shortly before I found him — underneath the forest litter. Wildflowers and tree seedlings aren’t the only things pushing their way out of the ground these days.

April 20, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Six very brief essays

Back to the Basics

A local bottled-water company describes its product as “mouth-watering.”

Why Similes are the Most Common Poetic Device in Contemporary American Poetry

Well, like, Americans prefer similitude. Y’know?

Context is Everything

The sign said, “Cut your own.”

Going Native

As kids, whenever we were really bad, our parents would threaten to give us back to the Indians.

Haploidal

In my past life, I was in two places at once.

Remember This

A politician in hot water never says “I can’t remember,” because that might make him seem forgetful and incompetent. He says, “I don’t recall.”

April 17, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Where poets are superstars

I’ve always said to anyone who would listen that we English speakers could stand to emulate Arabs in their respect for the written and spoken word. Actually, most other cultures give poets and other intellectuals more respect than they get in the Anglophone world, but this story from PRI demonstrates the unusually strong appeal of poetry in the Arabian peninsula.

April 2, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Snakes in the water

“Hello Sirs, I’m very sorry for my post,” said the ghost in the machine-generated blog comment as a prelude to its list of commercial links. Or maybe, indeed, these were the words of a truly repentant soul typing spam for pennies somewhere in the global South, where a penny might actually still suffice to buy someone’s thoughts.

At any rate, that was the last thing I read this morning before abandoning my blog for the fog, which was rapidly burning off. The field was dotted with the first spider webs of spring.

“What exactly do you call that thing?” I asked my dad just now. “A junction box, I guess,” he said. It’s where the telephone cable divides in eight, like the legs of a spider. I went back down to the other house, and he signalled me a moment later: “Phone call!”

You have to understand — I rarely ever get any phone calls. But speak of the devil, and it rings. A lady from the newspaper was calling to verify that I was the author of a letter sent in under my name two weeks before. “Could you tell me the subject of your letter please?”

I could barely remember. “Uh, wind plants?” I ventured. “That’s right!” she said, sounding as pleased as a game show host.

On my way back down the hill, I noticed a knot of garter snakes in the old well. Clearly not a mating ball, I thought, but it didn’t seem as if they’d need to bunch up for warmth today, either — it was 65 degrees and sunny by this time. Maybe they were just feeling sociable.

At my approach, they all started going off in different directions, and a few dropped into the water and began swimming in circles. It’s always such a surprise to see a snake swim. You wouldn’t think them capable of any bouyancy at all.

“If I lived here, I’d set up an easel and just paint,” said a visitor on Saturday. But I don’t just live here — I grew up here, and that can make it hard to see things as an artist should, always at a bit of a remove. Ever since that remark, though, I’ve been looking at things with canvas in mind. Would this be worth the time, the trouble? Would it look good on a gallery wall?

It’s funny how a few casual words can lodge in the memory and bring about a subtle shift in outlook. We tend to think of communication as a kind of transaction, I think, with messages analogous to currency, inert, possessing only whatever arbitrary values we assign them. A convenient view, designed to keep the myth of the sovereign individual high and dry.

April 1, 2007 by Dave Bonta

My new book

Bullshitting for Dummies

I just received the page proofs for my new book, due out in late August from Wiley Publishing. If you’d like a review copy, let me know. Here’s an excerpt from the Preface.

Prime-grade bullshit is the ultimate in tenderness, juiciness, and flavor. It’s immediately recognizable by its marbling — flecks of arresting imagery and compelling analogies within an overall lean prose structure — which enhances both palatability and believability.

But ask yourself: would you rather consume bullshit, or produce it? Just as the USDA has convinced consumers that the watery and tasteless flesh of feedlot cattle is something to be prized, so do seasoned bullslingers know how to take advantage of people’s general tendency to believe any claim that is attractively packaged and/or authoritative-sounding. This book will teach you how to run with the bulls in easy, step-by-step language that anyone can understand. And that’s no bull.

