Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://edwardcolettispoetryblog.blogspot.com

(Ed Coletti's) NO MONEY IN POETRY
"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either." -- Robert Graves
This is sort of an online portfolio occasionally featuring a few samples of both my work
and that of others. Please also consider looking at
Ed Coletti's P3 (edcolettip3.blogspot.com) for philosopy, politics, and also some poetry.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Codrescu Word Shakers NPR Special/Poets and Ego/Robert Creeley and Robert Creeley Reading/


Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
Is all it takes to get me by
Fool my belly till the day I die
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
--- from Cold Dog Soup by Guy Clark

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google
account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name
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Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.
Poets And Ego (Part 1)

About a month ago, I put the word out that I was looking for ideas about "poets and ego."
The replies I received were thoughtful and interesting. Many responded with well-considered
ideas about how the poet does or does not utilize the first person in their poems. For example,
Carlo Parcelli wrote that

All I can say is that I have always shunned the personal 'I' in my poetry except as 'persona'
for basically one reason. Not using it made me think and write in ways where I was not necessarily
the generative element, the psychic haven, if that makes any sense. Material as it appeared and
accrued played off other elements in the poem, not me.
Because my original idea had been to look at personality and behavioral aspects of poets, I
clarified my request like this,


Wondering why I do what I do? Why I paint? Why I publish books? Why I attend readings? Why I
send poems to and am published by journals? Why I'm aware of a certain competitiveness and self
promotion among poets? Why any of this matters? Why there are so many tempests in this tiny
little teapot whose very existence is known or understood by so few?
I was mindful of my own recent poem on this very subject,



Tea and Turmoil

Present universe requiring little,
she demands all things from herself,
“write poems, check Facebook. blog.
paint, create. Do it all before you die,
So little time to breathe, smile, feel.
So much to be before being itself is
no more, and nonbeing is or isn’t. So
why do much of anything requiring
planning, plans at which the gods
laugh and at such mortal fools
falling over each other boiling
like her in her little teapot —
so many kettle storms
felt only in this one crucible
which she with others like her
inhabit unbeknownst to
occupants of all those infinite pots
brewing tea and turmoil and
signifying only babble boiling
invisibly, inevitably, unknown.

So I went to poets like the wonderful Pat Nolan who told me
it’s all ego, Ed, and poets are surfers on the ego wave – gnarly
Ed, there may be a generation blindness. Oldsters not being able to see or have access to the great young talent, and youngsters too busy with themselves to discover the contemporary masters. There are hidden treasures, from Apollinaire to Whalen, that have been bypassed or ignored. It takes the diligence of a scholar to discover them. I don’t see many young poets taking that route.
To by original request for books on the subject, Copper Canyon Founder Sam Hamill replied,

Do I know of anything in print about poets egos? No. But 40 years as editor and friend to poets, I know many are out of control.

Clark County Washington Poet Laureate Christoper Luna gives us a comprehensive answer,


OK, Ed. I look at this way. A writer is one who is compelled to write. It does not necessarily follow that he/she must share it with the world. However, if one has something to say that means something, why not share it? And if what you're writing doesn't mean anything to you, why bother writing in the first place? Sharing the work publicly does involve some ego, but it need not be of the competitive, crush everything in its path variety. My model is Ginsberg, a Buddhist who also had an enormous ego and was a great promoter of himself and others. It is a kind of paradox, but poets grok negative capability, right?

I don't believe that we create in a vacuum. It is good for humans to meet, gather, and exchange ideas with one another. Getting up to read a poem at an open mic or featured reading does not automatically make one an egotistical asshole. That part is up to them. I do believe that we can do this work with humility and a sense of service to the community. I believe Ginsberg had a handle on poetry as a public service and a spiritual practice. If the work means something, then merely sharing it will help others.
Harsh as it may sound, my feeling is that if a writer doesn't believe that the work has the power to change the world, they should do anything else. There are plenty of others who take it seriously, and as you know, there's no money in it.
I find Sonoma County former poet laureate Bill Vartnaw characteristically public-spirited on the subject,

I don't know of a book. My own thoughts: I think "service." Service to poetry, other poets, other causes. For balance. I'm sure you do all this, but that's what I do. Poets need ego because we can be quick change artists and can get it utterly wrong; ego, besides making us think we're idiots when we're down, helps pull us out of the funk, but when we are on a roll, we need service. Hope this helps. . .

Given the subject, I hope I'm not being an enabler, or, if I am, am doing so modestly. This is also an invite to read at the Petaluma Poetry Walk. I don't know what venue yet. We're asking and seeing who can make it first. It's on September 20th. Do you want to read?
Well, of course I do, Bill! I hope these contributions are useful. In the next edition of NMIP, I will do a Part 2 on "Poets and Ego" and will incorporate more of the responses about the poem itself, particularly how poets see the role of themselves in the poem.
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Edit---

OK, Ed. I look at this way. A writer is one who is compelled to write. It does not necessarily
follow that he/she must share it with the world. However, if one has something to say that means
something, why not share it? And if what you're writing doesn't mean
anything to you, why bother writing in the first place? Sharing the work publicly does involve
some ego, but it need not be of the competitive, crush everything in its path variety. My model
is Ginsberg, a Buddhist who also had an enormous ego and was a great promoter of himself and
others. It is a kind of paradox, but poets grok negative capability, right?

I don't believe that we create in a vacuum. It is good for humans to meet, gather, and exchange
ideas with one another. Getting up to read a poem at an open mic or featured reading does not
automatically make one an egotistical asshole. That part is up to them. I do believe that we
can do this work with humility and a sense of service to the community. I believe Ginsberg had
a handle on poetry as a public service and a spiritual practice. If the work means something,
then merely sharing it will help others.
Harsh as it may sound, my feeling is that if a writer doesn't believe that the work has the power
to change the world, they should do anything else. There are plenty of others who take it
seriously, and as you know, there's no money in it.

^^^^^^^^^^^-- This pretty much sums up my view on potery as well.
Idealist, maybe- but why write if not serious-why write if not to eventually share?
And why write poetry if not to be giving of ones self?--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/250870#guide

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. > ........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/250662

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 .............................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...nterpellation/

Twilight of the Mind: Toward a Poetics of Interpellation
BY PHILP JENKS

Twilight
revisiting a prior version of this (see GutCult *8)
It isn’t exactly as Spicer said that “most things happen at twilight,” but is where the most productive natal spaces are located. It is here that the most interesting interpellations happen and what I hope poetry can be. I don’t want to be front and center, nor do I want to be obliterated. This space between is not-I, nor Thou, but is the space between. It is here that we re-call and re-cover what was/was not. Yes, there is a time and place for individuation and the abyss of night, but it is in relation to the world, between one and another that remembrance takes place. And when it does and is voiced as a beginning into more than what was there before, then this is where some of the greatest work is done. The neither subject nor object, nor neither attunes the body’s relationship to the world—and in so doing produces new experiences with one part of the body while recording those experiences with another. That chiasmic relationship is fundamentally connected to love for me. A poem can sing and sign, but if there is no love of the world or some world, it’s going to strike me as stale.
I’ve vexed on this subject for more hours, countless cups of coffee, heated complaints to the wall (and I fear, my neighbor by proxy), and two monumental efforts of procrastination. One of them involved trying to listen to all of my music from A – Z while the other was the decision to run my first marathon and actually train for it. As a smoker with 1000+ albums, finishing either task is demanding at best. I would fluster at the thought of saying what I think—and for that matter have never been one to venture to explain what this or that line of my writing “means” to me. I could tell you what I didn’t like, but to let you in on who or what I do like, that is frightening. Why? I may tell if you ask me. Ultimately, a loving relationship to an embodied world that sings and signs is what makes me leap and freak out. My incomplete list is long and comprises a generalist approach to poetics. The move is toward “inclusion” not strategically, but because inclusion opens into space, our wide faces. Some of what I would call poetry of twilight includes everyone mentioned above at some juncture, Elizabeth Treadwell, Johnson, Paul Blackburn, Ponge, Donne, Leslie Scalapino, Rilke, Rosmarie Waldrop, Creeley, Robin Blaser, Whitman, Anna Akhmataova, Forrest Gander, Baraka, Duncan, Mackey, Stein, Larry Eigner, Susan Howe, Sappho, Peter O’Leary, Maya Angelou, John Giorno, Michael Smith, Stein, Cavafy, Mallarme, Hölderlin, Cesaire, Kerouac and Snyder. The thing about poetry for me is that it is plenitude, has so many entry points for revelation that constriction to one school is sad, really. Much of the best verse in the United States isn’t coming from the academy, but from the world of music. Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey’s anthology, Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry & Prose moves significantly toward this. Still, if it is written (or sung) and laid down into recorded form with instrumentation, perhaps the most vibrant “vernacular” (and not so) verse from hip-hop to ? is often ignored. Grandmaster Flash crafts as much of a time in “The Message” and does so with all the standard markings of “poetry” as Ginsberg did with “Howl.”
What these writers share is a certain adhesion to and in the world/s. As Merleau-Ponty notes, that adhesion comes between or at the joints of self/other/world. This chiasm and a careful attuned attendance to it is a vital space, characterized by humility. If humbled before it, then “it” will get the care that the text and world deserves. Paul Blackburn’s “The Net of Place” embodies everything I hope to accomplish in my work.
I turn back to the Rockies, to the
valley swinging East, Glenwood to Aspen, up
the pass, it is the darkest night the hour before dawn,
Orion, old Hunter, with whom
I may never make peace again, swings
just over the horizon at 5 o’clock
as I walk . The mountains fade into light
[…]
It is
An intricate dance
to turn & say goodbye
to the hills we live in the presence of .
When mind dies of its time
It is not the place goes away .
I couldn’t, haven’t, and will never say it better. But, that’s not the point. It’s the charged and natal plenitude of what and who and where “we live in the presence.”

