Bob's Blog of Poetry

I'm on MySpace

2007-07-12T11:55:00.001-05:00

If you've been missing me, I regularly blog on MySpace.

Ballard Street Poetry Journal

2007-04-04T11:05:00.000-05:00

Along with Lori Desrosiers, I have a poem in the current issue of the Ballard Street Poetry Journal. Neither of our poems is viewable online, but their site tells you how to order the printed issue, if you're interested. I got my contributor's copy a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed the work included. It's edited by Heather Macpherson, who is an accomplished poet in her own right.

This is it!

2006-12-31T16:47:00.000-05:00

In an article on Canada.com, Hugo Kugiya, of Canadian Press, describes the kind of life that I thought was only paralleled by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was paid an annual allowance by the publisher of Black Sparrow Press for all the poems he could write. Jack Prelutsky, a children's poet who has earned millions, was similarly treated by his editor.

Hirschman insisted they open a joint chequing account and put him on an allowance, $130 a week. She also promised him lunch out every week if he gave her a poem.

His books have sold more than a million copies (children's poetry vastly outsells adult poetry), making him one of the bestselling living poets.
Prelutsky demurs when talk turns to money, but it is clear his poetry has made him millions. Today, his advances are befitting of a bestselling author

Now that just might be the thing to do. Writing humorous poetry for kids seems like a healthy and lucrative way of wordsmithing.

The Programming Poet

2006-06-21T06:59:00.000-05:00

In an article by Kevin Duffy he writes about Chris Jansen, a computer programmer who is also a poet. Sounds familiar. He articulated the reason for why I probably wrote no poetry during my first dozen years of progamming computers, and then I started writing poetry again:

Writing computer code is not unlike writing poetry, he said.

"You have to build up, line by line, meaning. If you screw up, magic does not happen."

"You try to plan everything. You try to celebrate your success. But it is not enough," he said.

BTW, this programming poet (aka me) has a poem in the latest issue of The November 3rd Club. I believe I'm now the only poet who is privileged to have had a poem in every issue.

New Poet Laureate

2006-06-15T11:20:00.000-05:00

So, Donald Hall will be the next American poet laureate. The man who so famously denounced the writing of the "McPoem" while ironically creating so many himself will now be at the helm of poetry awareness for the country.

Don't get me wrong. I like Donald Hall's writing-- when he's writing prose, particularly his reminiscences of other poets (Their Ancient Glittering Eyes) or criticism (Breakfast Served Any Time, All Day). Well, ok, "Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird" seemed a bit pretentious to me, but other than that, Hall has some delicious things to say about poetry, like:

"The McPoem is the product of the workshops of Hamburger University," and "every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer." Poems, "to satisfy ambition's goals, must not express mere personal feeling or opinion -- as the moment's McPoem does. It must by its language make art's new object."

Hall wants a poetry channel on satellite radio and/or perhaps a TV poetry channel. I hope he's successful, especially if it's XM Radio, since I'm a subscriber. (hint, Don)

And while we salute Hall's ascension, let us not forget the real poet in the family...

Making it all about me

2006-06-09T11:32:00.000-05:00

In an Associated Press article, John Cusack talks about "Grace is Gone", in which Cusack plays a man whose wife Grace is killed in service in Iraq. Filming wrapped last month; the movie's producers — who include Cusack — will be looking for a distributor or film festival opportunities.

Cusack's character, Stanley, delays telling his two daughters about their mother's death, instead taking them on a road trip while the former military man sorts out his complicated feelings about the war.

Cusack said he does not dwell on how his movies are initially received by the critics or public.

"I'm not worried about how it turns out in the first two months after it's released. A piece of art takes a while to be appreciated or not — if it is a piece of art. You try to make something that has some value and then in three, four or five years, it will still be interesting or it will have a pulse. Some things that you make, people say are terrific right away and they don't really hold up," Cusack said.

"You just sort of make it, and it's all about the process of making it. Trying to do the best you can. And then you have to wait for a long time to see if it has resonance anyway."

I've certainly had poems I thought were well-crafted being met with a "that's nice..." and poems I thought were throw-away being received with "Wow! That's really good. I really like that!" And poems that were initially met with a "that's nice..." have been published a year or two later. But the word I most focus on in "Trying to do the best you can" is "you": not trying to do the best a committee can. Whether good or bad, years from now I'd like a reader who comes across my poems to at least be able to recognize "oh, I can tell, that's a Bob poem." And that's why I don't submit my poems for critique much anymore. It's not that I think I know it all; I'm just not interested in conforming to what others think should be my voice. I hope I'm saved from megalomania by continuing to read and listen to poetry and literary criticism by others, always trying to learn how to appreciate different kinds of poetry than the ones I write.

The new Tilt is up

2006-05-31T19:55:00.000-05:00

Rachel Mallino did a great job with the layout of the new Tilt, and the guy who reviewed the books didn't totally suck.

Dueling Poets

2006-05-30T11:54:00.000-05:00

I have mixed feelings about QuickMuse as reported in Dinitia Smith's article
On Your Marks, Get Set, Poeticize: Dueling Poets on the Web in the NYT. Two poets were given fifteen minutes to write poems based on a statement by Elisabeth Bishop on the writing of poetry. First, such a prompt invites poetry about poetry, which Paul Muldoon did in an Animal Planet kind of way. Thylias Moss wanted us to know she had a headache and problems finding her favorite shows on cable TV. Ok, whatever.

I have mixed feelings for several reasons. First, I personally don't like to write to a prompt. I want to be inspired, but I don't wait around to be inspired: I read, I discuss, I think. I try to cultivate my mind for maximum inspirational receptivity. But my brain's not a Wal-Mart for poetic ideas.

The other thing I'm not comfortable with is the competitory nature of having two poets square off against each other. Yes, I know that competition exists even in the world of poetry, but such focused jousting doesn't appeal to my nature.

I disagree with Robert Pinsky: "You may not write your best, Pinsky said, "but you should be able to write something that is memorable." I don't have a problem with a poem being written quickly, but fifteen minutes seems a bit short to generate something truly memorable.

On the other side of the spectrum, Gary Snyder, whose poetry I wish didn't bore me as much as it does: "Being spontaneous doesn't interest me nearly as much as getting 'it' right — 'it' being the poem," he said. "I write slowly, come to conclusions slowly, and for better or worse I am just a slow poet." I'd say, perhaps for worse in Gary's case.

One of the features of the site is to have the poem's typing being replayed in actual time. And I thought dressage was boring!

Well, it's another one of those ideas that sounds somewhat intriguing in concept but fails to compel me in its execution.

Gone is a Member of the Community

2006-05-15T14:29:00.000-05:00

Stanley Kunitz died yesterday, and so the deathwatch over the hundred-year-old poet can now come to an end. I have a couple books by Kunitz: one of selected poems; and the other translations of Akhmatova. I've enjoyed both, though a single poem doesn't jump out in my memory. Like William Stafford and Robert Lowell, he was a conscientious objector during WWII. Unlike them, he was the target of Anti-Semitism.

He seems to have lived more for poetry than by poetry, refusing tenure at the schools in which he taught; refused because he wanted to be a poet who taught instead of a professor who wrote poetry.

Kunitz said: "I think all artists, and especially poets, are forever in search of a community. It’s a solitary act, and you need a community of like-minded souls to survive and to flourish. So the search for a community is really a lifetime engagement."

The People's Poet

2006-04-07T19:28:00.000-05:00

Erik Baker, in an article on Ted Kooser quoted some of Kooser's observations that I found worth mulling over.
“Anyone in the world can write a poem that’s impossible to understand,” said Kooser. “It’s not so easy to write a poem that a lot of people can understand and will be moved by emotionally.”

Kooser’s distaste for abstract poetry comes out in his dismissal of modernism.

“I’m not a cultural critic, but I think modernism has come to serve dead ends,” said Kooser. “It has excluded an enormous audience that has been hungry for poetry. It is like a leaf spinning at the end of an alley.”

“Slam poetry may not be the greatest art, but you have to include people,” said Kooser. “When people ask me about the state of poetry, I always say it isn’t one big state. Rap poets are different from cowboy poets, and both are thriving. The only group that thinks everyone should be writing like them is the literary group.”

Yes, that's probably true, until the rap poets and cowboy poets start their own critique groups. And the part about the leaf spinning at the end of an alley-- I first thought that was a good image for the indictment of modernism, but, then again, I have to admit, there was something lyrical about the windblown paper bag in American Beauty that prevents me from totally dismissing the leaf spinning at the end of an alley as serving no aesthetic end.

The Key is to not be Emotionally Illiterate

2006-04-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

Something particularly struck me in an article on Dannie Abse by John Horder. In June of last year, art historian Joan Abse died instantly in a horrific auto accident while returning home from a poetry reading she had given with her husband of 54 years, doctor and poet Dannie Abse. He suffered a broken rib.

Well, he suffered more than that.

Now, a difficult year later, Abse is publishing a new collection of his poems called "Running Late." In evaluating the book, Horder writes these words:
Many well-known male poets - and I have been lucky to interview a few, including Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin - are emotionally illiterate theorisers of how they would have liked their lives to have turned out.

With their huge egos, they tend to live in some detached land in their heads - too afraid to experience their mortality with their physical bodies.

Fortunately, Abse doesn't carry that kind of obstructive luggage around with him and seems to have more in common with the egoless poets Hafiz, Kabir and Rumi.

Against all the odds, he has managed to embrace his mortality without turning it into a drama.

But he does suggest that the secret of his long marriage lay in four lines by Robert Browning:

"When the apple reddens
Never pry
Lest we lose our Edens
Eve and I!"

And Abse is quoted as saying:
I don't mind melancholy poems. It's what poetry is for. I'm not interested in poets with crossword puzzle minds, like John Ashbury.

Now, I don't know that Abse's work receives the kind of intellectual admiration that Ashbury receives from the academic elite. But, as Horder writes, he is greatly loved by so many. I would say that love trumps admiration.

Why I like Thomas Lux

2006-03-25T11:43:00.000-05:00

I just read an interview with Thomas Lux by James Heflin. I attended a reading by Lux a couple of months ago, which I enjoyed. Even before that, I enjoyed reading his selected poems. Judging by the interview, he is a poet whose aesthetics don't contradict his practice. I could quote the whole article, but, instead I'll just present the bits I most identified with.

