Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178489
ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.

But I didn’t know about Walt Whitman. Yes, I had heard about this bohemian, this homosexual, even, who wrote something about The Captain and The Lilacs in The Hallway, but nobody ever told me to read his work! Not only was Whitman not required reading, he was, on the contrary, presented as a rather hairy buffoon suffering from a childish proclivity for exercise and open air.

Nevertheless, it is through the study of the poems and the ideas of this particular white father that I have reached a tactical, if not strategic, understanding of the racist, sexist, and anti-American predicament that condemns most New World writing to peripheral/unpublished manuscript status.

Before these United States came into being, the great poets of the world earned their lustre through undeniable forms of spontaneous popularity; generations of a people chose to memorize and then to further elaborate these songs and to impart them to the next generation. I am talking about people; African families and Greek families and the families of the Hebrew tribes and all that multitude to whom the Bhagavad-Gita is as daily as the sun! If these poems were not always religious, they were certainly moral in notice, or in accomplishment, or both. None of these great poems would be mistaken for the poetry of another country, another time. You do not find a single helicopter taking off or landing in any of the sonnets of Elizabethan England, nor do you run across rice and peas in any of the psalms! Evidently, one criterion for great poetry used to be the requirements of cultural nationalism.

But by the advent of the thirty-six year old poet, Walt Whitman, the phenomenon of a people’s poetry, or great poetry and its spontaneous popularity, could no longer be assumed. The physical immensity and the farflung population of this New World decisively separated poets from suitable means to produce and distribute their poetry. Now there would have to be intermediaries—critics and publishers—whose marketplace principles of scarcity would, logically, oppose them to populist traditions of art.

Old World concepts would replace the democratic and these elitist notions would prevail; in the context of such considerations, an American literary establishment antithetical to the New World meanings of America took root. And this is one reason why the pre-eminently American white father of American poetry exists primarily in the realm of caricature and rumor in his own country.

As a matter of fact, if you hope to hear about Whitman your best bet is to leave home. Ignore prevailing American criticism and, instead, ask anybody anywhere else in the world this question: As Shakespeare is to England, Dante to Italy, Tolstoy to Russia, Goethe to Germany, Aghostino Neto to Angola, Pablo Neruda to Chile, Mao-Tse-Tung to China, and Ho Chi Minh to Vietnam, who is the great American writer, the distinctively American poet, the giant American “literatus?” Undoubtedly, the answer will be Walt Whitman.

He is the poet who wrote:
A man’s body at auction
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale.)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it. (1)
I ask you, today: Who in the United States would publish those lines? They are all wrong! In the first place there is nothing obscure, nothing contrived, nothing an ordinary strap-hanger in the subway would be puzzled by! In the second place, the voice of those lines is intimate and direct, at once; it is the voice of the poet who assumes that he speaks to an equal and that he need not fear that equality. On the contrary, the intimate distance between the poet and the reader is a distance that assumes there is everything important, between them, to be shared. And what is poetic about a line of words that runs as long as a regular, a spoken idea? You could more easily imagine an actual human being speaking such lines than you could imagine an artist composing them in a room carefully separated from the real life of his family. This can’t be poetry! Besides, these lines apparently serve an expressly moral purpose! Then is this didactic/political writing? Aha! This cannot be good poetry. And, in fact, you will never see, for example, The New Yorker Magazine publishing a poem marked by such splendid deficiencies.

Consider the inevitable, the irresistible, simplicity of that enormous moral idea:
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it . . .
This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers
in their turns
In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him count-
less immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments
Crucial and obviously important and, hence, this is not an idea generally broadcast: the poet is trying to save a human being while even the poem cannot be saved from the insolence of marketplace evaluation!

Indeed Whitman and the traceable descendants of Walt Whitman, those who follow his democratic faith into obviously New World forms of experience and art, they suffer from establishment rejection and contempt the same as forced this archetypal American genius to publish, distribute, and review his own work, by himself. The descendants I have in mind include those unmistakeably contemporaneous young poets who base themselves upon domesticities such as disco, Las Vegas, MacDonalds, and $40 running shoes. Also within the Whitman tradition, Black and First World* poets traceably transform and further the egalitarian sensibility that isolates that one white father from his more powerful compatriots. I am thinking of the feminist poets evidently intent upon speaking with a maximal number and diversity of other Americans' lives. I am thinking of all the many first rank heroes of the New World who are overwhelmingly forced to publish their own works using a hand press, or whatever, or else give it up entirely.

That is to say, the only peoples who can test or verify the meaning of the United States as a democratic state, as a pluralistic culture, these are the very peoples whose contribution to a national vision and discovery meets with steadfast ridicule and disregard.

A democratic state does not, after all, exist for the few, but for the many. A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak. And unless that many, that manifold constitution of diverse peoples can be seen as integral to the national art/the national consciousness, you might as well mean only Czechoslovakia when you talk about the USA, or only Ireland, or merely France, or exclusively white men.

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.

This kind of artistically indefensible censorship would have you perceive qualitative and even irreconcilable differences between the poet who wrote:
You, my antagonist, in that splintering dream
like the bristling glass of gardens, like a menace of ruinous bells, volleys
of blackening ivy at the perfume’s center,
enemy of the great hipbones my skin has touched
with a harrowing dew (4)
And the poet who wrote, some twenty years later, these lines from the poem entitled “The Dictators”:
Lament was perpetual and fell, like a plant and its pollen,
forcing a lightless increase in the blinded, big leaves
And bludgeon by bludgeon, on the terrible waters,
scale over scale in the bog,
the snout filled with silence and slime
and vendetta was born (5)
According to prevalent American criticism, that later poem of Neruda represents a lesser achievement precisely because it can be understood by more people, more easily, than the first. It is also derogated because this poem attacks a keystone of the Old World, namely dictatorship or, in other words, power and privilege for the few.

The peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman, against the first son of this democratic union, can be further fathomed if you look at some facts: Neruda’s eminence is now acknowledged on international levels; it is known to encompass profound impact upon North American poets who do not realize the North American/Walt Whitman origins for so much that is singular and worthy in the poetry of Neruda. You will even find American critics who congratulate Neruda for overcoming the “Whitmanesque” content of his art. This perfidious arrogance is as calculated as it is common. You cannot persuade anyone seriously familiar with Neruda’s life and art that he could have found cause, at any point, to disagree with the tenets, the analysis and the authentic New World vision presented by Walt Whitman in his essay, Democratic Vistas, which remains the most signal and persuasive manifesto of New World thinking and belief in print.

Let me define my terms, in brief: New World does not mean New England. New World means non-European; it means new; it means big; it means heterogenous; it means unknown; it means free; it means an end to feudalism, caste, privilege, and the violence of power. It means wild in the sense that a tree growing away from the earth enacts a wild event. It means democratic in the sense that, as Whitman wrote:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than
the journey-work of the stars. . .
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger
sextillions of infidels (6)
New World means that, as Whitman wrote, “I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart.” New World means, as Whitman said, “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”

In Democratic Vistas, Whitman declared,
As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress . . . Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms of history, power and practicality, on areas of amplitude rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political speculations of ages, long, long deffer’d, the democratic republican principle, and the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards and self reliance.
Listen to this white father; he is so weird! Here he is calling aloud for an American, a democratic spirit. An American, a democratic idea that could morally constrain and coordinate the material body of USA affluence and piratical outreach, more than a hundred years ago he wrote,
The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the lifeblood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultra marine, have had their birth in courts, and bask’d and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes’ favors ... Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? ... We see the sons and daughters of The New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the partial, the dead.
Abhorring the “thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-song, tinkling rhymes,” Whitman conjured up a poetry of America, a poetry of democracy which would not “mean the smooth walks, trimm’d hedges, poseys and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing billions of tons.”

Well, what happened?

Whitman went ahead and wrote the poetry demanded by his vision. He became, by thousands upon thousands of words, a great American poet:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day
Or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories,
and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird. . . (7)
And, elsewhere, he wrote:
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
or ever some many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,
so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river
and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet
hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats,
I look’d. . . (8)
This great American poet of democracy as cosmos, this poet of a continent as consciousness, this poet of the many people as one people, this poet of diction comprehensible to all, of a vision insisting on each, of a rhythm/a rhetorical momentum to transport the reader from the Brooklyn ferry into the hills of Alabama and back again, of line after line of bodily, concrete detail that constitutes the mysterious the cellular tissue of a nation indivisible but dependent upon and astonishing in its diversity, this white father of a great poetry deprived of its spontaneous popularity/a great poetry hidden away from the ordinary people it celebrates so well, he has been, again and again, cast aside as an undisciplined poseur, a merely freak eruption of prolix perversities.

Last year, the New York Times Book Review saw fit to import a European self-appointed critic of American literature to address the question: Is there a great American poet? Since this visitor was ignorant of the philosophy and the achievements of Walt Whitman, the visitor, Denis Donoghue, comfortably excluded every possible descendent of Whitman from his erstwhile cerebrations. Only one woman was mentioned (she, needless to add, did not qualify). No poets under fifty, and not one Black or First World poet received even cursory assessment. Not one poet of distinctively New World values, and their formal embodiment, managed to dent the suavity of Donoghue’s public display.

This New York Times event perpetuated American habits of beggarly, absurd deference to the Old World. And these habits bespeak more than marketplace intrusions into cultural realms. We erase ourselves through self hatred. We lend our silence to the American anti-American process whereby anything and anyone special to this nation state becomes liable to condemnation because it is what it is, truly.

Against self hatred there is Whitman and there are all of the New World poets who insistently devise legitimate varieties of cultural nationalism. There is Whitman and all of the poets whose lives have been baptized by witness to blood, by witness to cataclysmic, political confrontations from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era, through the Women’s Movement, and on and on through the conflicts between the hungry and the well-fed, the wasteful, the bullies.

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life. There is an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge, an easily deciphered system of reference, aspirations to a believable, collective voice and, consequently, emphatic preference for broadly accessible, spoken language. Deliberately balancing perception with vision, it seeks to match moral exhortation with sensory report.

All of the traceable descendants of Whitman have met with an establishment, academic reception disgracefully identical; except for the New World poets who live and write beyond the boundaries of the USA, the offspring of this one white father encounter everlasting marketplace disparagement as crude or optional or simplistic or, as Whitman himself wrote “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.”

I too am a descendant of Walt Whitman. And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully.

My brothers and my sisters of this New World, we remember that, as Whitman said,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate
itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize (9)
We do not apologize that we are not Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Or, as Whitman exclaimed, “I exist as I am, that is enough.”

New World poetry moves into and beyond the lives of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Aghostino Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker. I follow this movement with my own life. I am calm and smiling as we go. Is it not written, somewhere very near to me:
A man’s body at auction . . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders
they cannot be high enough for it . . .
And didn’t that weird white father predict this truth that is always growing:
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail,
I swear to you they will understand you and justify you,
The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you
and encloses all and is faithful to all,
He and rest shall not forget you, they shall
perceive that you are not an iota less than they,
You shall be fully glorified in them (10)
Walt Whitman and all of the New World poets coming after him, we, too, go on singing this America.


*Given that they were first to exist on the planet and currently make up the majority, the author will refer to that part of the population usually termed Third World as the First World.

Notes

1. from “I Sing the Body Electric,” by Walt Whitman
2. from Section XII of The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Nathaniel Tarn, Farrar Straus and Giroux: New York
3. from The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Ben Bolitt, Evergreen Press
4. from “Woes and the Furies,” by Pablo Neruda in Selected Poems of Neruda, translated by Ben Bolitt, p. 101
5. Ibid. “The Dictators,” p. 161
6. from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
7. from “There was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman
8. from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
9. from “Song of Myself”
10. from “Song of the Rolling Earth”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.
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(1.) Excerpt below taken from full body of previous text in my previous post..-Tyr

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.

I do not knock Pablo Neruda being a fine poet.. as truly he is--so are many others for that matter.
However, this legendary status the elitist morons try to bestow upon him is damn sickening to me!
I could point out other so-called minor poets that put Pablo to shame but do not get the fame given Pablo by modern fools simply because his name being Pablo and his leftist political leanings.
Whereas, in my view, in my world -- politics in poetry is a damn invasive cancer that should be cut out every place it invades.
So much of his fame rests upon the desire to advance a political ideology! ffing morons...-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/177750

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
William Bronk
1918–1999

BY KAY RYAN
I love to open the big book of William Bronk poems, Life Supports, and read one at random. It doesn’t matter which one shows up because they all release the same bracing smell and parch of stone, the same chill of stone in the shade. I don’t remember a single individual Bronk poem, and I don’t know if they’re actually memorable; anyhow, they don’t matter to me in that way. For me they’re like the small brown bottle my grandmother carried in her purse and sniffed for the pick-me-up jolt.

However little you thought you’d been trafficking in surfaces and ornament, after a Bronk poem you realize it was much too much; however cleansed of illusions you believed yourself to be, it looks like they built up anyhow. Bronk takes them off like paint stripper. You’re shriven, your head is shaved. The experience is religious in its ferocity and disdain for cheap solace.

Here, let me open to a poem—and I swear this one just turned up:

Wanting the significance that cause and effect
might have (we see it in little things where it is)
not seeing it in any place
important to us (it is in our lives but in ways

that deny each other) and the totality,
I suppose, is what I mean—it isn’t there—
we look around: the possibilities,
dreams and diversions, whatever else there is.
—The Effect of Cause Despaired


If you aren’t familiar with Bronk, maybe this doesn’t thrill you. But if you are, it’s like dropping the needle down into the endless groove of an implacable, insatiable, relentless intelligence that allows itself not the least shred of consolation, not the thinnest veil of protection. Bronk’s poems are almost entirely abstract and disembodied, like the poem above, his language desiccated but also conversationally halting and embedded. There is no flesh, no world, precious little metaphor—as though every human attachment is cheating. If anything seems to work—such as cause and effect—it never adds up to anything. “We look around,” and, in the absence of any system that could explain our actions to ourselves, whatever “dream” or “diversion” we cook up is understood to be just that—a distraction from nothing.

Bronk is thinking and thinking, as purely as possible, about how we want—want not to be alone, want things to matter, want to feel that we are connected to reality. His poems are all about wanting and how there is no end to it. And about how whatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it.

