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  1. #1
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    Default Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

    1.A

    A SHORT, HIGHLY PERSONAL OBSERVATION COMPLETELY LACKING IN EXAMPLES WHICH I COULD HAVE NEVER HAVE MADE THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS A YOUNG POET STILL LIVING IN NEW YORK, BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH TO KNOW IT WAS TRUE. BUT I DO NOW.
    BY MARTIN EARL

    W.H. Auden once said that he always felt that he was the youngest person in the room, even at an older age, when this was certainly not the case. I’ve felt similarly while blogging, especially when being reprimanded by commentators half my age. This could have all sorts of explanations. But for the moment let’s file them under “Monkey Glands”, aka W.B. Yeats. Today, I have a more pressing issue at hand, a comment on the younger generations of scriveners; or to reverse Auden’s impression, all of those younger than myself and involved, in one way or another, in the palimpsestic quest of poetry. I mean poets in their twenties, thirties and forties – fifty being the cut-off date.

    Of course, there are exceptions but for the moment I am intent on generalizing. In the field of poetry, women make better bloggers than do their male counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the women are clearly superior. Not only is their poetry more ambitious and achieved but their criticism is more daring, their originality of thought deeper and their wit more honed.
    Why should this be? One reason perhaps (and this is undoubtedly one of those clichés for which I will be run out of town) is that women have an ontological connection that men don’t have to making and creating, to nurturing form out of raw materials: out of themselves, out of language and out of the ground, in the sense of both lettuce patches and the Heidegerrean notion of fundamentum absolutum, or der grund. Heidegger posits a reversal of the Cartesian first principle and says “I am therefore I think.” This stands in well for the difference between male and female sensibilities.
    Traditionally discouraged or prevented from taking part in social paradigms of creative expression (with the exception, of course, of motherhood) women have learned patience, the art of autonomy and a capacity for restraint. Related to these qualities is the fact that they are more open to difference, generally more tolerant, and less threatened by the mechanisms of authority: those mechanisms that are found in traditional knowledge structures, traditional language structures and traditional institutional structures. Since historically women have had to defend themselves against the power emanating from these structures, their mastery and insight into the workings of power is deeper. Likewise, women’s competitive instincts are more subtly attuned to the task at hand, the medium they are dealing with, the objectives of a given project than they are with the impression they would like to make upon the world. This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will. Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem. Because they are more coherent, grounded and possess a higher degree of self-knowledge at a younger age, they are better prepared to resist the influences of their teachers, their education and even the expectations of the medium they are working in. Hence they are more original.
    Decades of work by women to open new formats, create equalities, to encourage creative and intellectual work, to valorize the special experiences of women (both material and intellectual), and to formulate a critical framework for understanding the various forms of oppression woman have born, and continue to bear, is, in my opinion, and in my special field of concern (poetry and literary criticism) also responsible for the health, innovation and continuing wonder of the medium. But it is not the whole story, and it is time to move on, away from theory and back to practice. On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.
    And yet in spite of what I say above (characterizing women’s experience, perhaps inaccurately, and seeing their poetry as having benefited from that experience) I have never been comfortable with the designation “women’s poetry”, or with any of the other normative appellations that marked 20th century discussions on the subject and that led to misleading typologies and atomizations. In fact, I follow Berryman’s cue in not distinguishing between British and American poetry – and I carry that further to all poets writing in English: Irish, South African, Indian and West Indian, Australian etc. (two of my favorite poets, John Kinsella and Less Murray, are from down under).
    I’m even uncomfortable (since I live and work in a polyglot setting) with classifying poets or their poems by language. To pit French poets against German poets seems hardly useful when we finally arrive at the poem itself. My Portuguese colleagues, some of whom I’ve translated, are essentially doing the same thing that I do when I write a poem. The fact that they are writing in Portuguese doesn’t matter in the end. Of course different situations produce different poems, but this is a question of topicality and character and follows no scientifically consistent pattern. When I have to use categories I prefer them to be as large as possible and related to historical conditions, which effect poets in an aleatory fashion. I recently argued that postwar Central European poetry was stronger than that produced in Western Europe over the same period, but these are supranational categories and have more to do with how two different political systems effected creativity in a variable and highly unorganized fashion. Just as women, over the last three centuries, have had more hurdles to overcome than men when it came to legitimizing their status as artists and poets, Central Europeans had far more difficulties creating poetry and publishing freely in the postwar period. Perhaps a degree of resistance helps in the creation of art. Be it as it may, it is the art that we must finally look at, independent of even the most sweeping categories.
    (cf. http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemag...ntais-earl.pdf )
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  2. #2
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    This is not to say that poets should not use (if such were possible) their special experience, experience that can derive from many things: location, language, race, gender, poverty, wealth, temperament, what they read and what they don’t read, or whatever. But for the reader or the critic to use these experiences taxonomically corrupts our capacity to evaluate poetry at the level of the poem.
    By looking at poetry qua poetry we are more apt to read more sensitively, praise more accurately and winnow more decisively. But just in case you’ve missed my point, I think we’d all be the better for paying serious attention to the poems now being made by poets who happen to be women, and trying to figure out why they’re so good.
    COMMENTS (111)
    1.B
    On May 19, 2009 at 10:20 am Michael J. wrote:
    I find that the moment one says “there are exceptions”, the act of generalization becomes a fallacy. It is impossible to generalize unless you are willing to deal in stereotypes and false structures.
    I grew up in a family of women, a house of women. And when I say this, I don’t mean we were outnumbered by a small margin… I mean we equaled 3 or 4 other men in the range of 50 women. If that. And if I were to remove those other men, I was usually alone with upwards of 15 women at a time.
    But I agree female creatives are way more fascinating to me than my male counterparts. I recently bought Sandra Beasley’s “Theories of Falling” and Olena K. Davis’ first book “And her soul out of nothing”. They should arrive this week. But they aren’t the only ones tickling my poetics.
    Anyway… I really don’t think it comes down to simply male and female, though we have our differences… but those differences, I am realizing, are less inherent.
    You could view me as the exception, meaning, I am very in touch with my feminine side — what does that mean? Nearly all the personality qualities you may associate with the feminine, you could see in me. Same with the masculine. Which then tend to cancel each other out and simply allow one to be themselves, without the need to tag certain qualities with “masculine” or “feminine”.
    And if I am then viewed as an exception, I am not special enough to believe I am *the* exception. This means there is another, and if this is two, there is likely three, and so on and so on… which then possibly leads us back to the phrase: there are exceptions, but I will deal in generalizations…
    It is possible then that when people say this, they are saying (obviously, I guess) generalizations outweigh the exceptions… of course, this is impossible to account for. As generalizations exist in this outer realm of opinions and wants and other things…
    You did mention personal experience coloring ones self and in turn ones work… which I agree with…
    And I haven’t attempted to answer your original question — why are women creatives so enticing (read: popular?) these days when put parallel with the male creatives…
    Maybe it is the swing of times that we, males that is, are truly and finally noticing such things? Maybe there are more women on the position to give notice to other women who may go unnoticed? (this I want to doubt, because I’d hope art is the only space where such prejudices and sexism do not exist… but this is only a wish, as I have seen mass amounts of ego and childish antics involved in poetry when I used to perform with a poetry group).
    I feel I am contradicting myself here.
    It is very likely we are all exceptions…
    I dunno…
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:14 pm Zachary Bos wrote:
    The will to debunk this post point-by-point has been leached right out of me by the solar intensity of the poor reasoning on display. Among the topics misunderstood are ontology, gender, Heidegger, instinct, creativity, and logic. Pious affirmations of generally agreeable statements do not give shoddy thinking a pass. To self: is my hyper-critical response a masculine trope?
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm Joseph Hutchison wrote:
    Michael J.—I take exception to your statement about generalities and exceptions. We can all agree that there are mammals, and that mammals are distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of their young, and by giving birth to live young. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater are exceptions: mammals that lay eggs, i.e., monotremes. The problem is not with the generalities; the problem is that our systems are not completely congruent with the world.
    This is part of Martin’s point, I think: in a world where gender equality is assumed, we still find women writing stronger poems. By “we,” of course, I mean Martin and me; I share his feeling but know as well as he does that it’s highly personal and subjective.
    Nevertheless, I think what Martin says is true about the superiority of women poets, especially in certain “camps.” I’ve especially felt this when criticizing so-called Language poets for their many weaknesses. I always have to insert the caveat that I admire several poets in that camp, and that for some reason they are all women. (Not that I admire all female Language poets!) I too wonder why this should be so. But I’m a poet and a reader, not a critic and certainly not a theorist. So I’ll have to wait for someone with talents in that direction to suggest an answer….
    On May 19, 2009 at 1:27 pm Daniel E. Pritchard wrote:
    I’m interested to know who the women are to which you refer. (Also, I think it’s accepted generally that anyone over 40 isn’t young anymore, by any standard except comparison.) Also, though my memory may not serve me, I recall that in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the most popular and well-respected authors, essayists, and poets were women, though few have persisted — how would this be a substantially different phenomenon?
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm thomas brady wrote:
    Who is this mysterious gunslinger leaning quietly against the wall?
    Be still, my heart!
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:51 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
    I think this measuring the contemporary quality of one’s writing based on gender, contains elements of both truth and fantasy, but is ultimately a defective and redundant position to put forward.
    Consider the following statement, which is the exact same as Jason makes, but with the genders reversed:
    “Men make better bloggers than do their female counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the men are clearly superior.”
    The comedian in me calls to mind a (good looking and cunning) pal i knew when i was in my mid twenties, who donned a right-on cloak of ultra PC Femminism when in his university years.
    any (often totally innocuous) comment which he construed as sexist and/or insulting to women, even when the (inevitably) student-men making what he considered to be such, did so in innocence and even if though most others would not see the anti-woman slant — my pal would stand up for the sisterhood and generally sing to the skies of his battle for the gals.
    But in reality, it was all an act he engaged in purely to ingratiate himself with the women, in order to pursue a thoroughly male agenda of bedding as many women as he could. And it worked. he got a name as the metro-sexual all caring fella, amongst early twenties women and when this three year period of his life finished, went back to being the sexists git i always knew.
    My own background is, i was reared with four sisters, three older, one younger and myself and my father, the only men.
    Currently i have seven neices and three nephews, all seven necies arriving on the scene before the nephews. Growing up, i was effectively a token girl in the sense of having no brothers.
    ~
    I think the Amergin text i have been banging on about, which explains what Poetry is, the fundamental of it, that 50% of all humanity will be born with the poetic gift, can be appropriated to this debate.
    Rather than reversing it and elevating Woman to the position Man previously held in the delsion that He was God, my learning has brought me to making Jason’s statement this:
    “wo/men make better bloggers, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the wo/men are clearly superior.”
    This is true 50/50 gender neutrality.
    Our mind is neither male or female, but a s/he and once we transcend gender, come to understand it in these plain terms. The bnest writing is gender neutral, a third person eye speaking for all pronouns.
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 06-20-2015 at 12:15 PM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    ["She thinks the monkey's bad luck..."]
    BY PHILIP JENKS
    I.

    She thinks the monkey's bad luck because
    of all the Institutions it's seen.
    A curious curious George hooked to my hoodie,
    with arguably racialized, inappropriate lips
    curling out to smile and greet the staff
    as I ask for the nth time why no release
    or where is Albeheary? By now,
    anything may well prove to be true,
    which, of course, is insane.

    II.

    Sometimes I lose it. If I can't wear it,
    When I'm on the outside, the backpack
    Or higgly pocket. Little higgly pigglies
    Tearing at the tongue. Speak to me.
    Who, art? Thinning. More vodka.
    This time Lakeshore third floor,
    My DTs I can't dial. The kindest black
    Trans/guy who did my dialing for me.
    Others tore their hair out or hanged themselves.

    My roomie he collapsed his lung
    Eleven times. This is his last trip to the place.
    Eventual. Even. They moved me I got the same roommate
    Last New Year's as the one before.
    The shakes are permanent.
    The stain all the more so, like nothing.
    Inside, a perpetual processing. This is prisoning.
    Ever emotion's measured. "wrong" (with you)
    This isn't as or like anything. Outside, I just want back in.