Nietzche said about certain philosophers there are philosophers who are more afraid of being understood than they are of being misunderstood, and I think there are poets like that, a lot of poets like that, because if you did understand them, you would go, "Wait a minute, there's not that much here." The old emperor with no clothes thing. When that stereotype fools people, when they feel that they're not supposed to understand poetry because they're just not quite smart enough and it has to be explained to them by a professor, that kind of poetry I dislike, because I think it diminishes all poetry, all good poetry. And I think often what is termed "difficult poetry" or even "obscure poetry" is neither--it's really just arbitrary. There isn't much there. I think it takes guts to write lucidly, clearly as possible.

You know what? I have great respect for those people [slam poets], and I think they are one of the main reasons that poetry is gaining a wider audience. Those people are taking poetry back to its roots, its oral roots. They do want to be understood. They make it exciting, make a reading/performance exciting. Maybe they're not all the best writers, but I have a shelf full of books, hundreds and hundreds of books that are pretty boring in content and often incomprehensible. I'd rather listen to a good slam or performance poet any day than read that kind of poetry on the page, so I give them a lot of credit and support.

I'm not sure if there's any clichéd subjects, cause there's only a couple of subjects anyway. Love and death--pretty much all the themes of poetry fit into one of those two categories in one way or another. But I think there's clichéd language, there's clichéd images, there's clichéd ideas, maybe even clichéd ways of expressing emotion. But if there's any way I could deal with, say, a political subject like I do in "The People of the Other Village," which is dismay over the continuing cycle of violence for thousands and thousands of years, one is to try to be odd or fresh enough, and also not being afraid to have some humor in something that's terribly, terribly dark or serious.

Thanks, Thomas Lux and James Heflin, for bringing me a breath of fresh air.

Stand-Up Poetry

2006-03-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

Two articles recently in the news, one on Mary Jo Salter, the other on James Tate and Brian Henry have got me mulling over once again the page vs. the stage.

The James Tate article didn't have much to offer, besides the point that his surrealistic poetry is now moving into prose poetry. The prose poetry is labeled "witty" in the article. Well, maybe "whimsical" would be how I'd characterize it. The performance of their poems seems to have been instrumental in forming an opinion of it. Of Henry, Adriane Hanson writes He delivered the poems with a rapid excitement that engaged the audience, and he spoke about what had inspired his writing. Of Tate, she writes His reading style brought the poems vividly to life and had the audience laughing for half an hour. He has a unique storytelling ability, and the poems he read were by turns startling and hilarious.
Ingrid Lane writes on one of Salter's poems that the piece offers a view of the humor Salter employs in describing scenes all her readers can understand... From serious to funny, our little group laughed and mourned with her verses. It would seem the Salter reading offered more depth. And I find much to like in her answers to the April 2001 Knopf Question-a-Poet Contest, especially positions I can identify with, such as:

I suppose the first thing I learn when I finish a poem is that I was able to finish a poem. I don't mean to reply flippantly: I mean that I genuinely fear when I write a poem that there won't be another one.

Much has been written about the importance of dreams to the making of poetry, but I'm even more interested in that blurry time you mention "between consciousness and sleep."...I've become particularly attached to the illogical thoughts one has in the minute or two before sleep or after waking....It's during such moments... that I try to elongate the fuzziness, and the attendant weird metaphors and wordplay, for as long as possible...One nice thing about reading the newspaper early: sleepy readers are more prone to misreading, and sometimes the misreadings jump-start poems...I guess I'd say that I do use literal memories in writing, and I do apply my conscious mind to crafting that artificial thing, a poem--but I hope that I have gotten myself thoroughly confused first.

Now here's the thing. I've flipped through the books of both Tate and Salter at the Odyssey bookstore, which is across from Mt Holyoke College, where Salter has been, and is down the street from Amherst, where Tate has been. I've had the oppotunity to see/hear either of them perform their work, yet I haven't. Why? Because when I've looked at their work on the page it hasn't grabbed me. I'm all for being accessible, and I think I like both Tate and Salter in theory, but in execution on the page, they just haven't struck me as compelling. And people are coming up to me, asking for copies of "The Pig", wanting me to read it again, etc., and kidding me that I'll become known as the guy who wrote "The Pig", which is a relatively accessible piece that gets a lot of laughs. I like to satisfy an audience, but is what I write to do that always suitable for putting into a book? I wonder if poetry publishing should ditch the books for some poets and just sell us recordings of live performances of their poems. Perhaps for some poets, or for some poems, that would be the better value for the poetry purchaser.

Creative Spark Fuels Active Sex Life

2006-03-09T10:23:00.000-05:00

Robert Preidt writes that a study finds that artists and writers are busier in the bedroom than others. Well, yeah, because that's where I do a lot of my reading and writing...

An active sex life and creativity may go hand-in-hand, according to a new British study that finds professional artists and poets have about twice as many sexual partners as other people...

"Creative people are often considered to be very attractive and get lots of attention as a result. They tend to be charismatic and produce art and poetry that grabs people's interest," study lead author Dr. Daniel Nettle, a lecturer in psychology at Newcastle University's School of Biology, said in a prepared statement...

The average number of sexual partners for poets and creative artists was between four and 10, compared with an average of three for non-creative people. The more creative a person was, the higher the number of sexual encounters, the researcher reported in the Nov. 29 issue of The Proceedings of the Royal Society (B).

Oh. Well, uh, then maybe I have a theory for poets' suicides. With advancing age, the odds must change for some people to an intolerable degree.

A Tide of Words

2006-02-22T10:25:00.000-05:00

In Jeffrey Hart's review of Juliet Barker Ecco's biography of Wordsworth he brings up several interesting points. The one that most sticks in my mind is what he says about water.
Watch out when Wordsworth hears that sound of waters. He seems then to gain access to his unconscious mind... The sound of waters signals Wordsworth's moment of access to his own childhood mind--really, as he believes, to his pre-infant mind.
This echoes in my mind as I read the poetry of Paul Celan, particularly this poem

In Egypt

Thou shalt say to the eye of the woman stranger: Be the water.
Thou shalt seek in the stranger's eye those thou knowest are in the water.
Thou shalt summon them from the water: Ruth! Naomi! Miriam!
Thou shalt adorn them when thou liest with the stranger.
Thou shalt adorn them with the stranger's cloud-hair.
Thou shalt say to Ruth and Miriam and Naomi:
Behold, I sleep with her!
Thou shalt most beautifully adorn the woman stranger near thee.
Thou shalt adorn her with sorrow for Ruth, for Miriam and Naomi.
Thou shalt say to the stranger:
Behold, I slept with them!

and I think of how Celan, like Shelley, Hart Crane, Rene Crevel, Berryman, and (probably) Weldon Kees died in or near the water. As if they wrote to save their lives until writing wasn't enough and they submerged into the unconscious that was all they felt they had. (One might object that Shelley wasn't a suicide, but he reportedly felt inadequate next to Byron, and his boat trip could possibly be construed as suicidal.)

And, since I've been reading "The Courtier and the Heretic", a book by Matthew Stewart about Leibniz and Spinoza, I felt the pang of Jungian synchronicity when Hart writes
The term "pantheist" has been applied to Wordsworth, as if he were a follower of Spinoza. No, I think he was proto-Christian.

Well, these are just vagrant thoughts banging around my head. I'm trying to see more worth in Wordsworth than I have before.

What I've learned and from whom

2006-02-11T16:52:00.000-05:00

I was inspired to put this together by a similar list on Jude Goodwin's blog.

From Lewis Carroll and Ogden Nash: I learned that verse could be humorous, even silly.
From Edgar Allan Poe: I learned the good lessons of delight in rhythm and rhyme, and the bad lesson of obsession with morbidity.
From e. e. cummings: I learned that language could be wrenched however you want it, that simplicity can be profoundly moving, that form can be subtle, and that you can like the "thrill of under me you so quite new" without "you" being in a grave.
From Emily Dickinson: I learned that you can relate the quirky small things to important big things.
From Vachel Lindsay: I learned that poetry can be verbally exuberant to physically delight the ear. (He recited for food.)
From William Blake: I learned poetry could deal effectively with spiritual and social issues.
From Edward Arlington Robinson: I learned that a character's essence can be dramatically revealed in an unforgettable way.
From Sylvia Plath: I learned you can be fearless on the page.
From John Crowe Ransom: I learned to distinguish between Latinate and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.
From William Stafford: I learned that inspiration is not willing an idea, but being receptive to the ideas that come to you. I learned that it's ok to write a less successful poem on the way of getting to a more successful poem. I learned not to attempt to learn the voice that others think I should have, but to simply listen to the voice I already own.

Outrage

2006-02-06T16:20:00.000-05:00

Muslims throughout the world are outraged at the cartoons desecrating Muhammad. I understand, and I sympathize. I'd prefer those cartoons were not published. While we're at it, there's something else I prefer wouldn't have happened over the past several decades. Can you guess what it is?

Cure for the mad poet

2006-02-04T14:54:00.000-05:00

Just read an article by John B. Amos about joining a poetry discussion group that turned out to be a writing workshop. He tells of a person reading a beautiful and terrifying poem about insomnia, only to have people respond by criticizing the first line...
I glanced over at the fellow to see how he was taking such criticism. His face twitched slightly, and then suddenly he exploded. Purple with rage, he screamed, "Just read the damned thing! Quit trying to analyze it!"
And I would say, that I would have to agree. Often, criticisms in critique groups can be more along the lines of, "well, if it were me, with my aesthetic..." I feel I have been guilty of that myself. And one thing I like about the poetry discussion group at the Forbes Library in Northampton is that we don't get into what should be in the poem or what shouldn't be in the poem, but how does what is in the poem work for us as readers? Still, when I feel vaguely dissatisfied with a poem of mine, I like to bring it to a critique group. First will be the positive responses: I liked this or that, but then come the questions about what didn't work, and suggestions for improving the reader's experience. With that dynamic, critique groups can be an essential component of making a poem successful.

The November 3rd Club

2006-01-31T08:16:00.000-05:00

A poem of mine is in the Winter edition of The November 3rd Club. I also have one in the Fall edition. You might like to check it out if you're interested in literary values in a political age.

Yes, but what does he sound like?

2006-01-20T10:15:00.000-05:00

Went to the Wintonbury Library in Bloomfield, CT for the first time last night. There were so many people who signed up for the open mike that we were limited to two poems. But you don't have to miss out. You can hear me read at my MySpace band page. You can right click on the lyrics and open them up in a new window if you want to follow along while I read.

And tonight is the open mike at the Arms Library in Shelburne Falls, which I hope to record and post tomorrow.