March 2, 2007March 5, 2020 by Dave Bonta

The Pleasures of a Book: Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge book The Nature of Things, by Francis Ponge

Translated and with an Introduction by Lee Fahnstock

New York: Red Dust, 2000 (2nd printing)

Originally published as Le parti pris des choses
by Editions Gallimard Paris, 1942

Poems crowd into the meager paperback like moss on a stone: the book teems. Its ink and glued binding give off a faint odor of fermentation. The margins are scandalously narrow, and the shorter poems don’t even get a page to themselves. Often they lack the most rudimentary spaces between their stanzas, and poorly reproduced engravings are the only illustrations.

But what fecundity! The French originals linger somewhere close by, like shed undergarments littering the floor around a marriage bed. And between these thin covers, everything is in flux, surrendering to multiple readings — at first slow and tentative, then gradually more assured. The off-white paper takes on a greenish cast, like the base of a flame. Fire or ferment, some kind of oxidation is clearly taking place, beyond the normal decomposition that disorders the senses after a good, long read.

Entering a poem by Francis Ponge, we become conscious of the way our thoughts take on the shape of whatever they encounter, though never as a mere vegetal clone. Eyes and lips no less than tongues serve as reproductive organs for the mind. To a poet like Ponge, there could never have been more than one poem in existence at a time. It’s we readers who are to blame for this profligacy: it’s our throats that burn, it’s our paper bodies that are spent.

As for the book, it will not lie flat. The moment I remove my fingers, it springs back to its original position: shut tight, but for the slight gap of the top cover.

February 23, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Reflex

I wish more poets would try working in the past tense. I am tired of reading poems that rely on startling metaphors and present-tense immediacy for most of their effect. It begins to feel very formulaic and unearned. How about some genuine insight once in a while?

Novelist and blogger Richard Lawrence Cohen has a terrific little story that suggests how all those run-of-the-mill poems come about.

But conditioned reflex comes to the rescue. She knows how to write a poem. She knows how to trawl for a metaphor, how to stitch lines together with assonance and consonance (and the occasional alliteration, not too much), she knows how to intertwine nature images with love-memories and transcendent ideas. So here is Listen, the first word, followed by a colon, herding the reader with an authoritative bark. Here is wind in the next line, another short-i sound, and then lent to tie the l’s and n’s and short e’s through three lines. Here is blue forgiving the encroaching purple, forgiveness is always good, and linen-clad dandelions whisper together, with that l- n-short-vowel combo again, and personifying nature’s voice is a reliable tactic. She makes the gesture of a surprising epithet; she makes the gesture of a truncated line; she pays witty homage to a better-known colleague’s best-known poem.

To me, the most telling thing about the writing process as depicted in Cohen’s story is its origin in impulse and distraction, rather than in true attention to something outside the writer.

February 12, 2007March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

The evolution of a reading

My post on difficult poetry and poetry readings spawned an interesting discussion. Both Laura and Bev felt there was a strong connection between hearing a poem and understanding it, which is interesting considering how difficult it can be to grasp the meaning of a poem on first listen. Bev wrote,

The speaking is what makes it come alive for me. If I don’t understand a poem, I read it aloud two or three times. Btw, when I was working on my graduate degree in Eng. lit, I was assigned to the university’s writing tutorial services. I used to work with students who were having problems with their essays. I frequently had students bring in a poem they were supposed to write about. They wouldn’t know what to say because they didn’t understand the poem. I think they thought I’d explain it to them. Instead, I’d make them read it to me at least a couple of times — sometimes more. The first time was usually quite pathetic. Subsequent attempts were usually much better. After a couple of readings, we’d sit and discuss the poem – and most times, they’d already be starting to get the meaning. I liken the process to talking to your dog about your problems. You already know the answer, but you just have to hear it.

Ivy Alvarez stressed the importance of warming up before giving a public performance.

I think if poets are going to read their work aloud, they should practise being heard, otherwise what’s the point?

