Category: Poets and poetry

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.

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 paño / 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.

Some mornings I like to devote to reading rather than writing, feeling that since reading itself is chief among the acts of the imagination, it cannot be an entirely healthy thing day after day to employ my most creative hours mainly in the production of my own words. The structure and phrasing of the foregoing sentence may already suggest to the subtler reader in which era I have spent my morning. I started for some reason with Andrew Marvell, who writes so engagingly about gardens and the mind:

The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade….
(“The Garden”)

*

Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,
Did after him the World seduce:
And from the Fields the Flow’rs and Plants allure,
Where Nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclos’d within the Gardens square
A dead and standing pool of Air:
And a more luscious Earth for them did knead,
Which stupifi’d them while it fed.
The Pink grew then as double as his Mind;
The nutriment did change the kind….
(“The Mower Against Gardens”)

Then I decided to try and find poems more appropriate to the season. In English poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries, winter is usually portrayed in a negative light, symbolizing either frigidity and lack of feeling –

Shee’s but an honest whore that yields, although
She be as cold as ice, as pure as snow…
(Sir John Suckling, “Against Fruition”)

or the decrepitude associated with advanced age, as in Shakespeare’s famous 73rd sonnet:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang….

Both sets of meanings are at work in the following poem by John Donne, which I remembered too late to share on St. Lucy’s Day. But in fact it is a solstice poem, since before the reform of the calendar the solstice fell on December 13.

A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,
Being the Shortest Day

‘Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar’d with mee, who am their Epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaosses, when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
Were I a man, that I were one,
I needs must know; I should preferre,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
At this time to the Goat is runne
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoyes her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

The pseudonymous Restoration-era poet Ephelia makes novel use of winter imagery at the beginning of an invitation to Platonic love, which is worth quoting in full for its novel subject matter, I think. (The complete text of Ephelia’s book, Female Poems On several Occasions, is thankfully now online. I found this poem however in Kissing The Rod: an Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse, edited by Germaine Greer, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1988.)

To Phylocles, inviting him to Friendship

1.
Best of thy Sex! if Sacred Friendship can
Dwell in the Bosom of inconstant Man;
As cold, and clear as Ice, as Snow unstain’d,
With Love’s loose Crimes unsully’d, unprofan’d.

2[.]
Or you a Woman, with that Name dare trust,
And think to Friendship’s Ties, we can be just;
In a strict League, together we’l combine,
And Friendship’s bright Example shine.

3.
We will forget the Difference of Sex,
Nor shall the World’s rude Censure us Perplex:
Think Me all Man: my Soul is Masculine,
And Capable of as great Things as Thine.

4.
I can be Gen’rous, Just, and Brave,
Secret, and Silent, as the Grave;
And if I cannot yield Relief,
I’l Sympathize in all thy Grief.

5.
I will not have a Thought from thee I’l hide,
In all my Actions, Thou shalt be my Guide;
In every Joy of mine, Thou shalt have share,
And I will bear a part in all thy Care.

6.
Why do I vainly Talk of what we’l do?
We’l mix our Souls, you shall be Me, I You;
And both so one, it shall be hard to say,
Which is Phylocles, which Ephelia.

7.
Our Ties shall be strong as the Chains of Fate,
Conqu’rors, and Kings our Joys shall Emulate;
Forgotten Friendship, held at first Divine,
T’ its native Purity we will refine.

Some of Ephelia’s poems in a more romantic vein were equally unconventional, such as “To one that asked me why I lov’d J.G,” which contains the immortal line, “And yet I love this false, this worthless Man.” Its opening lines contain a brief, neutral reference to winter weather:

Why do I Love? go, ask the Glorious Sun
Why every day it round the world doth Run:
Ask Thames and Tyber, why they ebb and flow:
Ask Damask Roses why in June they blow:
Ask Ice and Hail, the reason, why they’re Cold:
Decaying Beauties, why they will grow Old:
They’l tell thee, Fate, that every thing doth move,
Inforces them to this, and me to Love….

This précis of Nature’s unknowable order may owe something to the monumental achievement of 17th century English literature, the King James Bible – specifically, Job:

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?
or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail,
Which I have reserved against the time of trouble,
against the day of battle and war?
By what way is the light parted,
which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?
Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters,
or a way for the lightning of thunder;
To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is;
on the wilderness, wherein there is no man;
To satisfy the desolate and waste ground;
and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth?
Hath the rain a father?
or who hath begotten the drops of dew?
Out of whose womb came the ice?
and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
and the face of the deep is frozen.
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades,
or loose the bands of Orion?
(Job 38:22-31)

Of course, if all else fails in the search for positive winter imagery, one can always quote out of context. John Dryden had something entirely different in mind when he wrote the following lines (in “Astraea Redux,” 1660), but they form an apt conclusion for this all-too-brief survey:

And now Time’s whiter Series is begun
Which in soft Centuries shall smoothly run.

__________

For those interested in pursuing the Ephelia enigma, this site purports to identify not merely the poet, but “J.G.” and most of her other subjects. Other scholars dispute this attribution, some even making the case that “she” was a male poet adopting a female persona.

A very brief history of modern poetry: Mallarmé banished the world. The poem became a room panelled in mirrors – all four walls, floor and ceiling – and the poet’s pen at the center in lieu of a sky. Whitman invited the world back in, all of it. Nothing was to be excluded. The walls of the room began to expand at an exponential rate. Physicists refer to this as the Big Bang – their own, two-word poem. Though it seems a little comical to give an unimaginable event the power to generate impossible sound waves, to rattle windows in their non-existent frames.

So anyway, that’s the point of free verse: either to free the pen from the tyranny of writing alogether, or else to make a place in the poem for everything, “poetic” or not. Free verse means that the poet is no longer a dictator, but a maker who gives full autonomy to her creations. It has little to do with the presence or absence of rhyme and meter. Almost everything rhymes if you listen right.

What do I hope to accomplish through my writing? I would like to de-mystify the mind and re-mystify the world. The one word I keep coming back to is incommensurate, even though I am never exactly certain what it means. The night before last when I walked out of my parents’ house after supper I could feel the fog all around like the moist breath of a large dark animal. When I got to the driveway a sudden fear gripped me. What’s that? Nothing but a trickle of water in a ditch that was usually dry. Whence this fear? I haven’t been afraid of the dark since I was eight years old! But just as I was saying this to myself, something in the woods right beyond my house very loudly cleared its throat. Half-growl, half-cough: the sound supposedly made by (for example) very large cats. I stood motionless in the driveway for a few minutes, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Then I walked slowly down the hill, heart pounding, nostrils flaring. Why hadn’t I left any lights on? As soon as I got in, I switched on both spotlights and walked out on the porch. The thick fog swallowed the light. “Little cat feet,” my ass!