Tags: Aimé Césaire, chiasm, Dan McNaughton, Duncan McNaughton, Elizabeth Treadwell, Gary Snyder, Grandmaster Flash, GutCult, Holderlin, Io Mcnaughton, Jack Kerouac, John Donne, John Giorno, Kevin Killian, Larry Eigner, Mary Barnard, Maya Angelou, Merleau-Ponty, Michael Smith, Nathaniel Mackey, National Poetry Month 2015, Paul Blackburn, Poetry, Ponge, Robin Blaser, Sappho, Susan Howe, The Message, Treadwell
Posted in Featured Blogger on Wednesday, April 29th, 2015 by Philp Jenks.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250120

ESSAY
Snow Days
From flurries to relentless storms, why snow makes American poetry American.

BY STEPHEN BURT

Snow got you down? Maybe poetry can help—or, at the least, if you live in the part of the United States pummeled by snowstorms over the past few weeks, maybe the poets can bring you back to aspects of snow that aren’t about plows or school closings. “Snow is to water what poetry is to prose,” writes the historian Bernard Mergen in Snow in America. Snow may have been like poetry—beautiful, often impractical, different each time—since time immemorial, but there was not much snow in English-language poetry for centuries: Great Britain got snow (especially in the 18th century, the so-called “Little Ice Age”), but never as much as New England (let alone Minneapolis or Buffalo). Renaissance and Augustan poets could make it a metaphor (“O that I were a mockery king of snow!” exclaims Shakespeare’s Richard II), but they rarely described or enjoyed it for its own sake: James Thomson’s “Winter,” from The Seasons (1750), portrays “one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide / The works of man.” When Thomson tries to admire winter weather, he praises not snowflakes or snowdrifts but crisp ice and frost. British Romantic poets liked snow a lot more—Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had seen a lot of snow in the Swiss Alps, explains why in this poem:

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature’s, and may be
Untainted by man’s misery.
No wonder, then, that when the residents of the United States of America tried to distinguish their poems from those of Great Britain, some of them seized on the snow. Nineteenth-century writers, says Mergen, saw snow as a test of “moral and physical fitness,” as well as a way to “mirror Yankee character.” When Emily Dickinson wrote the line “I see—New Englandly,” she meant that it would not be winter, for her, “without the Snow’s Tableau.” In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm,” snow is a kind of Romantic poet, remaking simple New England farms and fences into elaborate shapes, then leaving human beings “[t]o mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, / Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, / The frolic architecture of the snow.”

Emerson’s poem supplied the epigraph to John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1866 “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl,” widely taught—and recited—in schools for a century. My mother’s parents used to read it aloud when snow closed her school for the day. Whittier’s snow makes a New England farmstead exotic:

The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;
The bridle-post an old man sat
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant splendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa’s leaning miracle.
Stuck indoors for a week, the Whittiers do puzzles, play games, and tell stories about New England and Quaker history. Whittier’s snowstorm scares children during the night, with “the shrieking of the mindless wind”— but when the sun comes up his family stays warm, and stays together, thanks to the “hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.”

Whittier was known, before the Civil War, for his poems against slavery, and “Snow-bound” preserves his Abolitionist sentiments, praying that “Freedom’s young apostles” can “[u]plift the black and white alike.” For later readers, though, the poet’s politics could disappear behind his snow-white images and Anglo-Saxon cast: poet and scholar Angela Sorby writes that “Snow-Bound” satisfied postbellum “longing for a simpler, more rustic, more intimate, more democratic, and whiter America.”

Snow can signify racial whiteness, or white supremacy, for African American poets today. Consider Thylias Moss’s response to Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” entitled “Interpretation of a Poem by Frost”: Moss’s young girl, “her face eternally the brown / of declining autumn,” goes into the white woods and finds, not Frost, but “Jim Crow.” She watches “snow inter the grass, / cling to bark making it seem indecisive / about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism”: the intricacies of literary interpretation can obscure the white privilege still present in literary scenes. But Moss’s girl has her own “promises to keep”:

the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow,
and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover,
more than the distance from black to white
before she sleeps with Jim.
Moss taught for years at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, an elite and historically WASPy prep school.

Terrance Hayes’s take on snowy whiteness interrogates Wallace Stevens, the author of “The Snow Man,” who famously made at least a few racist remarks. Hayes’s “Snow for Wallace Stevens” sees the modernist poet’s involuted, introverted, meditative work as part of his “snowed-in life”: “This song is for the wise man who avenges / by building his city in snow,” Hayes writes, quoting the last line of Stevens’s long poem “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.”

American poetry, like American history, cannot be separated from race and racism. Yet poetry by white Americans (Stevens among them) has given Hayes materials and techniques for his own self-aware and intricate poems:

I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. This song is for my foe,
the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.
Hayes looks more closely at snow than Stevens did (or so Hayes’s poem implies). Packed snow in cold light, which stands for Stevens’s America, is not entirely white (as in white privilege) but permeated by blue (as in the blues).

Snow in Alaska—especially for Native Alaskan poets—can take on meanings foreign to the Lower 48. For dg nanouk okpik, snowfall belongs to a ritual of renewal:

The smell of wormwood,
fresh snow
on beach greens,
like a place name,
from a hand-scribed map.
For okpik, as for other 21st-century Inupiaq and Inuit poets such as Joan Kane and Cathy Tagnak Rexford, falling snow is one aspect, and not the most important aspect, of the larger hydrological features—permafrost, “a freshwater glacier,” “shelf ice,” “glacial resin,” slush and open water—that have supported native cultures for centuries, but may no longer work as they did. In the title poem from Kane’s Hyperboreal, she watches “the last snowmelt, a tricklet into mud, ulterior,” then contemplates “a glacier’s heart of milk” amid the threat of climate change: “June really isn’t June anymore, / Is it?”

Earlier American poets found melancholy in snow for other reasons. In Randall Jarrell’s poems “Windows” (1955), “Quarried from snow, the dark walks lead to doors / That are dark and closed”: Jarrell’s lonely pedestrian watches the snowbound houses—some of them lit from within by a TV—and feels cut off from the families inside. “The windowed ones within their windowy world / Move past me without doubt and for no reason … If only I were they!” The traveler in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods,” on the other hand, with “miles to go before I sleep,” may not even want to go home; enticed by the “dark and deep” forest, he may want instead to get lost forever. The brightly familiar rhymes belie the equally Frostian terrors underneath.

Frost learned a lot from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, naming his first book, A Boy’s Will, after a Longfellow poem. Both poets became very popular in their own day, both depicted New England winters over and over, and both wrote poems that look like celebrations of cold weather but—seen close-up—hold tears. Longfellow’s great sonnet “The Cross of Snow” compared his own heart, after the death of his wife, to a forever-snowy, never-sunlit mountain crevasse in Colorado. He chose not to publish that poem during his lifetime, but he did publish the often-reprinted “Snow-flakes,” in which snow holds

the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

Because they melt fast, and because they at least seem unique, and because—if you grew up reading “Snow-Bound” or throwing snowballs—they connote childhood, snowflakes can also represent nostalgia. That is how William Matthews regarded the mild precipitation in his finest poem, “Spring Snow,” where “childhood doesn’t end / but accumulates” and memories, after a death, disperse “in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.” Accumulating and vanishing (either melted or plowed away), snow represents both erasure and memory, the wispy past and the emptiness of................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250242

ESSAY
First Loves
A formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds.