They Regret Poetry

2006-01-11T16:02:00.000-05:00

So say Charles Mudede and James Latteier in The Stranger. They get around to bashing Wordsworth, "tenured poetry", the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York school of poets, and then every frickin' poet there is:

Poet, listen! And listen good. You are not important, your childhood experiences are worthless, your father was not all that bad, your womb is not the universe, your impotence is not the end of the world, language will never regret the absence of all you have to say about who you are, where you are from, why you are anxious, why you are tough, why you love, why you fuck. What you dream, what you smoke, what you believe are not the stuff of heaven or hell—it just comes out all wrong and goes on and on. As T. S. Eliot once asked, and what we must ask you now with great urgency, when will it end?

to which several people responded to Poetry's autopsy, including these snippets:

My suggestion? Tell aspiring poets whose work you despise to read more poetry.
--J.R.Tipton

If the work relies on the horror-show gravity of your minority (or misunderstood majority) status, childhood abuse, bad marriage, poverty, disappointingly hollow wealth or the deaths of your parents for its impact, then it is fraudulent and silly and begging to be shot out of the sky.
--Grant Cogswell

7 Things Tag

2006-01-07T12:23:00.000-05:00

Martyn has just tagged me to have a go at listing 7 things from the following categories...so here goes.

7 Things to do before I die

Fall in love again
(that would be enough)

7 Things I cannot do

Do home repairs
Suffer fools gladly
Go a whole day without swearing
Have dairy
Keep answering this question

7 Things that attract me to blogging

(boring)

7 Things I say most often

Bloody, bloody hell!
He/she/they will burn in hell.
What the fuck?!!
Move your ass! (when driving)
(enough)

7 books I love

e e cummings: Poems
Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(curiously, for all the reading I do, I find I love hardly any)

7 Movies or TV Series I watch or would watch over & over again
(there are more than 7 of these)
Smallville (TV series)

War movies:
Patton
Full Metal Jacket
The Hunt for Red October
Braveheart

Romance:
Say Anything
A Walk in the Clouds
High Fidelity

Comedy:
Back to School
Summer School
Real Genius

Once a Bastard, Always a Bastard

2006-01-06T15:19:00.000-05:00

Pat Robertson has done it again, this time suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.”

According to MSNBC News Services:

Robertson said “God considers this land to be his. You read the Bible and he says ‘This is my land,’ and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, ‘No, this is mine.”’

Robertson spokeswoman Angell Watts said of critics who challenged his remarks, “What they’re basically saying is, ‘How dare Pat Robertson quote the Bible?”’

“This is what the word of God says,” Watts said. “This is nothing new to the Christian community.”

And I'd say, then that's what's wrong with the Bible and the Christian community, especially the million daily viewers who watch and listen to this demented psycho nutjob.

When Robertson finally dies, we can all say that it was God's way of telling him to shut the fuck up.

News of a Coupla Bastards

2006-01-03T13:32:00.000-05:00

The bastard Byron had one of his poems recently discovered. Typically, it was found in a book inscribed to him which he returned to its author after falling out with him. Bastard. Also

A previously unrecorded manuscript of Shelley's 1820 Ode to Naples, in the handwriting of Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Shelley's wife, Mary, was found at the same library.
Poor Claire Clairmont, mother of Byron's daughter, Allegra, who died at age five in a convent, not having been visited by her father even after sending him a touching letter asking him to take her to the fair. Bastard.

But David Biespiel would have us admire the poetry, if not the poet. He makes his case with the example of Philip Larkin, whose published letters are so salacious that they are not quoted in the article. He quotes Martin Amis:
"The word 'Larkinesque' used to evoke the wistful, the provincial, the crepuscular, the sad, the unloved; now it evokes the scabrous and the supremacist."
Biespiel writes
One question to ask is: Should we care that much if a poet has a bitter disposition or an ugly world-view in his private life or private letters? All things considered, I say no. For me, the poems, not the seedy or saintly life of the poet who wrote them, is what we want to care about. A poem is something a poet makes; it's not the life he lives.
Which I guess is a fine view to have, unless you are one of those unfortunate enough to be a victim of the poet's bastardy. Or have no empathy for those who were.

The Muses Among Us

2006-01-02T21:12:00.000-05:00

For the first time in a long while I spent the entire day alone: didn't go out; no phone calls; no visitors. But I wasn't totally without the thoughts of someone else. I read "The Muses Among Us" by Kim Stafford. It's subtitled "Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft." It's about how inspiration is not something we force from ourselves, but exists all around us in what other people say. I found myself so frequently thinking that a particular sentence would be a good quote that I just gave up trying to remember them all. The whole book is worth a read to anyone who values the process of the writing life as much as the product. Perhaps the two best chapters are "The Writer as Professional Eavesdropper" and "Quilting Your Solitudes", but, really, the entire book was charming and comforting to read.

Good Friend, Awesome Writer

2005-12-31T14:39:00.000-05:00

In thinking over the past year, I found myself remembering (and missing) a Zoetrope friend who was very supportive during my time of angst at the beginning of the year. Her kind and honest attention may have kept me from sliding into a deep depression. We drifted out of touch, and so I checked back in with her a few days ago to see how she's been doing. Evidently, very well. She has a flash fiction piece at hackwriters.com, with more on the way elsewhere. It's good to see a good person and talented writer get the recognition she deserves. Plus, she's taken one of my most favorite photos: I love the blue in this, and there's something Hopperesque about it that I really like.

The Trouble with Billy Collins

2005-12-27T14:37:00.000-05:00

I loved reading Elizabeth Lund eviscerate Billy Collins in the Xian Science Monitor. Headed by

The trouble with this book

Popular poet Billy Collins fails to deliver in his seventh collection of verse.

She details

lines instead come across as self-observed and obvious...The poems feel undeveloped, and the language is often disappointing...There's little spark or imagination...Perhaps to compensate for lack of inspiration, Collins returns to well-trodden ground or overanalyzes.

She quotes from Collins himself, and then uses his own words to damn him

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

While Collins points a finger at other poets here - there are more people who write verse than read it these days - his message may apply to himself as well. Cranking out book after book, trying to keep an audience happy, can lead to unsatisfying results.

Booyah!

Sestina started

2005-12-25T13:52:00.000-05:00

Well, please disregard my post about choosing the heteronyms. Last night I put on a music mix and went to bed. It's been so long since I've done that. I kept drifting in and out of sleep, and sometime between 4 and 5 am I woke up with the line

A stately ship shudders in cold waters

in my head (which I like, because "waters" can be both noun or verb) and I wrote it down and three-and-two-thirds stanzas after that. So now I'm in the thick of things, with only one heteronym in sight. In case you're wondering, my end words are

waters
lights
now
bars
above
lives (the heteronym)

I'm not sure of its quality yet. Some of it I think is better than average, but I feel I'm at a point now where it will either dribble away into mediocrity or leap into more significance.

Not exactly Xmasy, I guess, but it works for me.

The results are in

2005-12-24T13:23:00.000-05:00

from the Shrine of Blind-Winger Jones Xmas competition.

Check out the results and remember, the opinions expressed by Scrooge are not necessarily those of the poet. I'm just the vessel.

I seek more advice

2005-12-23T22:18:00.000-05:00

I finished Why it Won't be a Good Idea to Welcome the Alien Spaceship and am now focusing on the writing of my annual sestina. For the past year I have toyed with the idea of writing a heteronymic sestina. Not to be confused with the heteronyms of Pessoa, I've narrowed down my choices to ten end words. Can you help me narrow down my choice to six?

minute - unit time, or small
evening - time of day, or process of balancing
number - numeral, or feeling less
refuse - trash, or to not comply
tear - on the cheek, or in paper
wind - breeze, or to energize a watch
wound - a break in skin, or wrapped around
dove - a bird, or past of dive
raven - a bird, or to devour (dove and raven would go together, I think)
desert - a lot of sand, or to leave

It would be a beautiful thing for anyone to spend any time or attention on this.

He knows just how naughty you've been

2005-12-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

Poetry Personified

2005-12-20T14:57:00.000-05:00

Usually I don't seek advice. Usually I do what I damn well please. Well, that's not true. I accept critique in my critique group. I'm responsive to my daughter's needs. I think. Anyway, there is a "poem of personification" contest going on at my favorite online critique board, and I'd like to know which one of mine you think I should submit. They are

I guess it looks like a lot, but they should read quick. It would be incredibly nice for anyone to give this any time and attention.

Shelburne Falls Set List 12/16

2005-12-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

Bogey

Paige Turner

Hate Mate

Sage

Scrooge the Day After

You can read more detail about it at my other blog under the "Long Night" entry.

George, you sly dog

2005-12-16T09:58:00.000-05:00

Dalya Alberge reports that Adele Davidson, Professor of English at Kenyon College in Ohio, has found poetry by George Herbert, the 17th-century priest, contains innumerable acrostics and anagrams, discoverable by reading the first letter of each line down the left-hand column of text.

Evidently, many of the acrostics are arcane and scrambled, so they have been virtually unnoticed for over 375 years, though John Dryden is said to have referred to them.

What's my take on it? Apart from its aesthetic value, writing to conform to an acrostic can help to break writer's block. It's another way of screwing around with words, which, for me, is what poetry is all about.

Not a slam on slam

2005-12-16T09:45:00.000-05:00

Beth Quimby writes about high school kids finding reason to rhyme (or not) in their school library slam. Although I personally don't usually get into slam as either a writer or listener, there are exceptions, and this event sounds like it was an effective way for kids to enjoy at least one form of poetry.

Ken Lamb, a junior, performed his poem about his fears of the ocean.

"I think it should be drained," he said. "It is huge and deep and the Bermuda Triangle does not help, in my opinion."

Louis Grassi, a senior, opened his "The Day I Saw a Social Worker," with some pacing.

"I walk, rushing, up the stairs, frantic. Dusty air littering my lungs. Passing through the hallways, my pores engorged with guilt," he recited.

Between the humor and rich alliteration, consonance and assonance, it sounds like they did pretty well.

Google's Quote of the Day

2005-12-14T09:42:00.000-05:00

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.
- Henry Fielding

Which reminds me, I have a book called "The Failures of Criticism" by Henri Peyre which I read about twenty years ago, which details the failings of critics. Something to remember when receiving an obtuse review in a critique group.

Of course, there are some writers who have also been imagined to have a greater profundity than they have had, so I suppose it evens out.

from the Rant-is-not-Poetry Department

2005-12-13T13:38:00.000-05:00

Shirley Dent writes Why polemics are killing poetry:

There is no poetry that is as guilty of deliberately shrinking our perception of the world and providing a snug elastoplast that makes living with it easier than the poetry of polemics.

Examples of atrocious poems are given from the Poets Against the War website, followed by an example of a good anti-war poem: Wilfrid Owen's Strange Meeeting

Before there were Bushisms

2005-12-12T09:43:00.000-05:00

John Nichols writes about Eugene McCarthy's Lyrical Politics, including some quotes and a poem. I remember that time: a time when McCarthy offered hope against the failing (in many ways: politically; health-wise; etc.) Lyndon Johnson (and better rhyming than "Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?!")