Bronk’s body of work is a strange achievement which it is hard not to call brave. There is such a grave honor in its repetitiveness, how it harps on what it can’t have, and how it won’t bend—can’t bend. If I say that Bronk’s poems are like blocks of stone, similar, but each slightly different and fitted one to another, and if I say that one experiences a strange exhilaration and release in the presence of the stark monument they form, then I am echoing Bronk’s own description of the stonework of Machu Picchu in “An Algebra Among Cats,” my favorite essay in his remarkable book of essays, Vectors and Smoothable Curves.

Bronk is compelled by the “plain perfection” of Machu Picchu’s stones, whose “surfaces have been worked and smoothed to a degree just this side of that line where texture would be lost.” Standing among them, he feels released from the idea of time as moving from past to future and the accompanying illusion of human progress: “It is at least as though there were several separate scales of time; it is even as though for certain achievements of great importance, this city for example, there were a continuing present which made those things always contemporary.”

There are moments of aesthetic transport which weld beauty to beauty, occasional angles which offer a glimpse of something endless and compelling. Bronk feels it in the presence of the pure artifacts of Machu Picchu; I get a touch of it in the presence of Bronk.
Originally Published: February 28, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/177759

PROFILE
The Ghost Inside
A profile of Jack Gilbert.

BY SARAH MANGUSO
“I don’t want to be at peace,” Jack Gilbert pronounced shortly after his 80th birthday. Yet he has spent much of his life on remote Greek islands, on a houseboat in Kashmir, on a western Massachusetts farm, and in the remote outskirts of Sausalito, California, either alone or in the company of one other. He has never owned a home and has driven a car only twice. A sensible person might even say he’s sought a peace separate from the arena of the “career poets”—and maybe even separate from that of the career adult. But the unique kernel of Gilbert’s poetry is its fearless exploration of the adult heart. It takes a moment to have a fling or write one good line, but sustaining authentic emotional participation, as Gilbert has in his life as a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is practically a lost art.

Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and grew up in the East Liberty district. His father worked in the circus for a time and died after falling out the window of a Prohibition-era men’s club when Jack was 10. After failing out of Peabody High School, Gilbert sold Fuller brushes door-to-door, worked in steel mills, and accompanied his uncle to fumigate houses, a job he began when he was 10 years old. “The cyanide could knock you out with just one breath, and in a matter of minutes you’d be dead,” he said in 1991. “It was an eerie way to grow up.”

He was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh because of a clerical error, where he began writing poetry (having previously written only prose) and earned a B.A. in 1947. After several years in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Italy—a chapter notable for his relationship with Gianna Gelmetti, the first of the three women who appear in his best love poems—Gilbert made his way to San Francisco, where the Beat and Haight-Ashbury countercultures were beginning to thrive.

A word about the women in Gilbert’s love poems before I go on. More than a few readers bristle at Gilbert’s apparently “antifeminist” poems. Women appear as totem creatures of mystery and beauty in poems like “Dante Dancing,” “Finding Eurydice,” and “Gift Horses,” but I am convinced that conventional feminism is the wrong filter through which to read these works. In response to a question about his elegiac poems written for his lost wife, Gilbert explained: “It was about grief, not about me.” Despite relationships that had all the signs of intimacy—with Gianna, Linda Gregg, and Michiko Nogami—Gilbert found the women he “knew” unknowable. And so he may write: “We are allowed / women so we can get into bed with the Lord, / however partial and momentary that is.” In the introduction to his own poems in the 1983 volume Nineteen New American Poets of the Golden Gate, Gilbert wrote: “I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.”

Back to San Francisco. Gilbert lived in the Bay Area for 11 years, from 1956 to 1967, during which time he attended San Francisco State, worked with Ansel Adams, took Jack Spicer’s magic workshop, and enjoyed a years-long friendly argument about poetry with Allen Ginsberg. As the story goes, Gilbert didn’t like much of Ginsberg's work until one day when Ginsberg walked through a roadless and undeveloped area of Sausalito to Gilbert's cabin. He read aloud from two pages of poetry he’d just written.

Gilbert liked it. It was the beginning of Ginsberg’s iconic poem “Howl,” read publicly for the first time in 1956 to wild acclaim, and published in 1958. Four years later Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer. Gilbert enjoyed a year and a half of stateside fame, then won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and left for Greece with the poet Linda Gregg. Six years would pass before he returned.

Gilbert wrote poems in Greece (and Denmark and England) that became Monolithos, his second book, finally coaxed into publication by editor Gordon Lish in 1982, 20 years after Gilbert’s debut. (Lish wrote a one-sentence essay for the New Orleans Review about Gilbert’s poetry. It read: “Why I like Jack Gilbert’s poetry and why I think Jack Gilbert is one of the best American poets and why I publish[ed] Jack Gilbert’s books is, was, and shall be to bring about the embarrassment of the power of discrimination in force in the assembly of fucking Harold Bloom’s fucking canonicity list. The End.”) That book, too, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. By then, Gilbert had separated from Gregg and married Michiko Nogami.

In 1982, after only 11 years of marriage, Michiko died of cancer at age 36. Gilbert next published a limited-edition volume called Kochan, a collection of elegiac poems written for Michiko, whose ghost would inspire what many call his best love poems, written in the early 1990s. Those poems constitute much of Gilbert’s third book, The Great Fires, which appeared in 1994. By this point he had been teaching from time to time, stretching the money in order to live quietly abroad, writing.

Last year Gilbert turned 80 and published his fourth book, Refusing Heaven. Form appears incidental to content in the new poems, as ever in Gilbert’s work. In an interview in the 1990s Gilbert said, “Mechanical form doesn’t really matter to me. . . . Some poets [write within a form] with extraordinary deftness. But I don’t understand why. . . . It’s like treating poetry as though it’s learning how to balance brooms on your head. . . . It’s like people who think sexuality is fun. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s a way of getting someplace, not just running to the corner for a little spasm.”

There are no little spasms in Gilbert’s poems—just giant ones, the immeasurable subjects of love and death, quiet but also somehow deafening. Gilbert’s is an aesthetic of exclusion. “There is usually a minimum of decoration in the best,” he has said. “Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in love with what mathematicians mean by elegance: not the heaping up of language, but the use of a few words with utmost effect.” Despite their streamlined appearance, Gilbert’s poems are not sentimental, obvious, or thin.

One of my favorite poems from The Great Fires contains even fewer elements than a classical haiku: the poem simply describes a man carrying a box. “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms / underneath. . . . Afterward, / he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood / drains out of the arm that is stretched up / to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now / the man can hold underneath again, so that / he can go on without ever putting the box down.” The lines appear almost inconsequential. But the title of the poem is “Michiko Dead.”

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Gilbert asked, “Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. . . . When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there.”

What is the most important thing a poet must seek, I asked him in February. His response: “Depth and warmth.”

Originally Published: February 27, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

PROFILE
The Ghost Inside
A profile of Jack Gilbert.

BY SARAH MANGUSO
“I don’t want to be at peace,” Jack Gilbert pronounced shortly after his 80th birthday. Yet he has spent much of his life on remote Greek islands, on a houseboat in Kashmir, on a western Massachusetts farm, and in the remote outskirts of Sausalito, California, either alone or in the company of one other. He has never owned a home and has driven a car only twice. A sensible person might even say he’s sought a peace separate from the arena of the “career poets”—and maybe even separate from that of the career adult. But the unique kernel of Gilbert’s poetry is its fearless exploration of the adult heart. It takes a moment to have a fling or write one good line, but sustaining authentic emotional participation, as Gilbert has in his life as a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is practically a lost art.

Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and grew up in the East Liberty district. His father worked in the circus for a time and died after falling out the window of a Prohibition-era men’s club when Jack was 10. After failing out of Peabody High School, Gilbert sold Fuller brushes door-to-door, worked in steel mills, and accompanied his uncle to fumigate houses, a job he began when he was 10 years old. “The cyanide could knock you out with just one breath, and in a matter of minutes you’d be dead,” he said in 1991. “It was an eerie way to grow up.”

He was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh because of a clerical error, where he began writing poetry (having previously written only prose) and earned a B.A. in 1947. After several years in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Italy—a chapter notable for his relationship with Gianna Gelmetti, the first of the three women who appear in his best love poems—Gilbert made his way to San Francisco, where the Beat and Haight-Ashbury countercultures were beginning to thrive.

A word about the women in Gilbert’s love poems before I go on. More than a few readers bristle at Gilbert’s apparently “antifeminist” poems. Women appear as totem creatures of mystery and beauty in poems like “Dante Dancing,” “Finding Eurydice,” and “Gift Horses,” but I am convinced that conventional feminism is the wrong filter through which to read these works. In response to a question about his elegiac poems written for his lost wife, Gilbert explained: “It was about grief, not about me.” Despite relationships that had all the signs of intimacy—with Gianna, Linda Gregg, and Michiko Nogami—Gilbert found the women he “knew” unknowable. And so he may write: “We are allowed / women so we can get into bed with the Lord, / however partial and momentary that is.” In the introduction to his own poems in the 1983 volume Nineteen New American Poets of the Golden Gate, Gilbert wrote: “I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.”

Back to San Francisco. Gilbert lived in the Bay Area for 11 years, from 1956 to 1967, during which time he attended San Francisco State, worked with Ansel Adams, took Jack Spicer’s magic workshop, and enjoyed a years-long friendly argument about poetry with Allen Ginsberg. As the story goes, Gilbert didn’t like much of Ginsberg's work until one day when Ginsberg walked through a roadless and undeveloped area of Sausalito to Gilbert's cabin. He read aloud from two pages of poetry he’d just written.

Gilbert liked it. It was the beginning of Ginsberg’s iconic poem “Howl,” read publicly for the first time in 1956 to wild acclaim, and published in 1958. Four years later Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer. Gilbert enjoyed a year and a half of stateside fame, then won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and left for Greece with the poet Linda Gregg. Six years would pass before he returned.

Gilbert wrote poems in Greece (and Denmark and England) that became Monolithos, his second book, finally coaxed into publication by editor Gordon Lish in 1982, 20 years after Gilbert’s debut. (Lish wrote a one-sentence essay for the New Orleans Review about Gilbert’s poetry. It read: “Why I like Jack Gilbert’s poetry and why I think Jack Gilbert is one of the best American poets and why I publish[ed] Jack Gilbert’s books is, was, and shall be to bring about the embarrassment of the power of discrimination in force in the assembly of fucking Harold Bloom’s fucking canonicity list. The End.”) That book, too, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. By then, Gilbert had separated from Gregg and married Michiko Nogami.

In 1982, after only 11 years of marriage, Michiko died of cancer at age 36. Gilbert next published a limited-edition volume called Kochan, a collection of elegiac poems written for Michiko, whose ghost would inspire what many call his best love poems, written in the early 1990s. Those poems constitute much of Gilbert’s third book, The Great Fires, which appeared in 1994. By this point he had been teaching from time to time, stretching the money in order to live quietly abroad, writing.

Last year Gilbert turned 80 and published his fourth book, Refusing Heaven. Form appears incidental to content in the new poems, as ever in Gilbert’s work. In an interview in the 1990s Gilbert said, “Mechanical form doesn’t really matter to me. . . . Some poets [write within a form] with extraordinary deftness. But I don’t understand why. . . . It’s like treating poetry as though it’s learning how to balance brooms on your head. . . . It’s like people who think sexuality is fun. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s a way of getting someplace, not just running to the corner for a little spasm.”

There are no little spasms in Gilbert’s poems—just giant ones, the immeasurable subjects of love and death, quiet but also somehow deafening. Gilbert’s is an aesthetic of exclusion. “There is usually a minimum of decoration in the best,” he has said. “Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in love with what mathematicians mean by elegance: not the heaping up of language, but the use of a few words with utmost effect.” Despite their streamlined appearance, Gilbert’s poems are not sentimental, obvious, or thin.

One of my favorite poems from The Great Fires contains even fewer elements than a classical haiku: the poem simply describes a man carrying a box. “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms / underneath. . . . Afterward, / he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood / drains out of the arm that is stretched up / to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now / the man can hold underneath again, so that / he can go on without ever putting the box down.” The lines appear almost inconsequential. But the title of the poem is “Michiko Dead.”

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Gilbert asked, “Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. . . . When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there.”

What is the most important thing a poet must seek, I asked him in February. His response: “Depth and warmth.”

Originally Published: February 27, 2006

Last year Gilbert turned 80 and published his fourth book, Refusing Heaven. Form appears incidental to content in the new poems, as ever in Gilbert’s work. In an interview in the 1990s Gilbert said, “Mechanical form doesn’t really matter to me. . . . Some poets [write within a form] with extraordinary deftness. But I don’t understand why. . . . It’s like treating poetry as though it’s learning how to balance brooms on your head. . . . It’s like people who think sexuality is fun. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s a way of getting someplace, not just running to the corner for a little spasm.”

There are no little spasms in Gilbert’s poems—just giant ones, the immeasurable subjects of love and death, quiet but also somehow deafening. Gilbert’s is an aesthetic of exclusion. “There is usually a minimum of decoration in the best,” he has said. “Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in love with what mathematicians mean by elegance: not the heaping up of language, but the use of a few words with utmost effect.” Despite their streamlined appearance, Gilbert’s poems are not sentimental, obvious, or thin.

One of my favorite poems from The Great Fires contains even fewer elements than a classical haiku: the poem simply describes a man carrying a box. “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms / underneath. . . . Afterward, / he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood / drains out of the arm that is stretched up / to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now / the man can hold underneath again, so that / he can go on without ever putting the box down.” The lines appear almost inconsequential. But the title of the poem is “Michiko Dead.”

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Gilbert asked, “Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. . . . When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there.”

What is the most important thing a poet must seek, I asked him in February. His response: “Depth and warmth.”

Originally Published: February 27, 2006

Here Gilbert expounds on the attitude some of us have about the outright demand that we adhere strictly to form!
Or else be declared poor poets, unworthy and/or lacking in poetic talents!
Who gives these arrogant assholes such authority to speak as if-THEY- own poetry!??
Or hold the sole rights to its purity, heart and message?
Pure elitism at its deepest acidity, stupidity and imbecility! Says I, a poet that rebels and only uses form enough to keep the arrows of chaos and insanity away!--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/177877

ESSAY
Nature Rules
A reading by Mary Oliver at the 92nd Street Y.