    III.
    At one point, there was something to it.
    As when he found a hernia on me in the tub
    And suddenly, "operation." Herr Doctor.
    Then hospital at five years old and a Curious
    Curious George story. How he went too.
    Or windup Campbell's Soup.
    Of course he slept there, for solace. For comfort.
    Night rounds. Book learnt animal instinct.
    Aping compassion. Inappropriate lips. The old testament wronged.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    This is modern poetry that has a feel, has a meaning. Its very descriptive and shows lots of pain, emotion, thought and imagination.
    Vast majority of modern poetry I have no care for but when its good I simply love it..-Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-05-2015 at 09:10 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Poet in the Crack of Liberty: My Life with Christopher, 1988
    BY CA CONRAD
    CA Conrad
    If you steal my idea I swear to God, well, I’ll be mad at you. It’s a moneymaking machine this idea, and
    I came up with it when I dated an actor named Christopher. He was very New England-handsome and therefore able to find work dressed as a hot revolutionary war soldier for tourists at Independence Hall. I loved seeing him in his uniform, my sexy Philadelphia hero in his tri-cornered hat, knickers, and of course his gun I loved his gun. He would be cleaning it in the park and I would watch from behind a tree hoping to keep my gun-cleaning voyeurism a secret, but he always caught me. “There’s something wrong with you” he said. “Yes and I LOVE IT” I said.
    He liked that I always wanted to see the Liberty Bell. He liked it because he never met anyone who loves it as much as I do. It’s one of my favorite things on Earth and I think he secretly wanted to like something, anything, as much as I do the Liberty Bell. He squeezed my shoulder lovingly in his vicarious bell love. I asked, “can you draw the bell’s crack in the air?” “Yeah, sure” he said. “Okay then, do it.” “There” he said, “like that.” “Not even close” I said, “if you mean to actually know how such a consequential crack exists in the world you need to give it the dignity of seriously studying its character as only the character of such a crack can possess.” “I don’t know why I put up with you,” he said. “We’re talking about the crack of Liberty Christopher stay focused please you have the attention span of a goldfish sometimes.”
    Practicing the crack in the air that day is when the million-dollar idea came to me. The crack, it’s the crack of the bell that matters. If you draw the Liberty Bell’s crack on paper without the bell it’s a waterway map, a chocolate stream with chocolate frogs and salamanders. “I KNOW WHAT TO DO” I said, “I’ll create chocolate treats in the shape of the crack, sell them on a stick, a chocolate crack on a stick! I’ll sell them outside the Liberty Bell on a table and call out CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACK ON A STICK, GET YOUR CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACK ON A STICK, like the poet Gil Ott when he first moved to Philadelphia taking his magazine PAPER AIR out to the corner yelling PAPER AIR PAPER AIR GET YOURS NOW. And then one day a wealthy candy factory owner will be in town with his children and they’ll love my chocolate cracks and he’ll take me on board. And then we’ll have different kinds of chocolate cracks, ones with crushed nuts sprinkled on the crack, or peanut butter injected cracks, cinnamon dusted cracks, delicious DELICIOUS CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACKS! It will make millions,” I said excitedly! “Well what do you think of my new idea?” He shrugged and said “I like how crazy your ideas are, but it’s not a good one this one.” “I don’t know why I put up with you,” I said.
    Philadelphia is where you move to when you love the Liberty Bell. It’s the reason I’m here and only the National Park security guards have seen it more than I have. You would think after years of seeing me standing at the velvet ropes to gaze at the bell’s crack that we would be on familiar terms but the guards always act like I’m Al-Qaeda. “He’s on his way in again,” they say into their radios as though I can’t hear them. The bell needs more than Taser guns, rubber bullets and paranoia to protect it; it needs liberty in the best sense of the definition. Liberty is a serious word, born from too many examples of tyranny, “The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” If we U. S. Americans are going to actually enjoy the freedom we boast to the world about having, then we should be giving the bell a place of openness.
    I’ve most definitely seen the bell more times than anyone alive who is not being paid to be there everyday, and there is a performance idea I’m getting down onto paper, one where I fill the crack of the bell with rich dark chocolate, then eat it out from the bottom up, give it a good tongue licking to get every delicious bit of chocolate. Then I would walk around to the tourists and hand out leaflets on safe sex. This could be a terrific project. Or maybe the other project would be about what happens when I submit the paperwork for the proposal, the project about the project. The project about the official National Park Headquarters reacting to the proposed project I already know they won’t let me do. Write the president, that’s what I’ll do, I mean if it’s okay to drop bombs on unsuspecting families in Afghanistan and Pakistan, what in the hell could be the problem with allowing me to eat out the Liberty Bell of its chocolate filled crack? To be “free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” It’s important that I’m ready to answer the National Park Headquarters when they ask if my project is a way of life, a behavior, or a political view. I’m not sure which it is, but I’ll be ready for them!
    When I stand in front of the bell I have so many ideas. It’s like a magic idea factory. For instance one day I was standing near tourists with their tiny American flags posing for pictures with the bell when I thought, HEY I want to work in a laboratory doing research on high-powered soul-matter transference lampshades. Not lampshades that cure cancer or AIDS but lampshades that extract some of the creative powers from artists to perforate the armor of those believing themselves undeserving of the Muse’s unction. The light through the lampshade that can sell everyone to themselves, light where we finally get it, we get it that it’s of magnificent importance to be creative each day with something we want to do. Cancer and AIDS are going to sever us from this world no matter what, it’s the way we spend these remaining days, it’s the only thing I want to matter to us. When I look at the Liberty Bell this is one of the things I like to think about, lampshade laboratories of the future of wild unleashing.
    Christopher HATED that he was a faggot. I understand that, I mean why on Earth would anyone choose to be queer, it’s very hard. With most families in the world it’s very hard. With most governments it’s very hard. With all monotheistic religions it’s a terrible sin. You deserve whatever you get if you choose to be gay, you’re just asking for trouble. But as far as I know no one chooses it. It’s something to learn to enjoy in our own way and feel beautiful and loved whenever and however we can. I love being loved, don’t you? Of course you do, and we all want to thrive in that love and we should do so whenever possible! When we were together I was the only one with the patience for Christopher’s hard shell and it’s because I got it, that disappointment in yourself that the family who loved you flipped the switch off when you told them you’re a faggot, and it was never going to switch back on again. There are a few faggots and dykes who are lucky enough to have understanding families, but for the rest of us we tenderly fill those dark spaces in one another the best we can.
    I decided to make his brooding cold sadness sexy, as much as for me as for him, and it was a dark and lovely task I made for myself. After sex he was always perkier and jovial, and that satisfied me very much knowing I was doing something good for the world. He was always going to New York to try out for plays, and once for a musical. He never got called back, and I knew he was secretly upset that he might be a failure at the only thing he really wanted to do. One day I brought us lunch while he was cleaning his gun and he didn’t look up, his brow furrowed with anger. “Hey hot stuff” I said, “what’s the matter?” “What’s the matter is you pissed off the Benjamin Franklin impersonator again, why can’t you leave that guy alone!” “Look,” I said, “all I did was point out that he was getting Franklin wrong.” Christopher looked up, “yeah well he’s a mean old bastard and he’s giving me shit because he sees us hanging out together and now refers to you as my girlfriend.” “I don’t care what he calls me” I said, “he has no fucking clue how to play the role of Benjamin Franklin, I mean just because he looks like him and dresses like him doesn’t mean he GETS Franklin!” “But nobody cares” he said, “people come from Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Ares, and they want their picture taken with him, that’s it, that’s all they want and he doesn’t need to do anything else.” “Well,” I said, “all I told him was that Franklin wasn’t a goofy buffoon the way he portrays him, Franklin was a GENIUS, and a Lady’s man, he liked beer, he LOVED LIFE, c’mon, he invented the swim flippers as a teenager, he invented the glass harmonica which is the most extraordinary sounding musical instrument ever invented, AND he charmed the French and that’s not easy to do no matter what century you’re talking about!” “Would you please leave the old man alone, when he gets on your bad side he makes your life fucking miserable and I don’t like being in his gun sites frankly.” “Well I think it’s a disgrace,” I said, “to take the only decent founding father we have and turn him into a bumbling goofball, but I’ll stop it, for you I’ll stop it, I’m sorry.” “Thank you, please leave him alone, he hates you.” “Well the real Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t hate me, he would like me very much, and you, he would like us both, and give us some beer and ask us to get naked for a proper ménage a trois the way they taught him in Paris.” Finally Christopher smiled, “I’m not sure why,” he said, “but I do love you.” “Well you better,” I said, “I’m your boyfriend, I’m the man you’re supposed to love and you know what I think is that our odious Benjamin Franklin fake wants to fuck you.” “STOP IT, no he does not!” “Oh yeah, yeah he does.” “Do you think I should fuck him?” “I think you should fuck him, OH YES, his asshole needs to be loosened up Christopher my man, that opening is as small as a sesame seed.”
    Most bells are in buildings, you go to the buildings to see the famous church or playhouse and the bell there is the bell that is there, nothing more, and no one cares about the bell. The Liberty Bell is one of the only bells with a building no one goes to see. Who goes to see the Liberty Bell’s building? It was built to house the bell, nothing more and we don’t care about the building we don’t even remember it. It’s the bell, it’s all about the Liberty Bell and you know as well as I do that when you go to see it you’re going through security, having your bag checked, being frisked, waiting in line, and walking the long corridor of short films and giant placards filled with historical trivia because it’s for the crack. You’re there for the finale at the end of the frisking, and that finale is called the crack. No one ever goes to the Liberty Bell to avoid seeing the crack. Millions of people come to Philadelphia each year to see the bell and I bet you not one of them ever averted their eyes from its delicious crack! Not one of them I tell you! Who would do that? Why would you look away from it, you WANT to see it, you know you do, c’mon now! It’s a beautiful crack, look at it with me a second, okay a few minutes more. See in there, it’s a portal into another dimension if we stare long enough. If we were allowed to get closer, touch it, we might just discover it’s an oracle, a sleeping oracle that’s been waiting for us to waken its divinatory powers.
    Early one morning after park rangers finished a tour of the bell twenty-six-year-old Mitchell Guilliatt jumped over the velvet ropes and hit it five times with a hammer. Ringing out to the four directions and with one more for the spirit head. JUST BEAUTIFUL I remember thinking that day, wishing I had been there to witness this prophetic act of ringing out liberty. Tourists being interviewed said they were stunned, “I WAS STUNNED I WAS SO STUNNED OH MY GOD” they said. “SHUT UP” I thought, “you are going to remember Mitchell Guilliatt for the rest of your lives, and you HEARD the ringing, you got to HEAR it and you have Mitchell to thank!” He was tackled by security as he yelled out, “I didn’t do anything violent!” I believe this former high school football captain, I really do. I was the only one in Philadelphia who believed him and I was defending him everywhere I went. I was on the verge of making tee shirts with his picture and the words “MITCHELL GUILLIATT WOKE THE ORACLE,” but when I realized I would be the only one to ever wear the shirt I scrapped the whole idea. It’s lonely being the only person in the world on one side of an argument, but I didn’t mind. I held my own at Dirty Frank’s Bar and wherever I met those calling out for justice to have poor Mitchell locked away forever. My good friend Frank Sherlock didn’t agree with me, but I think he liked that I was willing to champion the drifter from Nebraska with a mighty hammer. The federal magistrate charged Mitchell with “causing damage to an archaeological resource.” Resource is a word derived from Old French, meaning, “rise again, recover.” Awaken the oracle, AWAKEN THE ORACLE! For weeks we peered through the glass to see if we could see his hammer marks. We never were sure I mean it’s a broken old bell.
    Christopher called very excited and told me to meet him by the Commodore Barry statue behind Independence Hall........
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-26-2015 at 09:13 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Renascence”
    A Modern poet’s message and her mediums

    BY HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL

    A person stands and looks at mountains, turns to look at a bay, lies down and screams,
    and gets up. This is nearly all that “happens” in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s "Renascence,”
    the poem that made her famous at just 20 years of age. But, over 20 stanzas, many more and much
    stranger events transpire. The person is wrapped in “Infinity” and enters a state of clairvoyance,
    seeing people in distant countries and taking on their pain, experiencing the world unbounded
    when “The Universe, cleft to the core, / Lay open to my probing sense,” and the outcome isn’t
    pleasant but vampiric: “But needs must suck / At the great wound, and could not pluck
    / My lips away till I had drawn / All venom out.” This kind of experience, in which the boundary
    between self and world seems to have dissolved, will be the focus of Millay’s poem. It’s at once
    incredibly painful—as these first stanzas attest—and potentially transformative. We might call
    it something like immediacy, the sense that nothing stands between you and the events or objects
    of the world. “Renascence” will go on to explore just how possible such immediacy is and how
    poetry can intervene to create a necessary perspective between persons and their experiences.

    The person haunts the world and is haunted by it and then finds relief by encountering God. In
    anguish, the person sinks into the ground in a kind of death trance. Somehow, this death is
    both metaphoric and literal: listening to the rain (not so dead?), they longingly note,
    “For rain it hath a friendly sound / To one who’s six feet underground” (decidedly dead).
    The person begins to imagine the world going on without them, and they pray to join it again.
    Then, in a sudden thunderstorm, the wish is granted: “And the big rain in one black
    wave / Fell from the sky and struck my grave.” The speaker springs up and thanks God, promising
    to see God’s presence behind everything: “no dark disguise / Can e’er hereafter
    hide from me / Thy radiant identity!” This is the “Renascence,” the renewal, or resurrection,
    of the poem’s title.
    Over roughly six sections, Millay provides a grid for ecstatic experience—that sense of
    immediacy previously discussed. The person is first enmeshed in horizontal logic, bounded by
    the earthly panorama, and then caught up in vertical drama; both floating above and dwelling
    below states of consciousness prove painful. They return to the starting place armed with the
    insight that knowledge for knowing’s sake isn’t sustainable: “For my omniscience paid I toll
    / In infinite remorse of soul.” Witnessing God finally grants the kind of immediate experience
    this person craves: “God, I can push the grass apart / And lay my finger on Thy heart!” It seems

    that God can unite person and world in a kind of healing whole. However, the poem ends curiously,
    with an admonition:

    The world stands out on either side
    No wider than the heart is wide;
    Above the world is stretched the sky,—
    No higher than the soul is high.
    The heart can push the sea and land
    Farther away on either hand;
    The soul can split the sky in two,
    And let the face of God shine through.
    But East and West will pinch the heart
    That can not keep them pushed apart;
    And he whose soul is flat—the sky
    Will cave in on him by and by.