BY LYNN MELNICK AND BRETT FLETCHER LAUER

The Goodwill near Hollywood in the late ’80s was filled with outdated lampshades, corny figurines, and myriad mugs. It was also where, for 50 cents each, one of us—Lynn, to be specific—purchased The American Poetry Anthology, edited by Daniel Halpern, and Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, by Diane Wakoski. As for Brett, he didn’t have to search the used-book bins; when he began writing poetry as a teenager, his older brother sent home volumes from college: Sharon Olds’s Satan Says, Mark Strand’s Selected Poems, and the poetry anthology Walk on the Wild Side.

Years later, when the two of us were talking about our early discoveries, it became apparent how much these collections had provided a gateway for us into the world of contemporary poetry. It was with the hope of providing a similarly exhilarating experience to emerging readers and poets that we compiled our anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation.

In editing, we felt it was important not just to bring contemporary poems to a younger audience but to bring contemporary poets to a younger audience. So much of the poetry taught in schools is written by long-dead poets, and we wanted the readers to get to know the poets as real people, with real, 21st-century lives.

To that end, we sent a questionnaire to all 100 poets included in the anthology, and we included excerpts of their answers in the biographical notes of the book. (You can view them in their entirety here.) We asked the poets questions such as “What is your favorite word?” and “What is the natural talent you would most like to have?” (One-third of the poets listed “singing.”)

For us, though, the most compelling answers were to the question “What was the first poem you read and loved?” For poets, this question seems to recall other first questions they might find themselves asked by a friend: Do you remember your first kiss, or the first concert you attended? It is a formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds, and each tells a story.

We realized that the poets’ answers to this question created a persuasive list for further reading, what we began to call a “shadow anthology.” The following is an edited selection of the responses we received on first-poetry loves, from what we consider to be some of the most exciting poets writing today.


Srikanth Reddy
I probably read a lot of poems before I ever fell in love with one—you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs, as they say—but I do remember the first poem that rocked my world: “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” by Wallace Stevens. I’ll never forget that drunk and dreaming sailor at the end.

Jennifer Chang
One of the first poems I found and loved was in a book my grandfather left behind in our house, The World’s Best Poems, edited by Mark Van Doren, which I now keep on my office bookshelves. I was a gloomy little girl of about 11 or 12 and, upon reading that old book, went just crazy for Heinrich Heine, particularly the last stanza of “Mein Kind, Wir Waren Kinder”: “The children’s games are over, / The rest is over with youth— / The world, the good games, the good times, / The belief, and the love, and the truth.” I swooned over this gloomiest of poems and underlined those particular lines repeatedly, as if that would make the words spring to life.

Timothy Donnelly
The first poems I remember loving were among the things I read in high school English class: poems by Dickinson, Keats, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (if that counts); Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Later on I read Baudelaire, Plath, Rimbaud, and Sexton on my own, as well as other Stevens poems, including “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow,” the first poem whose hold on me was so powerful I felt like I must have written it myself.

Hafizah Geter
The first two books of poetry I ever owned were Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life, by Lee Bennett Hopkins, and a collection of Langston Hughes’s poems for children, Don’t You Turn Back. My mother was always reading Langston Hughes to my sister and me, and she would assign us poems from that book to memorize. At six I was reciting “My People,” and my sister, “Mother to Son,” for family friends. Been to Yesterdays was the first book of poems I ever picked out for myself. I remember staying up late at night and reading it under the covers with a flashlight. The experience of those two books is where I began as a writer. They’ve come with me on every move and are two of my most important possessions.

Dorothea Lasky
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I know it is technically a work of fiction, but it reads like a poem to me. I remember staying up one night when I was 10 to read it for the first time and feeling very proud by the time the morning sun arrived that I had finished. The images have stuck with me all my life. Then, years later, at age 15, I first read Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°” and I thought: “I want to write poems like this!”

Mark Bibbins
When I was 12 or 13 I saw some E.E. Cummings poems and that was that—their weirdness was something that has sustained and challenged me ever since.

Erika L. Sanchez
I first became enamored with poetry when my sixth-grade teacher had us read Edgar Allan Poe. I was a fairly lonely and depressed 12-year-old, so Poe’s dark and gloomy poems really spoke to me. I specifically remember reading the poem “Alone,” and my first thought was something like “Wow! This creepy guy really understands me!”

Shane Book
The first poems I remember reading were “Alligator Pie” by Dennis Lee and Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” though perhaps it was actually my father who read them to me while I stared at the black marks on the pages, saying the words a half-second after he did, a little echo curled into him on the couch. I do recall spending every spare waking moment for what seemed like a week but could have been a month, reading Homer’s Iliad and somewhere near the end of the book being stoked to find out there was a sequel and that it was called The Odyssey. Lying on my bed, in this two-minute break between ending one book-length epic poem and starting another I was seized by a feeling, a strange mixture of anxiety and adrenaline.

Adrian Matejka
Other than almost everything in Where the Sidewalk Ends, the first poem I loved was Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up.” I didn’t know poetry permitted cursing. More than that, it was the first time I felt like I got a poem.

Ben Lerner
My mom taught me “The Purple Cow” when I was very little. I loved it and the tragic story of the poet who could never outrun the fame of his nonsense verse, no matter how seriously he wanted to be taken.

CAConrad
I grew up in rural America, where everyone worked in factories and didn’t read much. As a result books, especially poetry books, were hard to come by, but Emily Dickinson was on our local library’s shelf. I fell in love with her poems, and remain in love with them. Don’t listen to any of the stories you will hear about Dickinson being a sad, wilting lily hiding in her Amherst house writing her sad poems. She was courageous! It’s simply not possible to have centuries of poetry come up to your doorstep and reject it all and write something new, and not be absolutely courageous. Emily Dickinson is my American hero.

Metta Sáma
My dad had about a thousand pens imprinted with the last two lines of “Invictus” by the poet William Ernest Henley: “I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” My memory tells me that he added the phrase “By God’s grace,” but that could be a false memory, something to do with having so much of my young life in and about church. Those lines have followed me around my entire life; it was the only poetry (or snippet of poetry) we had in our house, and I both loved and hated the lines. Loved them because, of course, they inspire us to be individual, to control as much of our destiny as we can. Somehow, having the words trapped on pens, particularly those pens with the eraser tops, the heavy tip, the heavier ink, that stayed stored in my father’s drawer, made me question what, exactly, “fate” and “soul” were, for my father, for myself, for this writer whose name I did not know, but whose words my father, beyond the pens, said to us. It was the first time in my (very very young) life that I understood the true nature of words: they are stored in our blood, scratched into our bones; our taste buds are words; fingerprints, words.
Originally Published: March 11, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/249164

ESSAY
The Writing Class
On privilege, the AWP-industrial complex, and why poetry doesn’t seem to matter.

BY JASWINDER BOLINA


These are some of the ways my immigrant parents survived recessions, layoffs, and the disappearance of entire industries from the U.S. economy. This is how they earned, saved, and invested enough to move us into a brick split-level house with a two-and-a-half-car garage in the suburbs by the time I started secondary school. Though my father clocked into the same hydraulics parts plant as a machinist for more than a decade and my mother did data entry for an hourly wage at a financial publishing company, they could afford to buy me a set of encyclopedias and an Apple computer. They could pay for tennis lessons and give me a stereo system with a CD player and a double-cassette deck. They could send me to the private academy instead of the public high school.

This is how I lived a socioeconomic reality almost entirely separate from theirs. While my parents scrimped and stressed daily as part of the working classes, I went to a school with honors societies, study abroad programs, and AP courses. I went to college. I managed to turn my philosophy major into a high-paying job at a software startup south of Silicon Valley. Higher education had kept its promise of onward and upward mobility, which seemed easy enough in the bloated turn-of-the-century tech economy. Still, after less than six months at the startup, I decided to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. This didn’t make sense to my mother and father. Though we were far removed from the ragged apartments of my childhood, their class consciousness remained rooted in those earlier struggles. It told them we weren’t the kind of people who did certain kinds of things. Abandoning a salaried job with stock options for a graduate degree offering little hope of future employment or reliable income was chief among these, but I liked the integrity in my plan. If a degree in poetry dumped me into bohemian poverty, I thought, so be it. At least I was being earnest in my pursuit. I was that kind of people.