BY DARA MANDLE
What do the actor Steve Buscemi and two nuns have in common? An appreciation for Mary Oliver, the reigning queen of nature poetry. Oliver writes often in her newer verse about “the light of the world.” No surprise, then, to spot sisters of mercy at the poet’s January reading at New York’s 92nd Street Y. But Mr. Pink? Wouldn’t lyrics about the virtue of green beans be a touch too cozy for such a rough character? No, it turns out.

Judging from the size of the crowd that night, and from the sales of her current book, New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, it seems that many people—and not just those obviously drawn to daisies—need cheer.

Oliver’s minimalist stage persona and sense of humor undercut the frequent sentimentality of her lyrics. In person, she makes sure her fans are getting their money’s worth—in this case, $17 per ticket. They gave her a rock star’s reception when she strode to the podium after being introduced by Alice Quinn, director of the Poetry Society of America and poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Although she won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Oliver’s demeanor is more PB&J than port. She has what most poets outwardly disdain but secretly covet: readers. Her work might appear only occasionally in graduate curricula, but it registers mightily on the reorder lists at Barnes & Noble.

Many of the poems to which she gave voice at her reading were from her most recent New and Selected volume. The audience responded avidly to the few poems about her dog, Percy. “Oxygen,” a manuscript facsimile of which was reprinted in the evening’s program, was dedicated to her partner of more than 40 years, artist Molly Malone Cook, who died recently (your life . . . is so close / to my own that I would not know / where to drop the knife of / separation. And what does this have to do / with love, except / everything?).

“Do you want to hear this?” Oliver asked as she prepared to read “Wild Geese.” In this popular poem, the sound of geese reminds readers of their “place/in the family of things.” A friend found her question a cringe worthy attention ploy—but he doesn’t go to many poetry readings. I found Oliver’s commitment to her audience refreshing. After all, many had braved rain and two subways to get here.

By reading’s end her directness, which had at first invigorated, began to wear thin. In her introduction, Quinn had noted, “Like Frost, Oliver is a poet of belief.” Yet Frost let the darkness in his poems gradually seep out; one might not even detect it in a first reading. Oliver often tells us point-blank to move toward the light—or, as she writes, toward “the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over / all of us.”

And yet, Oliver acknowledges sorrow and mourning. One of the reasons her audience is so dedicated to her is because she lets them in. After reading the poem for her partner, Oliver shared three lines she’d read at her memorial service. In an age when so many writers build walls between themselves and their readers, Oliver opens windows. And why not? Her fans relish the view.
Originally Published: March 20, 2006
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My belief is-- ask a poet to write about Nature and if that poet cannot do so--he/she is a fraud.
For Love and Nature are by far the too easiest subjects to write poetry about IMHO.
With death and despair being on the other side of that scale.. -Tyr

Now do not let the word "easy" in that comment fool you. Easy to write about , but much harder to make an "impression with" in regards to other poets reading your work or getting such published! -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/177773

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment
BY TONY HOAGLAND
Aesthetic shifts over time can be seen as a kind of crop rotation; the topsoil of one field is allowed to rest, while another field is plowed and cultivated. In the seventies the American poetry of image covered the Midwestern plains like wheat; in the eighties, perhaps, it was the narrative-discursive sentence which blossomed and bore anthological fruit. This shifting of the ground of convention is one aspect of cultural self-renewal. But the fruitful style and idiom becomes conventional, and then conventionally tired.

In the last ten years American poetry has seen a surge in associative and “experimental” poetries, in a wild variety of forms and orientations. Some of this work has been influenced by theories of literary criticism and epistemology, some by the old Dionysian imperative to jazz things up. The energetic cadres of MFA grads have certainly contributed to this milieu, founding magazines, presses, and aesthetic clusters which encourage and influence each other’s experiments. Generally speaking, this time could be characterized as one of great invention and playfulness. Simultaneously, it is also a moment of great aesthetic self-consciousness and emotional removal.

Systematic development is out; obliquity, fracture, and discontinuity are in. Especially among young poets, there is a widespread mistrust of narrative forms and, in fact, a pervasive sense of the inadequacy or exhaustion of all modes other than the associative. Under the label of “narrative,” all kinds of poetry currently get lumped misleadingly together: not just story but discursion, argument, even descriptive lyrics. They might better be called the “Poetries of Continuity.”

Let me begin with two poetic examples which I think intriguingly register one aspect of the current temper. The first is from “Couples,” by Mark Halliday:


All the young people in their compact cars.
He’s funny and she’s sensible.
The car is going to need some transmission work
soon, but they’ll get by all right—
Aunt Louise slips them a hundred dollars
every chance she gets and besides,
both of them working—
Susan does day-care part-time
and Jim finally got full-time work
at Design Future Associates
after those tough nine months as an apprentice.
Or he’s in law school
doing amazingly well, he acts so casual
but really he’s always pounding the books,
and Susan works full-time
for a markets research firm, she’s
amazingly sharp about consumer trends
and what between her salary and Aunt Louise
Jim can afford to really concentrate on
his studies. Or he’s a journalist
and so is she, and they keep very up
on the news especially state politics.
Plus she does an amazing veal marsala
and he jogs two miles five mornings a week—
and in June they’ll be off to Italy again,
or Mexico; Susan’s photographs are
really tasteful, not touristy, she always
reads up on the culture before their trip.
Jim slips in a wacky shot every once in a while
and everybody laughs, that’s old Jim.
......................................
They’ll get by all right. They have
every one of Linda Ronstadt’s albums, and
they’re amazingly happy together.


And the next poem is called “First Person Fabulous,” by Matthea Harvey:


First Person fumed & fizzed under Third Person’s tongue while Third Person slumped at the diner counter, talking, as usual, to no one. Third Person thought First Person was the toilet paper trailing from Third Person’s shoe, the tiara Third Person once wore in a dream to a funeral. First Person thought Third Person was a layer of tar on a gorgeous pink nautilus, a foot on a fountain, a tin hiding the macaroons & First Person was that nautilus, that fountain, that pile of macaroons. Sometimes First Person broke free on first dates (with a Second Person) & then there was the delicious rush of “I this” and “I that” but then no phone calls & for weeks Third Person wouldn’t let First Person near anyone. Poor First Person. Currently she was exiled to the world of postcards (having a lovely time)—& even then that beast of a Third Person used the implied “I” just to drive First Person crazy. She felt like a television staring at the remote, begging to be turned on. She had so many things she wanted to say. If only she could survive on her own, she’d make Third Person choke on herself & when the detectives arrived & all eyes were on her she’d cry out, “I did it! I did it! Yes, dahlings, it was me!”


These two ingenious poems, written by poets of different generations* and styles, have something strikingly in common: their intention to hold narrative up for our inspection, at arm’s length, without being caught inside its sticky web. Rather than narratives themselves, both poems offer commentaries about narrative, story “samples,” safely told by a narrator who operates at an altitude above plot, narrating from a supervisory position. You could truly say that these poems serve to sharpen awareness of our narrative habits, but you could also say they contain a warning about how generic, how over-familiar, our storytelling is.

Mark Halliday’s poem “Couples” seems to make the point that our most precious personal narratives, despite our tender feelings for them, are generic—that human beings (yuppie couples, at least) are reducible to socioeconomic-historic clichés—no matter that we cling to the idea of our uniqueness and individuality. These stories of the self, the poem makes clear, are an exhausted resource.

Matthea Harvey’s ingenious, funny poem trumps the problem by translating the plot into a drama between “signifiers,” transposing drama into grammar. The ironic title, “First Person Fabulous,” suggests the essential egotism of all first person narratives. Tender and witty though the poem is about its “characters,” a real involvement by the reader is prevented by the latex condom of self-consciousness. “First Person Fabulous” is a poem, we are never allowed to forget, about pronouns.

It seems important to point out that both of these poems, though intrinsically skeptical, are also markedly playful. In their inventiveness of detail, in their teasing, in-and-out, back-and-forth development, in their pleasure in idiom, they are not cold in their detachment but imaginatively frolicsome. In fact, the self-consciousness of the poems creates the verbal dimension in which they play. However, despite the affirmative, vital presence of imagination, that playground area is situated at a great distance from experience. It is distinctly externalized. Distance is as much the distinctive feature of the poems as play; distance, which might be seen as antithetical to that other enterprise of poetry—strong feeling.


* * *


What aspect of narrative is so to be guarded against? A number of familiar explanations present themselves. To start with, it seems likely that narrative poetry in America has been tainted by its over-use in thousands of confessional poems. Not confessionalism itself, but the inadvertent sentimentality and narcissism of many such poems have imparted the odor of indulgence to narrative. Our vision of narrative possibilities has been narrowed by so many first person autobiographical stories, then drowned in a flood of pathos poems. Psychology itself, probably the most widely-shared narrative of the last several generations of American culture, has lost its charisma as a system, if not its currency.

Secondly, many persons think that ours is simply not a narrative age; that contemporary experience is too multitracked, too visual, too manifold and simultaneous to be confined to the linearity of narrative, no matter how well done. As Carolyn Forché says:


Our age lacks the structure of a story. Or perhaps it would be closer to say that narrative implies progress and completion. The history of our time does not allow for any of the bromides of progress, nor for the promise of successful closure.


Forché herself is an aesthetic convert from narrative poetry to a poetry of lyric-associative fragment.

Not only is organized narration considered inadequate to contemporary experience, its use is felt by some to be oppressive, over-controlling, “suspiciously authoritarian.” Because narrative imposes a story upon experience, because—the argument goes—that story implicitly presents itself as the whole story, some readers object to the smugness and presumption of the narration. “Whose narrative is this?” they cry; “Not mine!”

Put more bluntly, the new resistance to conventions of order represents a boredom with, and generalized suspicion of, straightforwardness and orchestration. Systematic development and continuity are considered simplistic, claustrophobic, even unimaginative. In the contemporary arena of the moment, charisma belongs to the erratic and subversive.

There may be yet another more hidden and less conscious anxiety behind the contemporary mistrust of narrative: a claustrophobic fear of submersion or enclosure. Narrative, after all, and other poetries of sustained development, seduce and contain; its feature is the loss of self-consciousness; in the sequential “grip” of narrative, the reader is “swept away,” and loses not consciousness, perhaps, but self-consciousness. The speedy conceptuality which characterizes much contemporary poetry prefers the dance of multiple perspectives to sustained participation. It hesitates to enter a point of view that cannot easily be altered or quickly escaped from. It would prefer to remain skeptical, and in that sense, too, one might say that it prefers knowing to feeling.


* * *


Harvey’s and Halliday’s poems are examples of one kind of hip contemporary skittishness. But they are, actually, too reader-friendly, too lucid and inclusive to truly represent the poetic fashion of the moment. The predominant Poem of Our Moment is a more lyric and dissociative thing, like “Improvisation” by Rachel M. Simon:


One thing about human nature is that nobody
wants to know the exact dimensions of their small talk.
I can’t imagine good advice.
If every human being has skin
how come I can see all of your veins?
Clicks and drips target my skull.
Important voices miss their target.
Some cities are ill-suited for feet.
I’d never buy a door smaller than a tuba, you never know
what sort of friends you’ll make.
In the future there will be less to remember.
In the past I have only my body and shoes.
The gut and the throat are two entirely different animals.
My hands don’t make good shoelaces, but I’m going to stay
in this lane, even if its slower.
The trick was done with saltwater and smoke
and an ingredient you can only find in an
out of business ethnic food store.
It all comes down to hand-eye coordination.
Once it took all of my energy to get you out of the tub
we had converted from an indoor pool to a house.
I ended up on snorkeling spam lists inadvertently.
It is all inadvertent.
If you don’t believe me ask your mom.


“Improvisation” is a quintessential Poem of Our Moment: fast-moving and declarative, wobbling on the balance beam between associative and dissociative, somewhat absurdist, and, indeed, cerebral. Much talent and skill are evident in its making, in its pacing and management of gaps, the hints and sound bites which keep the reader reaching forward for the lynchpin of coherence. One admirable aspect of the poem is the way it seems capable of incorporating anything; yet the correlative theme of the poem is that all this motley data—i.e. experience—doesn’t add up to a story. Even as the poem implies a world without sequence, the poem itself has no consequence, no center of gravity, no body, no assertion of emotional value.

If we ask, what is the subject of “Improvisation,” the answer would be, the dissociated self; and the aspect of self such poems most forcefully represent is its uncatchability, its flittering, quicksilver transience. Poems like “Improvisation” showcase personality in the persona of their chatty, free-associating, nutty-smart narrators. It is a self that does not stand still, that implies a kind of spectral, anxious insubstantiality. The voice is plenty sharp in tone and sometimes observant in its detail, but it is skittery. Elusiveness is the speaker’s central characteristic. Speed, wit, and absurdity are its attractive qualities. The last thing such poems are going to do is risk their detachment, their distance, their freedom from accountability. The one thing they are not going to do is commit themselves to the sweaty enclosures of subject matter and the potential embarrassment of sincerity.

I don’t wish to base a case on one example, so I will offer a few others. Here are the opening stanzas of two other recent poems:


My harvest has engineered a sanctioned nectary.
The transmission of each apple squeals when I apply the compress.
All my obsequities have finished their summer reading,
they are diligent students,
they understand the difference between precision and Kansas.
This was before I had pried up the floorboard to see what was ticking underneath.
I keep busy, every plane that flies through my sky
requires help, sign language for the commercial vector.
My octave’s intact so this may be working.
—From Watercooler Tarmac, by G.C. Waldrep



Oily fellows, earthmen. Spell
freeway, spell monolith, sell
me a fossil. Wholly repellent.
Malls, only relief. Post. Wheel
wells, the atmosphere (lolly-
lolly) honest, simple welfare,
topsoil anywhere—fell smell,
fell smell. Weaponry, hostile
fish, watermelon peels (lolly-
lolly) parentheses, mile, wolf,
fearsome whelp. Listen (lolly-
lolly) stolen female whisper.
Hollow salesman trifle, yelp
then loll. Mayflower slip. See
ELSE. My free hilltop, all snow.
Frost. Meanwhile sleep (lolly-
lolly) meanwhile self. Presto!
Trill myself open wholesale!
—Variations as the Fell of the Fall, Kevin McFadden


Sure, these styles have discernible origins and different, respectable precedents. In “Watermelon Tarmac” and “Improvisation” we might see the cartoony goofiness of James Tate or the unmoored rhetoric of John Ashbery. In the more radical “Variations of the Fell of the Fall,” one senses an aleatory nonsense-language system at work*. Though the modes are different, they are all modes of verbal-psychic dislocation. They all move with a manic swiftness. What is also striking to me, and representative of the aesthetic moment, is how these poems are committed to a sort of pushy exteriority.