    Millay’s final stanza muses explicitly on mediation by brooding over boundaries. Mediation is
    a notoriously tricky concept to define. It is important to bear in mind that mediation operates
    in part as a process in which boundaries break down and are rearranged. Though “Renascence” seeks
    out oneness, immediacy, or wholeness, it also ends with a stanza about the importance of
    maintaining distance between “East and West”—as well as one’s soul and the conditions that formed
    it. Why?
    In her poem, Millay explores the limits of individual perception while gesturing toward poetry’s
    ability to permeate the consciousness of others, to infiltrate, possess, or alter how any one
    person perceives the world, even if only momentarily. Even the poem’s ordinary opening forces
    readers to identify with the speaker: “All I could see from where I stood” becomes all readers
    can see from where they stand—literally inside another’s point of view. Readers’ familiarity
    with the poem’s thudding tetrameters also helps seal them into the poem’s world; Millay’s
    biographer Nancy Milford likens the poem to a child’s counting-out rhyme, and it seems true
    that the poem’s prosody lulls readers into accepting its premises. Poetry’s ability to occupy
    other perceptions dissolves the speaker’s sense of identity; it also intrudes on its readers’.
    When we read “Renascence” we become its “I,” which is poetry’s oldest trick. Millay wants to
    draw attention to that process, in which poetry creates or collapses distances between speakers,
    readers, and experiences. Poetry, Millay suggests, is a powerful mediator between persons and
    worlds.

    By the fourth stanza, Millay’s speaker confronts a quasi-Dickinsonian moment of lyric immensity
    or “Infinity”, “pressing of the Undefined / The definition on my mind.” The movement is forced,
    uncomfortable, and ultimately fatal, as “Infinity”

    Held up before my eyes a glass
    Through which my shrinking sight did pass
    Until it seemed I must behold
    Immensity made manifold

    Through this “glass” the world is “unmuffled,” horrifyingly so; friendly spheres “gossip”
    unkindly, tented skies “creak” precariously, and Eternity “ticks” like a bomb. The terror of
    “Renascence’s” middle stanzas suggests that this kind of over identification with the world is
    both impossible and not to be pursued at all. It isn’t just hurtful but also arrogant:
    “All suffering mine, and mine its rod; / Mine, pity like the pity of God.” Millay’s haunted
    and haunting stanzas conjure the scary promises that poetry might offer access to, or come from,
    other worlds. But accessing such worlds comes with the price of internment, entombment, and
    death. Once in the grave, and without anything to sense, see, or hear, Millay’s speaker falls
    into imagination, conjuring the world “multi-colored, multiform.” From those extremes of
    indirect and direct experience, a truce is arranged. God enters as the moderator, keeping
    boundaries at bay and souls together.

    God might be one word for this intermediate agent, poetry another. After all, that final stanza
    seems as much a scene of writing as theological landscaping: the repeated allusion to hands—both
    in “on either hand” and in sensory verbs such as push and pinch—suggests that the act of writing
    may be the activity on the forefront of Millay’s mind. That desire—to touch the source of beauty,
    truth, nature, and the infinite—lurks behind many of Millay’s lyrics, and it’s the motor powering
    the poem that rocketed her to renown; it’s also the reason “Renascence” could seem in the end to
    be a religious poem. If religion offers the hope that God, as a healing agent, might do away with
    the sense of distance from our own experiences, making us feel whole by offering us the right kind
    of element through which to feel, Millay’s poem suggests that poetry can do something similar.
    This isn’t so much un-mediated experience—the uncomfortable immediacy of the first sections—but
    properly mediated experience. Poetry might help us find the right kinds of distance or illuminate
    how boundaries between our selves and our worlds might not be so bad after all.

    It seems fitting, then, that “Renascence,” a poem about immediacy and mediation, has its own
    fascinating, and fascinatingly apt, media history. The communication theorist Marshall McLuhan
    made famous the idea that “the medium is the message”—the notion that the content of a message,
    or its meaning, is bound up with how it is expressed. This seems to be the case with the poem
    that made Millay famous. The poem’s history offers a window onto the ways the mediums of print and
    performance affect people differently. “Renascence” was first published in 1912 because of a new
    type of poetry prize: Millay sent the poem and a few others to New York publisher Mitchell
    Kennerley’s anthology The Lyric Year, which advertised $1,000 in cash prizes to the three best
    poems of the year and publication to 100 others. Critics responded warmly to the idea of the
    anthology, though not to the prize results. “Renascence” failed to earn anything but an honorable
    mention. In an outcry difficult to imagine happening now, major poetry critics responded to Millay
    ’s slighting in print. In a New York Times review, a founder and officer of the Poetry Society of
    America named Jessie Rittenhouse devoted a whole paragraph to Millay’s poem, arguing for its
    “freshness of first view.” Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Louis Untermeyer also weighed
    in, making Millay one of the most talked-about young poets of her day. > ........................
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
    “I Did Not Advance, I Cannot Retreat”
    BY DANIELLE CHAPMAN

    The Niche Narrows, by Samuel Menashe.

    New York City tends to obsess the poets who live there. Whitman and Crane used the epic city as a metaphor for the epic self-as-New-Yorker; Moore conscientiously collected and arranged its oddities; O’Hara manically maneuvered through its people and experiences. Surely these poets who made it in New York could, as the saying goes, have made it anywhere, and it’s no wonder that the city’s personality bursts through their voices without upstaging them. But contemporary New York poets, rather than inhabiting the city, often seem to have been inhabited by it—even contaminated. Attitudinal, world-weary, neurotic, each is another version of the same caricature of “self-expression.” That’s why it’s such a delight to come across Samuel Menashe, a lifelong New Yorker whose poems exist at a sonorous remove from the frenzy of life downtown. His small poems—most are less than ten lines long—speak to the archetypal condition of the poet or “scribe,” as Menashe calls him, with a quietude and depth virtually unknown in contemporary poetry.

    Menashe’s earnest assumption of the title “poet” has made him something of an anachronism in our professional age. While his contemporaries have garnered the fellowships, prizes, and university jobs that represent success in American poetic culture, poetry has been for him an independent, and ultimately isolating, venture. At almost eighty years old, and with only a fraction of his work in print, he is practically unrecognized, except as a sort of eccentric cult figure, the last West Village bohemian. The poetry, however, rises above this kitschy reputation. Menashe’s tiny lyrics are keenly aware of their author’s obscurity; it suspends them in a timeless sort of space, ballasting them between opposing questions of the same dilemma: is there any point in writing a poem? and is there a point in anything but writing a poem? Consider “At a Standstill”:

    That statue, that cast
    Of my solitude
    Has found its niche
    In this kitchen
    Where I do not eat
    Where the bathtub stands
    Upon cat feet—
    I did not advance
    I cannot retreat


    What’s most impressive here is the way in which, in so few lines, Menashe manages to encompass an entire life in poetry. In the first line, the poet’s ambition for immortality is evoked, only to be relegated to the humble surroundings of the prototypical bohemian flat—with its kitchen too small for a table, but just big enough for a bathtub. It is an image that is absurd and yet, with the last line, uncompromising and, one feels, true.

    Menashe’s portrayal of his self-as-poet is vulnerable, though never sentimental or narcissistic. A poem like “Morning” speaks movingly to the intimate sorrows of the artist:

    I wake and the sky
    Is there, intact
    The paper is white
    The ink is black
    My charmed life
    Harms no one—
    No wife, no son


    This leanness is typical of the poems in The Niche Narrows. Menashe returns to the same subjects and words time and again, inhabiting particulars in order to expand their significance. A “charmed life,” here a solitary life, harms no one—the kind of slightly enigmatic statement that many poets are content to pass off as interesting in itself—but Menashe presses the point, defining “no one,” as “No wife, no son.” What’s so poignant about this last line is that, in qualifying the line before it, it both narrows and expands the meaning; at once, we are moved to sympathy for the singular speaker and brought to an understanding about the nature of the poet, the costs of such a life. Craft prevents the meditation from becoming hokey or overly self-conscious: the linked vowel sounds and slant rhymes of “wake” and “paper,” “intact” and “black,” as well as the mixed images of the sky and the writing tablet, set up a composition that is slightly askew. In the last three lines, the rhymes get closer: “charmed” and “harms,” then “one” and “son.” As the sounds come together, so does the picture of this poet, whose reason for being is the same as his reason for being lonely.

    In most of Menashe’s poems, there is a deeply grounded sense of humor about the self. Often it returns us to the bodily condition with a sort of droll pathos in which the poet sums up the experience of living and dying in a few matter-of-fact phrases, as in “The Visitation”:

    His body ahead
    Of him on the bed
    He faces his feet
    Sees himself dead,
    A corpse complete


    This is an example of Menashe’s “niche,” the tiny poem which intends to encompass the scope of mortal existence; its narrowing is the approach of death, which brings life into stark focus. In the title poem, the mortal predicament is summed up in eleven words:

    The niche narrows
    Hones one thin
    Until his bones
    Disclose him


    Here, “Hones” and “disclose” describe the body of the poem as well as the body of flesh. The niche is narrowed—visually and sonically—through a series of shortening lines and half-rhymes that hone the general “one” into the particular “him.” It’s a morbid little metaphor of emaciation: the end of the poem is the end of the man.

    In his introduction to this volume, Dana Gioia states that “Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed.” Given the fact that Menashe has written poems with such obviously Judeo-Christian titles as “Adam Means Earth,” “Manna,” and “Promised Land”—as well as one that refers, with unchecked intimacy, to Noah’s nipples—this is a reasonable conclusion. With one or two exceptions, though, the overtly religious poems are the most problematic in The Niche Narrows. Those that use too many Biblical references compress meaning and syntax so tightly that they often must be decoded rather than read. Others assume the mannerisms of New Age mysticism, becoming simultaneously emphatic and, well, loopy, as if in creating access for his belief the poet has had to force out all nuances of pathos and wit, those rewards of his best writing.

    Nevertheless, Menashe is to be commended for taking the risk of writing poems of outright praise and wonder. He is often capable of achieving an effect that is airy and subtle, as in the aptly titled “Sprite of Delight,” which “Springs, summersaults / Vaults out of sight / Rising self-spun / Weight overcome.” Here, as in other poems-about-poetry such as “Spur of the Moment” and “Walking Stick,” creative power is evoked with both joy and a grounded intelligence. When Menashe’s poems of praise succeed, we are just as rapt in wonder at the way inspiration works through the poet’s mind as he is, as in “Dreams,” where he asks, “What wires lay bare / For this short circuit / Which makes filaments flare—.”

    While even Menashe’s most difficult poems have a gentle familiarity to them, they are rarely personal. One of the primary satisfactions of this volume is that no time is wasted getting to know and accept the tastes and preoccupations of the poet; he doesn’t dredge through memories or parade us through his bedroom, and, except as the archetypal mother, father, or friend, he rarely makes mention of specific people or places. His vocabulary is plain—without personality, one might contend. The common nouns are stone, tree, eyes, nose, darkness, light. Common abstractions are Paradise, Solitude, Time, Immortality. In this way, he reminds us of Dickinson, exploiting the duality of simple words and stacking syntax in order to render complex meanings. Yet in Menashe the poems don’t seem as if they are built as scaffolding around existential anguish as they often do in Dickinson. As much as he is a wordsmith and an artist, Menashe is a good son, prone to natural fondness and grief. In “Grief,” he writes:

    Disbelief
    To begin with—
    Later, grief
    Taking root
    Grapples me
    Wherever I am
    Branches ram
    Me in my bed
    You are dead


    While it’s not stated, the context of the surrounding poems leads us to believe that this poem is dedicated to one of the poet’s parents, those essential yet unspecific characters who appear throughout the book. We find their influence in a self that has felt itself loved both by the father and the Father, and has created, through poetry, a vigil in order to receive those presences again.

    By avoiding explicit autobiographical anecdote and compressing his poems to the point where each word reveals the limits of its meaning, Menashe takes risks that are unfashionable in contemporary terms. But to call him a “difficult” poet would be a misnomer, for there are few poems in The Niche Narrows that require a dictionary or supplemental reading; in fact, the immediate reaction upon reaching the end of a Menashe poem is usually amusement. Afterwards, one basks in the understanding of how simple genuine profundity is. But the “I” in Menashe’s poems, that scribe who is following his true calling, does present a difficult dilemma to contemporary poets—of the kind that requires soul-searching rather than scholarship.