•

My father wrote his share of poems in high school in India. He still recites verses—though never his own—in Punjabi on occasional late evenings. My mother, the daughter of a schoolteacher and at the top of her high school class in a village not far from my father’s, could probably recite a few herself. Poetry wasn’t a bad idea in the abstract to either of them. It might even be a noble pursuit, but it also seemed a thing better left to the children of the wealthy than to the son of working-class immigrants. To their minds, being a poet wasn’t a job. They still felt too near the keen edge of hardship to see me follow so precarious a career path. I didn’t see the danger.

I don’t think I entirely understood that it was the economic advantage they had worked and paid for that permitted me to be so brazen. If I’d been anything other than a protected spectator during my parents’ lean years, if I didn’t have their income and savings for a safety net during and after college, I probably would have stuck with that startup or some other bleary office job. Economists and accountants might make raw distinctions between the classes based on objective metrics such as net worth or income—the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, for instance—but class consciousness might be better defined by the kinds of choices we feel permitted to make. Where the working classes are regularly forced to take pragmatic action out of necessity, the privileged are allowed to act on desire. My parents’ money, modest as it was and still is, did more than pay for the things I needed. It allowed me to want things they couldn’t afford to want themselves.

There isn’t anything inherently bratty about this. It is, after all, what class mobility is meant to accomplish in the too few places such a thing is even possible. The brat is born when the privileged mistakenly believe that we somehow earned and deserve the socioeconomic and structural advantages granted to us by the fluke or fortune of family, gender, race, sexual preference, religion, education, or national origin. To suffer from that delusion is a mostly personal problem. It becomes a problem for everybody else when the privileged also believe that the things we’re permitted to want are necessary or superior to what somebody else wants, when we believe our desires should be respected and even admired by those who don’t share in our advantage.

I don’t know that I ever suffered from cluelessness quite so severe as that. I did believe my dream of a life in poetry to be pure, to be something apart from socioeconomics. My concerns were artistic concerns, I thought, my acceptance of bohemianism an earnest embrace of the artist’s life. The contradiction is that those concerns, however sincere, led me to graduate school. The desire to write and publish poetry leads a lot of us there, which is all well and good, but there’s nothing bohemian about it. Quite the opposite, Western postgraduate education has historically been one of our culture’s most prominent expressions of upper-class privilege. The fact that grad programs in creative writing exist at all is testament to the remarkable abundance of collective, institutional wealth in the United States. Those of us who are able to attend these programs can do so only as beneficiaries of certain structural advantages that are required simply to walk through their gates. Latter-day versions of my parents, meaning those who might appreciate poetry but lack college degrees or the time and resources to spend on graduate schooling, can’t join us there.

This might be acceptable in the context of professional fields such as medicine, business, and law, but poetry is supposed to be an art, which means it should at least attempt to represent the society in which it’s produced. It can’t fully do this if its primary mode of production inherently excludes large swaths of the population. The risk of such exclusions is that they limit the variety and appeal of the kind of writing produced in graduate programs. Nearly every complaint about contemporary poetry in the United States, whether in reference to the lack of diversity among those publishing it or to its opacity or to the very credibility of the genre itself, is rooted in this basic dynamic.

•

I wanted to write poetry. I didn’t need a graduate degree to do this. Nobody does. But graduate programs in creative writing offer a two- to five-year respite from that other life working long hours in restaurants, bars, factories, or offices. We’re given time and money—no matter how brief and how paltry—to focus almost exclusively on our art, which is no small advantage over everyone else writing on the fringes of a 40-or-more-hour workweek. For many of us, that advantage is supplemented by financial support from parents, partners, and spouses along the way. Added to this is the immaterial benefit of receiving feedback on our writing from published faculty and invested classmates, which helps us refine our poems toward publication—an achievement that might finally give us the satisfaction we’re all after to begin with.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/249164

Concluding from previous link and post--Tyr




As for poetry itself, it’s possible that more people are writing, reading, performing, and
publishing it today than at any other point in human history. If, in spite of this, our work
doesn’t seem to bring enough refreshment to readers outside of our industry, if so many feel
disconnected from both, it probably isn’t because their desire for the poetic mode of
expression has gone away. It’s more likely because they can’t afford our version of it.
They don’t have the same time and money some of us have had to invest in it. Our poems, then,
become a thing like that $2 houseplant my parents waged their small war over. Neither is an
object anybody needs. Either can be ignored when more vital concerns loom large. Yet people
want them still. Open-mic nights and slams that take place daily across the country stand as
proof of the desire for poetry. Beyond these, millions turn to the lyrics of singer-songwriters
and hip-hop artists for experiences in verse. The complaint among the poetry-is-dead set is
that too few of those people ever turn to us certified, bona fide poets of the AWP.

If we want to bring those critics and those masses to our poems, if we want poetry to matter
to those outside our classrooms and conference halls—and there may be some poets who don’t;
bully for them—then those others, their lives and their language, have to matter to us first.
The only way they will is if we disrupt the culture of privilege that insulates us. And we
need to disrupt it, not for our egoistic desire for a larger audience, but for the sake of
our art. The only job of the poet is to destabilize and expand language. This is how poetry
changes the world—not by grand ambition or the lauding of critics. It takes the plodding,
unending effort of many to alter line by line, phrase by phrase, word by word the way we
describe ourselves and everything around us. This is how we change perception. This is how we
change the mind. We can’t do it while isolated by our privilege. There are too few of us.
Our language is too limited. We need more words. We need more than ourselves and each other.
We need every broke shoulder to the wheel.

Originally Published: November 12, 2014

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/249062

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
The Medium of the English Language
BY JAMES LONGENBACH

The Medium of the English Language
BY JAMES LONGENBACH
The medium of Giorgione’s Tempest is “oil on canvas”; the medium of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is “oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet.” Descriptions of a work of art’s medium seem to tell us everything and nothing, for our entire experience of art is dependent upon the artist’s intimacy with the medium, and yet the medium itself may seem weirdly mundane, especially when the artist harnesses everyday materials like a sheet. In the nineteenth century, the stuff from which art is made came to be called the medium because for hundreds of years the word had referred to something that acts as an intermediary, a piece of money or a messenger. The artistic medium enables a transaction between the artist and the world, and, over time, the history of those transactions has become inextricable from the medium as such, an inherited set of conventions. It’s not coincidental that it was also in the nineteenth century that the word medium was first used to describe a person who conducts a séance, a person who exists simultaneously in the worlds of the living and the dead.

Lots of people sleep on sheets. Very few people handle oil paint as provocatively as Rauschenberg, and even fewer deploy sheets as a way of forging a transaction between the interior space of the mind and the exterior space of the world, a transaction that gives other people, the audience, an enticing and sometimes puzzling way of rethinking their own relationship to those spaces. Members of the audience may draw a little, they may have a fine sense of color, but they respect the transaction that the artistic medium does not simply record but presents as a unique and enduring act in time. Sometimes, however, when the sheer otherness of the medium is foregrounded at the expense of a conventional signal of the artist’s mind at work, they don’t respect the transaction, in part because the artist doesn’t covet such respect: how can art be something made of a bed sheet?

How can art be something made of words, the same words used for newspapers and parking tickets? Unlike the media most commonly associated with visual and sonic artistry, words are harnessed by most people during almost every waking moment of their lives; they’re more like bed sheets than like oil paint or the notes of the diatonic scale. Even small children are skilled manipulators of language, 
capable of detecting and repeating the most subtle nuances of intonation and tone: how swiftly we learn that by shifting the accent from one syllable to the other, the two-syllable word “contract” can be either a noun referring to a kind of agreement (“contract”) or a verb meaning either to acquire or constrict (“contract”). But while children rarely confuse such words when they’re speaking, children don’t write the poems of Shakespeare or the novels of Henry James, and neither do most adults. We may sustain an easy mastery of language in our daily lives, but once we engage language as an artistic medium, that mastery is never secure: our relationship to language is constantly changing as we discover aspects of the medium that our prior failures and, more potently, our prior successes had occluded.

My medium is not language at large but the English language. When I was young I took this for granted, but over the years I’ve become increasingly conscious of the qualities shared by poems because they’re written in English, rather than Italian or French. I’m not fluent in those languages; while I’ve lived for a time in Italy, where my children attended Italian school, I spent much of that time sitting at a desk, trying to write poems in English. But my lack of fluency heightened my awareness of my medium. Living in Florence, I was incapable of taking my mastery of  language for granted, and this incapacity not only reared its head when I was speaking broken Italian to our landlord; it infected my relationship to English, demanding that I hear the medium of the English language in particular ways, ways in which it has also been heard before. In Italian, the word for what we call a landlord is proprietario, just as in French it is propriétaire. And while those languages contain no version of the word landlord, a typically Germanic compound noun, the English language does contain the Latinate word proprietor: when we savor these possibilities, we are (as the meanings of the word medium suggest) undertaking a complex negotiation with the dead.