Even the poets are restless now. They're not content to go along with Shelley and be the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They want to be acknowledged just a little bit.

Eugene McCarthy March, 1968

"We proved something in that 1968 campaign," McCarthy explained to me a few years ago..."We showed that you could challenge the two political parties and all the powerful institutions in that country, and we did so with some success. (The backers of that 1968 campaign believed), when few others did, that we could take on all the institutions of politics - the parties, the media, the pollsters, the military-industrial complex. You had to have something of the poet in you to believe that."

From the lips of poets

2005-12-09T12:36:00.000-05:00

A website launched last week in Britain aims to bring the voices of poets to a listening world, writes Warwick McFadyen.

The Poetry Archive (poetryarchive.org) was launched last week by Britain's Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, who is one of its directors. The archive's aim is to record and store the voices of poets reading their works. Many poets have recorded their works down the decades, but the archive is an attempt to create a central database of significant poets of the English-speaking world.

Tennyson was recorded in 1890 using wax cylinders. The Poet Laureate had written The Charge of the Light Brigade immediately after news of the cavalry disaster reached Britain, but such was the poem's popularity almost 40 years later he was still reciting it.

The Tennyson work is not the earliest recording in the archive. Robert Browning takes that honour. In 1889, Browning was at a dinner party where he was asked to recite a poem into a phonograph. The poet chose his How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. But perhaps because of his age (he was approaching 80 and in fact died that year), he forgets it, starts again, then gives up. He does say, however, that the phonograph was a "wonderful invention".

Les Murray, although a self-confessed Luddite, is well represented on the archive. He says the project is "terribly valuable because there's no other reading of a poem that's so authentic as that of the poet's. There's no substitute for the poet's voice, and down the centuries they'll be able to hear it."

Murray knows first-hand of the benefits of reading his poems. "People have often told me, 'I really haven't known how to read your poetry until I heard it and then suddenly it fell into place'."

The two other Australians on the archive are Alison Croggon and Peter Goldsworthy. To Croggon, "I hope it proves as popular as it deserves: the point of it is that poets' readings can actually be very illuminating, because a poet will read to his or her inner rhythms in ways that, say, an actor will not be privy to. And poets tend not to 'act' their poems, being more interested in the language itself, and 'acting' a poem - i.e. imposing upon it a sense of false expressiveness - can be fairly disastrous for the poem itself.

"Poetry is an oral art, or so I believe, and it's too easy to forget that it is; good readings restore a sense of the oral pleasures of complex and feeling language."

As with an archaeologist embarking on a dig. Motion holds a fervent prayer. "My earnest wish is that someone will come staggering out of the mists and say, 'I've had this recording of Thomas Hardy in my attic all these years and haven't known what to do with it'."

Motion does. He would launch it into space, with the roar of a cannon.

MiraLux

2005-12-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

Allegra Mira (originally from Boston) was charming; Thomas Lux (born in Northampton, raised in Easthampton) was witty and whimsical. It was a very pleasant evening, made more enjoyable by running into a couple of Arms Library poet friends at the Haymarket, and also chatting with others at the Forbes Library. Oh, and it was good to pick up a copy of Lux's The Blind Swimmer, published by Gary Metras at Adastra Press. This contains selected poems from 1970-1975 not included in his New and Selected published by Houghton Mifflin. Good times.

What a Week I'm Having

2005-12-07T08:02:00.000-05:00

First, on Saturday, it was the Equinox reading salon in Shelburne Falls, MA, where I heard several fine pieces read by their authors, and read a couple myself. Then it was down to Peaberry's in Simsbury, CT, for the open mike, where I heard several fine musical performances and I read my newly-published sestina. Sunday, it was two events in Northampton: a Slate Roof Publishing Collective reading at Half Moon Books, where four of the Slate Roof poets read their engaging poems (and where I busted my budget on several old books: Swinburne, Herbert Read, Philip Booth, William Logan and more); immediately followed by our literary critique group at Packard's, where I heard some engaging work, and got some advice on how to tweak the ending of

Long Distance Town

where the final lines will read

with the concrete poured from tumbling thoughts;
polished as worry stones, sections of road
dashedly bump and buckle on the way out.

when I can have some time to post it.

Monday, it was Northampton again for the poetry discussion group, where we read and critiqued Carl Phillip's poetry, during which I gained a better appreciation for his technique. And last night I was able to hear him first hand at Smith College. He reads rather slowly, with many pauses, giving his work a meditative feel. It occured to me that he is an example of poetry being the silence between the words, and his use of abstract thought gives one much to reflect on during those pauses. By the end, however, it occured to me that he seems to write pretty much in the same tone poem after poem, so that it had a monotonal effect not unlike listening to a self-hypnosis tape. In his book Coin of the Realm, he suggests that people resist abstraction because they are unwilling to think athletically. I have some sympathy for that take on things, and I can appreciate that the use of abstraction is a valid technical choice. Then it becomes a matter of taste. No, "taste" implies good or bad, so let me use the word "preference." It comes down to whether the reader prefers the access of emotion through abstraction, or not. If someone readily associates emotional responses through intellectual contructs (as opposed to say, images) then they will get more out of that kind of poetry than those who do not. I sometimes wonder if the current fetish for imagery will someday seem as old-fashioned as the earlier fetish for heavy alliteration in English poetry (most recently celebrated, then denounced, and now starting to be celebrated again, in Swinburne.) At that point, it may then be the skillful use of abstraction, much like Phillips is currently doing, which may become more in fashion.

Tonight, it's Northampton again to hear Thomas Lux and Allegra Mira in the Calvin Coolidge Room at the Forbes Library. And I've got stuff for the rest of the week, but I'll leave it there for now.

The Equinox Salon Reading

2005-12-04T10:19:00.000-05:00

I read two poems which have been published this year:

a sestina published by The Equinox, fall edition

and a poem published in The Berkshire Review

What is a Poet?

2005-11-25T21:25:00.000-05:00

Not just a rhetorical question, but the title of a book, apparently now out of print. It consists of essays from the Eleventh Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature. The editor, Hank Lazer, is up first with an introduction that hints at what's to come. The first essay is by Louis Simpson. I could practically quote the whole thing. Much of it reminded me of a recent post by Martyn Clayton on introversion. Here is what Simpson has to say about poets and their need for silence in his essay, The Character of the Poet:
But I think that if we look into the lives of poets we shall find there was a time of withdrawal from the world, of silence and meditation.

I believe that all true poets feel a sense of dedication, and that this comes to them in solitude and silence. The silence of which Pascal spoke, the silence of infinite spaces, is terrifying, and most avoid it, but poetry feeds on silence. To apprehend the silence of the universe is to wish to break it, to speak to those who are in the same boat with ourselves.

The measure of a man, said Ortega, is the amount of solitude he can stand, and great poets are those who have listened greatly. The task of the poet is to put into words the message that formed itself out of silence.

In poetry-writing workshops all over the country, writers, having been told that they must describe things accurately and be sincere-- and if you ask who said so, they might say Williams-- are writing these dreary little exercises in futility... Confessional writing is a dead end... I do not see how this can be felt unless one has the vision of a community.

For a hundred years lyric poetry has been placed on a pedestal. Can it be only coincidence that this has been accompanied by a general decline of interest in poetry? It is the nature of the lyric to express a subjective mood and ignore the outer reality. It is to be expected that such writing will interest very few.

The wish for "pure poetry" has brought about writing that is as far from meaning as one can get without lapsing into nonsense, and frequently it crosses the line... Stevens poetry is not philosophy and his philosophy is not poetry.

With us, however, the wish to be pure has not expressed itself as music-- more commonly it has led to imagistic writing, poems that consist only of images.

If poetry is to matter we must put in our poems those elements that have been excluded as impure. This means breaking with the standards set by the academy, by those who have made emptiness a virtue-- who have elevated Stevens above Frost...

No sooner does an American set up as a poet then he begins to suffer from what a friend of Whitman's called the "beauty disease." He thinks that poetry has to be written in a special language and that subjects have to be far-fetched. This brings on the inanity of which I have given examples, a kind of anorexia nervosa, so that poetry becomes thin to the point of disappearing. There is no cure but immersion in the common life and language, as Wordsworth said, really used by men.

I have spoken of the poet's training in solitude and silence. What he discovers there, the messages the wind delivers to him, are the themes of his writing.

Much to think on in reading the entire essay, although some of it seemed contradictory. It seemed that at one point Simpson claims poets think too much of themselves, and at another that they are not bothered enough by themselves (well, perhaps those are two different things, after all.) I tend to agree that confessional poetry is overdone. Just as is any other kind of poetry. I prefer a poet who can write in various forms in various moods than in a constant monotonal, defensible-in-theory-but-unengaging-to-the-reader kind of way. But readers like to typecast their poets as much as viewers like to typecast their actors. And so, if you play to poety readings, you tend to be more accessible while fronting as witty, and if you play to academia, you tend to be more inscrutable while fronting as deep.

Disappointed

2005-11-19T13:15:00.000-05:00

I was putting my set together for the Berkshire Review reading tonight when I received a call that the space was accidentally double-booked, so the reading is being postponed. Now that my blood pressure is back under control, I don't feel bitter, seething rage, but a melancholy sadness that disappointment is the operative force that drives so many things. 8-(

Set List Shelburne Falls 11/18

2005-11-18T23:02:00.000-05:00

What's the difference between having ADHD and being a poet?

2005-11-17T12:44:00.000-05:00

None that I can see, according to this article The Gift of ADHD by Lara Honos-Webb. And what are the gifts of ADHD?

Impulsiveness (you mean, like having no internal censor?)
Distractible (you mean, like feeling significant obtrusions in trivial things?)
Creative (you mean, like obsessively putting words into new combinations?)
Odd Behavior (you mean, like sitting hours at a time looking blankly into space while occasionally writing down a few words?)
Goofing Around (you mean, like occasionally writing doggerel and using bad puns in a poem about animals just for the halibut?)
Confusion (you mean, like making something simple into something obscure, but it sounds good?)
Powerful Imagination (you mean, like writing convincingly about something that never happend?)
Searching Insight (you mean, like seeing connections where others only see distinctions, and vice versa?)
Unusual Intuition (you mean, like rendering a truth which was never explained to me?)

Beats me what the difference is.