Of course, dissociative doesn’t necessarily mean detached, or empty, or even hyperintellectual. “Prufrock” is one example of a dissociated yet passionate poem. In various poetic hands, the dissociated-improvisatory mode can represent vivaciousness of self, or uncontainable passion, or the fractured wash of modernity, or an aesthetic allegiance to randomness. The intention of the maker—if we can recognize what it is—makes all the difference.


* * *


What are the intentions of the current version of “difficult” poetry? Some of the stated, advertised intentions of “elusive” poetics are to playfully distort or dismantle established systems of meaning, to recover mystery in poetry, to offer multiple, simultaneous interpretive possibilities for the energetic and willing reader to “participate” in. The critic Stephen Burt describes some of the traits of this poetic style, for which he offers the term “Elliptical Poetry”:


Elliptical poets are always hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory; they are easier to process in parts than in wholes. They believe provisionally in identities... but they suspect the Is they invoke; they admire disjunction and confrontation, but they know how little can go a long way. Ellipticists seek the authority of the rebellious; they want to challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional lyric goals.


Burt’s definition is quite general in order to encompass the diversity of the poetry he champions, but he gets the mania and the declarativeness right. Also the relentless dodging or obstruction of expectation.

Avant-gardes of the past have surely rejected linearity and conventions of coherence, but some of them did so with the motive of asserting worlds of feeling—amazement or distress—which could not be expressed within conventions of order. Consider the surrealism of Lorca or Vallejo, which embraced both arbitrariness and passion with radical subjectivity. Yet surrealism operates out of a faith in psychic veracity, and Surrealism has a heroic aspect to it. As Louis Aragon says, “the marvelous is born of the refusal of one reality, yet also the development of a new relationship, of a brand-new reality this refusal has liberated.” Here is Aragon’s “Pop Song,” performed in a style quite congruent to “Improvisation,” but with a larger, quite different motive:


Cloud

A white horse stands up
and that’s the small hotel at dawn where he who is always first-come-first-served awakes in palatial comfort
Are you going to spend your entire life in this same world
Half dead
Half asleep
Haven’t you had enough of commonplaces yet
People actually look at you without laughter
They have glass eyes
You pass them by you waste your time you pass away and go away
You count up to a hundred during which you cheat to kill an extra ten seconds
You hold up your hand suddenly to volunteer for death
Fear not
Some day
There will be just one day left and then one day more after that
That will be that
No more need to look at men nor their companion animals their Good Lord provides
And that they make love to now and then
No more need to go on speaking to yourself out loud at night in order to drown out
The heating-units lament
No need to lift my own eyelids
Nor to fling my blood around like some discus
Nor to breathe despite my disinclination to
Yet despite this I don’t want to die
In low tones the bell of my heart sings out its ancient hope
That music I know it so well but the words
Just what were those words saying
“Idiot”


Aragon’s bold, clownish poem, typical of this strain of French Surrealism, is an exhortation to wonder. Its leaping, erratic movements are meant to assert the urgency of the speaker, the range of human nature, and the volatile resourcefulness of imagination. The mention of death, the progressive intimacy of the voice, the arrival at self-examination and tonal sincerity, all mark this as a poem which combines rhetorical performance with interiority. “Life is hard,” the poem suggests, “time is unendurable and absurd, the sleep of consciousness is oppressive, but it is still important to try to live.” Aragon’s poem, for all its whimsy and dishevelment, is finally humanist, asserting values.

Narrated and associative poems are not each other’s aesthetic opposites or sworn enemies. Obviously these modes don’t necessarily exclude each other. They overlap, coexist, and often cross-pollinate. Nevertheless, one might truly say that the two modes call upon fundamentally different resources in reader and writer. Narration (and its systematic relatives) implicitly honors Memory; the dissociative mode primarily values Invention. “Poetries of Continuity” in some way aim to frame and capture experience; dissociative poetry verifies itself by eluding structures. Their distinct priorities result in different poetries. A poetry which values clarity and continuity is obligated to develop and deliver information in ways that are hierarchical and sequential, ways which accommodate and orchestrate the capacities of human memory. In contrast, a dissociative poetry is always shuffling the deck in order to evade knowability.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, whose well-known phrase, “the pursuit of the real,” declares his allegiance in this matter, has something to say abo...................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
American Poetry in the New Century
BY JOHN BARR
1

Poetry in this country is ready for something new. We are at the start of a century, and that, in the past, has marked new beginnings for the art. Pound and Eliot launched Modernism in the opening years of the twentieth century, in the pages of this magazine. And in the opening years of the nineteenth, 1802 to be exact, Wordsworth launched poetry's Romantic era with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. (The centennial calendar does not go further back. The early years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not mark new departures for English poetry. And American poetry found its true beginnings in Whitman and Dickinson, who did their writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, not at either end.)

But it's not really a matter of calendar. American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today. If one could say that a characteristic of Romantic poetry was that there was way too much of it written once it became established (weekend versifiers to this day still write in Romantic modes), one could say the same of modern poetry. The manner of it has long been mastered. Modernism has passed into the DNA of the MFA programs. For all its schools and experiments, contemporary poetry is still written in the rain shadow thrown by Modernism. It is the engine that drives what is written today. And it is a tired engine.

A new poetry becomes necessary not because we want one, but because the way poets have learned to write no longer captures the way things are, how things have changed. Reality outgrows the art form: the art form is no longer equal to the reality around it. The Georgian poets wrote, coming after a century of such writing, with the depleted sensibility of Romanticism. Their poetry was in love with an antebellum England: "yet / Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?" The Georgians did not sense the approach of WWI, and their poetry was unequal to the horrors of trench warfare. (To see how a Georgian sensibility did respond, read Rupert Brooke: "If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England." This is a beautiful poem, but one far afield from mustard gas.) It took Yeats to give British poetry its first great dose of twentieth-century realism. It took The Waste Land to enable a poetry of chaos.

The need for something new is evident. Contemporary poetry's striking absence from the public dialogues of our day, from the high school classroom, from bookstores, and from mainstream media, is evidence of a people in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed. You can count on the fingers of one hand the bookstores in this country that are known for their poetry collections. A century ago our newspapers commonly ran poems in their pages; fifty years ago the larger papers regularly reviewed new books of poetry. Today one almost never sees a poem in a newspaper; and the new poetry collections reviewed in the New York Times Book Review are down to a few a year. A general, interested public is poetry's foremost need.

More than a decade ago, Dana Gioia recognized poetry's disjunction from public life, in his seminal essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" The question still pertains. Lacking a general audience, poets still write for one another. (Witness the growth of writing workshops and the MFA programs.) Because the book-buying public does not buy their work, at least not in commercial quantities, they cannot support themselves as writers. So they teach. But an academic life removes them yet further from a general audience. Each year, MFA programs graduate thousands of students who have been trained to think of poetry as a career, and to think that writing poetry has something to do with credentials. The effect of these programs on the art form is to increase the abundance of poetry, but to limit its variety. The result is a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor—and I stress this quality—entertaining; a poetry that both starves and flourishes on academic subsidies.

Not surprisingly, poetry has a morale problem. A few years ago I read a review, in the Sunday Times, of three books of poetry. One was about the agonies of old age, one about bombed-out Ireland, one about the poet's dead father. The question arises: how does one rouse an entire art form out of a bad mood? Of course the tragic has a place in poetry. Indeed one of poetry's jobs is to descant on the worst that life can hand us. As Yeats said, let "soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress." But art should not be only about malfunction. Poetry need not come only from impairment. To the extent it does, it makes for a poetry that is monotonic—mono-moodic, if you will. Yeats recognized this when he wrote, "Seventy years have I lived, / Seventy years man and boy, / And never have I danced for joy." Poetry's limitations today come not from failures of craft (the MFA programs attend to that) but from afflictions of spirit. American poetry has yet to produce its Mark Twain.

The combined effects of public neglect and careerism, then, are intellectual and spiritual stagnation in the art form. Although poets pride themselves on their independence, when did you last read a poem whose political vision truly surprised or challenged you? Attitude has replaced intellect.

2

I wish I could offer a distinct picture of what I think the next poetry will look like. But predicting the future path of poetry is like trying to predict the stock market (Wall Street being my other career). Both are relentlessly resistant to being captured in that way. And poetry the more so because it arises from what is intractable in the human spirit. (Poetry—thank goodness—is the animal that always escapes.) There is, however, another way to approach the subject: by describing how a new poetry might differ from what we have today. This may not give us an exact picture of the elephant, but when we are done we will have the elephant as described by how it differs from the other animals on Noah's ark.

The place to look for the next poetry is probably not where you might look first. Modernism was born amid an upheaval in writing that was heavily technical: Pound's Imagism and Vorticism, Gertrude Stein's automatic writing, Eliot's free verse and collage, Marianne Moore's syllabic verse. It would be natural to look for the next poetry to emerge from other kinds of experimental poetry. But this has been tried, and the innovations that followed those of Modernism (projective verse, Language poetry, concrete poetry) have not carried the art form with them. (I think a dead end is the fate that awaits any poetry that is not a record of the human spirit responding.) Technical innovation for its own sake is like the tail that tries to wag the dog. Formal verse or free, a debate which a century ago was nearly religious in its fervor, has settled into a choice of which method best suits the individual poet. And many poets use either, depending on the needs of the poem. I do believe the next era of poetry will come not from further innovations of form, but from an evolution of the sensibility based on lived experience.

The malaise that lies over poetry today has no single cause, and it will take more than a single change to restore its vitality. Let me elaborate on two of the issues I seldom hear discussed.

POETRY AS A CAREER

My own experience with MFA programs, having taught in one, is that they can make of a writer a better writer. "Better" in this case means more knowledgeable in the traditions and the contemporary scope of the art, more accomplished in the craft of writing, more aware of the nimbus of critical commentary which surrounds and to some extent drives the art. That's the good news: you graduate with a better understanding of the sophistication of your audience and of other writers. At the same time, these programs carry pressures to succumb to the intimidations implicit in a climate of careerism. They operate on a network of academic postings and prizes that reinforce the status quo. They are sustained by a system of fellowships, grants, and other subsidies that absolve recipients of the responsibility to write books that a reader who is not a specialist might enjoy, might even buy.

The MFA experience can confuse the writing of poetry, as a career, with the writing of a poem as a need or impulse. The creation of art is not a matter of fellowship. Writing a poem is a fiercely independent act. It is the furthest thing from mentors, residencies, and tenure. The one valid impulse to write a poem is not to impress but to share: wonder or anger or anguish or ecstasy. But always wonder. For the poet a sense of wonder is prerequisite to afford the possibility of the displacement of language into fresh response. Will the next Walt Whitman be an MFA graduate? Somehow it seems hard to imagine.

LIVE BROADLY, WRITE BOLDLY

At an artists' colony some years ago a fellow resident turned to me at the dinner table and said, "So where do you teach?" It was a reasonable question, since all the other artists there, although living for their art, seemed to teach for a living. Now don't get me wrong: the academic life can provide a perfectly good base of experience from which to write. Witness the quantity of fine poetry that has been written by resident poets. But the effect of how we live on what we write—a linkage which seems to me very under-recognized today—suggests that if everyone teaches in order to support their writing needs, it follows that the breadth of the aggregate experience base available to poetry may suffer. In fact, with a few important exceptions, no major American poet has come from the academic world. Wallace Stevens worked as a vice president for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Eliot worked for a time at Lloyds Bank, then in publishing at Faber and Faber. William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician in New Jersey. To varying degrees they all did business with the community of critics based in academia, but none wrote from a lifetime experience gained there. Poetry, like a prayer book in the wind, should be open to all pages at once.

In 1933 Ernest Hemingway went on his first safari, hunting big game in East Africa. Then he came home and wrote short stories ("The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"), the non-fiction Green Hills of Africa, and an unfinished novel, True at First Light. It is a commonplace among creative writers that we should write what we know, but Hemingway took that a step further by seeking out fresh experience in the service of his writing: ambulance driving in the Spanish civil war, marlin fishing off Cuba, running with the bulls in Pamplona. He sought to live more in order to write better. That's not to say that one has to be chased around Pamplona by bulls to gain experience. It could be something as slight as the difference between the poem one might get from a poet strolling past a construction site versus the poem one might get from the poet who is pouring concrete. Either could produce the better poem, of course, but the latter's will be more deeply informed by experience. "To change your language," as Derek Walcott says, "you must change your life."

But when did you last meet a contemporary poet who takes this approach, seeking out fresh experience or new knowledge specifically for the benefit of his or her poetry? I personally don't know many who would think to cross the street, let alone do what Hemingway did, in the hopes of getting a poem out of it. Rather it is the unconscious habit of poets to wait for the poem to come to them. (In the words of a poet friend, "You don't choose the poem, the poem chooses you.") Most contemporary poets align their role as writer with that of witness. (Mary Oliver: "I don't know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention." Or William Matthews: "I plan to notice everything.") They think of the artist as one more acted upon than acting. This is not to say, of course, that great poetry cannot come out of the most meager repository of lived experience. (Think of Emily Dickinson: all those years of writing in a still house, in the grip of a constant intensity.) The point rather is that poets today don't seem even to be aware that what they write will be influenced by how they live. As Auden wrote:

God may reduce you
on Judgment Day
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.
— From Thanksgiving for a Habitat


When poets come to pay as much attention to how they live as to what they write, that may mark one new beginning for poetry. As a Zen tea master, long before the ceremony of making tea, prepares the garden for his guests, sweeps the walk, cleans and composes the room, so poets should give their first attention to the lives they lead. Indeed, if they do not, on what authority can they claim to be Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world?" Indeed, if they do not, how can poetry be a moral act? How can poets answer for the effects of what they write on how their readers live? Poets should live broadly, then write boldly.