Every language has different registers of diction, but the English language comes by those registers in a particular way, one that reflects 
the entire history of the language. Unlike the romance languages, which were derived from the Latin spread throughout Italy, France, and Spain during the Roman Empire, English descended independently from German. Old English, the language of the eighth- or ninth-century poem we call “The Seafarer,” now looks and sounds to us like a foreign language, close to the German from which it was derived: with some study, one can see that the Old English line “bitre breostcaere gebiden hæbbe” means “bitter breast-cares abided have” or “I have abided bitter breast-cares.” The language of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century Canterbury Tales, or what we call Middle English, feels less strange, in part because its sense now relies largely on word order rather than on word endings: “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” or “then people long to go on pilgrimages.” And the Modern English of the Renaissance we can read easily, because it is the language we speak today, even though the language has continued to evolve: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”

Many complicated factors determined this evolution, but one of the most important was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Once Norman French became the language of the English court, a new vocabulary of words derived from Latin began to migrate into Germanic English. The Old English poet could abide breast-cares, but he could not go on a pilgrimage or suffer impediments; those Latinate words were not available to him. Even today, we raise pigs and cows (from German, via Old English) but eat pork and beef (from Latin, via French), because after the Norman conquest the peasants who raised animals generally spoke English while the noblemen who ate them spoke French. We similarly inhabit a body but bury a corpse because the English language contains Germanic and Latinate words for the same thing, and, over time, we have made discriminations in their meanings. The traditional language of English law is studded with pairs of Germanic and Latinate words (will and testament, breaking and entering, goods and chattels) in which the meaning is not discriminated but reiterated, made available to the widest variety of people who spoke the rapidly developing English language.

Speakers of English may or may not be aware that their language is by its nature different from itself, but any interaction with English as an artistic medium depends on the deployment of words with etymologically distant roots — words that sound almost as different from each other as do words from German and Italian. Notoriously, T.S. Eliot incorporated quotations from foreign languages into his poems, but in The Waste Land, when he jumps from German words (“das Meer”) to words borrowed from the French (“famous clairvoyante”), he is exaggerating what English-language poems do inevitably all the time. The line “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” mixes Germanic and Latinate diction strategically (the plain folk playing off the fancy pilgrimages), and the sentence “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” does so more intricately, the Germanic monosyllables let, true, and minds consorting with the Latinate marriage, admit, and impediments to create the richly 
polyglot texture that, over time, speakers of English have come to recognize as the very sound of eloquence itself. One hears it again in Keats (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”), in Browning (“the quiet-colored end of evening smiles”), or in most any poet writing today. Coleridge famously called Shakespeare “myriad minded,” a phrase that itself wedges together Latinate and Germanic words, and the very medium of English-language poetry is in this sense myriad minded.

It’s possible to write Modern English as if it were an almost exclusively Germanic language, as James Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, evoking the alliterative rhythms of Old English poetry by giving priority to Germanic monosyllables and treating English as if it were still a highly inflected language, in which sense need not depend on word order:

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship.
It’s also possible to write English as if it were an almost exclusively Latinate language, as Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, frontloading Latinate vocabulary and weeding out as many Germanic words as possible:

Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed.
But these bravura efforts of parody and pastiche sound more like the resuscitation of a dead language than the active deployment of a living one; it’s difficult to speak English so single-mindedly. In contrast, Shakespeare’s language feels fully alive in Sonnet 116, and yet its drama nonetheless depends on the strategic juxtaposition of a Germanic phrase (“true minds”) with a highly Latinate phrase that a speaker of English might never say (“admit impediments”), just as that speaker probably wouldn’t say “babe bliss had” or “with sapience endowed.” We don’t speak of the cow who jumps over the moon as “translunar,” though we could.

We do speak of the “Grand Canal” when we come to Venice, deploying two Latinate words; but to a native speaker of Italian, the word grande simply means big. As an Italian friend of mine once said, all we’re thinking about is size: the canal is big in the same way that your hat might be too big, “troppo grande.” The difference between our deployment of the Latinate phrases “Grand Canal” and “admit impediments” is that in the former case we are scripted by the language we deploy, our typically awe-struck response to the history of Venice produced by the language we speak. In the latter case Shakespeare has made a choice, as in other circumstances any speaker of English might also make a choice: saying “look how big the canal is” 
is different from saying “look how grand the canal is.” It is at such junctures that our language begins to function as a medium, something that acts as an intermediary, a transitional object. Nothing is automatically an artistic medium, though anything could be.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/248620

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Undead Eliot: How “The Waste Land” Sounds Now
BY LESLEY WHEELER

When reading a poet who found his own voice after 1922, I often come across a cadence or trick of diction which makes me say “Oh, he’s read Hardy, or Yeats, or Rilke,” but seldom, if ever, can I detect an immediate, direct influence from Eliot. His indirect influence has, of course, been immense, but I should be hard put to it to say exactly what it is.
— W.H. Auden

Thomas Sayers Ellis, or a version of him looping eternally on YouTube, is about to read “All Their Stanzas Look Alike,” a weirdly 
hypnotic indictment of academic and aesthetic politics. Before launching into the poem, he remarks:

I was beat digging at the artist’s colony, it’s kind of funny, and I heard “let us go then you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky in a red wheelbarrow and that has made all the difference.” The cadence of that decade became my new haint, the new thing that haunted me, and so I wrote this — this is an homage to that sound.

Imagine this pastiche declaimed in a deep-pitched monotone, as Ellis jiggles nonexistent jowls. He goes on to observe that during his childhood in Washington DC, “the voice that was on television all the time was Richard Nixon, and so when I began my formal training in poetry, you know, they all sounded like Nixon to me.”

Thomas Sayers Ellis reads Thomas Stearns Eliot (and Williams, and Frost) as Nixon, guilty spokesman for a corrupt establishment. This is part of what modernism means now, has meant for decades: not revolutionary art but stiff authority. Despite the stiffness and the guilt, though, Ellis describes enchantment by rhythm. Ellis was beat digging, riffling through old vinyl, haunted less by the denotation of the words than by their detonations. Auden is right that moments of Eliotic influence are hard to finger, but it’s precisely in cadence that Eliot’s work survives.

For twenty-first-century poets, Eliot persists as a sonic obsession more vividly than as a poet who leveled important arguments or shaped literary history. As editor, critic, and builder of poetic landmarks from recycled materials, the man overshadowed Anglo-American poetry for generations. For William Carlos Williams, the atomic blast of The Waste Land knocked American poetry out of its groove. For poets born in the thirties and forties — Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney — Eliot is monumental, although those writers have different responses to his looming edifice. Poets born since, though, metabolized Eliot differently. It’s not that modernism is less relevant. Younger writers claim certain modernist poets over and over: Williams, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, H.D., Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks. Eliot just isn’t on their public lists quite so often.

The “paradigm shift” lowering Eliot’s status, as David Chinitz puts it, occurred in the eighties. In 1989, Cynthia Ozick commented in The New Yorker on Eliot’s reduced place in school curricula. Books by Christopher Ricks and, slightly later, Anthony Julius brought Eliot’s anti-Semitism to the fore. Also in the late eighties, a prize-winning essay by Wayne Koestenbaum highlighted Eliot’s misogynistic and homoerotic correspondence with Ezra Pound, midwife to The Waste Land. Eliot’s poetry of the teens and twenties communicates fear of women, and often revulsion about their bodies, and Koestenbaum adds force to the point. Then there was Eliot’s portrayal in the 1994 film Tom & Viv by Willem Dafoe, a.k.a. the Green Goblin. Eliot is a synonym for tradition but he also became, for readers attuned to his prejudices, a supervillain.

The gradual mutation of modernist reputations over time is no catastrophe. Certain poetic frequencies, strong at the time, had become buried in interference. Poet-performers such as Hughes, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg experimented with new performance modes and ultimately changed what we expect from poetry readings, in addition to publishing verse that hums with theatrical and musical energy — their signals should still reach us. Nor does the swelling of the modernist horde mean Eliot’s resonance has died. People want to voice his poetry and hear it voiced. Four Quartets, for instance, is popular again, inspiring performances by Chicago actor Mike Rogalski and by Ariel Artists, 
a group of classical musicians that stages collaborative events.