Latest Music purchases

2005-11-16T20:02:00.000-05:00

Tracks:

Depeche Mode: Precious
Elastica: Car Song
Jeff Black: Easy On Me
Jeff Black: Nineteen
Dar Williams: Comfortably Numb
North Mississippi Allstars: No Mo
Los Lobos: Kiko and the Lavender Moon
Peter Gabriel: Growing Up
Peter Gabriel: The Barry Williams Show
Death Cab for Cutie: Soul Meets Body

Albums:

Mindy Smith: One Moment More (favorite tracks: Down in Flames; Raggedy Ann, Train Song)
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Howl (favorite tracks: Devil's Waitin'; Fault Line; Ain't No Easy Way)
Shannon McNally: Geronimo (favorite tracks: Pale Moon; Leave Your Bags by the Door; Lovin in my Baby's Eyes)
Fiona Apple: Extraordinary Machine (favorite tracks: Red, Red, Red; Oh Well; Not About Love)
Anna Nalick: The Wreck of the Day (favorite tracks: Breathe; Citadel, Catalyst)

Downloadable poetry

2005-11-14T12:32:00.000-05:00

In her article, Poetry for the iPod generation, LORNA MacLAREN reports
Many young people who would never pick up a poetry book are downloading verse from their computer, or buying odes being read on CD, then absorbing them while they travel to work or to meet friends.

In the US a set of audio disks, entitled The Romantic Poets, and including works by Byron, Blake and Wordsworth, among other Romantic greats, has created huge interest and is a potential "poetic blockbuster".

But why is the Romantic period becoming so popular? Scholars call it one of the most evocative eras in the history of poetry. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a group of young poets created a new mood in literary objectives, throwing off the traditional style of their time, challenging the public to consider new ideas and pushing back the boundaries of the imagination. Five people emerged as the main movers – Wordsworth, Taylor Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Like many modern-day rappers, the personal lives of the Romantics were dogged with social scandal, drugs and personal tragedy.

While they did occasionally wander around looking at daffodils, the Romantics were the rebels of their day, challenging politics, the law and the establishment and voicing what were seen as dangerous new concepts.

Top 10 poetry books this year (in the UK)
1 The State of Poetry Roger McGough, Penguin
2 The Nation's Favourite Poems, BBC Books
3 Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, Bloodaxe Books
4 Love Edward Monkton, HarperCollins
5 The World's Wife Carol Ann Duffy, Picador
6 The Works: Pam Ayers Pam Ayers, BBC Books
7 Now We Are Sixty Christopher Matthew, John Murray
8 Warning: When I am Old I Shall Wear Purple Jenny Joseph, Souvenir
9 The Shoes of Salvation Edward Monkton, HarperCollins
10 Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive, Bloodaxe Books

And it looks like here we have a place where what's written for the page meets the palmtop stage. I admit I'm intrigued by the pleasantries of listening to verse while slogging through this winter's impending blizzards.

pat robertson himself is the best argument against intelligent design

2005-11-11T08:50:00.000-05:00

If an intelligent hand were actually guiding the universe, how could we then account for the ignorant persona which is pat robertson? According to Reuters, he has claimed that citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania, rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.

In 1998, Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Fla., that it risked hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist bombs after it allowed homosexual organizations to put up rainbow flags in support of sexual diversity.

Which is like saying the equator risks extreme heat, or Canada much snow, because of whatever reason you want to conjure. It's one thing to discuss whether a balanced education has room for the mention of intelligent design. I personally don't have much of a problem with it. After all, we teach history, and history is full of the erroneous beliefs and mistaken actions of people throughout millenia. So we can probably fit intelligent design in somewhere.

There are probably more problems with robertson's persona than I can accomodate in a short blog entry. I suppose what robertson is saying is that he would not be surprised if his god is a vengeful, uncompassionate, spiteful god. And, if it is granted that robertson is one of god's creations, well, then it seems his case is proved. I suppose this is appealing to people who feel that things are not going the way they'd like. And I suppose religion per se is not to blame; it is simply the appetite that so many have for the destructive. Which is why so many of them ultimately consume themselves. So let me make my own prediction. If medical science allows robertson to exist long enough, I will not be surprised if he eventually self-destructs in the same manner as jim bakker and jimmy swaggart, if not like jim jones.

Why People Have Faith in Faith

2005-11-10T08:15:00.000-05:00

AP writer Margie Mason reports that terrorist Azahari bin Husin was shot to death while reaching to detonate his suicide belt.
Azahari is accused of direct involvement in at least four terrorist attacks in Indonesia that together killed more than 240 people, many of them foreign tourists.

Ken Conboy, a Jakarta security analyst, said in a new book about Jemaah Islamiyah that Azahari's embrace of Islam quickly became fanatical in 1998 after his wife was diagnosed with throat cancer.

Before that, he had never outwardly shown much piety, Conboy wrote in "The Second Front."
As faulty as religious faith may be in terms of handling modernity, it affords its adherents with stability in a changing world. Meanwhile, rationalism as expressed through science tells us coffee is good for us one day, and that it is bad for us the next day. It doesn't always heal our sick, and it's sometimes responsible for illness in the first place. For many people, rationalism is of no use in dealing with deeply painful personal loss. We simply can't wish or argue religious extremism away. But meanwhile our science is developing ever more powerful weapons which religious extremism can use against humanity.

I'm wondering just how much democracy is essentially a secular phenomenon. How the Greeks devalued the gods as they developed democracy. How much the religious trappings of our own government were put there by secular leaders to reassure their religious constituencies. If it is reasonable to expect that any kind of stable democracy can develop in the maelstrom of religious intolerance which seems to characterize the majority of Iraq. How it seems the chance for democracy is inversely proportional to the level of religious fervor. How the treatment of women, for example, improves the further we get from Paul's "Christ is the head of every man, and a husband the head of his wife."

Look to our own country to see how religion hamstrings a free society. Christian fingers are squeezing our educational policies, family planning, sexuality, medical research and treatment, drug policies, penal law, foreign policy, and free expression. For more details, see The End of Faith by Sam Harris. Secularism also has its problems and mistakes and limitations. Many point to Hitler, Stalin and Mao as secular examples of a world gone mad. But they simply substituted the cult of personality for the older cults. What all of them had was a zeal for proclaiming they knew what the future held. A biblical zeal.

What we need is a questioning faith that tries to nurture us toward the twenty-seventh century, not a backward-looking faith that has us bound to the barbarity of past milleniums. I would submit that many of the writers of our oldest religious texts were barbarians compared to the scientist who writes a paper on stem cell research.

I'm in love

2005-11-08T21:32:00.000-05:00

with a woman I've never met. OK, so that's impossible: I'm not really in love. Let's say I'm entertaining a fantasy of being in love. And who is the object of my adoration? A poet was recommended to me last night, so I went to find more about her today. All I could remember was that her last name was B hyphen B. At poets.org I found Lucie Brock-Broido. I didn't pay much attention to the photo; I went straight to the poetry. And I found it good. There is a musicality, imagery, and sensibility which I find compelling. So, in the course of googling more about her, I thought I'd see what other images of her were floating around. The first photo that came up was this one from Villanova. And I found her super-intensely physically attractive. In the scrawny limits of my life, that counts as love.

But I am not deluded. There are likely a myriad number of reasons why either one of us would find the other objectionable. But in the meantime, I will simply toy with a chivalrous love, jousting for her in my fashion. Because, when all is said and done, I'm a sad and pathetic and deeply flawed man.

Faith vs. Inspired Guesswork

2005-11-06T10:16:00.000-05:00

I'm reading "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" by Sam Harris. It has such delicious thoughts in it as

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

Harris pits faith (the acceptance of belief now because it's been believed in the past) against scientific, verifiable knowledge. And yet...

There is an interesting excerpt from Ian McEwan's introduction to "What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty", edited by John Brockman, which includes such observations as

As the Nobel laureate Leon Lederman writes...: "To believe something while knowing it cannot be proved (yet) is the essence of physics."

Generally evident is an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world which does not have an obvious equivalent in, say, cultural studies. In the arts, perhaps lyric poetry would be a kind of happy parallel.

So it seems there is a place for Faith in the Age of Science. Perhaps the distinction, and I think Harris makes it, is between questioning faith that drives discovery and dogmatic faith that allows for no deviation from its ancestral roots.

I like the suggestion that lyric poetry is somehow distinctive in the arts for embodying this questioning spirit, but I think practitioners of other arts would dispute that.

Marina Tsvetaeva

2005-11-04T20:02:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Victoria Schweitzer's biography of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. The book is now out of print, but I feel very lucky and privileged to have found a good copy at Half Moon Books in Northampton, MA. Tsvetaeva wrote "Fear and pity, anger and longing, were the passions of my childhood."

Schweitzer: What is the Poet? What is the Poet's role in the world? These "eternal" themes exercised Tsvetaeva's creative imagination. The foundation of her own outlook is an instinctive feeling that the Poet stands in opposition to the world. The Poet is the prisoner of his or her gift and time.
Tsvetaeva: A poet's marriage with his time is a forced marriage. A marriage which, like any violence to which he has been subjected, he feels ashamed of -- and from which he tries to escape.

Schweitzer: A transparent wall separates the one "doomed to be a poet" from other people, a wall which they perhaps do not see, which can be approached but not passed.
Schweitzer: ...when she was fully adult she insisted...that egocentricity is a normal characteristic of poets.
Tsvetaeva: The creative state is a state of enchantment...The creative state is a state of dreaming.

Schweitzer: How could the same person feel two such very different emotions, write two such different poems, at one and the same time? The poet is an unpredictable, unaccountable creature, unable to foresee what will demand utterance from one day, one hour indeed, to the next.
Tsvetaeva: I never did and never shall belong to any poetic school.

Schweitzer: In my view, nothing helps us more to interpret a poem than to hear the poet read it.
Tsvetaeva: Who am I writing for? Not for the millions, not for one person alone, and not for myself. I write for the sake of the thing itself. The thing writes itself through me.

Schweitzer: (summarizing Tsvetaeva's article "Poets with History and Poets without History) Briefly, poets with history are always in motion, always developing, discovering themselves in the world. Poets without history -- pure lyric poets -- do not move, do not develop, they discover the world in themselves.
Tsvetaeva: Can there be such a thing as catastrophic development?...throughout his poetic career Blok was not developing but tearing himself to pieces.

Ouch. But I get what they're saying.

Burn Baby Burn

2005-11-04T18:42:00.000-05:00

I just read Shane Barry's interview with Camille Pagila which contains several thoughts I agree with.

Paglia’s latest book: Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems implicitly and explicitly argues for the essential role of an art form marginalized, according to Paglia, not so much by commerce and popular culture as the complacency of an academy besotted by trendy theory and contemporary poets “who treat their poems like meandering diary entries”.