3

Poetry, in its long history, has been all things to all people. For warrior peoples, Beowulf and the Icelandic Njal's Saga told the stories of their heroes. Homer's subject, in his twin epics, was that prior world when the gods lived just over the horizon and came to visit men. Lucretius put his science and philosophy into books of hexameter verse. Virgil used the epic to give his Rome a mythical past and divine sponsorship. Chaucer brought the high and low of English society into his pentameter couplets; with his narrative gift and love of human nature he was our first short-story writer. The Elizabethan verse dramatists created an entertainment industry based on the iambic pentameter line. In all these manifestations—epic, elegy, meditation, religious devotion, satire, the public poem, verse drama—poetry was .........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178645

ESSAY
Is It Poetry or Is It Verse?
The president of the Poetry Foundation weighs in on 2Pac Shakur, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and “Jabberwocky.”

BY JOHN BARR
1.

Question: What do the following poems have in common?

* * *

It seemed to me a simple thing since my socks was showin’ through:
Turn my old boots out to pasture, and buy a pair—brand new.
Well, they built this cowboy K-mart outa town there in the Mall,
Where I parked my Studdybaker after shippin’ drys this fall.


* * *

There R no words 2 express
how much I truly care
So many times I fantasize of
feelings we can share
My heart has never known
the Joy u bring 2 me
As if GOD knew what I wanted
and made u a reality


* * *

My brother built a robot
that does not exactly work,
as soon as it was finished,
it began to go berserk,
its eyes grew incandescent
and its nose appeared to gleam,
it bellowed unbenignly
and its ears emitted steam.
Answer: They are the opening lines of poems by leading writers in their respective fields. And they all, most likely, set on edge the teeth of the readers of Poetry magazine.

It’s not just snobbery. People who care about their poetry often experience genuine feelings of embarrassment, even revulsion, when confronted with cowboy poetry, rap and hip-hop, and children’s poetry not written by “adult” poets. Their readerly sensibilities are offended. (If the writing gives them any pleasure, it is a guilty pleasure.) The fact that Wallace McRae, Tupac Shakur, and Jack Prelutsky wrote these works for large, devoted audiences simply adds insult to the injury. Somewhat defensively, the serious poetry crowd dismisses such work as verse, not poetry, and generally acts so as to avoid it, if at all possible, in the future. The fact that these different kinds of poetry don’t communicate, don’t do business with one another, is not just a matter of lost e-mail addresses. The advocates of each know what they like, and it’s definitely not what the others are doing. The result is a poetry world of broad divides, a balkanized system of poetries with their own sovereign audiences, prizes, and heroes. The only thing they share is the word poetry, and that not willingly.

There’s nothing wrong with this, a generally peaceful coexistence of live-and-let-live poetry communities, except to those who require, for intellectual comfort, a universal theory of poetry that ties it all together. It also matters to the Poetry Foundation and organizations like it, which must make choices and use their finite resources to support some kinds of poetry while not others.

2.

Efforts to define the difference between poetry and verse (like efforts to define the difference between poetry and prose) have been with us for a long time. Verse is often a term of disparagement in the poetry world, used to dismiss the work of people who want to write poetry but don’t know how. Verse, in this usage, means unsophisticated or poorly written poetry. But quality of writing is not the real difference between the two. Yes, there is plenty of poorly written verse out there, but there is also plenty of poorly written poetry—and sometimes the verse is the better crafted.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” with no help from the critical establishment, is still going strong after a century, while most early Yeats is read today only because it was written by Yeats. To use verse as a pejorative term, then, is to lose the use of it as a true distinction.

George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”
A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form—for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things—some emotion which very nearly every human being can share.
Into this same pot Orwell puts “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the work of Bret Harte—and presumably that of Robert Service. “There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English,” says Orwell; by implication, there is even more bad bad poetry. My own nominations for the latter include the work of Edgar Guest, whose Collected Poems, in a signed limp leather edition, was one of two books of poetry in the house where I grew up (a wedding present to my parents).
Ma has a dandy little book that’s full of narrow slips,
An’ when she wants to pay a bill a page from it she rips;
She just writes in the dollars and the cents and signs her name
An’ that’s as good as money, though it doesn’t look the same.
Orwell’s distinction, between good bad poetry and just plain bad poetry, is one based on quality of execution, of craftsmanship. Good bad poetry is verse competently—even memorably—written. But his distinction leaves unaddressed the nature of the poetry itself.

3.

Verse, I have come to think, is poetry written in pursuit of limited objectives: to entertain us with a joke or tall tale, to give us the inherent pleasures of meter and rhyme. It is not great art, nor is it trying to be. Verse, as Orwell says, tells us something we already know—as often as not something we know we already know. Verse is not an instrument of exploration, but rather a tool of affirmation. Its rewards lie not in the excitements of discovery, but in the pleasures of encountering the familiar. Writers of verse have done their job when they make lines that conform to the chosen meter—and do not go beyond it. Frost’s notion, “The possibilities for tune from dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless,” is unvisited territory. Verse does not seek to know the unknown or to express the unexpected, nor does it undertake the risk of failure that both entail.

“Serious” poetry, on the other hand, is written in pursuit of an open-ended goal. It seeks to use language, in its full potential, to encompass reality, both external and internal, in the fullness of its complexity. Unlike verse, poetry does not bring our experience of the world down to the level of the homily or the bromide, and sum it all up in a soothing platitude. It does not pursue simple conclusions or familiar returns. Rather, it is a voyage of discovery into the unknown. Of the figure a poem makes, Frost says,
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. . . . It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
A poem begins in delight, he says, and ends in wisdom. Verse begins in delight and ends in . . . more delight. The difference between poetry and verse, then, is the difference between an explorer and a tour guide. Verse tells us, finally, that all is well. Poetry, on the contrary, tells us that things are not as we thought they were. Verse does not ask us to change our lives. Poetry does.

At its best, verse can cross over into the realm of serious poetry. Children’s poetry, in particular, can speak at the same time to its intended audience of the young or very young, while holding the attention of an experienced reader.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
In the recent finals of Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest cosponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, if any one poem drove the judges to thoughts of suicide if they had to hear it one more time, it was probably Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Yet the poem probably stands as high today in the critical community as it does with young readers. Constructed wholly out of neologisms, the poem tells its tale from a parallel universe. Many of the new schools of poetry that followed it in the 20th century could claim “Jabberwocky” as a progenitor. With a little effort, you can even get Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss to resonate with contemporary poetry’s fascination for the nonrational. The nonsense of children’s verse converges with the non-sense of the fanciest experimental poetry.

Most verse has no following in the critical world because it needs none to be understood and appreciated. Most verse also receives no support from the programs of the Poetry Foundation (with the exception of children’s poetry). This is not so much because the Foundation takes a position on the value of verse as poetry, although the legacy of Poetry magazine strongly inclines us to the “serious.” It is rather because the mission of the Foundation is to discover and address poetry’s greatest unmet needs. (The estate of Tupac Shakur is presumably doing just fine without the Poetry Foundation, thank you very much.) The exception is children’s poetry, which the Foundation supports because of its importance to the future of the entire art form. Findings from our major study—Poetry in America—show that a lifelong interest in reading poetry is most likely if developed early and reinforced thereafter.

Whether it’s “Jack and Jill ran up the hill” or “There once was a man from Nantucket,” there is a kind of poem that won’t get out of our ears, even as it refuses our serious attention in the matter of its sense. There is a place in the poetry world for verse—if it is memorably written—and we wish it well in all of its variety.
Originally Published: September 18, 2006
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Far too much verse is currently being heralded as magnificent poetry IMHO.
TRUE GREAT VERSE IS OFTEN BETTER THAN AVERAGE POETRY (ESPECIALLY IF IT IS WRITTEN WITH NO SPIRIT AND NO HEART), BUT GREAT VERSE NEVER IS BETTER THAN GREAT POETRY IMHO. -TYR

George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I HAVE ALWAYS FOUND Orwell's criticism of Kipling to be laced with the vilest venom of pure jealousy!
Enough that I have very little respect for Orwell. As I respect no man that deliberately knocks another strictly due to jealousy... --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178703

ESSAY
Bob Dylan: Henry Timrod Revisited
When Bob Dylan lifted lines from an obscure Civil War poet, he wasn't plagiarizing. He was sampling.
BY ROBERT POLITO


These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!
—Henry Timrod, “A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night,” from Poems (1860)


. . . and at times
A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies.
—Henry Timrod, “A Vision of Poesy,” from Poems (1860)


The moon gives light and it shines by night
Well, I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O’er the road we’re bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down
—Bob Dylan, “When the Deal Goes Down,” from Modern Times (2006)



As a culture we appear to have forgotten how to experience works of art, or at least how to talk about them plausibly and smartly. The latest instance is the “controversy” shadowing Bob Dylan’s new record, Modern Times, wherein he recurrently adapts phrases from poems by Henry Timrod, a nearly-vanished 19th-century American poet, essayist, and Civil War newspaper correspondent.

That our nation’s most gifted and ambitious songwriter would revive Timrod on the number-one best-selling CD across America, Europe, and Australia might prompt a lively concatenation of responses, ranging from “Huh? Henry Timrod? Isn’t that interesting. . . .” to “Why?” But to narrow the Dylan/Timrod phenomenon (see the New York Times article “Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines from Henry Timrod?” and a subsequent op-ed piece, “The Ballad of Henry Timrod,” by singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega) into a story of possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper.

Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828, his arrival in this world falling two years after Stephen Foster but two years before Emily Dickinson. His work, too, might be styled as falling between theirs: sometimes dark and skeptical, other times mawkish and old-fashioned. (Dylan, I’m guessing, is fascinated by both aspects of Timrod, the antique alongside the brooding.) Often tagged the “laureate of the Confederacy”—a title apparently conferred upon him by none other than Tennyson—Timrod still shows up in anthologies because of the poems he wrote celebrating and then mourning the new Southern nation, particularly “Ethnogenesis” and “Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery.” Early on, Whittier and Longfellow admired Timrod, and his “Ode” stands behind Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (and thus in turn behind Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”).

On Modern Times Dylan avoids anthology favorites, but his album contains at least ten instances of lines or phrases culled from seven different Timrod poems, mostly poems about love, friendship, death, and poetry . Dylan also quoted Timrod’s “Charleston” in “Cross the Green Mountain,” a song he contributed to the soundtrack of the 2003 Civil War film Gods and Generals; two years earlier he glanced at Timrod’s “Vision of Poesy” for “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” on his CD “Love and Theft.” (Various Dylan Web sites annotate his lyrics, but I found these two related sites invaluable: http://republika.pl/bobdylan/mt/ and http://republika.pl/bobdylan/lat/.)

From the dustup in the Times—after our paper of record found a middle-school teacher who branded Dylan “duplicitous,” Vega earnestly supposed that Dylan probably hadn’t lifted the texts “on purpose”—you might not guess that we’ve just lived through some two and a half decades of hip-hop sampling, not to mention a century of Modernism. For the neglected Henry Timrod is just the tantalizing threshold into Dylan’s vast memory palace of echoes.

Besides Timrod, for instance, Modern Times taps into the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, John, and Luke, among others), Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Stanley Brothers, Merle Haggard, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and standards popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, as well as vintage folk songs such as “Wild Mountain Thyme,” “Frankie and Albert,” and “Gentle Nettie Moore.”

It’s possible, in fact, to see his prior two recordings, Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,” as rearranging the entire American musical and literary landscape of the past 150 years, except that the sources he adapts aren’t always American or so recent. Please forgive another Homeric (if partial) catalog, but the scale and range of Dylan’s allusive textures are vital to an appreciation of what he’s after on his recent recordings.

On Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,” Dylan refracts folk, blues, and pop songs created by or associated with Crosby, Sinatra, Charlie Patton, Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell, Doc Boggs, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Wilbert Harrison, the Carter Family, and Gene Austin alongside anonymous traditional tunes and nursery rhymes.

But the revelation is the sly cavalcade of film and literature fragments: W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, assorted film noirs, As You Like It, Othello, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Timrod, Ovid, T.D. Rice’s blackface Otello, Huckleberry Finn, The Aeneid, The Great Gatsby, the Japanese true crime paperback Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Wise Blood. So pervasive and crafty are Dylan’s recastings for “Love and Theft” that I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we learn that every bit of speech on the album—no matter how intimate or Dylanesque—can be tracked back to another song, poem, movie, or novel.

One conventional approach to Dylan’s songwriting references “folk process” (and also, in his case, “blues process”) and recognizes that he’s always acted as a magpie, recovering and transforming borrowed materials, lyrics, tunes, and even film dialogue (notably on his 1985 album Empire Burlesque). Folk process can readily map early Dylan, the associations linking say, “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Go ’Way from My Window” with his current variations on traditional blues couplets in his update of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” for Modern Times.

Yet what about Twain, Fitzgerald, O’Connor, Confessions of a Yakuza, and Timrod? If those gestures are also folk process, then a folk process pursued with such intensity, scope, audacity, and verve eventually explodes into Modernism. As far back as “Desolation Row,” Dylan sang of “Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers.” Dylan’s insistent nods to the past on Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” and Modern Times can probably best be apprehended as Modernist collages.

To clarify what I mean by Modernist collages, think of them as verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations that tend to organize into two types: those collaged texts, like Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s “The Waste Land, ” where we are meant to remark on the discrepant tones and idioms of the original texts bumping up against one another, and those collaged texts, composed by poets as various as Kenneth Fearing, Lorine Niedecker, Frank Bidart, and John Ashbery, that aim for an apparently seamless surface. A conspicuous model of the former is the ending of “The Waste Land”:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

The following passage by Frank Bidart, from his poem “The Second Hour of the Night,” actually proves as allusive as Eliot’s, nearly every line rearranging elements assembled not only from Ovid, his main source for the Myrrha story, but also from Plotinus and even Eliot. But instead of incessant fragmentation, we experience narrative sweep and urgency:

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father

not free not to desire

what draws her forward is neither COMPULSION nor FREEWILL:—

or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
imagined as action upon

preference: no creature is free to choose what
allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:

I fulfill it, because I contain it—
it prevails, because it is within me—

it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to enter that
realm to which I am called from within. . . .