For poets making their names now, Eliot endures as a rhythm, an icon of recurrence. His early verse offers a resource for those 
obsessed with linguistic music but skeptical of meter, and particularly for poets who chime radically different registers and references, hoping to revive something human through uncanny convergences. For some writers, these powerful cadences are abstracted from meaning; The Waste Land is an emblem of obscurity, communicating mainly the impossibility of communication. Others, though, understand the noisiness of Eliot’s jazz-influenced verse as a mark and even a means of transformation. Sound is how Eliot expresses personal despair and social critique most forcefully, and also how he survives the apocalypse.

•

“Poetic sound” is a physical phenomenon and a metaphor. Voiced texts, whether performed by the author or by someone else, involve pitch, volume, duration, and all the linguistic prosody of dialect, 
including rhythm, stress, and intonation. Medium matters: live presence and video convey gesture, facial expression, and other visual information, while recording and broadcasting technologies introduce nonhuman noise and strip away most of what the body says. Silent reading is also a physical phenomenon, engaging muscles and parts of the brain associated with vocalization and audition. Printed, digital, or manuscript texts have other sonic attributes, too. Although recitation makes sound structures more audible, a good reader, without voicing a poem, may perceive alliteration, rhyme, and meter or other rhythmic patterns interacting with vocabulary and typography. I often seem to hear a poem as I read it silently, especially if I know the author’s own voice, and most especially if that voice is unusual — 
Brooks’s musical intonations, for example, haunt my inner ear more powerfully than Adrienne Rich’s plain intensity, although both 
authors are deeply important to me.

Because listening to an author’s recitation can change how you read a poem forever, never play Eliot’s 1948 recording of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “Prufrock” on the page is full of discord, humor, fear, and despair, but the poet’s Talking Dead performance leaches out its urgency. Listeners to the Caedmon version of The Waste Land, recorded in 1947 and 1955 in London, and for a long time the only widely available performance by Eliot, have often felt the same horror. This version is, however, unforgettable. My own copy is a bootleg cassette handed to me in the early nineties by my dissertation adviser, A. Walton Litz. He remarked that Eliot’s recitation 
lasts just under half an hour, meaning, by Edgar Allan Poe’s rule of duration, The Waste Land counts as a lyric poem. Did Walt give this peculiar gift to generations of graduate students, or did he, like Tiresias, foresee my doom?

This aural document is peculiar in several ways. Part of the strangeness rests in pronunciation. Eliot was raised in St. Louis and educated in New England when American classrooms emphasized the art of elocution. The Waste Land was published in 1922, but by the forties, Eliot had lived in England for decades and deliv....................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/249038

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
On “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time” by Larry Levis
BY DAVID ST. JOHN

Larry Levis’s dramatic monologue, “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time,” invokes the opening lines of one of Villon’s most famous poems, “Ballade des Pendus,” (Ballade of the Hanged Men), also known as “Frères Humains” or “Epitaphe Villon.” Villon’s poem was published posthumously in 1489 and has been widely — though not conclusively — acknowledged to have been written while Villon was in prison awaiting execution (his sentence was later commuted to banishment from Paris).

Villon’s opening two lines read, in French: “Frères humains, qui après nous vivez, / N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis,” and are translated by Galway Kinnell as: “Brother humans who live on after us / Don’t let your hearts harden against us.” These lines are a conventional plea for Christian charity typical of the Middle Ages, as the following two lines (again, Kinnell’s translation) make clear: “For if you have pity on wretches like us / More likely God will show mercy to you.” Yet the hanged speakers in Villon’s poem don’t seek any simple charity from their “brother humans,” but instead ask for the prayers of their “brothers” so that they, the hanged, might find some form of redemption and absolution, although their bodies have already rotted and been devoured by both birds (in Villon, magpies and crows) and the elements.

During the years 1972–1974, while studying for his doctoral exams in modern letters at the University of Iowa, Levis had become immersed in French poetry and also, under the guidance of Daniel Weissbort, the practice and theory of translation. Levis had been reading both Villon and Baudelaire in French since the time he was an undergraduate, and had more recently discovered other French poets he’d come to love — Gérard de Nerval, Jules Supervielle, and Pierre Reverdy. Of the surrealists, Levis admired most Robert Desnos and Paul Éluard, for their poetry, and André Breton, for his nerve.

Four hundred years after Villon, in his poem “Au Lecteur,” Baudelaire would offer his own trenchant testimony as he cataloged a carnivalesque stream of characters and despairs that could have been drawn directly from Villon’s age and poetry into Baudelaire’s “modern” Paris. The speaker in Levis’s poem is the self-named François Villon — who lives in both his own time and in the equally merciless, equally savage late twentieth century — as voiced by Levis, who has shrewdly chosen Villon as his own Baudelairean semblable, his own poetic frère. In the raw conclusion of the Levis poem, Villon presents himself as being hanged not by the neck but upon a cross, and crucified, a still-living mirror for those of us he is addressing — he is our “disappearing likeness on the cross!” No wonder that we live in a time both ancient and immediate, as Levis-and-Villon notes, when “there’s not one tear left in all of us.”

Originally Published: November 3, 2014
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No wonder that we live in a time both ancient and immediate, as Levis-and-Villon notes, when “there’s not one tear left in all of us.”

Found this very interesting article. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...i-didn’t-know/

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 dif

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/248812

Four Englands
Four Debut British Poets Being Variously English

BY TODD SWIFT


This omnibus review is very much about English poetry, and Englishness in contemporary poetry from England, and, perhaps even better, young English poets. By something like a happy coincidence, these four collections are each by a poet who has won an Eric Gregory Award (more on this in a moment) — and, even more pleasingly, they won their awards more or less consecutively, in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 (Martinez de las Rivas, Mort, Berry, Brookes). So, here are four poets who have been noticed, and even encouraged, as some of the main rising stars of new poetry in “these isles.” Well, these isles are crowded with poets, many Welsh, Irish, or Scottish, but any list of the most appreciated of the YBPs (Young British Poets) would include these poets — along with, say, Ahren Warner, Sam Riviere, Luke Kennard, Heather Phillipson, Sandeep Parmar, Caleb Klaces, Jen Hadfield, Jack Underwood, Liz Berry, James Byrne, Jon Stone, and Clare Pollard.

There is something like a broad consensus that has been forming, based on appearances in the larger British magazines, acquisition of prizes and university degrees, and publication in pamphlet form with publishers like Faber and Faber, or, in a smaller way, tall-lighthouse, when Roddy Lumsden was its editor. The Eric Gregory goes every year to a handful of the best poets thirty years or under, for an unpublished manuscript. To win one is to get a nice chunk of money, and 
a very good shot at a publishing deal within the next few years.

In the case of the poets here whose books from late 2012 to 2014 are under review, this wait has been between three and nine years. One of the collections is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which is the sort of stamp of approval most poets would gnaw a finger off for; Berry has won a Forward Prize, and Mort been asked to judge the Forwards already (a great honor for a debut poet); Brookes was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Martinez de las Rivas is being spoken of as a major new Christian poet. Each is from a recognized publisher — Faber and Chatto & Windus, relatively major players; and Salt, the feisty newer kid on the block (despite having published hundreds of poetry books). In short, here are four poets American poets and poetry readers would do well to acquaint themselves with — and yet, none of these debuts are likely to be widely sold, reviewed, or read beyond Britain’s borders, at least for the time being.

These poets come out of a certain tradition, or at an angle from The Tradition, as one might expect of poets in their twenties or early thirties. Each has a few notable precursors, so-called presiding spirits, who have very much shaped their work’s temperament, goals, and style. Helen Mort, a poet from Sheffield in the relatively impoverished North of England (home to the major indie band Arctic Monkeys), writes under the influence of Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, yet her major themes and music come even more from Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson — each, in their way, very male poets. 
In a sense, Mort is the strong female Northern Poet, come at last (she does not very much resemble the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who nevertheless has publicly praised her work).

Emily Berry is only one of the “Berrywomen” now active in London poetry circles — the other is Liz Berry, whose own debut was published this year. Ms. Emily’s is a berry-red book from Faber, with the very pop title of Dear Boy. Berry is from London, where she has lived her whole life and it is something of a rude shock to actually read a Faber collection by a British poet from the publishing capital itself, who is, for instance, not Irish or Scottish. She is resolutely English in tone and manner, in much the same way as her hero, Morrissey of The Smiths is; indeed, Berry’s key precursors may be said to be the great pop and indie lyricists since the eighties, during which time she grew up. But this is half the story. In other ways, her ironic, edgy, and peculiarly strangled emotionalism seems to reach out and grab Plath from the grave and demand she return, this time as a pastiche ghoul. Berry, then, has a skewed relationship to how contemporary British poetry has heretofore tended to sound — unless one had been reading Luke Kennard, the strongest poet of this new generation, who seems to have invented several of the key tropes, forms, and concepts that Berry herself assays.