I know there’s plenty to think about while a person’s up on stage [nerves, do I gotta go pee, is my time up, why are they looking at me funny, have I got all my poems, hey, he’s cute, random thoughts like that] but that’s why one has to warm-up beforehand.

I can’t help thinking that poets who give lackluster readings are just being lazy — unless, as Marly suggested, they are deliberately affecting “a toneless, mechanical sort of reading,” stemming from a “desire for the inaccessible.” Just because I’ve written a poem doesn’t mean I automatically know the best way to read it right off the bat. I thought it might be fun to record myself in three different stages of comprehension of a given poem, using the most recent thing I’ve written. If I’d saved a recording of every take, this would’ve been close to an hour long and about as exciting as listening to a guitarist practice the same riff over and over.

[audio:http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/5/600283/Good_Morning_Blues_%28evolution%29.MP3]

Probably no one will ever accuse me of a lack of enthusiasm for poetry. But you can have too much of a good thing, creating a sort of enthusiasma that makes normal breathing difficult. That’s a line I hope never to cross. But I think I may have gone a little too far with this particular recording adventure, mixing in a harmonica (my very inadequate rendering of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Eyesight for the Blind”). You can listen to the results on the poem’s new page at shadow cabinet.

By the way, in case anyone was wondering, the poem was not autobiographical. (You’ll notice I included it in the Masque section of shadow cabinet.) I chose it for this reading exercise mainly because it was short, without thinking that I’ll probably want to revise it at some point. Well, if I do, I’ll simply erase these recordings and make new ones, I guess.

__________

Speaking of evolution, Happy Darwin Day, y’all.

February 8, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The eclipse of a cry

The easy and the difficult complement each other.
–Daodejing

1. Sí, “Mister” Ashbery

I have my browser home page set to Poetry Daily, and this morning I was greeted by a John Ashbery poem, Yes, “Señor” Fluffy.

Now, I know John Ashbery is a poet who inspires strong feelings — as poets should. Some critics insist he is our greatest living poet, while others denounce him as a tone-deaf, pretentious fraud. I think it’s obvious that the snipers are just jealous. He’s a big target. And sadly, all too many people don’t know how to read a John Ashbery poem — or any poem, for that matter. American poetry is more than Billy Collins and Ted Kooser, folks. For example, there’s Ron Silliman.

It’s easy to read John Ashbery as if he weren’t difficult and deserving of a more practiced form of attention, like cleaning under one’s fingernails and mistaking them for moons, or perhaps vice versa. We’ve been so moonstruck by the romantic figure of the poet, we forget that when he points at the moon, his other three fingers are pointing back at himself, and not necessarily like Narcissus — which would make it a myth demeanor — assuming he (or she) doesn’t point with, say, pursed lips, as they do in some parts of the world, a sideways shake of the head, or a suggestive motion of the penis gourd. But I think if you put in the effort that any difficult poem requires, you’ll begin to see, beneath the “free-flowing, often disjunctive syntax, extensive linguistic play, often infused with considerable humor, and a prosaic, sometimes disarmingly flat or parodic tone” (Wikipedia), whole new vistas of, you know, deep poet stuff. Also, it really helps if you read all his poems in a Krusty the Clown voice.

2. Shepherd: “death is contagious”

Of course, it’s all too easy to make fun of what we don’t understand. Poet and new blogger Reginald Shepherd has a very thought-provoking post on difficult poetry, supporting his argument with an array of great quotes and assertions. One commenter wonders why Shepherd doesn’t include any examples from actual poems, but the result of that omission is an essay I had no trouble reading as a vindication of my own views. Here are two snippets:

Incomprehension and even frustration can seduce in poems just as they can in people: many objects of desire are obscure, but their outlines are clear. What does the sunlight breaking through the clouds that have hovered all day, then filtering through the leaves of the giant live oak tree in my back yard, “mean”? It is, I saw it, I felt in on my skin. You can see something too, feel that slight difference in the temperature when you step out from under that tree, your feet sinking a little into the thick layer of leaf litter. Too many bad poems, dull poems, are just meaning, with nothing or too little doing the meaning. I know what they mean, but I can’t be bothered to care. As Charles Bernstein notes, some poems are easy because they have nothing to say. Conversely, some poems are difficult for the same reason, in an attempt to cover up their vacuity.
[â€¦]
A destination is also an end, but as Nietzsche wrote, the end of a melody isn’t its goal. Too often understanding is the prize you get after you’ve consumed the poem. Now that you’ve taken it apart to get the decoder ring, you’re done with the poem, you can throw it away. I don’t see poems as things I want to get over with, any more than I see life as something I want to get over with. The end of life is death, and we start dying from the minute we’re born. But on the road to the contagious hospital there are muddy fields full of new growth if we just take the time to look closely. We’ll get down that road soon enough. Death is contagious, people are always catching it; the time we don’t take will be taken from us. There’s no need to hurry oneself along.

3. An Angel named Ralph

Difficult poets don’t help their case any if they can’t read their stuff in public, by which I mean introducing some inflection and moving one’s body once in a while. The other week I went to hear Ralph Angel at Altoona College, and had a hard time staying in my seat — and not because he was that funky. I wanted to climb up on stage, elbow him out of the way, and read his poems myself. I could tell they were good. Difficult, yes, but in a way I happen to like. Intriguing shapes kept emerging from the quiet, halting, expressionless fog of his reading, only to recede again before I could get a clear idea of them. “In our white and blue city, everything smells like a story,” I heard. Well, I think some of us were getting a whiff of connectivity, too — but only a whiff. From the next poem, I got: “What I am trying to say makes faint scratching sounds on the paper.” Ah. So this reading style is a deliberate affectation, and not just the result of a lack of aptitude for public speaking? “You’re transparent in the basement by way of all exits.” Actually, we were on the ground floor, but otherwise, yes. The room was packed, and I imagine our collective bafflement was written on our faces.

Those were all last lines, identifiable as such by the longer-than-usual pause that followed, and then the brief return to a slightly more expressive voice indicating ordinary speech. During the fourth poem, I was able to extract a line from somewhere past the middle. “I write down everything as I forget it, especially at night,” Angel murmured. I liked the idea of writing as a process of forgetting. I put my notebook back in my pocket.

Afterwards, I bought copies of both his recent books — a volume of selected poems (Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006) and a translation of Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song — largely to confirm my suspicion that he is, in fact, a very fine poet. But I don’t think my reaction was typical. The students, who had all dutifully signed in before the reading, stampeded out as soon as the question-and-answer period was over, with hardly a glance at the books. As far as I could tell, the only ones who bought Angel’s books were other poets. Maybe he doesn’t care about that, but I do. I want people to like good poetry, and it pains me every time I have to listen to a gifted poet who can’t read his or her own stuff. Doesn’t an MFA in poetry require credits in public speaking and performance? I’m not saying that all readings should be as dramatic as the average poetry slam — that’s like saying symphony orchestras should have light shows and stage diving. But poets should at least know how to engage an audience, I think. One of the Lorca poems Angel read was a translation of El Grito, “The Cry.” The word Ay! occurs three times in the poem; it’s an exciting piece. Let’s just say that it was not well served by murmuring.

The eclipse of a cry
echoes from mountain
to mountain.

From the olive trees
a black rainbow
veils the blue night.

Ay!

4. Imposture

In that video clip from The Simpsons I linked to above, I love it when Bart unmasks what he takes to be an imposter by pulling his fake nose off. “Krusty’s a real clown!” he tells his sister. “That’s just some lumpy old guy in a clown suit.” Pandemonium ensues, as pandemonium is wont to do.

That’s what a good poem should be like.

Update

In a follow-up to the post quoted above, Reginald Shepherd has a very helpful ennumeration of the various ways in which a poem can be difficult. I encourage everyone with even a passing interest in this topic to go read it. I especially liked his conclusion: “Every reader encounters poetic difficulty of some kind at some point.”