    The idea that the existence of a poet is a prerequisite to a poem, and that this implies some confluence of talent, circumstance, and character, is unsettling to us. We have bought into a poetic culture that imitates popular American culture at large—with its cults of personality, its shameless self-marketing, its ethos of maximum productivity, and its surface frenzy—to such a degree that a voice untouched by these factors seems at times naïve, even absurd. That Menashe, who is on the margins of the poetry world, has written good poems about being a poet while so many insiders have become talking heads for the industry begs the question: can “successful” poets speak truthfully to their own condition? If not, po-biz success and poetic integrity may soon become mutually exclusive. Under these circumstances, the pause that Menashe gives is exactly what we need.
    Originally Published: October 30, 2005
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot View Post
    1.B
    On May 19, 2009 at 10:20 am Michael J. wrote:
    I find that the moment one says “there are exceptions”, the act of generalization becomes a fallacy. It is impossible to generalize unless you are willing to deal in stereotypes and false structures.
    I grew up in a family of women, a house of women. And when I say this, I don’t mean we were outnumbered by a small margin… I mean we equaled 3 or 4 other men in the range of 50 women. If that. And if I were to remove those other men, I was usually alone with upwards of 15 women at a time.
    But I agree female creatives are way more fascinating to me than my male counterparts. I recently bought Sandra Beasley’s “Theories of Falling” and Olena K. Davis’ first book “And her soul out of nothing”. They should arrive this week. But they aren’t the only ones tickling my poetics.
    Anyway… I really don’t think it comes down to simply male and female, though we have our differences… but those differences, I am realizing, are less inherent.
    You could view me as the exception, meaning, I am very in touch with my feminine side — what does that mean? Nearly all the personality qualities you may associate with the feminine, you could see in me. Same with the masculine. Which then tend to cancel each other out and simply allow one to be themselves, without the need to tag certain qualities with “masculine” or “feminine”.
    And if I am then viewed as an exception, I am not special enough to believe I am *the* exception. This means there is another, and if this is two, there is likely three, and so on and so on… which then possibly leads us back to the phrase: there are exceptions, but I will deal in generalizations…
    It is possible then that when people say this, they are saying (obviously, I guess) generalizations outweigh the exceptions… of course, this is impossible to account for. As generalizations exist in this outer realm of opinions and wants and other things…
    You did mention personal experience coloring ones self and in turn ones work… which I agree with…
    And I haven’t attempted to answer your original question — why are women creatives so enticing (read: popular?) these days when put parallel with the male creatives…
    Maybe it is the swing of times that we, males that is, are truly and finally noticing such things? Maybe there are more women on the position to give notice to other women who may go unnoticed? (this I want to doubt, because I’d hope art is the only space where such prejudices and sexism do not exist… but this is only a wish, as I have seen mass amounts of ego and childish antics involved in poetry when I used to perform with a poetry group).
    I feel I am contradicting myself here.
    It is very likely we are all exceptions…
    I dunno…
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:14 pm Zachary Bos wrote:
    The will to debunk this post point-by-point has been leached right out of me by the solar intensity of the poor reasoning on display. Among the topics misunderstood are ontology, gender, Heidegger, instinct, creativity, and logic. Pious affirmations of generally agreeable statements do not give shoddy thinking a pass. To self: is my hyper-critical response a masculine trope?
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm Joseph Hutchison wrote:
    Michael J.—I take exception to your statement about generalities and exceptions. We can all agree that there are mammals, and that mammals are distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of their young, and by giving birth to live young. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater are exceptions: mammals that lay eggs, i.e., monotremes. The problem is not with the generalities; the problem is that our systems are not completely congruent with the world.
    This is part of Martin’s point, I think: in a world where gender equality is assumed, we still find women writing stronger poems. By “we,” of course, I mean Martin and me; I share his feeling but know as well as he does that it’s highly personal and subjective.
    Nevertheless, I think what Martin says is true about the superiority of women poets, especially in certain “camps.” I’ve especially felt this when criticizing so-called Language poets for their many weaknesses. I always have to insert the caveat that I admire several poets in that camp, and that for some reason they are all women. (Not that I admire all female Language poets!) I too wonder why this should be so. But I’m a poet and a reader, not a critic and certainly not a theorist. So I’ll have to wait for someone with talents in that direction to suggest an answer….
    On May 19, 2009 at 1:27 pm Daniel E. Pritchard wrote:
    I’m interested to know who the women are to which you refer. (Also, I think it’s accepted generally that anyone over 40 isn’t young anymore, by any standard except comparison.) Also, though my memory may not serve me, I recall that in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the most popular and well-respected authors, essayists, and poets were women, though few have persisted — how would this be a substantially different phenomenon?
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm thomas brady wrote:
    Who is this mysterious gunslinger leaning quietly against the wall?
    Be still, my heart!
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:51 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
    I think this measuring the contemporary quality of one’s writing based on gender, contains elements of both truth and fantasy, but is ultimately a defective and redundant position to put forward.
    Consider the following statement, which is the exact same as Jason makes, but with the genders reversed:
    “Men make better bloggers than do their female counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the men are clearly superior.”
    The comedian in me calls to mind a (good looking and cunning) pal i knew when i was in my mid twenties, who donned a right-on cloak of ultra PC Femminism when in his university years.
    any (often totally innocuous) comment which he construed as sexist and/or insulting to women, even when the (inevitably) student-men making what he considered to be such, did so in innocence and even if though most others would not see the anti-woman slant — my pal would stand up for the sisterhood and generally sing to the skies of his battle for the gals.
    But in reality, it was all an act he engaged in purely to ingratiate himself with the women, in order to pursue a thoroughly male agenda of bedding as many women as he could. And it worked. he got a name as the metro-sexual all caring fella, amongst early twenties women and when this three year period of his life finished, went back to being the sexists git i always knew.
    My own background is, i was reared with four sisters, three older, one younger and myself and my father, the only men.
    Currently i have seven neices and three nephews, all seven necies arriving on the scene before the nephews. Growing up, i was effectively a token girl in the sense of having no brothers.
    ~
    I think the Amergin text i have been banging on about, which explains what Poetry is, the fundamental of it, that 50% of all humanity will be born with the poetic gift, can be appropriated to this debate.
    Rather than reversing it and elevating Woman to the position Man previously held in the delsion that He was God, my learning has brought me to making Jason’s statement this:
    “wo/men make better bloggers, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the wo/men are clearly superior.”
    This is true 50/50 gender neutrality.
    Our mind is neither male or female, but a s/he and once we transcend gender, come to understand it in these plain terms. The bnest writing is gender neutral, a third person eye speaking for all pronouns.

    generalizations are valuable.

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    2A

    On May 19, 2009 at 3:12 pm Colin Ward wrote:
    Martin,
    There may be another perspective to this. In the print world, among living poets we tend to see men dominating the scene: Cohen, Ondaatje, Heaney, Hill, Walcott, Collins, etc. By contrast, a poll of internet poets had all four top spots taken by women: Grinnell, Griffith, Carter, Copeland, plus Lindley (6th) and Kelleher (10th)–and this was before Kristalo arrived on the scene!
    Others will judge which media or process can serve as the better meritocracy, now or in the future.
    Best regards,
    Colin
    “If you don’t think your work is competing against the works of others you’re probably right!”
    – Elizabeth Zuk
    “Even a burning flag has to be waved, if only to put out the flames…”
    – Dale M. Houstman
    -o-
    On May 19, 2009 at 7:23 pm Pris Campbell wrote:
    I’m a female blogger/poet over 50 and I don’t feel any gender superiority at all. It’s true. Reverse the gender in this post and we women would be screaming ‘chauvinistic!’.
    On May 19, 2009 at 9:40 pm Steve wrote:
    Dear Colin Ward: who are these Internet poets described in your poll? they’re not the poets I know from the Internet. Can you post a link?
    Dear Martin: Provocative, certainly; but I wish you would name some of your favorite younger, or “younger,” poets. Do they all write about experience that has historically, or biologically (e.g. parturition) been the province of women? Some women poets write about things like parturition, which men can’t do (Elizabeth Alexander has a whole sequence); some women poets seem to be undertaking ecriture feminine (Larissa Szporluk, sometimes); some women poets write about topics traditionally considered feminine– sex, beauty, the beauty myth, raising young children, managing a household (Laura Kasischke! Laura Kasischke!); and some women poets, most of the time, don’t do any of those things (Kay Ryan, Lucia Perillo, many many others). Does your claim apply equally to all four categories? If so, why? If not, isn’t it just a claim that we seek out, and should seek out, contemporary poets whose topics and approaches are under-represented in the literature of the past? (As we should.)
    On May 19, 2009 at 10:04 pm Reb Livingston wrote:
    Well I feel all kinds of superiority and not just because of my gender, but that’s a start. Heh.
    I concur with much of what Martin Earl has written, of course he can get away with writing it and not being labeled as bitter or a ball snipper.
    What I mean is that as an editor, I too have noticed a trend in the submission pile. On *average* I find the work of contemporary female poets to be more daring, original and interesting. My magazine receives more submissions from men (about 10-15% more), but it publishes more women. Years ago when I first noticed this, I was surprised. All along I thought I preferred male poets. I owned more books by them, was definitely more familiar with their work from major literary magazines and from my education. Turns out I was incredibly ignorant.
    So when certain editors talk about the “number troubles” I don’t understand why this is even an issue. Are these editors living in a cave?
    One can chalk up my observations to my taste and bias, which I most certainly have, like every other editor and poet.
    Reb
    On May 19, 2009 at 11:21 pm michael j wrote:
    Reb, and other Editors out there,
    If you were to remove the names from submissions (unless this is done already), do you feel you’d naturally gravitate towards female writers? Very curious to know.
    ___
    All this talk of child raising and such, is, to me, a stereotype which frustrates me. Men can raise child just as women do. The pregnancy aspect is agreeable. No man (except the fictional character Arnold played in that one movie where he got pregnant) can ever experience pregnancy. The genetic/instinctual chain-link which rises from the bottoms of the stardust which binds us will eventually explode from the creative mind. It is inevitable. And this does, possibly, provide a different slant to ones work.
    Though the specific experience of being a woman can’t be recreated, meaning — shoot, you know what I mean — but the oppression can be. That type of experience can be. On many various levels, no?
    If I am reading the article correct, Martin is wondering if this is why the work is more daring. Or, rather, one of the reasons. Good question. The natural instincts instilled in us seep into our work, most definitely. Creativity is one of those deeper, ancient things.
    But I dunno, I think the better way to approach this is where you almost went but stopped, “On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.”
    Approach it from why male’s aren’t doing the daring work to figure out why females are. I think I’m gonna attempt that. Thanks Martin!
    And did anyone else find that portrait genius? How the hands are held, with the head cocked, she is purely an adult woman. But with the foot soles touching, her legs slanted like that, she is purely a young girl.
    The juxtaposition makes me keep staring at it.
    On May 19, 2009 at 11:59 pm Reb Livingston wrote:
    “If you were to remove the names from submissions (unless this is done already), do you feel you’d naturally gravitate towards female writers? Very curious to know.”
    Yep. Like I said, I began the magazine believing I preferred male poets. It wasn’t until after a year of publishing different poets each week that I “looked at the numbers” and realized my preference leaned otherwise.
    Not sure why this is such an unbelievable or questionable concept. I’m trying to be honest and open here regarding my editorial leanings as I best understand them. If certain poetry magazines dropped the malarky of “we only publish the BEST regardless of . . .” and were more open/aware of their own leanings, whether it be style, subject matter, etc., I’d have much less of an issue with them. If the editors came clean and said something like “Well, we’ve been publishing for 20 years and 75% of the poems are by white men and 65% are narrative, so we must at least have some unconscious editorial leanings in those directions.” But no, instead they blame it on women having babies or being too shy to submit or lacking a certain kind of ambition. Because as editors of course they have no control what appears on their pages!
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...aul-batchelor/


    FROM POETRY MAGAZINE

    Judge How He Fleeceth the Country
    BY PAUL BATCHELOR
    Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
    Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
    [Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Paul Batchelor’s “The Discoverer’s Man” appears in the July/August 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]