James Brookes is even more English than Berry, if such is possible. That is because, in a daring or foolhardy swerve back to confront the major living poet of his place and time, Brookes seeks to take on Geoffrey Hill at his own game. Surely Hill, like Milton or Yeats, has mastered a baroque and learned rhetoric so steeped in history and language as to be inescapably his own? Well, yes, and no. The general way of putting it is that Brookes “reminds” us of Hill. I would say he out-Hills Hill, in being, in this debut, even more concerned with the history of kings and parliament, the violence and graphic details of world wars, and the demands of place, in this instance, Sussex, where he was fortunately born a stone’s throw from Shelley’s “boyhood home.” It is perhaps unimaginable for an American poet born in 1986 (even if it was a few yards from Hailey, Idaho) to unironically compose and publish poems with titles like “Amen to Artillery,” “Silent Enim Leges Inter Arma,” “Surveying the Queen’s Pictures,” or “Lucifer at Camlann.” This is high poetry, full stop.

However, in terms of an attempt to turn lyric modernism’s highest Hill into a mountain, or unaging intellectual monuments, we must end with the Somerset-raised Martinez de las Rivas, whose Christian poetry seems almost impossibly erudite (by contemporary standards), with blatant echoes of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, David Jones, and Lowell, and several poems that (seemingly without irony) break off into Anglo-Saxon, Greek, or Latin. It is apparently the most learned debut by a twenty-first-century British poet; we in England last saw work with this Poundian high modernist ethos in Bunting. Depending on your relationship to words like “elitism” and “accessibility,” Terror either appalls or thrills, or both — as it is no doubt (given its title) meant to.

What we have here are excellent emerging poets, each to a certain degree acclaimed, each imbued with a seriousness of purpose that varies between the almost-sentimental to the almost-portentous, with way-stops any fellow traveler will recognize as arch irony, wit, reserve, and tonally restrained elegance. These are the stations of the English poetic cross, and yet these pilgrims make something new of them while revisiting the old blood-dimmed haunts.


•


Helen Mort’s Division Street opens with a quote from Stevenson about Jekyll and Hyde, followed by a poem playing on the fact that her name means “death” in French; and various poems across the book relate to divided loyalties, identities, and the dangers (and promise) of names. Anyone who has followed British poetry since 1990 will know this is territory that deceased British-American poet Michael Donaghy staked out as his own in the poem “Smith,” often cited as a modern British classic. However, this idea of doubles, and doubling, and double identities, central to Scottish literature from James Hogg to Robert Louis Stevenson, indeed, J.K. Rowling, is perhaps most famously explored, even obsessively so, in most of Don Paterson’s collections; Paterson is the best-known advocate of Donaghy’s work (as well as his publisher at Picador). Mort’s collection is almost a direct reply to these influences — and is especially Patersonian in its sensorial enjoyment of alcohol, pubs, and drink in general — few other poetry collections have such a fug of lock-ins as this one. In her most Patersonian moment, in the poem “The Complete Works of Anonymous,” she even says, “I’ll raise a glass to dear Anonymous: the old / familiar anti-signature, the simple courage / of that mark.” In Mort’s Northern English world, raising a glass is no bad thing. Indeed, as she tells us in “Oldham’s Burning Sands,” “people sing the sweetest when they’re drunk.” As a credo for a poet it promises lots of hangovers after the carped diem. “Stainless Stephen,” a local, provincial comedian down on his luck, even when shut out of most establishments, “knows a pub across the river / where the doors will never shut.” Even the elements want to possess the local pub — snow, in the poem “Fur,” wants “to claim The Blacksmith’s Arms.” In the poem “Fagan’s” there is a pub quiz host “part-drunkard, part-Messiah.” The Division seems to be between those sober, and less so. In fact, it is more than that. Mort’s poems can sometimes be a bit sentimental, or force a bonhomie or epiphany past the point of no return, but her music is almost never wrong — indeed, in terms of her skill at expertly deploying fairly conservative rhythm and rhyme, she seems the equal of Paterson or Duffy.

More vitally, her origins appear authentic — her Northern “voice” underwritten by a sense of generational blight and hardscrabble self-empowerment that few poets from the South of England could ever reference. Not since Tony Harrison, it seems, has a poet wanted to make so much of what divides “uz” from them. The two most noteworthy poems in the collection, which as a whole is as openly 
readable as any mainstream British poetry is likely to ever be this decade, and hence, as likely to be prized for such, both emphasize the rather striking (pun intended) contrast between Mort’s non-elite past (growing up Northern, and less privileged) and her elite present, or more recent past (Cambridge student/graduate). This becomes the tension of her own life and work, but, more broadly, the perceived tension of the English current today.

The great poem in the book, a sequence in five parts, is called “Scab.” A scab, which we know is a wound’s barely healed covering often picked at, to no good effect, is also the ugly name for someone who crosses a picket line during a strike to find work — often, poignantly, betraying family and friends in the process of making ends meet. This resonates with the violent history of the suppression of the miners’ strikes under Thatcherism. Mort considers how her own crossing, from Sheffield to Cambridge, is an equivalent selling out of more tribal loyalties. In the bravura last few lines, she achieves a tonal force simple yet worthy of her concerns, likely to make the poem essential reading for anyone concerned with such issues:

One day, it crashes through
your windowpane; the stone,
the word, the fallen star. You’re left
to guess which picket line
you crossed — a gilded College gate,
a better supermarket, the entrance
to your flat where, even now, someone
has scrawled the worst insult they can — 
a name. Look close. It’s yours.
That is the big poem in the book, but to this reader, the more elegantly affecting is “Miss Heath,” a poem in nine more-or-less tercets, whose narrative is easily summarized. Mort writes the kind of popular English poem whose subject and theme can be summed up easily, and is thus ideal for exams; this is what the experimental poets 
loathe about so-called mainstream British poetry, that it d

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/251110

ESSAY
Prufrock, Lewinsky, and the Poetry of History
How T. S. Eliot’s lovelorn classic still sways us.

BY AUSTIN ALLEN

One of the more striking literary essays in recent memory appeared this summer to zero fanfare. That in itself is no surprise: most literary critics could reveal the nuclear codes without even the NSA noticing. Still, you might have expected some buzz around a splashy Vanity Fair tribute to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” penned by a longtime fan named Monica Lewinsky.

The occasion of the essay was the “Prufrock” centenary; the author’s guiding impulse was sheer enthusiasm. Lewinsky writes that she was “smitten” by T. S. Eliot’s lovelorn classic as a teenager and that after “more than 20 years, these feelings have not waned.” She’s a connoisseur of “Prufrock” allusions, from the pop to the highbrow; one “personal favorite” comes from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris: “Prufrock is my mantra!” Even her e-mail address contains a “Prufrock” reference—a fruitful conversation starter, she says, with fellow lovers of the poem.

As it turns out, this isn’t the first revelation of her fandom. The 1999 biography Monica’s Story, which Andrew Morton wrote in collaboration with his subject, mentions her “life-changing” love of poetry and of “Prufrock” in particular. Covering the Morton bio for Time in 1999, John Cloud peppered his article with excerpts from the poem. He introduced a section on Lewinsky’s publicity tour with “Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”; he suggested that, like Prufrock pinned to the wall, she’d “begun to feel fixed and formulated by the eyes of the public, the prosecutors and the media.”

In 2004 Lewinsky withdrew from public life, fed up with all those prying eyes. When she re-emerged a decade later as part of an anti-bullying campaign, she invoked her old hero:

I believe my story can help. Help to do something to change the culture of humiliation we inhabit and that inhabits us. I had been publicly silent for a decade—but now I must, as T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock said, disturb the universe.
All in all, you sense that “Prufrock” is her mantra and that her devotion to it verges on spiritual zeal. Although she argues that the poem transports us “beyond meaning,” it seems to have had a sizable and definite meaning in her own life. Reflecting obliquely on his early reading in a 1934 essay, Eliot wrote, “Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet.” By her own account, Lewinsky was such a reader, and her consuming passion was for the starchy, High-Church Anglican who wrote modern poetry’s great song of shyness.

•

If she’d had the choice, Lewinsky couldn’t have picked a more fitting inspiration. Eliot learned early in his own life that diffidence and daring, intense inwardness and intense exposure, can be twin edges of a single sword. Few 20th-century poets were as painfully reticent or achieved greater fame. None brooded more on the convergence of literature, sex, and history—the ways in which the private mental and physical lives of individuals intersect with the public life of the masses.