Dylan’s songwriting tilts toward the cagier, deflected mode that Bidart is using here. We would scarcely realize we were inside a collage unless someone told us, or unless we abruptly registered a familiar locution. The wonder of the dozen or so snippets that Dylan sifted from Confessions of a Yakuza for “Love and Theft” is how casual and personal they sound dropped into his songs—not one of those songs, of course, remotely about a yakuza, or a gangster of any persuasion.

Some of Dylan’s borrowings operate as allusions in the accustomed sense, urging us back into the wellspring texts. Timrod, I think, works as a citation we’re ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on that notice. Dylan manifestly is fixated on the American Civil War. In his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, he recounted that during the early 1960s he systematically read every newspaper at the New York Public Library for the years 1855 to 1865. “The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age,” he wrote, “but it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.”

His 2003 film Masked and Anonymous takes place against the backdrop of another interminable domestic war during an unspecified future. Dylan clearly sees links between the Civil War and America now—and once you consult a historical map of the red and blue states, would you contradict him? The echoes of Timrod help him frame and sustain those links. For Dylan, Modern Times (and this is the joke in his title, along with the reference to the Chaplin movie) are also old times, ancient times. “The age I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but it did. . . .”

Other borrowings, such as the tidbits of yakuza oral history, aren’t so much formal allusions as curios of vernacular speech picked up from reading or listening that shade his songs into something like collective, as against individual, utterances. But here, too, it’s hard not to discern specific designs. On recordings steeped in empire, corruption, masks, male power, and self-delusion, aren’t Tokyo racketeers (or Virgilian ghosts) as apt as Huck Finn, Confederate poets, and Charlie Patton?

Without ever winking, Dylan is inveterately canny and sophisticated about all this, though after a fashion that recalls Laurence Sterne’s celebrated attack on plagiarism in Tristram Shandy, itself plagiarized from The Anatomy of Melancholy. On “Summer Days” from “Love and Theft,” Dylan sings:

She’s looking into my eyes, and she’s a-holding my hand
She looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand,
She says, “You can’t repeat the past,” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you
can’t? Of course you can.”

His puckish, snaky lines dramatize precisely how one could, in fact, “repeat the past,” since the lyrics reproduce a conversation between Nick and Gatsby from chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby. On “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” from Modern Times, Dylan follows another oblique intimation of Timrod with the confession “I’ve been conjuring up all these long-dead souls from their crumbling tombs.” The quotation marks in the title of “Love and Theft” signal Dylan’s debts to Eric Lott’s academic study Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class; the secondhand title of the CD also specifies his status as a white blues and rock ’n’ roll performer inside an American minstrelsy tradition, as well as his songwriting proclivities (loving stuff enough to filch it).

In a 1996 interview for Newsweek, novelist David Gates asked Dylan what he believed. He replied, “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’—that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”

Let’s presume that by “songs” Dylan also now must mean poems, such as Henry Timrod’s, and novels, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, as well as traditional folk hymns and blues. His invocation of that expanded “lexicon” might be surprising, and daunting, but it certainly isn’t plagiarism. Who else writes, has ever written, songs like these? Poems, novels, films, songs all partake of a conversation with the great dead—a “conjuring,” as Dylan would say. The embodiment of his conjuring, those conversations with his dead on his recent recordings are among the most daring and original signatures of his art.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Originally Published: October 6, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/lear...e/178723#guide

Robert Hass: “The Nineteenth Century as a Song”
Robert Hass, Baudelaire, Marx, and a bomb-building anarchist.

BY JOY KATZ
Imagine a young married professor ensconced in the library on a sunny afternoon. He began his day listening to people argue against the war in Vietnam, and then, perhaps, he met his wife and three small children for lunch. It’s spring. He’s studying revolutionary history and 19th-century poetry. His mind sifts through the events of the morning: uprisings, outrage, a picnic. He reads essays about anarchy and the abolition of the state. Outside, someone is flying a kite in the quadrangle.

Robert Hass meditates on such incongruity in “The Nineteenth Century as a Song,” a poem published in his first book, Field Guide, written while he held his first university teaching job. Hass came of age in San Francisco in the late 1950s and early ’60s, during a turbulent time: the Cambodian conflict, Vietnam, McCarthy. It was a “monstrously inhuman world,” he wrote then. Yet Hass is not a revolutionary. He makes poems “for the peace involved in reading and writing them.” “Feeling human,” he says, is a “useful form of political subversion.” The pleasure in “The Nineteenth Century as a Song” is the poem’s easy movement across an uneasy era, the way it touches down on increasingly discomforting subjects as casually as a bird hops from branch to branch of a tree.

The poem unfolds in Europe, from about 1850 to 1870, also a time of upheaval. Aesthetically the world was on the brink of Modernism. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the great Romantic poets who found redemption in nature, had died. God was dead, too: Darwin had published The Origin of Species. Marx was penning screeds on state-run socialism. Workers toiled in wretched factories. Paris saw a revolution and mob rule. The French poets Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, both active politically, were writing a new kind of violent, sexual poetry. Baudelaire was even prosecuted for obscenity (just as Allen Ginsberg would be in the late 1950s, in Hass’s San Francisco).

Above all this turmoil there was the sky, of course. Birds. Clouds. Everything that inspired the Romantic poets, and that inspires Hass—who writes often and in detail about the California landscape—was there. What role does beauty have in a time of revolution? That’s the question the poem seems to ask.

The opening image of orderly loveliness seems to say that beauty was thriving in the 19th century. Hass quotes the poet Verlaine (1844–1896): “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” The soul is not in torment; it’s a pretty place to walk through on a sunny day. Right? Well, all is not what it seems. Verlaine was no stroller in gardens. He was a tormented spirit, a wife-beater and a drunk who died (not entirely unhappily) in a fleabag hotel.

The poem leaps from this apparently peaceful image to an imagined scene in which Baudelaire (1821–1867) shops for the ingredients of his dinner. His butcher

shorted him four centimes on a pound of tripe.
He thought himself a clever man
and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,
gazed briefly at what Tennyson called
“the sweet blue sky.”

Baudelaire’s shopkeeper is a devious character, cheating the poet of a bit of change on a cheap cut of meat. But he must need those four centimes: France is in crisis. There’s a depression. This man can’t even vote—the voting privileges of the working class have been revoked. As a révolutionnaire, he has a lot more than calves’ blood on his hands. Still, life is not so hellish that a butcher in a stinking shop can’t admire a beautiful sky.

It was a warm day.
What clouds there were
were made of sugar tinged with blood.
They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages
new settings of the songs
Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.

Hass lingers in that pleasant afternoon. Instead of rain, the clouds are shedding music (a song’s setting is its melody). What would a new melody for a folk song be like in the mid-19th century? Modern music has its roots in the late 1800s. Compared with Romantic and Victorian music, it is cacophonous and dissonant. Hass may have had in mind Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), who spent his childhood in Moravia and whose symphonies, some of which are based on folk songs, began to play with anti-tonality. Perhaps he also thought of the Paris premiere of the ballet Rite of Spring. The audience booed and hissed at the pagan orgy onstage and at the animal-like shrieks of the bassoon in Igor Stravinsky’s score. Now picture a half-dozen country virgins staggering down a forest path to a weird, sort of ugly tune. They are being delivered into the sexuality of wifehood and the brutality of industrial-age life, not a flower-strewn happy ending. Poor virgins!

Hass’s title announces that the poem, too, is a song. Modern classical music has melodious parts that collide with jarring ones. Hass has given us flowers and animal intestines, sugar and blood, leaping from the smelly to the sublime and back again.

The poet is a monarch of the clouds

This line is adrift in space, like—well, like a cloud. I like to picture Robert Hass looking out that library window. Writing is a solitary act, unlike a march on Washington, or on Versailles. Poetry can’t change the world. On the other hand, Hass isn’t bombing Bien Hoa. Verlaine and Baudelaire didn’t exactly help oppressed Paris workers, but they did write impassioned verse. Poets lack power. They rule over a kingdom of ice droplets. Maybe that’s not so bad.

With a simple ampersand and line break, Hass makes another jump, this time from France to England.

& Swinburne on his northern coast
“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”
composed that lovely elegy

The poet Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) was attempting to wield perhaps the only public power a poet does have: memorializing the dead, in this case Baudelaire, one of his heroes. The elegy Hass nods to is indeed lovely, but “trod by no tropic foot” isn’t. It’s clunky and silly. Hass is taking a jab at the way Swinburne sometimes chose words for the sake of rhyme, but he rolls his eyes affectionately, as if at an overwrought love letter written by a teenager.

and then found out Baudelaire was still alive
whom he had lodged dreamily
in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”

In his elegy, Swinburne had imagined the dead poet taken up into the bosom of a Titan woman whose vastness could barely contain Baudelaire’s lusty, rebellious soul and whose heavy tangle of hair smelled like forests. All very noble, except Swinburne had made a mistake: Baudelaire was alive. As a big fan of artifice, Baudelaire would have loved that Swinburne turned literary tradition on its head, however unwittingly. What could be more droll and modern than elegizing someone who wasn’t dead?

Next, Hass stakes his claim for the poet again. He sounds insistent, as if trying to convince himself that art has a purpose, or as if he can tell what you’re thinking: poets traffic in beauty, but the world isn’t beautiful. It’s full of madness, war, and betrayal. What’s the point?

Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century
while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit

Hass has neatly conjured Karl Marx beside him in the library, reading the very book he may be studying himself. If poets are useless, what about revolutionaries? Surely they are more than monarchs of the clouds. But while Hass floats around in the sky, Marx endures a tedious afternoon. Being a revolutionary seems glamorous, but one spends a lot of time waiting around for weavers to revolt.

Hass imagines a different sort of tedium in the affairs of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Bakunin thought Marx didn’t go nearly far enough. Forget any form of government, he said. People should live in communes, farm the land, and rule themselves. It was as sexy a vision as the Age of Aquarius, and as short-lived...............................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/178919

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Does Poetry Have a Social Function?
BY STEPHEN BURT AND DAISY FRIED AND MAJOR JACKSON AND EMILY WARN
Stephen Burt:

What is the social function of poetry? Well, what is the social function of ER nursing? Of plumbing and carpentry? Whatever you think of the folks who fix your pipes, you know roughly what they get paid to do, and why the people who pay them value their services. An individual poet may think she knows such things about poetry, but put two or more poets (let alone critics) in a room, and their so-called knowledge may reveal itself as clashing opinions or axioms—even though "social," as the antithesis of "individual," implies some ground of agreement, something shared. (One reason we keep seeking a "social function" despite this lack of agreement: those of us who make a living through poetry—by teaching other people how to write more of it, or by writing about it—often feel a bit guilty for getting paid.)

Compared to the writing of poetry, few other human activities take place so widely, at least in America, absent even a tacit consensus as to why we do them, what good they do, what function they serve. When you read a lot of contemporary poetry, you discover that the presumed or stated, implicit or explicit, social function of poetry (if any) varies wildly with the poet. Rae Armantrout's poetry, for example, seeks—at times, it seems to despair of finding—a social function we might identify as the inculcation of skeptical thinking. That's a social function in the sense of "social good," even of "social policy." James Merrill's poetry has a social function in the sense of "social event": it tries to produce—often, in the face of mortality, or dejection, or bodily ills—a sense that the poet has friends who get his jokes, who share his sense of things, who respond in kind. Late Merrill—the Merrill of "Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker"—wonders whether his poetry might resound beyond that social group. Both poets want to say something about a society, and both poets want to do something we might call "social"—to imagine, and to cause, some sense of relations that extend beyond one-on-one intimacy—but they differ in what they want to do, and in why. To speak usefully about the social function of poetry, we need to decide what—or whose—poetry we intend.

Daisy Fried:

People who talk about poetry's social utility often concentrate on content. They think, perhaps, that poetry Tells the Truth, or Provides Solace. These notions make me queasy, and are treason to poetry. If you're crawling to poems on your hands and knees, as I once heard a famous poet remark—in my view, you're not crawling to poetry. Prozac would probably work better.

Poetry's social function comes not from what it means but from what it is. Its utility is to shake us out of our standard American buy-stuff-and-watch-TV half life. A poem's content matters very little to that utility.

I read the phrase "social function" particularly in terms of politics. Plenty of things need to happen in this country, like impeaching George Bush, nationalizing health care, legalizing same-sex civil union, and bringing the troops home now. Poetry can make none of these happen. Anne Winters's "The Mill-Race," about office workers in lower Manhattan, contains virtuoso description of the urban scene: workers, weather, light, limos of the bosses, buses of the employees. Though its subject matter and politics are both clear and attractive, content has very little to do with why the poem is extraordinary.

Is it a useful poem? I like political poetry; it acknowledges that politics are part of life. Certainly at this historical moment, many of us are hungry for poems that look outward, not just into the self or into what seems like another kind of narcissism, a turning away via the knee-jerk (therefore empty) "avant garde" linguistic gesture. America's crimes may be forcing poets back into the world. It's not as though it's optional. Eventually it becomes political necessity.

But politically-alert poetry is no more intrinsically useful than any other poetry. The only kind of poetry that doesn't have social function is that which tells us how to think about X, Y, or Z, or tells us to buck up, or that the world is a wonderful place. The kind of poetry written to make us feel better, for example, after 9/11, is pro-establishment falsification, for it lets us pull the comforter back over our heads and go on sleeping.

For the record, I never feel guilty getting paid, ever.

Major Jackson:

The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world. For this reason, poetry makes everything (and, yes, nothing) happen, especially in a consumer society prone to assessing and dispensing value to everything from lap dances to teachers' salaries. Whether as a form of witness, as a medium which dignifies individual speech and thought, as a repository of our cumulative experiences, or as a space where we "purify" language, poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

I hope this does not sound like an exercise in ambiguities. If so, let me add another: one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminancy. Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder. Such a position is necessary to our communal health.