    There’s something disreputable about dramatic monologues. It’s easy to write a passable one but almost impossible to write a good one. They are never fashionable, but there’s never a shortage of them either. I’m not sure that I would mount a defence of the form even if I could. Instead, I want to talk about some of the models I had in mind when writing ‘The Discoverer’s Man’, a dramatic monologue set in the 1680s and spoken by an old man who in his youth acted as a witch-finder’s assistant.
    The exploits of my Discoverer and his Man are based loosely on those of the real-life witch-finders Matthew Hopkins (c.1620-1647) and John Stearne (c.1610-1670). I began the poem after reading Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill, which led me to the accounts provided by Hopkins and Stearne themselves (the phrase ‘Judge how he fleeceth the Country’ is taken from Hopkins’s self-justification, The Discovery of Witches). Hopkins, the self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, is the most famous witch-finder, for reasons that are not altogether clear. The speaker of my poem is an assistant to an unnamed Hopkins-like figure, but the real-life Hopkins himself started out as a Man to Stearne. My Elizabeth Bell is based on Elizabeth Clarke, Hopkins’s first victim; and my John Knowles is based on John Lowes, the vicar whose execution represented Hopkins’s most remarkable success. My description of Knowles’s execution draws on various accounts of similar deaths in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a work that Hopkins would have known well. Many of the incidental details of the witch-hunts (e.g., the names of Bell/Clarke’s familiars) were too good to be left out: that a starved and sleep-deprived old woman being tortured by her neighbours would name one of her devilish familiars ‘Newes’ (ie. gossip) is a heartbreaking detail. Similarly, when my Discoverer promises never to accuse anyone, he echoes Hopkins and Stearne, who only ever went where they were invited.
    At a certain point, I realised that researching the historical record was inhibiting me. The poem went cold and progress slowed. In the end it took five years to complete, and only when I knew I was nearly finished did I begin a second wave of research, in which I tried to check that the things I’d invented weren’t too far off the mark. In the mean time, what helped me to bring my characters back to life (to me anyway) was thinking of three less obviously relevant figures: Tony Blair, Nick Leeson, and Myra Hindley.
    Tony Blair led the Labour party to a landslide win in the 1997 U.K. general election, having stood for vaguely-defined ‘change’, which turned out to mean a continuation of neoliberal economics augmented with higher public spending. Officially, of course, it was the Labour party that won; but really it was Blair and his acolytes. Although what he led was not quite a personality cult, the Labour party has been gripped by an identity crisis ever since he stepped down as Prime Minister. The public euphoria with which his 1997 victory was greeted is easy to forget now that Blair is an almost universally loathed figure in Britain. I’d like to think that everybody hates him because he invaded Iraq in order to protect us from Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out to be no more real than the Evil Spirits the witch-finders battled. But this can’t be the whole story. Blair won a general election in May 2005 pretty comfortably, long after the truth about WMDs had been revealed. The fact is Britain was mysteriously ready to believe in Blair, and then, at a certain point, it was ready to turn on him. Similarly, Hopkins went from being welcomed as a kind of saviour figure to being demonised within the space of a generation or so. Blair has since got religion and is now a practising Catholic. I knew from quite early on that I wanted my speaker to misquote the Bible as part of his attempted self-justification.
    Nick Leeson is the derivatives broker whose actions led to Barings Bank (whose customers included the Queen) being declared insolvent on 26 February 1995. Leeson engaged in unauthorised speculative trading and hid his losses in secret accounts until they ran to over $1.4 billion. In the 90s, this seemed like a lot of money for a bank to lose. I am very attracted to the idea of Leeson as the Monster to Margaret Thatcher’s Frankenstein, as though the Thatcherite vision of liberated provincial youth came true, only to produce an agent of chaos who brought down a 233-year-old institution; but I realise that this is probably wishful thinking. Like Leeson, Hopkins came from what we’d call a lower-middle-class background. Hopkins was the third son of a clergyman in rural Suffolk, and the family’s respectability came from Matthew Hopkins’s grandfather, a yeoman farmer who restyled himself a gentleman after enclosing the common land upon which the poor depended. A stable English society would have checked the rise of such an ‘obscure’ figure, but the social, religious and political chaos of the civil war era allowed Hopkins to flourish, much as it did Oliver Cromwell, or William Dowsing, the puritan iconoclast. In the 1990s, it was the ethical and procedural chaos of market deregulation that gave Leeson his chance.
    I don’t know whether readers outside of the U.K. will have heard of Myra Hindley. She was a serial killer, who, along with Ian Brady, kidnapped, tortured and murdered five children, burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor in northern England, between July 1963 and October 1965. Brady, by his own account, was the leader, with Hindley his eager assistant. One of the strange things about the public interest in the case was the almost obsessive focus on Hindley: when I was growing up in the 80s, she seemed like a mythical figure, a bogeyman, often invoked as a symbol of the danger ‘out there’. The interest never really abated until Hindley died in prison of bronchial pneumonia in 2002. Unlike Brady, who was perceived as having been ‘born bad’, Hindley was disturbing because it was just about possible to imagine an alternative world in which she didn’t meet Brady and turned out—well, not exactly ‘normal’, but at least not homicidal. The motivations of serial killers (in real life or in fiction) are usually banal; what drives their enablers is a much more interesting question. I wanted the fanatical, inhuman Discoverer in my poem to remain a shadowy presence. His Man—the ordinary guy who fell under his spell, promulgated his myth, eased his progress, and then returned to society—would be my speaker and real subject.
    These figures interested me because they are simultaneously characters in the story England tells itself, and chancers who seized an opportunity to tell a story of their own. At a certain point, through some confluence of historical and personal circumstance, they were presented with the occasion to seize control of a bigger narrative, to identify and project some aspect of their own self-image, and to implicate others in their version of events. On a smaller scale, much the same processes—projection and identification; suspicion and discovery—are practised by the speaker and implied listener of a dramatic monologue, as well as the writer and the reader.
    Tags: dramatic monologue, Paul Batchelor, Poetry guest blogger
    Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Wednesday, July 8th, 2015 by Paul Batchelor.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Susan M. Schultz

    Most Beautiful Words:

    Linh Dinh’s Poetics of Disgust

    This article first appeared in Issue 8 (September 2004) of The Paper, U.K., edited by David Kennedy. It is is 3,400 words or about 8 printed pages long


    When I think about the Vietnam war, I remember Hamburger Hill, so called because American soldiers were ground up there in the late 1960s; the battle for Hamburger Hill was one I watched on television as a child. The American guide to Hamburger Hill was CBS newsman, Ed Bradley, best known these days for his recent interview of Michael Jackson. To think about Hamburger Hill not as a battle or as a place (which doubtless has another, Vietnamese, name), rather as the name for a battle, is to think about how language is often used in contemporary poetry to describe suffering.
    Linh Dinh by Brian Doan
    Linh Dinh, photo by Brian Doan

    A mainland Chinese poet, new to the United States and to the English language, once told a class of mine how much he had “suffered” in China. I was less astonished by his suffering than by the fact that he could say it; how many of us can say or write “I suffer” and not have our sincerity turned inside out, its fraudulence presumed? “Hamburger Hill” seems at first a playful, ironic name, referring as much to the product of McDonald’s back home as to the GI’s killed or wounded in that place. As a moment of poetry by an unknown GI, it tells us much about that war, the ways pain was inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike, and the way in which people tried to distance themselves from the war and its political implications. Its real force is this last, an irony that distances us from horror, even if the words themselves refer to it.

    But think literally about the name and it ushers up an emotion more like disgust. Men ground up like meat is an image that seeps out of the irony of the term “Hamburger Hill.” Linh Dinh, a poet who comes out of that war, even if his poems do not all address its history, takes the name and renders it as image. His work is like Emily Dickinson’s, as read by Camille Paglia. Rather than domesticate Dickinson’s work for the undergraduate audience, as I am sometimes wont to do (“she thinks about sadness and dying, just like the rest of us”), Paglia reads Dickinson’s images literally. If Dickinson writes about sticking a needle in her eye, goes Paglia’s reading, by golly she means it. There are problems with such readings, to be sure, but what Paglia gets at, and what Linh Dinh does as a poet, is to illustrate how we understand suffering through disgust, rather than through gentler manifestations of feeling, like “grief” or like “compassion” or even “anger.” Disgust, as the BBC reports (January 2004), “evolved to protect us from the risk of disease,” and arose, one scientist claims, “to protect people from rotting meat.”

    The disgust that is found in poems cannot claim to have that evolutionary value, the ability to protect us from disease. What, then, can it accomplish? As I read Linh Dinh I see manifestations of disgust in his poetry as paradoxical expressions of suffering: violence, poverty, degradation, and (in the reader) an odd empathy for those caught up in it. When the reader encounters an image that disgusts her, disgust becomes more than a child-like reaction to feces or vomit or blood, more an odd expression of empathy with one who suffers. Empathy as disgust (or is it the other way around?) may seem quite a stretch, but so is much of Dinh’s work. Better put: empathy after disgust, as empathy fills the void disgust leaves behind. If the poem forces us to confront rotting meat, then after an interval, we empathize with the character forced to eat it. The “mudman in earth cafeteria” of one poem does not feel disgust at eating “stinky food,” but the reader feels her emotions aroused by his predicament. It is not direct sympathy that I’m getting at here, the desire to put one’s arm around the mudman, but the kind of empathy that turns away from violence and toward something else. Dinh does not, perhaps, often get to that “something else,” but his poetry provides us with the example of a poetry of witness that comes as close to shattering the language-barrier as possible (disgust being that feeling before language). It’s a poetry of witness that makes the reader a witness, rather than a spectator of witness. And it is one, my friend Deborah Meadows reminds me, that does not depend on arbitrary notions of identity and aesthetics for its power.

    Dinh’s disgust is autobiographical in content, if not written in memoir form. Born in 1963, Dinh left Vietnam when he was twelve years old and spent many years in Philadelphia, a city which (despite its name, “brotherly love”) was rife with violence. Responding to Frank Sherlock’s question about the violence in his poems, Dinh responded:
    I see violence as a common misfortune and, by extension, fate. It’s what awaits each one of us just around the corner. One cannot think seriously about life without contemplating the destruction of the body. Born in Vietnam, I was baptized early into this awareness. As an adult in Philadelphia, I had many opportunities to gather my bloody evidences.
    (Philly Sound Feature, issue #2, 12/ 31/ 03).
    Dinh is capable of a nearly scientific view of violence. Poems like “Motate” (fusion of “mutate” and “rotate”; “motet” and “potentate”?) track the violent act with the specificity of super slow motion:
    General emission from all orifices.
    Blink left eye, then right eye,
    then left eye, then right eye.
    With index finger, jab at right temple.
    Then wheeze quietly as the bullet enters.
    (All Around 5)
    This is objectivist description, as most of Dinh’s poems are not. In others, Dinh combines violence and, say, food with a literalism (not to be confused with objectivity) that can turn the stomach. Charles Reznikoff’s poems are effective insofar as they present a clean surface, even as that surface moves us to see clearly injustices we cannot, by poem’s end, abide. Dinh’s poems, by way of contrast, are effective on a more visceral level; his images are always precise, like Reznikoff’s, but they are not clean; there is always interference in a Dinh poem, which contributes to its unfolding impact on the reader. Disgust breeds ambivalence, and ambivalence is an unclean emotion. Consider how this speaker regards his spoon: “After each meal, I lick my plastic spoon in a gesture of solidarity with an inanimate object. Did you know that I was once fucked with my own spoon? This very spoon. And then, later, with half a razor” (10). Clearly, the tools of hygiene and health have blood on them; to lick the spoon that raped you sounds like a cliché, but horrifies. Another poet of violence, Chris Abani, has a poem about a teenage boy tortured by the Nigerian authorities by having his penis nailed to a table until he died. That horrific image gains power by its very claim to truth; this happened, and the boy suffered horribly. Dinh’s images are not so “true”; rather, he (like the Vietnamese poets he has translated) uses surrealism as his own tool to oblige the reader to see horror. It’s as if Artaud had been raised in a war zone.

    “Earth Cafeteria” undermines every American truism from “organic food” to “ethnic cuisine” and “patriotism” as it explores violence through eating. In Vietnam, as one of Dinh’s favorite
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
    Drift and Pop: On Writing about W.S. Graham
    BY JOHN WILKINSON
    What is it to go into an abstracted state? When I find myself abstracted 
or lose myself in abstraction, my self blurs at its boundaries but nonetheless retains a capacity, an enhanced capacity to accept whatever comes across. Memories, freaks, phrases, and passing thoughts escape judgment as to whether they deserve retaining. Even if they hover and unravel trains of thought, they do not cancel or dislodge anything already contained or passing through this elastic “abstract scene.” Contradictions and other dissonance which would become jarring if sentience rose to active reaching, can coexist so long as the mind stays abstracted. What sustains such abstraction may be constitutional, environmental, or even economic. Woolgathering ... (Here I go) transhumant shepherds ... Cornish downpour ... 

    Let me pause and drift a little as in the automatism of reaching for a cigarette. In such a sentence, between intentionality and its abjuring, my “I” has been minimally embodied, even while an act deploys according to script. I hesitate (for to hesitate is entailed in some kinds of abstraction) to choose whether I situate my abstraction inside or outside, whether the “me” is dispersed within my abstraction 
or merely a point roaming it, or if I am a psychic skin surrounding it, or what fades at its extremities. Or is the uninterrupted nexus of automatic behaviors: breathing, walking, reaching, what reflection, always belated, comes to acknowledge as the self? What then abstracts? Is abstraction consciousness released from the automaton? Something outside or something within? Imagining a cigarette break, the smoker I once was tells me abstraction can be learnt — or relearnt, since so much of childhood is abstracted or its negative, bored.

    Until recently, the garden I look on from an upstairs window as I write had been little more than a backdrop I glanced at or walked through, a present pleasure scarcely noticed, and if I paused outside, it would be to crop an herb, or sometimes in early autumn to gather apples, pears, medlars, damsons, or plums. But I am woolgathering in an English idiom. Abstraction and pastoral have an affinity in England. In autumn the abstract garden gives way to use-value, to selective picking, although some purposeful activities can trigger an abstracted state — a woman pauses with an apple halfway to her mouth, or stands with her hand resting on a fork as she listens to an attendant robin.