Paglia: Over the past 35 years, literature and art have too often been reduced to lugubrious victimology or crass political sloganeering.

Paglia: I lost interest in the contemporary novel decades ago... By the time the novelist addresses some crucial political, social, or educational issue, it's already flat and stale, because it's been treated in a thousand ways and many years earlier by our media. Thus American novelists have drifted into thinly veiled autobiography, and because few of them have had any real life experience outside of writing programs or urban coteries, novels have become exhibitionistic memoirs, foregrounding every last banal or grisly trauma.

Paglia: I find Eliot grindingly conceptual and calculated; everything is pre-programmed, mapped out like a crossword puzzle. He leaves little to intuition, to the suggestive power of words. And he's too priggish about basic emotion.

Paglia: Ezra Pound (never) succeeded in writing a major poem of his own... Too much of it is pastiche--a compulsive showiness, a pillaging of culture for pretentious references that the general reader would need a thousand footnotes for. That's not deep or genuine art-making to me--it's adolescent skittishness, the posturing of a snippy, adenoidal grad student (I remember that type all too well). Pound was a generous facilitator and mentor, but he was creatively self-crippled.

Paglia: I believe that all the arts should be knitted together. It's my recipe for future creativity in the arts. We will never get important new artists again if we keep feeding students a sterile diet of cynical postmodernism.

Rock on, Camille, baby!

Berkshire Review Reading

2005-11-01T21:21:00.000-05:00

Five of us published in this year's Berkshire Review will be reading in Pittsfield at 7 PM, Saturday, November 19th at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts. Each of us will have a fifteen-minute set. It was nice to be invited, and I'll try to put together a killer set for them.

Hooks

2005-10-31T08:25:00.000-05:00

I was pleased to see that my poem Great White made it into Melissa Guillet's Hooks anthology. I couldn't be in better company, including Melissa herself, and other prominent poets in the New England area. It helped to salvage a hellish day of my car overheating and my blood pressure soaring.

My first time

2005-10-26T21:22:00.000-05:00

reading in Connecticut, that is. I read at Peaberry's Cafe in Simsbury, CT tonight. I read a couple of my old chestnuts. The one on Cher you may appreciate more if you remember the saying that "after nuclear holocaust, there will be only two forms of life left on earth: cockroaches and Cher."

So what?

2005-10-23T11:43:00.000-05:00

Along with Mary Oliver, one of the generators of many "so what?" poems (to me) is Billy Collins. Michael Hettich's review of Collins' "The Trouble with Poetry" seems to give with one hand what it takes with the other. After calling the poems meandering and self-satisfied, he says there are a few probing poems which "redeem an otherwise forgettable book." And, along with making these observations

As in his previous books, Collins' rhythms are closer to those of conversational prose than of verse, and these poems contain little variation in voice, rhythm or tone. Too many of the poems in The Trouble with Poetry, while entertaining, are marred by a cuteness that strives to pass as revelation...

Unlike the best poetry, these poems grow less interesting with each successive reading...

The Trouble with Poetry is filled with meditations that meander from their main subjects to become, in a sense, anti-meditations or portraits of a mind avoiding itself.

he also says

There are, however, a number of poems here that resist easy solutions to the imagined situations they set themselves....

One of the pleasures of reading Collins is following his narrator's digressive mind as it moves across the landscape of the domestic world we share with him. In some of the most interesting and successful poems here, however, Collins develops his ideas in less whimsical, more focused and ultimately more moving ways.

And I think I get what he's saying until he quotes the final poem in the book: a poem which I was liking until it became writing about writing at the end. Come on, how many times do I have to suffer writing about writing? I can't take it anymore. It's like taking a picture of your camera in a mirror. Stop it!

A life of poetry, told in the language of a poet

2005-10-23T11:31:00.000-05:00

Aieleen Jacobson's article in Newsday about Gloria Murray was encouraging. At a time when the audience for the open reading in Shelburne Falls has plummeted, it's good to hear that other poetry communities are growing.

Beginning Thursday, her poem "In My Mother's House" will be showcased on a Web site created by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. At www.americanlifeinpoetry.org, Kooser offers a free weekly poem that, he writes, "is brief and will be enjoyable and enlightening" to any publication that wants it. The readership of newspapers that carry the poems exceeds 10 million, says assistant editor Pat Emile. Murray, who is poet No. 31, is the only Long Island writer to have been chosen so far.

When Murray moved to Long Island from Queens in 1973, she says, there weren't many organizations for poets. Now, she says, Long Island is a "hotbed," and she loves being part of a close-knit community that includes Live Poets Society and Performance Poets Association.

In My Mother's House

By Gloria g. Murray

every wall
stood at attention
even the air knew
when to hold its breath
the polished floors
looked up
defying heel marks
the plastic slipcovers
crinkled in discomfort
in my mother's house
the window shades
flapped
against the glare
of the world
the laughter
crawled like roaches
back into the cracks
even the humans sat
cardboard cut-outs
around the table
and with silver knives
sliced and swallowed
their words

Slam poet has an impact

2005-10-22T11:11:00.000-05:00

An article by Karen Gardner about someone in my neck of the woods extolls the virtues of slam poetry in getting high school students excited about words. Taylor Mali reportedly uses a method described by Billy Collins as "teaching it backwards" by first introducing students to spoken word -- as opposed to literary -- poetry. Mali quotes founder of slam poetry Marc Smith as saying "I didn't invent a new style of poetry. What I invented was a new way of listening to poetry." Mali has won the national poetry slam four times, and he's led six national poetry slam teams to the finals.

Spoken word poetry, said Mali, has to be immediately accessible.

"Students need to be able to get it, and being able to understand it quickly," Mali said. "Instead of reading a poem over and over again and 'I don't get it. I just don't get it.'"

And therein lies the rub for me. It's sorta like the McDonald'sization of poetry, to say we get kids interested in food by giving them slippery burgers that slide right down the throat. And I certainly think it's good to get kids interested in this way, and I won't go so far as to say that slam poetry isn't really poetry, but perhaps I'd say that slam poetry is poetry on its most superficial level, and that one can get really good at being superficial. And that may be enough for a lot of people. And if that brings more people into poetry then I guess that's a good thing. What's even better is if it leads people to experiment with the rest of the poetry that's out there, poetries without empty calories.

Having said that, I don't believe that something accessible is automatically bad or shallow, or that something difficult is automatically good and profound. Maybe L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets would believe that. And I'm sure there are some slam poems which are better than many literary poems, although I don't know if they would be the ones to win slam competitions. But there is room enough for more than one aesthetic, and whether one is slamming, iambing or just plain hamming it's a better activity than a lot of alternatives, especially for teenagers.

Set List 10/21/05

2005-10-21T21:47:00.000-05:00

Tonight at Shelburne Falls I chose four from the eleven poems I've written since last month. The first poem kind of sets up the second poem. The second poem is one I like for the use of rhyme which I think is relatively natural and unforced. Also, it deals with the process of grieving, which I feel particularly drawn to lately. The last two poems are powder puffs to please the audience.

Obscurity

2005-10-21T11:05:00.000-05:00

So tonight is the open reading at Shelburne Falls, and I'm not sure what I'm going to read. My most recent poems have been written more for the page than the stage, and many of them are somewhat obscure. I've been more inclined to evoke a sensibility than to delineate an easily accessible thought. And I wonder if I am pushing the boundaries of what I can do, or if I am lapsing into a state of fraudulence. Am I being self-indulgent, and, if so, do I deserve to be self-indulgent after a couple years of writing mostly to please an audience? But even if my self-indulgence is deserving, it certainly doesn't mean anyone else has to hear it.

I think my work has taken a darker, more inward turn since I've become more aware of the mortality of those closest to me. It may be just a phase, and my usual desire for novelty will eventually propel me to something else. But in the meantime I feel compelled to write this way even as I'm painfully aware that what I'm writing will mostly disappoint people who've come to expect something different from me.

Well, in the long run, I suppose it doesn't really matter. It's just poetry; it's not like it will have an effect on the mortality of the people whose vulnerability has been weighing on my mind. Anyway, I was Googling Poetry Obscurity and came across this lengthy article by Donald Justice, which I haven't completely read, but I like so far.

You should know about ... Arthur Rimbaud

2005-10-20T08:22:00.000-05:00

Texas would not be my expected source for a reminder of the life and poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, but, incredibly here is an article about him in the Daily Texan. It's interesting to compare the Fowlie, Schmidt and Mason translations.

Helen Vendler Listens Invisibly

2005-10-15T15:24:00.000-05:00

I have several Helen Vendler books: Poets Thinking; Coming of Age as a Poet; Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire; On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems; and The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Something good in all of them. And there are plenty more available. There is a brief essay on her newest: Invisible Listeners.

The Black Anthology

2005-10-14T07:14:00.000-05:00

I've been reading the Back Anthology lately. I have a new appreciation for the rhythms in Nikki Giovanni's poetry. Actually, when I read her poetry I hear the voice of Lenelle Moise, who I've had the pleasure of hearing several times. Hey I just discovered she has a blog. Anyway, I particularly like Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks and Carolyn Rodgers, but there is an article on June Jordan which is worth a read.

What I like about many of the poems I've been reading in the anthology is that important things are at stake, unlike a lot of contemporary poems which wax angst over hangnails.

Now that's what I'm talkin' about

2005-10-13T08:52:00.000-05:00

I confess I have no retirement plan. When I was younger I never thought I'd live this long. I have some savings, but no kind of growing retirement investment portfolio. My vague plans for seniority are described in young poet Lara Coley's hopes for the future:

As for the distant future, she would be satisfied if she was "just well-known enough that people want me to travel to their schools or their cities and teach, and to be in-house poet for the year."

You can read more about Lara Coley to appreciate how important a supportive teacher can be to creative effort.

Here are her poems: two-timing and Cracks.

Poetry Roundup 10/13/05

2005-10-13T07:06:00.000-05:00

I had no idea that this week is Random Acts of Poetry Week

A review of Miller and Lucinda Williams' show sounds like it was a really good event: the mixing of poetry by the dad and song by the daughter.

I've been wondering lately why we don't currently have iconic poets in America of the stature of a Longfellow or Frost, and today there is an article on Longfellow which asks whatever happened to him (meaning his reputation.) But I'd ask, whatever happened to the reputation of the "national poet", so that there is no one of such popularity and veneration in modern times. Perhaps we all just really suck. I'd be tempted to say that we can esteem a national poet only as high as we esteem the character of the nation, but during Longfellow's time we were just as bloody and annihilating as we are now, if not more so.

I'm not very familiar with the poetry of Philip Levine. On the one hand he's praised for being accessible, and on the other hand he's criticized for being too prosaic and mundane. This is a common dilemma for the work of many poets. Like the poetry, this article on him is also accessible and mundane.