I try to teach my students the full magnitude of what can happen during the reading of a poem. The readerly self, if the music and strategies of the poem are a success, fades away to assume the speaker's identity, or the poem's psychic position. Once a reader has fully internalized the poem's machinations, she collects a chorus within her and is transformed. This ritual generates empathy and widens our humanity. These might seem like grand dreams, but it is just such a belief in the power of poetry that spurs my pen to action, whether I am getting paid or not.

Emily Warn:

Here is a guess at Will Shortz's crossword clue for your collective answer to our question: "A six-letter word for an art form with no public use other than the one each artist defines. You can separate its content from its uses, which are to shake people from their consumer stupor and usher them into indeterminate mystery."

Plato need not have stewed about poets, you seem to be saying. They have banished themselves from the republic, having abdicated their role as loud-mouth rousers of weeping and gnashing. They won't discombobulate the young, especially young soldiers, whom Plato warned off poetry lest it remind them of their dirty little fear of death. Now it is the poets who soldier on; they have, after all, paying jobs to perform, not for the republic, but for the realm of the personal which has subsumed it.

Does the social function of poetry vary so wildly that we cannot generalize about it? What can be commonly said about a skeptic who turns for clarity to a Rae Armantrout poem, a plumber who searches on Yahoo for a wedding toast, a harried person who seeks in poetry refuge from a grueling job, or a Guantanamo prisoner who, denied pen and paper, uses pebbles to scratch poems on Styrofoam cups?

I'll hazard an answer. Poetry binds solitudes. It enacts a central human paradox: we exist as singular selves, yet can only know them through our relations. A poem creates a presence that is so physically, emotionally, and intellectually charged that we encounter ourselves in our response to it. The encounter, which occurs in language, preserves and enlarges our solitude and points out our connections. Pyrotechnic poets, such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich, set a charge that reverberates among multitudes, changing the shape of our social relations and, inescapably, our individual and collective consciousness.

"The Mill-Race" by Anne Winters serves as proof text. How can its content not matter? How can one not relate to the drained faces of the women office workers on an evening bus, to their scant hope that, despite their misspent, dwindling hours in the service of Labor, they have preserved a shred of self?

It won't take us
altogether, we say, the mill-race—it won't churn us up
altogether. We'll keep
a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self's self—to
reflect the sky.
But we won't (says the bus rider now to herself).
Nothing's
left over really, from labor. They've taken it all for the
mill-race.


Will this poem end drudgery? No. Does it disclose the pathos of other human beings and the source of their suffering? Yes. Is it this capacity that will help us, better than ammo or dollars, find a way through these harrowing times? Absolutely.

Stephen Burt:

I hope I share Emily Warn's passionate optimism about the scope of our art form, but I either fail to understand, or cannot believe, her argument. Is there some function we should call "social," in some ordinary meaning of that term, which all good poems, and only poems (no non-poems: no sculptures, for example) attain? Emily says yes: "poetry binds solitudes," creating "a presence" in whose contemplation we "encounter ourselves" alongside other readers and writers.

Certainly many poems—one might say all good poems—have this effect. So do many objects and events which are not poems. Would it be nonsensical to say that by building houses with Habitat for Humanity, through the hard work of hammer and nail, on the one hand, and the contemplation of poverty, on the other, I might encounter and come to know both my society and myself? What about reading my great-grandmother's love letters, reading Studs Terkel's oral histories, contemplating Brancusi's "Bird in Flight"? We are more likely to experience great visual art in the presence of others (in museums); we might say such experience connects us more evidently than can the silent reading of verse whose authors we have never met.

Ah, but poetry binds our solitudes, creating this self-encounter which becomes paradoxically social, through language alone. Our current—our late-Romantic—understanding of poetry (by which all poems are really or fundamentally lyric) posits this binding-together through language alone as poetry's chief goal: poetry becomes that way of using language in which that goal (rather than, say, exposition or persuasion) takes center stage.

If that is what Emily means, I accept her claim, with two demurrers. First, it is a historically specific understanding, one which describes many superb poems, but leaves out many—to say the least—wonderfully memorable uses of verse (e.g. Milton's sonnet against the Long Parliament). Second, hers appears to be a sense of "social" by which "social" denotes any experience or quality shared among two or more people, friends or strangers, living or dead. Otherwise a poem could not bind—as many poems do bind—solitudes and make connections among readers who do not live in the same society, nor even in the same century. If we use any more conventional, more restrictive senses for "social"—for example, "having to do with a particular society taken as a whole," or even "having to do with people in large groups"—then there is no social function which all good poems have.

Daisy Fried:

How about a moratorium on using plumbers and other "common" people as mythical readers of poetry? Of course Ms. Hardworking Roto-Rooter reads poetry, at least casually, like anyone who reads at all. I'm only sorry more poets don't know how to fix toilets, myself included. It's easy to talk about some "them" for whom poetry is useful. "Them" seldom includes "us."

Emily Warn seems to argue that content supplies poems' utility. Content matters—poetry is far more than a formal game—but does not supply utility. Quality does. "The Mill-Race" is good and usefulbecause it presents in extraordinary language an aspect of the human condition, not some false solution having to do with feel-good "relat(ing) to drained faces." Emily should reread the very lines she quotes if she thinks this poem is about workers "preserv(ing) a shred of self." The poet is there on the bus, we are there, we are all in the mill-race.

I've never found an explanation for why poetry, apparently alone among the art forms, is asked to do more than be itself. Some people devote their lives to Art Song. They take it quite seriously and expect a small audience, without worrying about whether their obsession is useful or that their audience is small. No one says, "Hey lyric soprano, make me feel better, hey basso profundo, help me understand societal problems."

But poetry's the High Art which is also democratic: inexpensive, portable, reproducible, quickly consumed (except for epic and very difficult poetry), requiring only literacy to participate. So maybe it's good that poetry carries this extra burden, even if it means that the idea of poetry is more necessary to people than individual poems, and that people tend not to pay attention to what's happening on the page. But this doesn't explain why the superfluous demands are often made by educated poetry experts. I doubt most poets, good and bad, political or not, put these demands on their own work. Why should we make them of poetry in general?

I'm also disturbed by Emily's romantic scenario relating to Guantanamo prisoners. I'm not pooh-poohing poetry of witness, quite the opposite. Art of witness is essential. But we should beware of using witness poetry as some cliché of the triumph of the human spirit, providing ourselves with a sop to make us feel better about our government's victims. Poetry's point is not to make safe middle-class readers say, "Poor things! They have it tough. Thank Heavens I vote Democrat!"

Major Jackson:

Daisy Fried wonders why poetry is called to duty, why it "is asked to do more than be itself," especially during moments of political or national crisis. Hers is the same annoyance expressed by disapproving poets who sniff the air upon hearing a 9/11 elegy or an inaugural poem, or upon learning of a famous poet penning her own line of greeting cards. Why do we, as poets, find this function of poetry so regrettable? Is it because it is too social?

Just ask the poet who reluctantly agrees to contribute to a wedding program, a funeral, or a political rally: the assignment pales in comparison to those poems that arise out of his own mysterious and idiosyncratic need. Such poems come forth from a comparatively minor—yet compulsive—desire. They may enact, for example, an obsessive rhythmic movement in the body onto the page, or explore the significance of a gripping image. But they'll likely never mean as much in the public sphere, where content definitely does matter.

And here's where I disagree with Daisy. If a poem has something to say and says it well, it will be remembered. However, what may give a poem its originality and heft—extraordinary language, searing imagery, high lyricism—may be too arcane for the layperson. Ms. Hardworking Roto-Rooter could care less about your dithyrambs. For her, the poem has value and purpose because it says something meaningful to her.

Most poets must admit that they would cherish being seen by their community of friends and relatives as "functional," the voice who sanctions and gives formal expression to their lives in verse, who serves as the repository of their thoughts and experiences, much like the West African djali or griot. One only wishes more poets took on with greater awareness the higher calling of their art, which has always had embedded within it a vision of the social. Instead, what we have been cultivating, probably since the Romantics, is a vision of the self, either as lonely and overly sentimental, or as beleaguered and fractured, and thus modern. Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, as well as the more politically-minded poets like Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, and Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad all reach beyond mere aestheticism and challenge accepted notions of the above solipsistic poet toiling away at a few columns of free verse. Personally, I find the cynicism and disdain for such poets, even mildly detected here, overly familiar and somewhat nauseating.

Emily Warn:

After twenty-four hours of traveling, I get home to Seattle bleary-eyed. A headline swims into sight: "Shooting at Jewish Federation Offices Leaves 1 Dead, 5 Wounded." On high alert, I stop to read. Is my Talmud teacher among the wounded or dead? Is anyone else I know? No names have been released. The next morning Israel bombs a Lebanese village and more than fifty people, most of them children, die. Indeed, as Daisy says, "we are all on the bus." Inevitably, someone here, or in a bomb shelter in northern Israel or southern Lebanon, will turn to poetry to read at a funeral service, or to jump-start terrorized lives and pulverized communities.

Why is poetry called to duty during these crises (Major Jackson)? We avidly read poetry written about repression in other countries (Milosz, Ahkmatova, Darwish, Celan), and yet American poets who write of repression (Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination, for instance), we call—often with a slight sneer—"political."

Poems such as "The Mill-Race" make us aware of the social conditions that shape our relations; their language helps us dwell in, puzzle out, and feel the conditions and the relations, no matter how terrible, making a change in them more possible. It is this possibility, this hope, that makes poetry as necessary as a paycheck.

"The Mill-Race" ends on the word "salt," ("but it's mostly the miller's curse-gift, forgotten of God yet still grinding, the salt-/mill, that makes sea, salt"). The salt sting is both our empathy for the workers' weariness and the fact of their individual lives ground to salt. Over centuries, the poem also says, these workers have raised cathedrals, invented art. The work, "the curse-gift" of the poet, is to tell the story of a person who has no story other than the story of relations. As Celan wrote, "I am you / if I am."

But do all poems do this? I agree with Stephen Burt that if we prescribe a single ethical purpose to poetry, if we write toward an ideal, then we stymie the possibility that each poem can address a question raised by particular conditions. Yet if we reject tangled relations to insist on the isolated, fragmented self of modern consciousness, then we remain self-absorbed and self-limiting—and certainly incapable of responding to the woman standing with Ahkmatova in the prison line who asked, "Can you describe this?"

Stephen Burt:

A clarification for Daisy Fried: I meant what plumbers do (fix pipes), not who they are or what they read. (I could have used ASL interpreters, or oncologists.) Plumbers (or interpreters or oncologists) do something which we can easily describe, and for which most of us understand the demand. Poetry, like most of the other arts, cannot be defined in general terms that also make clear its utility; plumbing, ASL translation, and oncology can. I continue to maintain that poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all, even if (and here Emily Warn and I agree) most of the great modern poets do project visions of self which imply paradoxical communities of solitude, social in one sense, antisocial in another.

Maybe no one asks mezzo-sopranos to justify their work in terms of purported political utility, but composers have long encountered such demands. Dmitri Shostakovich faced (and sometimes tried to satisfy) the demands of Soviet musical realism. Theodor Adorno's social (and antisocial) theories demanded that composers, and writers, protect that "isolated, fragmented self of modern consciousness" against the false claims of a bad social whole.

I have no desire to insist on such protection, nor to deny that poems have social functions. Rather, my point is that different poems do different things, and good poems (such as "The Mill-Race") do many things at once. If there are universal truths about the communicative functions in poems—truths about all good poems, not just about "The Mill-Race"—they are so universal that they do not count as social, by my lights: they concern communication among just two persons at a time, whether the two meet face-to-face, or whether implicit author and genuine reader live thousands of years apart. One good reason to read poems from distant times and places is that they take us out of our society, showing us how much emotion and thought isn't social (for, about, or addressed to one particular society) at all.

Daisy Fried:

Why not a summation made up of parts?

1 History matters. The claim that the Romantics weren't interested in politics or society (Major Jackson) can be disproved by anyone who reads Shelley, Byron, or Blake. If, before the Romantics, the poet's job was speaking for society, the Romantics moved towards speaking to and for the individual, including the poor and oppressed. They were revolutionaries opposing the system.

2 Words matter. Use is not function. War and Peace makes an excellent paperweight; I've used it that way myself, after reading it. The function of War and Peace is greater than its many uses. So too poetry. Bad poems are often more useful for healing, persuasion, and celebration than good ones. They lack that rich ambiguity which Keats called negative capability, and so fail as poems. Take, for example, bad 9/11 poems, at which I do "sniff the air." There are good 9/11 poems. The degraded Romanticism of the mass of bad ones often amounts to decorative displays of the poet's own sensibility. Such displays may be emotionally or politically useful, but who needs them? They seem to claim authenticity for individual experiences derived from watching TV—and fail to ask the question, why do these people want to kill us? Good 9/11 poems sustain the possibility that America was both victim and guilty. I believe 9/11 solace poetry has given support, however indirectly and unintentionally, to the Bush administration. Solace poetry is to serious poetry as pornography is to serious art. Sex pornography has its uses, even positive ones, but nobody confuses it with serious art about love. The difference between solace porn and sex porn is that solace pornographers seldom seem aware that they're making pornography. Shame on them.

3 Poetry matters. Great poems don't always fit categories of usage: Martial's hilariously filthy invectives, Dickinson's apolitical lyrics, and, despite their stupid fascism, Pound's Cantos, all function as great poetry. Meanwhile, the four of us write poems. We might begin by intending to be merely useful (I never have). But at some point the poem takes over, makes requirements of us instead of vice versa. That's the moment of poetry; poems exist to let readers share in that moment. So our focus on mere use strikes me as odd: is this really all we know about our poems? Why exclude ourselves from our own readership?

4 Enjoyment matters. Poetry is fun! I mean this seriously. In "Lapis Lazuli," Yeats insists on the gaiety of human existence alongside its tragedy. Yes, there is terrible suffering; we are all going to die. And when, on the carved lapis lazuli, a man "asks for mournful melodies;/Accomplished fingers begin to play;/...their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay." The gaiety of great poetry reinforces and deepens our humanity. That's personal—and therefore social. Forget that, and we forget poetry's true function.