That obsession, which burns through the early poems, first flickers to life in the figure of Prufrock. Poor J. Alfred is the archetypal bit player on the world’s stage, anonymous and foppish right down to his abbreviated name. Mockingly comparing himself to biblical and Shakespearean heroes, he mourns his romantic failures and thwarted “greatness”:

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
In the end, he accepts the role of “attendant lord” in life’s drama, “cautious” and “deferential,” aiding the major players but staying in the background. (He could be describing a model White House intern.)

In his own recent “Prufrock” tribute for the New Republic, Damian Lanigan called the poem “the battle cry for legions of bookish virgins, the supreme validation of the neurotic soul.” At first glance, this seems too triumphalist: surely it’s no battle cry but a cry of disgust and pain. After all, we never feel that Prufrock’s self-mockery is mistaken—that he is destined for greatness or that the beautiful girls will sing to him. However, he is poignantly wrong about one thing: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” As Lanigan affirms, legions of readers have disagreed. Prufrock may lose out on love and glory, but his neurotic soul is validated in private eloquence.

By Eliot’s own admission, he was himself a frustrated virgin during the poem’s composition. Five years after its publication, his anxieties had curdled further. “Sweeney Erect” (1920) depicts the brutish title figure shaving in a brothel:

(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The diminishment of sex in this sleazy little scene is the failure of history itself. Sweeney’s callous indifference both perverts and grimly affirms the Emersonian metaphor; he’s repellent, but he’s a Representative Man of his time. The prostitute’s seizure is a sort of shadow orgasm, an image of uncontrollable suffering.

This sexual desolation becomes downright apocalyptic in The Waste Land (1922), with its arid plains and rotten marriages, its arrogant youths “assault[ing]” jaded women, its sweeping indictment of cultural sterility. Near the close of that poem, a memory of “daring” breaks the spell of barrenness, heralding regenerative rain:

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries …
The erotic crackle of the language leaves no doubt: this is the daring that eluded Prufrock. (“Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” … “Do I dare to eat a peach?”) It’s the transgressive daring of Romeo: “For stony limits cannot hold love out, / And what love can do that dares love attempt.” (Lewinsky reportedly once quoted these same lines in a valentine to President Clinton.) The “surrender” is exhilarating but impossible to “retract” and necessary to conceal. The “age of prudence” could be personal or historical, a period of caution, repression, waste.

It’s well known that Eliot wrote The Waste Land after the collapse of his first marriage. Though the poem was received as a judgment on a culture, it was also agonizingly personal—in a sense, the projection of a private breakdown onto the wider world. As both spouses’ letters attest, its vision of exhaustion and impotence drew on the poet’s bleak experience. Eliot hinted as much publicly in a comment on Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from that of his generation.”

“Strange accident,” maybe, but in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot argued that the poet’s goal is precisely the depersonalizing (or universalizing) of mere “personality and emotions.” No wonder he has always appealed to readers who conceive of their lives in broad symbolic terms. In the mid-1980s, one young scholar, reflecting on The Waste Land and the “Tradition” essay, wrote to his girlfriend:

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, [Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. … This fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

The astute, brooding commentator was a 20-year-old college kid named Barack Obama.

Of course, few readers see their self-projections onto the “tradition” justified so spectacularly. Yet Eliot entices all of us, even the most Prufrockian schlub, to view history as personal—and to personify it as the source of our daily temptations and frustrations. The heart of this vision is a passage in “Gerontion” (1920):

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with wh

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/152371

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Responsibilities, by W. B. Yeats
BY EZRA POUND
I live, so far as possible, among that more intelligently active segment of the race which is concerned with today and tomorrow; and, in consequence of this, whenever I mention Mr. Yeats I am apt to be assailed with the questions: “Will Mr. Yeats do anything more?”, “Is Yeats in the movement?”, “How can the chap go on writing this sort of thing?”

And to these inquiries I can only say that Mr. Yeats’ vitality is quite unimpaired, and that I dare say he'll do a good deal; and that up to date no one has shown any disposition to supersede him as the best poet in England, or any likelihood of doing so for some time; and that after all Mr. Yeats has brought a new music upon the harp, and that one man seldom leads two movements to triumph, and that it is quite enough that he should have brought in the sound of keening and the skirl of the Irish ballads, and driven out the sentimental cadence with memories of The County of Mayo and The Coolun; and that the production of good poetry is a very slow matter, and that, as touching the greatest of dead poets, many of them could easily have left that magnam partem, which keeps them with us, upon a single quire of foolscap or at most upon two; and that there is no need for a poet to repair each morning of his life to the Piazza dei Signori to turn a new sort of somersault; and that Mr. Yeats is so assuredly an immortal that there is no need for him to recast his style to suit our winds of doctrine; and that, all these things being so, there is nevertheless a manifestly new note in his later work that they might do worse than attend to.

“Is Mr. Yeats an Imagiste?” No, Mr. Yeats is a symbolist, but he has written des Images as have many good poets before him; so that is nothing against him, and he has nothing against them (les Imagistes), at least so far as I know—except what he calls "their devil's metres."

He has written des Images in such poems as Braseal and the Fisherman; beginning, “Though you hide in the ebb and flow of the pale tide when the moon has set;” and he has driven out the inversion and written with prose directness in such lyrics as, “I heard the old men say everything alters”; and these things are not subject to a changing of the fashions. What I mean by the new note—you could hardly call it a change of style—was apparent four years ago in his No Second Troy, beginning, "Why should I blame her," and ending—

Beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in any age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?


I am not sure that it becomes apparent in partial quotation, but with the appearance of The Green Helmet and Other Poems one felt that the minor note—I use the word strictly in the musical sense—had gone or was going out of his poetry; that he was at such a cross roads as we find in

Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete.


And since that time one has felt his work becoming gaunter, seeking greater hardness of outline. I do not say that this is demonstrable by any particular passage. Romantic Ireland's Dead and Gone is no better than Red Hanrahan's song about Ireland, but it is harder. Mr. Yeats appears to have seen with the outer eye in To a Child Dancing on the Shore (the first poem, not the one printed in this issue). The hardness can perhaps be more easily noted in The Magi.

Such poems as When Helen Lived and The Realists serve at least to show that the tongue has not lost its cun-ning. On the other hand, it is impossible to take any inter-est in a poem like The Two Kings—one might as well read the Idyls of another. The Grey Rock is, I admit, obscure, but it outweighs this by a curious nobility, a nobility which is, to me at least, the very core of Mr. Yeats’ production, the constant element of his writing.

In support of my prediction, or of my theories, regarding his change of manner, real or intended, we have at least two pronouncements of the poet himself, the first in A Coat,* and the second, less formal, in the speech made at the Blunt presentation.** The verses, A Coat, should satisfy those who have complained of Mr. Yeats’ four and forty followers, that they would “rather read their Yeats in the original.” Mr. Yeats had indicated the feeling once before with

Tell me, do the wolf-dogs praise their fleas?


which is direct enough in all conscience, and free of the “glamour.” I've not a word against the glamour as it appears in Yeats’ early poems, but we have had so many other pseudo--glamours and glamourlets and mists and fogs since the nineties that one is about ready for hard light.

And this quality of hard light is precisely what one finds in the beginning of his The Magi:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side.


Of course a passage like that, a passage of imagisme, may occur in a poem not otherwise imagiste, in the same way that a lyrical passage may occur in a narrative, or in some poem not otherwise lyrical. There have always been two sorts of poetry which are, for me at least, the most “poetic;” they are firstly, the sort of poetry which seems to be music just forcing itself into articulate speech, and, secondly, that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words. The gulf between evocation and description, in this latter case, is the unbridgeable difference between genius and talent. It is perhaps the highest function of art that it should fill the mind with a noble profusion of sounds and images, that it should furnish the life of the mind with such accompaniment and surrounding. At any rate Mr. Yeats’ work has done this in the past and still continues to do so. The present volume contains the new metrical version of The Hour Glass, The Grey Rock, The Two Kings, and over thirty new lyrics, some of which have appeared in these pages, or appear in this issue. In the poems on the Irish gallery we find this author certainly at prise with things as they are and no longer romantically Celtic, so that a lot of his admirers will be rather displeased with the book. That is always a gain for a poet, for his admirers nearly always want him to “stay put,” and they resent any signs of stirring, of new curiosity or of intellectual uneasiness. I have said the The Grey Rock was obscure; perhaps I should not have said so, but I think it demands unusually close attention. It is as obscure, at least, as Sordello, but I can not close without registering my admiration for it all the same.