More non-dull poetry

2005-10-12T10:00:00.000-05:00

Brod Bagert is like me in having given up poetry only to return to it later. I also started writing poems in the third grade. I wrote, not out of angst, but to describe things like a fire truck on our playground. My biggest hurdle has been on giving up trying to write in more popular forms with the slight hope of generating some revenue (plays, librettos, etc.) and in focusing only on poetry. Poetry is what I enjoy, and what I happen to be better at (I think.) I saw Russell Crowe on Inside the Actor's Studio say he would still act even if it payed next to nothing. Easy to say as he sits on his millions. I'll go you one better, Russell, you impulse-control-deficient millionaire: I'll write poetry even though it actually does pay nothing.

My favorite quote from the Brod Bagert article:

"You find a poem by listening. If I pointed to a sheet of music and asked if you liked it, that would be weird, wouldn't it?"

Performance: Revitalizer or Flesh-eating Virus of Poetry? II

2005-10-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

Rita Dove has her own opinion on performance poetry which she shared in Bangkok.

"In the United States slam poetry is a new form of poetry that is teaching people to listen again, to show them that poetry can be exciting. It all goes back to ancient oral traditions such as the shamans and stories."

Rather than reading poems to oneself, the audience realised that they felt alive when hearing the words spoken out loud. And it is not like a musical concert where there is no interaction, for at a slam, the interaction among participants is vital, she added.

In Thailand, poetry is seen as an academic and difficult creative medium, lacking the easy-to-grasp narration of prose or the spark of art or dance, and there are few young poets left for their notable predecessors to pass the torch to... On the reader side, a book of poetry has hardly ever made it to a local best-selling list. Very few people would voluntarily go out to purchase one anyway.

"People have written to me about their fear of poetry," Dove said. In defence of the genre, she added: "It's not a musty, esoteric and snooty art, but is in fact born out of real life. I always ask my students at the University of Virginia what do they do when they're not writing poems, such as how do they live? Poetry is not born out of poets, but is born from living."

Performance: Revitalizer or Flesh-eating Virus of Poetry?

2005-10-11T14:27:00.000-05:00

Shirely Dent has something to say about elevating energy and gusto over talent and judgement in her A Howl against performance poetry These are her words on the Poetry Society's Foyle Young Poets Awards event on National Poetry day this year in the UK:

Some performance poets - like Lemn Sissay - are good poets, so let's not go mad and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Nevertheless, the bath water is stagnant with its own misplaced self-righteousness and needs a good flushing out.

Voice has become, not something that is welded into lines of language on a once-blank page, but a fetishised thing of personal ownership - my voice, with my accent and all I have to say with this voice is to do with me, me, me. That's why the only way you can experience this language is if I personally perform it for you.

The energy and gusto of the young performers were never in doubt, but energy and gusto alone do not maketh the poet. Somebody has told these young people it is enough to speak and that they should be - will be - listened to; that their own authentic voice is enough... These kids may have reason to rant, but they should not make the mistake of thinking that ranting is enough without the 3Rs...reason, rhythm and risk. 'I want to be some place / where I am not judged by my race' simply doesn't cut it and does nothing to astound me or assault my senses.

The rhymes of the father

2005-10-11T11:42:00.000-05:00

Miller And Lucinda Williams are discussed in this article about one of their joint performances.

"I believe that every poem should begin as the poet's and end as the reader's," Miller Williams said about his work and the connection with readers.

"Lucinda and Miller are both poets," friend Michael Thomas said, "but she's a poet of song and he's a poet of work." She grew up around poets and poetry through her father, whose writing counsel she still seeks. She absorbed growing up in the South and uses country, blues and rock influences in her songs.

You might need BugMeNot to view the second page.

Favorite Lucinda Williams songs: "Can't Let Go" and "Essence."
Favorite Miller Williams book: "How Does a Poem Mean?" (with John Ciardi)

A new dimension for sext messaging

2005-10-11T07:06:00.000-05:00

Ah, even the realm of cell phone tanka (Tanka: composed of 31 syllables arranged in a rigid, five-line pattern of 5-7-5-7-7) is a battleground in the war between the academic and the popular, as described in an article on how traditionalists abhor cell phone poetry

Traditionalists frown on cell phone tanka's liberal use of slang and colloquial Japanese. They say the topics are frivolous and the writing shallow and one-dimensional. "Almost all of the cell phone poems are stuff I'd never call tanka," says Tokio Ishii, an 80-year-old former paper company employee who is a ranking member of Shin Araragi, or New Yew Tree, one of Japan's most traditional kessha (poetry society.) "What we do is something like religious training. It's pure literature. On the cell phones what they're doing is more like a chat group."

What's more, Kenya Washio, 61, an editor, says, nobody improves in cell phone tanka because everyone is just too nice. In a kessha, poets learn their craft the hard way: by having their creations torn to shreds at group readings. "Tanka is an exercise in masochism," he says. "You get criticized and put down, you curse, you're mortified, you cry. Then you go home and write some more."

The younger poets argue that the cell phone has opened up tanka to a wider group of people who would never have put up with the rules and rigor of a kessha. Young Japanese say tanka is surprisingly suited to the cell phone. It's short enough to fit on little mobile screens, and simple enough to let young poets whip out bits of verse whenever the spirit moves them. Scores of tanka home pages and bulletin boards are popping up on cell phone Internet sites with names like Palm-of-the-Hand Tanka and Teenage Tanka. Japan's national public broadcaster airs a weekly show called "Saturday Night Is Cell Phone Tanka," which gets about 3,000 poems e-mailed from listeners' mobiles each week on topics like parental nagging and the boy in the next class.

Raul Rivero: A poet unbowed by Cuba's jails

2005-10-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

Freed Cuban poet and journalist Raúl Rivero, in Miami this week to read his poetry, talked with The Miami Herald about his career and how he survived prison.

Under the dim light of a single bulb, he wrote love poems -- the only thing, his jailers warned him, he was allowed to write.

"Every time I finished a poem, I felt that they had not defeated me," said the 59-year-old, freed in April and now living in Madrid, where his jailhouse poems were published under the title Corazón sin furia (Heart Without Fury).

"It's a very special book because it was edited by the police," Rivero quips.

Before he could give the poems to his wife during her visits, allowed only once every three months, Rivero had to hand his poems over to the prison guard assigned to him for his approval.

He would hand in 10, Rivero says, get seven back.

"He always felt obligated to censor something," he says.

Then he laughs: "It didn't matter. He censored the silliest poems."

I hope someone translates him into English.

Islamo-fascism

2005-10-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

It would be an understatement to say I am not a staunch Bush supporter. But I loved these quotes from his recent defense of the war on terror.

Citing recent attacks in London, Sharm el-Sheikh and Bali, Bush said while the bombings appeared random, they serve a clear ideology, "a set of beliefs that are evil but not insane," and gave a new name for the ideology: Islamo-facism.

"Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims: 'What is good for them and what is not.' And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that this is the road to paradise, though he never offers to go along for the ride," Bush said.

For opinion on how the left is failing to properly perceive and respond to the Islamo-fascist threat, see Sasha Abramsky's piece at openDemocracy.

What are British poets writing about?

2005-10-05T07:31:00.000-05:00

Nature, war - or washing up? As Britain's top poetry prize is awarded today, John Mullan examines what preoccupies British leading writers.

In the long run, however dusty their embrace, it is the attention of academics that gives poets their standing... While the prizes and their attached ceremonials are good propaganda, poets need translators to help them find readers.

Yet in their hearts, poets cannot help but think that the fizz and splutter of contemporaneity is besides the point. The only reputation that matters is posthumous. Death, makes the poet's reputation secure, or fails to do so. The poets competing for prizes every year would surely forsake any prize money for the sake of just one timelessly memorable poem to leave behind them.

No dull poetry allowed

2005-10-04T08:31:00.000-05:00

I like this article I found through Google news. A poet reads humorous works and helps students learn to write poems about real life -- sort of. If you need a login, you can get one from Bug Me Not, which is a handy place to check out when faced with those pesky registrations.

Yes, there's certainly a place for angst in poetry, but there's also a place for the pure fun of screwing around with words.

Smallville a la Mode

2005-10-02T18:16:00.000-05:00

My daughter and I are big fans of Smallville. This season's opener was awesome! I particularly liked the scene where Chloe and Clark discuss her knowledge of his secret, and he fills her in on the details. And the Depeche Mode song "Precious" played at the end was just the right touch. It would be nice if their forthcoming album "Playing the Angel" is as good.

Precious and fragile things
Need special handling
My God what have we done to you
We always tried to share
The tenderest of care
Now look what we have put you through

Things get damaged
Things get broken
I thought we'd manage
But words left unspoken
Left us so brittle
There was so little left to give

Angels with silver wings
Shouldn't know suffering
I wish I could take the pain for you
If God has a master plan
That only He understands
I hope it's your eyes He's seeing through

Things get damaged
Things get broken
I thought we'd manage
But words left unspoken
Left us so brittle
There was so little left to give

I pray you learn to trust
Have faith in both of us
And keep room in your hearts for two

Things get damaged
Things get broken
I thought we'd manage
But words left unspoken
Left us so brittle
There was so little left to give

Song in my head when I wake up

2005-09-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

Anyone who hasn't heard Mindy Smith's "One Moment More" album is missing a beautiful voice rendering some excellent songs. I don't know why, but I keep hearing her "Down in Flames" in my head when I wake up.

I don't usually take chances
Most would easily agree
Something in your eyes
Is saying you can ease my heartache
I have a hurting inside
And I know you're just a stranger
If you cannot understand
There's too many times
I've lost my chance to talk with an angel
Too many to count

And life's so hard
It's the little things that seem to be getting me today, yeah
Life's so hard
But I'm doing what I can not to be getting down
While I'm going down in flames
Going down in flames

I would tell you I am happy
If I wasn't so damn sad
And the loneliness both overwhelms and keeps me empty
That's how it's been for a while

And life's so hard
It's the little things that seem to be getting me today, yeah
Life's so hard
But I'm doing what I can not to be getting down
While I'm going down in flames
Going down in flames

I need some direction
I need someone to listen
Someone to tell me that they know

That life's so hard
It's the little things that seem to be saving me today, yeah
Life's so hard
And I'm doing what I can
Oh, yeah, I'm doing what I can
Hey, I'm doing what I can
Putting out yeah
Putting out the flames

Submariners Do It Deeper

2005-09-23T20:41:00.000-05:00

I never went underway on the Philly, but I was onboard for about an hour when it was at Electric Boat in Groton, CT. What does this have to do with poetry? I've written some poems about my time in the Navy, including Gays in the Military

Hartford Courant
September 22, 2005

Sub Officers Disciplined

By Associated Press

GROTON -- The commander of a U.S. nuclear submarine that collided with a Turkish cargo ship in the Persian Gulf this month was relieved of command Wednesday and two other officers were reassigned, the Navy said.