Major Jackson:

Daisy Fried grossly misreads my critique of excessive egoism in Romantic poetry—which an even closer reading of literary history would reveal I mostly cop from Eliot and other anti-Romantic critics. But anyway, let's face it: were Daisy's nineteenth-century poet-revolutionaries alive today, they would be unemployed and writing in obscurity. They would likely be committed to mental institutions for claims of having visions, of the socially relevant and supernatural variety; at least one would be labeled a terrorist or terrorist-sympathizer for speaking against the state and/or professing anti-Christian beliefs; another ostracized for brazenly exercising self-proclaimed, progressive forms of natural love. All, except Keats maybe, would be ignored and cast aside as personae non gratae by the critical, academic, and literary establishments: no Guggenheim for you, Mr. Shelley.

True revolutionary poets are stripped of their laureateships or never reviewed in these pages, for some reason probably having to do with the worn-out argument of lack of aesthetic worth or little merit. Martín Espada, John Yau, and Nikki Finney are just a few of many poets who write poetry that "embraces experience in its full complexity," yet their books never receive a nod in Poetry. Even when the Establishment posthumously highlights a poet such as June Jordan, whose poetics and social vision coalesce into a rich model of the best of art created in a democracy, and whose poetry never suffers from mere narcissism, it does so patronizingly (see Dan Chiasson's review in these pages, November 2005).

What I also read in this exchange is a distasteful cynicism about poetry's ability—its responsibility—to affect lives. If a reading public feels consoled or seeks "a momentary stay against confusion," and poetry provides them this, why deem such works of art failures? Is healing really the domain only of prescriptive drugs?

The worth and importance of all poems is at least partially determined by the context in which they are read and the nature of the audience reading them. I once had a social worker approach me after a reading to thank me for writing a particular poem. "I run a weekly group for abusive men," he said. "I open each session with your poem." Now, I have no idea if this poem will "endure," but it was immensely gratifying that it was "of use" beyond my own desire to write it. I've talked to many other poets who have had similar experiences; it is a sobering moment when one realizes the extent to which art and grace are truly factors in people's lives. Poetry can have an immediate impact in the world. We shouldn't denigrate this capacity, no matter how much we are being paid.

Emily Warn:

Stephen Burt's logic is airtight. Yet his claim that "poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all" except that it "concerns communication among just two persons" seems cramped and unmoored. A long line of poets and thinkers have made great claims about poetry's social use. Burt seems to be stacking and storing different types of poetry in a container ship, removed and protected from the world as it journeys across the sea. The stacks of poetry can be referenced by poet-engineers, not of the sacred or the social, but of the aesthetic.

In contrast, Emerson claims that "Poets are...liberating gods." Emerson thought poems could change reality because they uncover its hardwiring, then jimmy with it. Poetic insight, he wrote, "does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucent to others." Emerson named the current flowing through things divine—a fire our bodies and poems externalize. "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."

Poets, he's saying, weld new relations and add new forms to the world. (Think, for instance, of D.A. Powell's poems about living and loving with HIV, or A.R. Ammons's poems about inlets, woods, and garbage.) In making our circuitry—our social and biological nerves—translucent, it becomes perceivable and so changeable. Our social reality is thus enlarged to include relations and facts that have been obscured (not yet discovered) or repressed. "Poems are born dark," Celan wrote, because language is "loaded with world."

Do other forms of art and work carry out this same task? Yes, of course, but poetry is especially adept at helping us experience, and so understand, celebrate, mourn, curse, or philosophize about our relations. The fact that most often this poetic "exchange of energy" (Rukeyser) is between two people does not mean it ends there. Poets do not know how their poems will be used in the future. Whitman did not know his work would inform a gay liberation movement. Housman did not know A Shropshire Lad would speak to people suffering the horrors of WWI.

Poetry can leap across and charge the synapse between us and the world, altering both. If we abandon this use, then poets become one more group of wage-laboring specialists, gathered into "ghettos," speaking our own language, and designing complicated objects which serve as prophylactics to protect us from people still naïvely seeking this life-making force.

Originally Published: December 28, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Stephen Burt's logic is airtight. Yet his claim that "poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all" except that it "concerns communication among just two persons" seems cramped and unmoored. A long line of poets and thinkers have made great claims about poetry's social use. Burt seems to be stacking and storing different types of poetry in a container ship, removed and protected from the world as it journeys across the sea. The stacks of poetry can be referenced by poet-engineers, not of the sacred or the social, but of the aesthetic.

In contrast, Emerson claims that "Poets are...liberating gods." Emerson thought poems could change reality because they uncover its hardwiring, then jimmy with it. Poetic insight, he wrote, "does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucent to others." Emerson named the current flowing through things divine—a fire our bodies and poems externalize. "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."

Poets, he's saying, weld new relations and add new forms to the world. (Think, for instance, of D.A. Powell's poems about living and loving with HIV, or A.R. Ammons's poems about inlets, woods, and garbage.) In making our circuitry—our social and biological nerves—translucent, it becomes perceivable and so changeable. Our social reality is thus enlarged to include relations and facts that have been obscured (not yet discovered) or repressed. "Poems are born dark," Celan wrote, because language is "loaded with world."

Do other forms of art and work carry out this same task? Yes, of course, but poetry is especially adept at helping us experience, and so understand, celebrate, mourn, curse, or philosophize about our relations. The fact that most often this poetic "exchange of energy" (Rukeyser) is between two people does not mean it ends there. Poets do not know how their poems will be used in the future. Whitman did not know his work would inform a gay liberation movement. Housman did not know A Shropshire Lad would speak to people suffering the horrors of WWI.

Poetry can leap across and charge the synapse between us and the world, altering both. If we abandon this use, then poets become one more group of wage-laboring specialists, gathered into "ghettos," speaking our own language, and designing complicated objects which serve as prophylactics to protect us from people still naïvely seeking this life-making force.

Five very important paragraphs(and right on cue methinks) from the previous very lengthy article. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...article/178842

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
In Praise of Rareness
“The more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs.”

BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Every time we print an issue of Poetry that has more prose than poetry in it, we get at least one letter of complaint. These complaints vary in tone and temperateness, but inevitably there are sentences which run something like this: "Given the nature of your journal, and given its very name, what's with all the prose? Couldn't you use those pages for more poems? Shouldn't poetry be your emphasis?"

Well, yes and no. Yes, poetry should be (and most definitely is) our emphasis; but no, that does not necessarily translate into publishing more of it. In fact, I think a strong case can be made that the more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs. There is a limit to this logic, of course, or else Plato would be the patron saint of the art. But still, an overdeveloped appetite for poetry is no guarantee of taste or even of love, and institutionalized efforts at actually encouraging the over-consumption of poetry always seem a bit freakish, ill-conceived, and peculiarly American, like those mythic truck stops where anyone who can eat his own weight in rump roast doesn't have to pay for it.

Reading through old literary journals is not an activity I would ordinarily recommend, but it can be instructive in this context. People who know the history of Poetry usually point to a couple of indisputably high moments, the first under Harriet Monroe, who published the early work of just about all of the major Modernists; and the second under Henry Rago, who was on the whole more eclectic and adventurous than Monroe. It's interesting, then, to look at a couple of memorable issues from those times.

In June 1915 Monroe, in a now-famous story, took the advice of Poetry's foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound, and printed the first published poem of T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The other contributors of verse in that issue include Skipwith Cannéll, William Griffith, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Dorothy Dudley, Bliss Carman, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Ajan Syrian, all of whose work sounds pretty much like this:


O leaves, O leaves that find no voice
In the white silence of the snows,
To bid the crimson woods rejoice,
Or wake the wonder of the rose!

Just over forty years later, when Rago was editor, Sylvia Plath made her first appearance in the magazine with six poems that, though not representative of Plath at her best, nevertheless practically blaze with radiance beside the poems of Lysander Kemp, Louis Johnson, Edith Tiempo, William Belvin, August Kadow, etc., etc.

My point here is not to illustrate how badly most poetry ages, nor to present some sort of "long perspective" by which to judge a contemporary journal. Because one generation's treasures are the next generation's jokes does not invalidate the earlier meanings people may have found. It's quite possible that for many people those now-indistinguishable poems alongside "Prufrock" provided just the provocation or consolation they needed on a bad day, or caused them to look at their immediate world not, Lord knows, with new eyes, but at least with old eyes, at least to look. (And in fact the general reaction to "Prufrock" was decidedly negative.) Time is the ultimate test of art, but it is not the only test of art. It is possible for a work that will not survive its own time to nevertheless speak truly to that time. For us, coming across passages like those I've just quoted is like discovering some foul, furred thing at the back of the refrigerator: one's whole spirit winces. But for someone somewhere they were once fresh. What happened then is happening now, I guarantee you. It is the bliss and curse of being alive.

But that's a digression. The point I want to make here has to do with the prose in these issues, which in both cases remains surprisingly fresh, readable, even relevant. In the 1913 issue there is a memorable, sharply-worded piece by Ezra Pound, which, ironically, fulsomely praises the utterly forgotten poetry of T. Sturge Moore. In the issue edited by Rago, there are excellent reviews by Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson, as well as an astute piece on verse drama by William Meredith. This tendency is borne out by other back issues of Poetry (issues old enough to allow for some perspective, I mean). The poetry is pretty much a steady backdrop of competence for the occasional and (now) unmistakable masterpieces. The prose is surprisingly consistent in its quality and appeal.

Does it follow from this that prose is the more durable art? Of course not. No one is reading that prose I just mentioned, nor is there any particular reason why they should be. Critical prose exists solely for the sake of the moment in which it is written. Its function is either to bring to light some work from the past that has been neglected or misunderstood for the sake of enlarging and refining contemporary consciousness, or to help readers know what contemporary works to read, and how to read them. The bulk of the critical prose that survives is written by famous poets, and it survives only because the poetry of these people has survived. There are a few exceptions to this, but in general aiming at eternity with critical prose is like praying to a potato. You may very well get God's attention, but probably only because He likes a good laugh.

Is prose simply easier to write than poetry? Again, not necessarily. Prose can be damnably difficult to write, but it's been my experience that one can always will oneself to write it. Right now, for instance, because I am busy and lazy in equal measure, I am bashing these sentences out hurriedly before the issue goes to the printer. I think we can all agree that what I am writing here is not, let us say, for the ages. But perhaps at least a majority of us can also agree that it is written in perfectly adequate prose. All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.

The truth is, sometimes poetry is almost embarrassingly easy to write. There are the famous stories: Keats writing "Ode to a Nightingale" in a single morning, Coleridge channeling "Kubla Kahn," Milton essentially taking dictation from God (or perhaps from the Devil, because that's who came out looking better) while writing Paradise Lost. But besides these instances, just about every poet admits to some simultaneous feeling of helplessness and unaccustomed power in the writing of his best poems, some element of mystery. "If you do not believe in poetry," Wallace Stevens once wrote, "you cannot write it," and indeed this is the chief "difficulty" in poetry, that it comes so infrequently, that it remains beyond our will.

Anyone involved with the institutions of poetry would do well to remember this. With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is. I don't mean how little there is in the culture, but how little there is at any one time that is truly excellent. Poetry's invisibility is deplorable and worth fighting. Its rareness is admirable and the chief source of its strength. Indeed, I sometimes think that if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently. Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

All of this ought to have implications for the writer of poems as well. If poetry is so rare in the world, if so much of it is dross, just think how much rarer it must surely be in your (our!) own work. There is nothing wrong with thinking of poetry as a process, with developing a way of writing that allows you to churn out verse. Nothing wrong with it, that is, unless you give up all attempt at discrimination and insist on publishing all of these efforts. It may not be the case that anyone who is writing a book of poems every two or three years is writing too much, but he or she is certainly publishing too much. The great thing about writers like Hopkins, Larkin, Bishop, Bunting, Eliot, Herbert, Justice, and Bogan is that they demanded more from their work than anyone else did, and their discipline and dissatisfaction are now our pleasure.

What might all this mean for a literary magazine? Sixty years ago George Dillon and Hayden Carruth, who were then editors of this magazine, created a firestorm when they published an issue that had a mere eleven pages of verse in it. They explained their actions by saying that there simply weren't enough poems on hand that merited publication, and that to have lowered the bar of admittance would have been to lower the prestige of the magazine. It's impossible to know whether or not they were justified, because it's impossible to recover the material from which they were choosing. My suspicion, though, being familiar with Carruth's work as an anthologist and critic, and having edited this magazine myself for several years, is that they were. I also suspect that it was not at all a denigration of poetry, but an exaltation of it.
C.W.

Originally Published: January 8, 2007

Very interesting take on poetry. His truth but not necessarily my truth.
A poet should never or else rarely ever write Prose .
And by writing that I just broke that rule. ---Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/183637

POEM SAMPLER
From the Archive: Robert Lowell
His minor masterpieces, first featured in Poetry magazine.

BY THE EDITORS
"Friend,
the hours will hardly pardon you their loss,
those brilliant hours that wear away the days,
those days that eat away eternity."
—From "Spanish Sonnets," October-November 1963

As it turns out, one of the bastions of twentieth-century American verse didn't have all that much to do with another: Robert Lowell published sparsely in Poetry, sprinkling eight poems in the magazine over almost twenty years. This seems an especially surprising total when considering Lowell's prodigious output (fifteen of his books were reviewed in Poetry) and the role of "public poet" he achieved later in life. March 1, 2007 marks Robert Lowell's ninetieth birthday. The occasion affords an opportunity to reflect on Lowell's history with Poetry, one that hints at the larger, more complex saga of his poetic and personal life.


Lowell's upbringing in the classics and his New Formalist attentions reveal themselves in his first Poetry publication, a series of metrically demanding stanzas written in homage to Sextus Propertius, in 1946. A year later, fresh off the Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary's Castle, Lowell published "The Fat Man in the Mirror," which foreshadows the interiority of his later work: "But this flabby terror.../Nurse, it is a person! It is nerves." The rest of the poems Lowell printed in Poetry sketch out this famous transition from the strict forms and rhetorical bombast of his early career to a looser, more personal style exemplified by Life Studies in 1959. But the fascination with Lowell's poetic "conversion," like the fascination with his wavering mental health, obscures a complete consideration of his oeuvre. Forty years after the poet's death, the brash young formalist and the inventive elder statesman remain in constant conflict, as evidenced by these minor masterpieces first published by Poetry.

Originally Published: March 1, 2007

One of the few modern famous poets that I have respect for . -Tyr