    A different yield of plums distinguishes the years, but I shall find it hard to remember what flowers flourished or were disappointing this year, to predict which return with a certain season, or even to identify what was planted recently and where. The garden’s visual 
intricacy offers a welcome depth for my study window, and sometimes wildlife is noticed in its seasonal passage: migrant birds, the dragonflies and damselflies, squirrels, and an infrequent muntjac deer. The cooing of wood pigeons makes for a persistent background noise by day; but there are no bats at twilight this year, perhaps nearby building work has dislodged them or they have been afflicted by a fungal disease. I have become late middle-aged. And I admit a marshy bleakness is more typical of an English summer than my bucolic fantasy. Although I am woolgathering, wooly clouds can be sharp-edged with sun setting behind them. It is possible to remain abstracted and nonetheless reflect; these mental states can dress themselves to coincide. That’s where I am. The turning of abstraction like a crystalline and involuted space, set in motion by birdsong, or a continent away by jazz leaking from an apparently vacant warehouse in Brooklyn, coexists with flashes of insight, sidelong links, assessments of risk and practical decisions — although these may be carried out by that embodiment of autonomic and learned behavior others give the name 
I bear. Abstraction might comport with habit. Abstraction and reflection in lockstep.

    Now it is twilight and there is a poem I am called upon to read, a poem calls on me to read it. How can a poem call from its perfected internal space? How could my being here for this poem have been anticipated in its advent? This is a poem I have read many times because I wanted to or because professionally I had to, a poem I have talked about in classrooms and informally, a poem my wife read at a celebration of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s life on September 26, 2009, as a little program folded into my book and bearing Eve’s face reminds me. At my sister’s funeral in 2012 I read a few lines from a poem by the same poet. This aquamarine book of his New Collected Poems feels eventful in itself, collecting my reading of these poems over three decades, if not in this particular edition; it accumulates too my reading of other poets who have felt close to this poet, his friends and contemporaries, or those drawn close through later discovering this work as I did. In a state of professional reading, I could scrutinize each word and its relations with surrounding words, both within the particular poem and across a wider range, searching out tracks others have left through their records of reading. I could listen intently and might sound aloud some lines. I could read with others in a class. And if engaged in inquiry I might seek earlier versions of the same poem, thinking how it has changed and why, or thinking what writing on poetics might extend the scope and heft of these poems, enriching, contesting, exemplifying.

    But for now I hover about questions of time and space. The spaces this book constructs are bleak, beautiful, and rock-obstructed in a way unique to a landscape the poet dwelt in, even while its spaces 
are drawn toward “pure” abstraction. When I incline to write about the scope of these poems, inclination goes beyond metaphor to the landscape I shared with my sister in childhood. Although my feelings about the poems are intimate, they are experienced by a 
person coexisting with the person who eats, works in his study, and suffers the loss of those he loves. It is the I which is another whom this poem entreats. Scope, for this person brought into being in its space, sends tense cables and grapples and sinews through the medium bringing him to life, and as he reads he feels reconfigured, as though by the dragged vertices of a psychical simulation in 3-D modeling. Such scope does somewhat envisage a Scottish poet in his Penwith peninsula ordinariness, encountered in these poems where he fetches coal and blags drinks, but more urgently entreats me into being from across the page where the poet writes; Graham scratches or taps like a prisoner hoping to hear an answering tap as the start of a communicative code. The time of these New Collected Poems by W.S. Graham may be variously the poet’s and mine and others’ in its details and waymarks, such as the seasonal flowers; but it is also abstract in its swiftness, its suspension, its gathering and its dispersal, abstract in its disclosures. Still, I fear I shall betray this poem, as I open my professional armamentarium. Can my reading still be interlaced with abstraction, can I leave off for a moment, look away from the page in honoring a bidding that commands my attention down toward the poem’s narrowest interstices? Pausing in a caesura I feel the song again, opening beyond boundaries; attention opens into abstraction.



    Last summer with the previous paragraph I stopped, and now resume in a wet and mild winter, with the improbable blossom of a winter-flowering cherry in the foreground of my gaze. That is what there is to it, a tree commands attention and releases it. I hear the surprisingly violent crepitation of a woodpecker at work beyond the next garden. It is time to write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” by W.S. Graham, this poem I have looked at through the seasons, a poem not addressed to me but, its title announces, to a painter. I recall this poem was written 
soon after the painter’s death in 1975. Memory of an involuntary kind is characteristic of abstraction, a feature separating it from a meditative discipline of “emptying”; how far though can concentration and external reference be tolerated by abstraction, without puncturing the reverie? (Is abstraction a return to being held in a maternal reverie? Is a fact a thorn?) Can abstraction permit a systolic-diastolic rhythm, an expansion and contraction?

    I am not yet ready to write about this poem. Fortunately I recall this was not the first time Graham addressed Wynter in a poem (or seemed to), and I shall write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” after finding a way of approaching through an earlier poem. And rather than saying I shall “write about” a poem by W.S. Graham, I shall write toward the poem. I can zero in on what I wish to say, although that may change as I go along, through an indirect route resembling a direct address to objectified texts, an exercise in close reading. Here, though, reading aims to comprise a practice toward, a set of gestures of recognition abstracted and refigured in the interest of .............................................
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/171122

    PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
    No Experience Necessary
    BY CHRISTINA PUGH
    "In some poetry you feel there is too little lived experience—here you feel there is almost more than you can take in." Such was a blurb I found the other day on the back of a first book of poetry. Read this, and be overwhelmed by experience: on the face of it, a strange way to recommend poems. But on the other hand, I knew I'd seen that blurb before. Even in a poetic climate that supports the cerebral, ludic peregrinations of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, reviewed by Danielle Chapman in the January 2005 issue of this magazine, there is still a sizable minority of poets and readers who come to poetry looking for a measure of "experience"—and what's more, "lived experience." What, in fact, are they really looking for? Is experience quantifiable? Is it equivalent to an empirically exciting life? Does it drive a red Ferrari, or is it a rambling pedestrian with a long white beard? Is there a difference? And when so many come away from American poetry today—particularly from the work of younger poets—with a feeling of disappointment or outrage, is experience what they are really missing?

    The category of experience is seldom defined or questioned; as a concept, it's more like a wink or a nudge in the ribs. But those who uphold it as a value seem to want to appeal to a shared sense of humanity—an unspoken agreement that despite our many cultural, racial, sexual, and economic differences, we all are born, live, and die. In this new, graciously multicultural universalism, the category of "experience" wants to provide a comforting sense that we're all in this together—and that we can, at least, agree on what "this" might be. And of course, "experience" wants even more to be the sine qua non for writing the type of poetry that will speak to "people" and not "just poets."

    But as the messy legacy of the American poets known as the Confessionals—particularly Lowell, Plath, and Sexton—the thirst for experience reveals its own fundamental contradictions. Plath died at thirty: from the perspective of anyone but the teenaged, how experienced could she really have been? Sexton and Lowell, for their parts, lived the life of economic privilege—which placed them, in Wordsworthian terms, "at a distance from the kind." The writing of both Plath and Sexton was, to a great degree, forged by their struggle with what Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique called "the problem that has no name": the mind-numbing burden of domesticity faced by women in an America that had yet to undergo the changes brought about by Second-Wave feminism. Can this be what is touted as "lived experience"?

    The category of experience seems to promise a place for everyone: like Walt Whitman, it wants to invite all of us to dinner. But it's clear that many readers simply can't identify with the life stories of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton. And though one could easily follow R.D. Laing and claim that mental illness itself is a voyage of discovery, it's not clear how such a voyage, as articulated in the work of the Confessionals, would feed into the common construction of experience as a shared and democratic value.

    Fascinatingly, the contemporaneous New York School, who were chattier than the Confessionals and just seemed to have a lot more fun, played down the role of experience in writing. As O'Hara so succinctly put it, "Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them." Or Ashbery's ruminations in an interview with Kenneth Koch: "We seem to be determined both to discuss poetry and not to discuss anything at all. This is probably what we do in our poetry. I only wish I knew why we feel it to be necessary."

    An even better indictment of experience-as-value comes in Ashbery's "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name." There he inimitably asserts that for the poet, "Certainly whatever funny happens to you/ Is OK." In this mock ars poetica, "whatever" becomes both everything and nothing—and the wisdom to know the difference. Kay Ryan has seconded this motion by pressing "the importance to the poet of avoiding or ignoring Kodak moments." In an essay that celebrates the habitual or "novelty-free life," Ryan lauds the least entropic state of being: "Your memory will be deep, quiet, undifferentiated as a pool. Change will enter and twist like a drop of ink, the tiniest bit of new per old."

    Perhaps it is precisely that near-invisible shimmer in the old that draws me to certain poets rather than others. I admit that I'm often thrilled by the poets of no experience: no experience at all, if experience is defined in the popular, unexamined way. For people immune to literature, Emily Dickinson "didn't have a life." After a year at Mount Holyoke, she embarked on what can only be called, experience-wise, an early retirement in her twenties. As for Wallace Stevens, how boring can it be to walk to your job at an accident and indemnity company (in Hartford, no less), year in and year out? From this perspective, both were writing books—or fascicles—on "nothing," much as Flaubert sought to do when he began to incubate the book that would become Madame Bovary. Yet we don't fault these poets for their lack of experience, for their humdrum and muted lives, for not having lived enough in the world (wherever we think that may be). For me, a certain contemporary parallel is found in the marvelous work of Charles Wright, which reads as a paean to the limited-experience life. If read collectively, his selected Negative Blue paints a portrait of someone who has done little more—experientially—than sit alone in his own backyard for decades.

    Still, experience has long provided a dubious litmus test for poetry, and not just in the American tradition. When Rilke's friend Ellen Key told him that his work "smacked of the writing desk," she clearly meant that it reflected too little actual experience. The poet's aversion to sustained relationships is well-known, as is his avoidance of service during the First World War. Isn't it funny, then, that Rilke's poetry has been popularly seen—even prescribed—as the poetry of experience: the poetry of weddings, funerals, and, according to Rilke scholar Judith Ryan, German soldiers' comfort at the front during both the First and Second World Wars?

    So the poetry that, for some, lacks experience can be embraced as the quintessential poetry of experience by others. And the poetry forged in what we might consider to be genuinely hefty experience—manual labor, for example—can also easily become its own template or formula: something just as repeatable as the oft-lamented "academic" poem. If Wright has repeated himself—much as Dickinson repeated herself—the same could be said of a poet like Philip Levine, who is often looked to as a quintessential contemporary poet of experience. Clearly, then, having "experience" doesn't void the risk of repetition in poems. Poetry that is "novelty-free," in Kay Ryan's terms, may be a function of self-actualization in the work, regardless of how much recognizable experience that work does or does not reflect.

    The longer I look, the more the category of "experience" dissolves before my eyes. I'm happy to see that dissolution, since it's a fitting prelude to another intimately related argument: one for the viability of reading as a version of, or a substitute for, "lived experience." Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveler provides a good model for what I'm talking about. There, the allegorical Writer and Reader are two separate people: the first male, the second female. Lately I've envied this Reader her fly-by-night quality, her ability to lose herself so irresponsibly in books. But if I superimpose the one allegorical figure upon the other, I end up with a viscerally viable, albeit cartoonish, prescription for who the writer is—or should be, or could be. Might it be that what is missing in the work of some younger poets is not "experience" at all, but reading that is deep enough to effect changes in the self?

    Here is where the university, the proverbial elephant in the room, comes in. Many believe universities fail poets, particularly younger poets, by depriving them of experience. This is said categorically of the MFA and other graduate degrees, as well as of academic positions that now support many poets as teachers and writers. Academia becomes, in this model, a sort of double Procrustean bed. We're told repeatedly that graduate programs in creative writing produce poets who crank out the same, experience-challenged, cookie-cutter verse. But do education and "lived experience" have to be so ineluctably incompatible? That question is almost never asked. And few, if any, seem to wonder whether universities are failing poets by not educating them enough, or widely enough—or later, by requiring them to teach only in the workshop model. What if experience were not the missing ingredient after all?

    I've thought a lot about this question because, though I'm hardly leading the escapist life of Calvino's Reader, I too am a Reader of sorts: Reader for this magazine. As such, I see an enormous quantity of work by poets who are hoping for publication. Ironically, it often seems that it's an inability to get past one's own experience that causes many of these poems to founder. For the beginner, it's the rather narcissistic belief that, to switch Ashbery a bit, "whatever melodramatic happens to you/Is OK." But even in certain, yes, more experienced poets, there can be an impulse around the anecdotal—around travel, around the family, around "events"—that, if not reworked in what Veronica Forrest-Thomson called the "internal expansion" of the poem, burns as the steady flame of ordinariness.

    What's missing in much of the work I see is an ability to distinguish experience from occasion: what I'll define here as the prime mover of the poem, be it based in the poet's empirical life, in imagination, in the jurr of language, in literary texts. Yes, it can even be anecdotal, as in the infamous "I placed a jar in Tennessee." It's the opening, the antechamber of the poem that invites us into the occasion that will, we hope, master us as readers. Consider these openings—how they happen, and how little you can resist them: "I heard a fly buzz—when I died"; "Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry"; "My black face fades"; "Yes, it's a joke—in the florist's dictionary"; "flower is becoming the graph." Infinite, the snares of occasion. And polyglot. One of them is even taken from the book whose well-intentioned but ultimately misguided blurb I quoted at the outset of this essay.