Cmdr. Steven M. Oxholm put the submarine in a hazardous situation, a Navy investigation found, and he received a letter of reprimand. The Groton-based USS Philadelphia was traveling on the surface of the Gulf Sept. 5 when it slammed into the bulk carrier M/V Yaso Aysen.

Citing a lack of confidence in Oxholm's ability to command, Rear Adm. John Bird relieved him of his duties. Oxholm will return to Submarine Group Two, based in Groton, for a new assignment.

Nobody was injured and the damage was minor. It was the U.S. Navy's second collision with a civilian vessel in the Gulf in 14 months.

Capt. Robert J. Brennan replaced Oxholm as commander of the Philadelphia, which has a crew of 125.

The boat is expected to return to sea.

Howl at fifty

2005-09-22T19:23:00.000-05:00

OK, I admit, I've only read the first few lines of Howl. They were good lines, but at a point it all just started feeling tedious. I'd like to look it up in my Ginsberg Collected, but I can't find it right now. I think it's a kind of poem whose existence I approve of in theory even though I don't have the patience to endure its actuality. In other words, "Yea performance poetry!" Ok, whatever. Here's the story

Howl at fifty

If you're wondering how I'm finding these poetry articles, I have my personalized Google homepage searching for poet poetry poem on Google News.

The Equinox

2005-09-22T18:49:00.000-05:00

I got notification in the mail yesterday that one of my sestinas was accepted by The Equinox literary magazine. The Equinox is eclectic, with the goal of offering a forum to the many voices of the Western Mass region, even at the risk of some cacophony. Simple charm or complete angst--and all points between--are equally considered. In your face, McSweeney's, you bloody bahstids.

What does it mean to be a poet in our time

2005-09-20T20:43:00.000-05:00

I haven't read this entire interview with Charles Bernstein (he's evidently a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, which doesn't automatically endear him to me), but I love this line:

As James Sherry once remarked, if you take a sheet of plain white paper, perhaps it’s worth a penny, but if you write a poem on it, it’s worth nothing.

I'd say, well, yeah, especially if it's a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem!

Set List

2005-09-17T06:46:00.000-05:00

Here's my set list from the open reading at the Arms Library in Shelburne Falls, Friday, September 17, 2005:

Current song stuck in my head: 4:35 AM by Gemma Hayes. Looking forward to her new album.

What Next?

2005-09-15T19:23:00.000-05:00

I have four recently-published books in front of me that I'm trying to decide which I'll read first. They are

The Wounded Surgeon by Adam Kirsch (a critical look at Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz and Plath)
The First Poets by Michael Schmidt (Lives of the ancient Greek poets)
Paul Celan Selections by Pierre Joris
Pizza Poems by Renata Dumitrascu

I'm just wondering if anyone who reads this has a preference for any of these books...(?)

Simply Lasting

2005-09-15T19:15:00.000-05:00

I finished this book about Jane Kenyon a couple weeks ago. It is a poignant telling of her life, as well as an informative look at her poetry. Still, the line that most sticks with me from the book is by Wendell Berry:

Those who are living and writing at a given time are not just isolated poetry dispensers more or less equivalent to soft-drink machines, awaiting the small change of critical approval.

Feeling as a Foreign Language

2005-09-08T21:12:00.000-05:00

I read this book by Alice Fulton about a couple months ago. There is much I like throughout the book, including her discussion of fractal poetics, an analysis of Dickinson, and her defense of abstractions. I believe it was in this book that she complained of so many poems sounding like "polished gossip" and that so many poems were more about emotions than ideas, but, since I can't track those lines down right now, I could be wrong. Still, a thought-provoking book.

A Concert of Tenses

2005-09-08T20:30:00.000-05:00

I read this book by Tess Gallagher several weeks ago. There is much I like throughout the book. Here's just a sample:

The young writers know that NEA awards and other contests are judged by other poets, so biting the wrong hand could mean no fellowship, no publication, no readings, no teaching job. This may partially explain the slack-hearted, overintricate manuevers in which a writer examines a poet's work only on its own ground but does not take it farther into the arena of what is being done by others.

She quotes Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text "The text you write must prove to me it desires me."

The Unemployed Fortune-Teller

2005-09-08T20:16:00.000-05:00

I read this book by Charles Simic a few weeks ago. The one line that really sticks with me from the book is "The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination."

Heteronyms

2005-09-08T20:07:00.000-05:00

Speaking of heteronyms... The last two years I've written a sestina and submitted it to McSweeney's, to the response of "it's not right for us." This is compounded by my having seen/heard McSweeney's founder David Eggers speak. He uttered every line as if it was inherently witty, which it wasn't. I've decided my sestina next time around will use heteronyms as the end words. Heteronyms, if you don't know and don't want to bother looking it up, are words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, e.g. "wind" (a breeze, or to wind a watch) or "minute" (a small amount of time, or a small particle.) Then when I get the "it's not right for us" I can console myself with the thought that "they just don't know how to appreciate heteronyms, the poor dumb bastards." A concern: if I had a sestina accepted by McSweeney's, would it mean my work had deteriorated into pretentiousness?

The Book of Disquiet

2005-09-08T19:50:00.000-05:00

Years ago I tried reading "Reveries of a Solitary Walker" by Rousseau. He was so hypersensitively obsessive about every psychic ache and pain that I actually got sick from reading it. I tried reading it again in a bookstore recently and the nausea returned. Now, from that, you would think my trying to read a book entitled "The Book of Disquiet" would have me hurling into my lap. But, oddly, I find myself unmoved. And I'm wondering why. I think it's because Pessoa seems to be forced in his pronouncements, as if he's trying to convince the reader how contrary, unique, creative and sensitive he is. So I'm not sure what my ultimate verdict on him is.

Well, of course he seems forced. He wrote under several personas (he called them heteronyms), so posturing was something he willfully did. But was he sincere in his posturing, was he a complex man of multiple sincerities, or was he trying for effect? One of his lines is "It's possible to feel life as a sickness in the stomach, the very existence of one's soul as a muscular discomfort." And this before the rise of existentialism. But after Dostoevsky.

Anyway, there are some intersections between his thought and mine. In flipping through the book I see one or two thoughts that seem to be represented in my poems. I'm not sure yet if the intesection covers more than just a small area.

Weird Poems/Weird Poets: A Miscellany

2005-09-03T20:43:00.000-05:00

I really enjoyed Jack Anders' article on Weird Poems/Weird Poets on MiPOesias, particularly the part on Georg Trakl. He quotes from the 20 Poems of Georg Trakl translated by Robert Bly and James Wright. He quotes from their introduction:

The poems of Georg Trakl have a magnificent silence in them. It is very rare that he himself talks–for the most part he allows the images to speak for him. Most of the images, anyway, are images of silent things. In a good poem made by Trakl images follow one another in a way that is somehow stately.

Wallace Stevens : Words Chosen out of Desire

2005-09-03T18:20:00.000-05:00

I recently finished reading Wallace Stevens : Words Chosen out of Desire by Helen Vendler. It changed my perception of him from an aloof obscurantist into a poet of melancholic desire. It's a short book which reveals his harshness, desire, secrecies and perfection of magnitude. He could be harsh with himself, he desired even as a septuagenarian, his secrecies were: using "he" or "she" instead of "I"; burying the emotional heart of a poem in the middle instead of stating it in the beginning or end; placing the context of the poem in his own work as well as his predecessors (particularly Keats); misleading titles; and his allusiveness. The final chapter covers Stevens' handling of the orders of magnitude between body, mind, garments, environment and nature. It illustrates how he reimagined the differences of magnitude between these elements in successive poems, culminating in The River of Rivers in Connecticut (which I happen to cross twice daily on my commute.) Included are some quotes from Stevens' Opus Posthumous, which prompted me to want to check that out, too.

My vote for favorite Vendler sentence in this book is on page 58: "If there is no medium of verbal solubility, perhaps one can only imagine two immiscible liquids with a metonymic impermeability." It seems that every book I've read of hers is usually very clearly written, but has one trademark sentence like that in it. I love it!

Approaching Poetry

2005-09-03T18:12:00.000-05:00

I really like this description of a poem in Approaching Poetry by Stacy Tartar Esch

"I think of a poem as being like a really tightly packed suitcase. This is the analogy: you're going on a vacation. A long weekend vacation, and you're not sure what to bring. So you throw just about everything you own into a tightly packed, barely closed little weekend- sized suitcase, which provides a nice neat boundary around all your stuff, holding it in place. But now imagine you need to get out your sweatshirt because your best friend needs to borrow it. You know the suitcase is all neatly packed, and it will be a disaster trying to find that thing, but you say, go ahead, you open it up. You can find, it yours. To me, that best friend is like a reader coming to a great poem. The poem is that impossibly stuffed-tight suitcase and the reader wants something from it. And the very minute that reader makes the slightest move to open the latch or the zipper-whoosh!-everything that's been stuffed in comes flying out. That's like the meaning flying out in every direction when we start to analyze rich poetry. It can be that emotionally, intellectually volcanic. It's amazing." -- Stacy Tartar Esch

Critical Reading

2005-09-03T17:41:00.000-05:00

Professor John Lye's CRITICAL READING: A GUIDE

The Mystique of the Difficult Poem

2005-09-03T17:15:00.000-05:00

Do you ever wrestle with clarity? Here is Steve Kowit's take on The Mystique of the Difficult Poem. Includes some Jorie Graham bashing and Robinson Jeffers boosting.

2005-09-03T07:08:00.000-05:00

my daughter snapped this when half my hair was sticking straight up in the wind!

Polishing Only the Nose

2005-09-02T08:54:00.000-05:00

The first issue of The November 3rd Club is active. My poem, Polishing Only the Nose of the Bronze Statue of Christ is in there.

Jane and Don

2005-08-24T12:08:00.000-05:00

Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall seem to have had a very fulfilling relationship. Neither of my wives was too much into poetry, and I stopped writing during my marriages. I'm thinking that it would be best to be in a relationship with someone who shares the poetic sensibility. Then I think of Ted and Sylvia.

Jane Kenyon

2005-08-24T10:13:00.000-05:00

Just learning about Jane Kenyon by reading "Simply Lasting". She has a plain style, but I sense more than plain thinking behind her words (unlike Mary Oliver.)