    Though the term may seem old-fashioned to some, occasion manages to crash the party of even the least referential of poetic schools. The best way I know to get a feel for this—what others might call integrity or bloom or motor—is not necessarily to go out and have an exciting life that you can write about in your work. Instead, I think, it's the ability to read widely enough to know which poetic occasions stir you: be they empirical, imaginative, aleatory, linguistic, discursive—and how various and transhistorical are poems' means to stir. So to argue against the litmus test of experience is not necessarily to argue, as did Eliot, for the extinction of the personality. It's also not to claim that I wouldn't drive the red Ferrari, if I had a license. Instead, it's to note that poetic occasion may not always be the result of "lived experience" per se. Understanding this will open the door to the younger poet who, like Mark Yakich, "divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen." At the risk of coining yet another new universalism, maybe this is precisely the sort of experience we should all want to have.
    Originally Published: October 30, 2005
    Though the term may seem old-fashioned to some, occasion manages to crash the party of even the least referential of poetic schools. The best way I know to get a feel for this—what others might call integrity or bloom or motor—is not necessarily to go out and have an exciting life that you can write about in your work. Instead, I think, it's the ability to read widely enough to know which poetic occasions stir you: be they empirical, imaginative, aleatory, linguistic, discursive—and how various and transhistorical are poems' means to stir. So to argue against the litmus test of experience is not necessarily to argue, as did Eliot, for the extinction of the personality. It's also not to claim that I wouldn't drive the red Ferrari, if I had a license. Instead, it's to note that poetic occasion may not always be the result of "lived experience" per se. Understanding this will open the door to the younger poet who, like Mark Yakich, "divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen." At the risk of coining yet another new universalism, maybe this is precisely the sort of experience we should all want to have.
    Certainly in imaginative poetry one can shine and write great poetry, which appeals to many but the greatest poetry-the most famous poetry came from poets that used their life experiences combined with heart's desires to create masterpieces.
    Which is harder to accomplish- something from nothing- "imaginative poetry" or taking that which is a known quantity (LIFE EXPERIENCES) AND WEAVING SUCH INTO TRUE MASTERPIECES?
    And who has the authority or enough life validation to declare which is superior. Eliot as great as he was had not ALL the answers--nobody does.-Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 10-08-2015 at 08:10 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  13. #13
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    2B

    On May 20, 2009 at 9:31 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
    Actually Marty my arl ramblin mahn,
    you are right.
    At least, going on the poems in an edition of a British e zine i recently read, edited by a woman, with around 80% of the poems by men, and with a preponderance of authoratitive philisophical all seeing all knowing narrator ‘I’s going for the majestrial note and not pulling it off.
    The few women that were in there, by contrast, there stuff was much more creative.
    The blokes tended to try to hard to be God, and in British poetry, the legacy of Larkin (a misanthropic man with racists leanings obsessed with swearing and with a massive complex about women) who introduced or at least made the the eff word acceptable as a poetic one – is the wrapping of mundane events (catching a bus, having a dump on the crapper) in a conversational prosaic style and then a stab at high blown lingo, evinced in the Larkin’s sun-comprending glass and nothingness schtick.
    Unfortunatley, it just comes across as posey twaddle by straight faced blokey bores.
    The gals gear though, was less ambitious – didn’t want to tell us the deepest fundamental secrets of the universal knowledge in a poem about a fridge- but instead seemed to spiral about in and around the concept of poetic expression in general, per se, vis a vis, a bit more jiggle, phwaor ‘n oomph Marty me arl god-like knower.
    On May 20, 2009 at 10:02 pm Colin Ward wrote:
    I tried posting a version of this yesterday but it didn’t show up. If it does so belatedly, I apologize for the double post.
    Martin:
    No, I don’t think you’re prejudging at all.
    Incidentally and for what it’s worth, those interested in gender differences in writing who haven’t seen this site might be amused:
    Gender Genie:
    http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php
    Steve:
    Dear Colin Ward: who are these Internet poets described in your poll? they’re not the poets I know from the Internet. Can you post a link?
    The “Caught on the Net” poll was taken a few years back. The site is defunct now but, fortunately, I kept a copy of it, which I can email you if you’d like. The question posed was: “Suppose there were an anthology of poems by the best online English language poets. Whose work (other than your own) would you like to see included?” The respondents were members of the more serious, expert internet venues: Poetry Free-For-All, Gazebo, Eratosphere, and Usenet (the web’s evil twin). Here are the URL’s for these moderated critical venues:
    The Poetry Free-For-All:
    http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/
    Gazebo in Exile (this URL is about to change):
    http://thegazeboinexile.iforums.us/
    Eratosphere:
    http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/Ultimate.cgi
    QED:
    http://www.qedpoetry.com/
    All of these sites have thriving discussion and theory forums within them. Members are often called “workshoppers”, but that is something of a misnomer; many members spend more of their time discussing poetry–much as we see here, but with the ability of all members to initiate threads and edit their posts–than posting or critiquing individual poems. One caveat regarding PFFA in particular: behave yourself and bring your best game.
    To access Usenet you need to install a newsreader program (e.g. Free Agent); the two most active newsgroups are rec.arts.poems and alt.arts.poetry.comments. One has to wade through a lot of trolls to get to the good stuff, though. N.B.: webbers (among whom workshoppers and bloggers are subsets) and Usenetters form two very different communities, often oblivious to each other.
    As for the poets I mentioned, I’m not really qualified to write their bio or CV but here are some impressions and what few facts I know:
    Professor Claudia Grinnell is perhaps better known as a fine critiquer. I believe she was one of the founders and administrators on QED–one of the smaller advanced online workshops. Claudia hasn’t been very active lately.
    Britisher Margaret A. Griffith, aka “Maz”, is the author of “Studying Savonarola”, a poem that might be trotted out when onliners speak of the best poems of the 21st century, whenever anyone says that free verse “isn’t poetry” or that stunning romantic poems aren’t still being written. When Carol Ann Duffy was named as Poet Laureate more than a few internetters wondered if selection committee members shouldn’t be subjected to mandatory drug testing. Maz is a member of PFFA, Gazebo and Eratosphere.
    Julie Carter is “the sonnet lady”, active on Usenet, Gazebo and Eratosphere. She’s also a huge baseball fan.
    Kim “K.R.” Copeland is arguably the most consistent, quirky and interesting performer. She seems to post mostly to Gazebo.
    Rachel Lindley is a very good theorist, along with the likes of Howard Miller (PFFA), Robert MacKenzie (PFFA, Usenet), Harry Rutherford (PFFA), and, of course, Peter John Ross (Usenet). Her articles on PFFA’s “Blurbs of Wisdom”, especially those on the topic of sonics, are a must read for any serious student of the art form.
    http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/forumd...aysprune=&f=34
    Rose Kelleher is a solid performer whose stock, like Ms. Copeland’s, may have risen in recent years.
    D.P. Kristalo (Poets.org, Gazebo) wrote both “Beans” and “Joie de Mourir”. Need I say more?
    Francesca Sweeney-Androulaki (Gazebo), Jennifer Reeser (Eratosphere), and Sarah Sloat (Desert Moon Review) are others well worth Googling on a rainy afternoon.
    If anyone is curious, humourist Sam Home (Gazebo & Eratosphere) topped the male poets. Robert J. Maughan (Usenet), Frank Matagrano (Gazebo), Andrew Kei Miller (Usenet, Gazebo), Oswald LeWinter (Gazebo, Zoetrope), Jerry H. Jenkins (Usenet) and Dale Houstman (Usenet) are other familiar names to those internetters outside the blogosphere, at least.
    I hope this albeit sketchy overview helps, Steve.
    -o-
    On May 21, 2009 at 10:34 am gmc wrote:
    “..as man won’t be male
    and woman won’t be female..” (gospel of thomas)
    what kind of poet are you, dear martin, whose memory is like a hole full of kaleidoscopic souvenirs?
    what you call man and woman are simply male and female, anything else, and your text is like an hallucination of yours, not less, not more.
    (sorry for my bad english, but i’m not english-speaking born)
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Walt Whitman 101
    A close look at everybody’s radical poet.

    Few poets have had such lasting impact as Walt Whitman. Widely considered the American father of free verse, Whitman has been celebrated by poets from Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda to Langston Hughes and Patricia Lockwood. His irreverence inspired the surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School. Critic Harold Bloom called Leaves of Grass part of the “secular scripture of the United States.” Schools, malls, and bridges are named for him, and in the past few years, Levi’s and Apple have used his words to sell jeans and iPads.

    However, although Whitman is a figure of mythic stature and popular appeal, his work remains strikingly provocative. Profuse, amorous, and candidly grand, his “barbaric yawp” defies all boundaries and borders, reminding readers of the radical possibilities inherent in the democratic ideal.

    Beginnings
    Whitman’s long road to poetic greatness seemed both unlikely and predestined. One of nine children, several of whom were named for American presidents, he left school at 11 but continued to educate himself while he apprenticed as a printer. For the first half of his life, his literary ambitions lay in journalism and fiction, and he worked for several New York newspapers. He didn’t write a book of poetry until he was 36, when, at his own expense, he first published Leaves of Grass, his great and lifelong work. Though he wrote other prose and poetry volumes over the course of his career, Whitman continually revised and reissued Leaves of Grass, adding to, removing from, rewriting, and reordering the book until his death. When Leaves was first published in 1855, it contained 12 poems; the final 1892 edition contains more than 400. His goal from the beginning was a kind of wholeness: a volume that gathered all of his work into one sustained epic.

    If the size and scope of Leaves of Grass was itself audacious, its form and content were even more so. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which called for a distinctly American poetry, Whitman abandoned traditional poetic style and elevated language. He pioneered a unique type of free verse that combined spontaneous, prosaic rhythms with incantatory repetition that he found in the Old Testament; with it, he found a form to match his great subject: the unity and diversity of the limitless American self.

    Walt Whitman, Kosmos
    His earliest and most fundamental work, “Song of Myself,” carries egalitarianism to its further extent. In long lines and ecstatic catalogues, Whitman embraces everything and everyone—good and bad, male and female, free and not—as equal. Celebrating the individual as both a product of and vessel for the multitude, Whitman adopted the persona of the kosmos, a kind of visionary or seer, and channeled the voices of America—“I am the hounded slave,” he writes provocatively at one point. His praise of the carnal and corporeal was likewise provocative. As he proclaims in “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman saw the body and the soul as commensurate and touch as the basis for all personal and political connections.

    Ebb Tide
    Though it gained him a handful of admirers and detractors, the first edition of Leaves of Grass sold very poorly. In the years following its publication, Whitman lived an unsettled, bohemian life, and his work took a melancholic, personal turn. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” for example, tells the tale of his artistic birth but roots it in death and loss, and the invitation in his earlier “Song of the Open Road” stands in stark contrast to his warning in “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” that he is “not what you supposed.”

    Skeptical as they can be, the poems of this period include some of Whitman’s most revolutionary work. “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” is a doubtful and inconclusive poem that prefigures the Modernist movement, and his “Calamus” sequence, first printed in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, is historic in its treatment of same-sex attraction and relationships. In comparison to the excited and explicit sexuality of his earlier work, “I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing” and “A Glimpse” are meditative, even plaintive in tone. But in lingering on feelings that were, at the time, too obscene to mention, Whitman introduced a language of queer love that, as critics Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price write, was essential to the development of gay literature.

    Drum-Taps
    As befits his signature blending of self and state, the Civil War marked a major turning point in Whitman’s career. Traveling first to the front lines to visit his enlisted brother, and then onto Washington, DC, where he made a home during the war, Whitman became a troubadour of the battlefield. In “Beat! Beat! Drums!” he sings of the war’s inevitability, and poems such as “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” acutely capture its horrors. “The Wound-Dresser” describes Whitman’s remarkable experiences at military hospitals, where he nursed thousands of wounded soldiers and befriended many.

    These years took a toll on Whitman: one of his brothers died, another was captured, and he watched as one of his dearest infatuations had his leg amputated. But these years also brought the publication of his book Drum-Taps and two of his most widely known poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!,” both written in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated at the end of the war.

    The Good Gray Poet
    Whitman was an avowed rabble-rouser—his abolitionist politics and explicit poetry lost him several jobs—but his image shifted in his later years to something more stately and sanctified. Despite declining health and financial instability, Whitman continued to write and even began to enjoy a certain amount of literary celebrity. He received numerous distinguished visitors, including Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oscar Wilde, at his home in Camden, New Jersey, where he relocated in 1873 after a stroke.

    Inspired more and more by science and engineering, Whitman wrote poems such as “Passage to India,” which hails the opening of the Suez Canal and the rapidly globalizing world, and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” which stages the conflict between scientific reason and cosmic experience. He continued to revise and expand Leaves of Grass and worked on several prose projects, including Specimen Days, which is an unconventional autobiography, and “Democratic Vistas,” an essay about Reconstruction-era America.

    If the tone of his poetry grew increasingly laudatory, in “Vistas,” Whitman is at his most critical, excoriating a political culture “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood” and “mal-administration.” But if America’s promise remained (or remains) unfulfilled, Whitman’s poetry reminds readers, even today, of democracy’s continuing potential.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Few poets have had such lasting impact as Walt Whitman. Widely considered the American father of free verse, Whitman has been celebrated by poets from Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda to Langston Hughes and Patricia Lockwood. His irreverence inspired the surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School. Critic Harold Bloom called Leaves of Grass part of the “secular scripture of the United States.” Schools, malls, and bridges are named for him, and in the past few years, Levi’s and Apple have used his words to sell jeans and iPads.

    However, although Whitman is a figure of mythic stature and popular appeal, his work remains strikingly provocative. Profuse, amorous, and candidly grand, his “barbaric yawp” defies all boundaries and borders, reminding readers of the radical possibilities inherent in the democratic ideal.
    ^^^^ This alone makes him in my top ten favorite poets list !!-Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-09-2015 at 11:21 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Tuesday, July 28, 2015
    The Kalevala

    AG: Does anybody know the Finnish epic, “The Kalevala”. Has anybody ever read any of that? – I’d like to read a few pages of that. It’s an epic poem which was originally in oral form, and (was) written down in the nineteenth-century by a Swedish scholar, Elias Lönnrot, and translated (fantastically) by Francis Peabody Magoun and published by (the) Harvard University Press. It’s called “(The) Kalevala” – K-A-L-E-V-A-L-A, and in the chapter, or poem, three, that I’m going to read from, this old bard, who has had lots of discipline and lots of experience and is an old dog, finally (old dog, incidentally, is one of the characteristics of tantric mind) – old dog, like an old dog that no longer jumps up (and) barks excitedly when it hears an egg drop.


    So, Väinämöinen the old dog bard, meets Joukahainen, a young punk bard coming up the road, and their chariots pass (but) can’t pass each other in the road because there’s a too-narrow road, and so comes “a contest of bards” between the older and the younger. They’ve heard of each other, but finally they’re meeting (at least Joukahainen has heard of Väinämöinen

    "..Steadfast old Väinämöinen lives his days/ on those clearings of Väinämöinen's district, on the heaths of Kalevala district./ He keeps singing these songs, keeps singing, goes on practicing his art,/ Day after day he sang, night after night, he recited/ recollections of ancient time those profound origin songs/ which not all children sing not all men understand/ in this dreadful time in this fleeting age/ Far away the news is heard the tidings spread quickly/ of Väinämöinen's singing, of the man's skill./ The tidings spread quickly to the south, the news reached the north country./ Joukahainen was a young, a scrawny, Lappish lad./ Once he was gadding about; he heard that remarkable charms,/ magic songs, were being rattled off, better ones intoned/ on those burned-over tracks of Väinämöinen's district on the heaths of Kalevala District/ - better than what he himself knew, had learned from his father/. That he took greatly amiss, constantly envied/ Väinämöinen being a singer better than himself.."

    So there are a few verses where he sets out to meet the older guy:

    "..Steadfast old Väinämöinen, eternal sage,/ was driving on his way, covering ground/ on those clearings of Väinämöinen's district, the heaths of Kalevala District./ Young Joukahainen came along, he was driving on the road in the opposite direction./ Shaft caught in shaft, trace got tangled in trace,/ hames became fast in hames, shaft-bow in butt of shaft-bow./ Therefore they then stop, stop deliberate;/ water poured from shaft-bow, vapor steamed from the shafts."

    As you'll notice, the formulaic aspect of this is - you make a statement and you modify it, make a statement and you modify it - two halves, one line.

    "..Old Väinämöinen asked: "Of what clan are you/ to come along foolishly, recklessly onward./ You break the bent-wood hames, the sapling shaft-bows./ you splinter my sleigh to pieces, my poor sleigh to bits."/ Then young Joukahainen/ uttered a word, spoke thus: "I am young Joukahainen/ but name your own clan;/ of what clan are you, of what crew, miserable creature?"/ . Then steadfast old Väinämöinen now told his name./ Then he managed to say: If you are young Joukahainen,/ pull over to the side. You are younger than I"

    "Then young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "A man's youth is small matter, his youth, his age./ Whichever of two men is better in knowledge, the stronger in memory,/ let him indeed stay on the road, let the other get off the road./ If you are old Väinämöinen, eternal singer,/ let us begin to sing, start to recite magic./ one man to test the other, one to defeat the other"/. Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ - "What can I really do as a singer, as an expert!/ I have always lived my life just on these clearings,/ on the edges of the home field, again and again have listened to the cuckoo by the house./ But, be this as it may, speak, so that I may hear with my ears:/ what do you know about most about, understand beyond other people?"/ Young Joukahainen said: "I indeed know something!/ This I know clearly, understand precisely: "A smoke hole is near a ceiling, a flame is near a fireplace./ It is pleasant for a seal to live, for a pike, dog of the water, to roll about;/ it eats the salmon around it, the whitefish beside it./ A whitefish has smooth fields, the salmon a level ceiling./ A pike spawns in the chill of night, the slobberer in bitter cold weather./ Autumns the timid, obstinate perch, swims deep./ summers it spawns on dry land, flaps about on shores./ "If this may be not enough, I have still another bit of knowledge,/ understand a certain thing:/ "The North ploughs with a reindeer,/ the South with a mare, remotest Lapland with an elk./ I know the trees of Pisa's Hill, the tall evergreens on Goblin's Crag,/ tall are the trees on Pisa's Hill, the evergreens on Goblin's Crag/. There are three strong rapids, three great lakes,/ three high mountains under the vault of this sky./ In Hame is Halla-whirlpool, in Karelia Loon Rapids./ none exceed the Vuoksi rapids (which) surpass those of Imatra" . Old Väinämöinen said: "A child's knowledge, a woman's power of memory! / It is neither that of a bearded man nor indeed of a married man./ Speak of profound origins, of unique matters."/ Young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "I know the origin of the tomtit, I know the tom-tit is a bird,/ the hissing adder a snake, the roach a fish of the water/, I know iron is brittle, black soil sour,/ boiling-hot water painful, being burned by fire bad./ Water is the oldest of ointments, foam of a rapids oldest of magic nostrums,/ the Creator himself is the oldest of magicians, God the oldest of healers./ The source of water is from a mountain, the source of fire is from the heavens/, the origin of iron is from rust, the basis of copper is a crag./ A wet tussock is the oldest land, the willow the first tree,/ the foot of a tall evergreen the first habitation, a flat stone the first wretched cooking vessel."/ Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered these words:/ "Do you remember anything more or has your foolish talk now come to an end?"./ Young Joukahainen spoke: "I remember a little more. /I remember indeed that time when I was plowing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone./ I was already the sixth man, seventh person/, when they were creating this Earth, fashioning the sky/, erecting the pillars of the sky, bringing the rainbow,/ guiding the moon, helping the sun,/ arranging the Great Bear, studding the heavens with stars"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "You are certainly lying about this./ No one saw you when they were ploughing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone,/ Nor were you probably seen, /probably neither seen nor heard,/ when the earth was being created, the sky fashioned,/ the pillars of the sky erected, the rainbow brought,/ the moon guided, the sun helped,/ the Great Bear arranged, the heavens studded with stars."/ Young Joukahainen then uttered these words: "If I do not happen to have intelligence, I will ask for intelligence from my sword./ O old Väinämöinen, big-mouthed singer!/ Proceed to measure off our swords, set out to fight a duel"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "I don't think I'm very much afraid/ of those sword of yours, your intelligence, your ice-picks, your thoughts./ But be that as it may, I will not proceed to measure swords/ with you, wretch,/ with you, miserable fellow"./ Then young Joukahainen screwed up his mouth, twisted his head around,/ clawed at his black beard. He uttered these words:/ "Whoever does not proceed to measure swords nor set out to fight a duel,/ him I will sing into a swine, change into a pig with lowered snout./ Such men I enchant, one thus, the other so. /strike dead onto a dunghill, jam into the corner of a cattle shed"./ Old Väinämöinen got angry, then got angry and felt shamed./ He began to sing, got to reciting,/ the magic songs are not children's songs, not children's songs, women's jokes;/ they are a bearded man's which not all children sing,/ nor half the boys indeed, nor one bachelor in three/ in this dreadful time, in this fleeting final age"./ Old Väinämöinen sang. Lakes splashed over, Earth shook/, copper mountains trembled, solid slabs of rock split,/ the crags flew apart, stones on the shore cracked./ He bewitched young Joukahainen. He sang sprouts onto his shaft-bow,/ a willow bush onto his hames, sallows onto the ends of his traces./ He bewitched the lovely basket sleigh. he sang it into a pond as fallen trees./ He sang the whip with the beaded lash into shore reed of the sea./ He sang the horse with the blaze to the bank of the rapid as a rock./ He sang the gold-hilted sword to the sky as flashes of lightning;/ then he sang the ornamented shaft of the crossbow into a rainbow over the waters/ then his feathered arrows into speeding hawks, / then the dog with the undershot jaw, it he sang onto the ground as rocks./ He sang the cap off the man's head into the peak of a cloudbank./ he sang the mittens off his hands into pond lilies./then his blue broadcloth coat to the heavens as a cloud patch/ the soft woolen belt from his waist into stars throughou the heavens/ He bewitched Joukahainen himself,/ sang him into a fen up to his loins,/ into a grassy meadow up to his groin, into a heath up to his arm-pits./ Now young Joukahainen indeed knew and realized./ he knew that he had got on the way, got on the route to a contest,/ a contest in magic singing with old Väinämöinen. /He keeps trying to get a foot free; he could not lift his foot./ However, he tried the other; here his shoe was of stone./ The young Joukahainen indeed becomes anguished,/gets into a more precarious situation. He uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage!/ Reverse your magic charm, revoke your enchantment,/ Free me from this predicament, get me out of this situation./ I will indeed make the best payment, pay the most substantial ransom"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "Well, what will you give me/ if I reverse my magic charm, revoke my enchantment,/ free you from this predicament, get you out of this situation?"/ Joukahainen spoke, "I have two vessels, two lovely boats. /One is swift in race the other transports much. Take either of these. / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I do not really care about your vessels. I will not select any of your boats./ These I too have with every rower hauled up, every cove piled full,/ one steady in a high wind, the other that goes into a head wind".. He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in./ Young Joukahainen said, "I have two stallions, two lovely steeds./ One is better for racing, the other lively in the traces. Take either of these"./ Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care about your horses. Don't bother me about white fetlocked horses./ These too I have, with every stall hitched full, every stable full,/ with fat as clear as water on their backbones, a pound of fat on their cruppers"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in./ Young Joukahainen said, "Old Väinämöinen, reverse your magic words, revoke your enchantment./ I'll give you a high-peaked hat full of gold pieces, a felt hat full of silver pieces got by my father in the war, brought in from battle"./ Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care about your silver pieces. I have no need, wretch, for your gold pieces./ These too I have with every storehouse crammed, every little box fully stocked./ They are gold pieces as old as the moon, silver pieces the age of the sun". /He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in. /Young Joukahainen said, "O old Väinämöinen , free me from this predicament, release me from this situation. /I'll give you my windrose back home, surrender my fields of sandy soil to free my own head, to random myself". / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I don't want your wind rose, useless person, nor your fields of sandy soil./ These too I have, filled in every direction, windrose in every clearing./ My own are better fields, my own windrose finer"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, kept bewitching him further down./ The young Joukahainen at last, however, grew desperate when he was up to his chin in the mud, up to his beard in a bad place./up to his mouth in a fen, in mossy places, up to his teeth behind a rotten tree-trunk. /Young Joukahainen said, "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage, now sing your song backward./ Grant me yet my feeble life. Set me free from here./ The current is already dragging at my feet, the sand scratching my eyes./ If you will reverse your magic words, leave off your magic spell, I'll give you my sister, Aino, to rinse out the wooden firkins, to wash the blankets,/ to weave fine stuff, to bake sweet bread."/ Then Väinämöinen was exceedingly delighted when he got Joukahainen's girl to provide for his old age./ He sits down on a song stone, sits himself on a song rock./ He sang once, he sang twice, he sang a third time too./ Young Joukahainen got free, got his chin free of the mud,/ his beard from a bad place, his horse from being a rock in the rapids,/ his sleigh on the shore from being a rotten tree-trunk in the water, his whip from being a shore reed./ He climbed slowly into his basket sleigh, He set out in a sorry state of mind with heavy heart to his dear mother's, to his esteemed parents."

    Student: When was that written?

    AG: Well, the oral tradition is old, maybe two, three, four, centuries.. It was written down mid nineteenth-century, not long ago, (17), perhaps (18)47. Lönnrot went around to Lapland and other places on field trips collecting these tales and has composed them into an epic. Here's Lönnrot out on his field trip looking for epics (from an 1847 illustration)........

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sorry about the wall of text but was presented exactly as it was posted....-Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-28-2015 at 08:33 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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