Squandermania and other foibles

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:09:00 +0000

"You don’t look contemporary to me….."

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:09:00 +0000

If you have a programmatic critical reading of what’s happening now, that defines itself by virtue of your agenda to promote a certain kind of writing over other kinds, then I’d say you have a critical problem that you’re not dealing with. But this is less of a problem for the maker than for the critic (the poet is partisan; the critic can look at the entire field with one disgust). The bigger knot is that there’s never a disinterested party at the party of the present. Critics, too, have an interest in promoting one work over another, as being worthy of attention, however different their investment. I think Goldsmith and Archambeau would acknowledge that. But we can’t wrestle this gator without grappling with the fact that poets do most of the writing about poetry. The buyer is the seller. Only Agamben, the philosopher, doesn’t get muddy in the market; particulars are the mud, and there’s no making without it. [...]

Another problem is that everyone writing seriously thinks he or she is contemporary, in many of the ways that Agamben suggests. Because Agamben doesn’t really deal with individual artists, or works, but with aesthetics. –"Hey everyone who’s making art, whoever doesn’t think he’s contemporary, raise your hand…. What, no one? Come on, not everyone here is contemporary, I gotta see some hands…. Hey, how about you! Or you! You don’t look contemporary to me….." etc. etc. This is nothing but a farce in the arena of literary history & critical discernment. Dostoevysky or Tolstoy? Beatles or Stones? Whitman or Dickinson? Frost or Pound? Bishop or Lowell? Twombly or Warhol? Goldsmith or Glück or Hejinian or Bidart or Seidel or…..? (I can only have one? I’m not on a diet…) Who gets to decide? Of course, we all do, we duke it out, and the struggle keeps changing with time, as various arguments and advocacies gain momentum, run their course, and dissipate, or continue. The maker has one ideology, let’s say, but her readers are legion. (I want to sell my books, but if they were the only books I had to read, I’d stay at the movies….) The contemporary now is what readers of the future decide contemporary was back when we were living it. It’s never not historical. Because reading is always historical; only writing can be contemporary. What you’re writing right now; others will have to let you know. Eliot’s most salient point in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is that the authentically contemporary changes how we read the past. But we’re all historians of the present. The most pernicious fiction about poetry is that of mutual exclusivity. The vicissitudes of time make a mockery of our theses. Or to quote Stein on Picasso, “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.” The question for me is always, what’s at stake in making definitive choices?

Joshua Weiner

Persons, not publishing houses

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 14:34:00 +0000

The facts are political. And it does matter. As Jennifer Dorn makes clear in her introduction to the Collected Poems, Ed published with persons, not publishing houses. There was always a firm engagement, a direct relationship carried through by regular and active correspondence, or face to face. LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) argued out the first US publications, The Newly Fallen and Hands Up!; Tom Raworth, in England, another reliable card and letter-writer, delivered From Gloucester Out. In other words, poets published poets, signalling their affinities the best way, through production, while continuing to strengthen transatlantic traffic, through readings, academic exchanges, hospitality. Distribution was nicely random, with many of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to peers, known and unknown. News had a frontier quality, coming in on the railway (in my case the clapped-out North London Line between Dalston Junction and Camden Road, for the great souk of Compendium Books). Control of production kept the process well away from corporate adventurism and required a network of fly-by-night independent bookshops. Dorn was comfortable in this world. Mike Hart, or one of the others from the communal Camden Town operation, would be on the phone to let customers know that the latest volume of Gunslinger had arrived. It really was as tight as that, 18th century in a way Dorn would have appreciated. That was his period. He took Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets as his prose model. ‘My desire,’ Dorn said, ‘is to be / a classical poet.’

[...]

Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be sequestered in the penthouse, intending to present him with a copy of the poem in which Dorn shaped his non-existence into a divine comedy of cocaine and cactus; virtual travel through high sierras and white deserts zeroing towards the vanishing line of the horizon like the bad craziness of a Monte Hellman western. It was that craziness we used to call the possible: that an invisible London publisher could provoke a reaction from the richest hermit on the planet, an unbarbered Texan tool-bit weirdo guarded by Mormon goons; that Howard Hughes, a fabulous entity capable of impersonation by Leonardo DiCaprio, would sue an impoverished poet and doctor with prime unsold stock stashed in his garage. Oh yes, those were the days.

Iain Sinclair, "Dysfunctional Troglodytes with Mail-Order Weaponry," LRB, 11 April 2013

... More deets, via Matthew Sperling:

"So SM goes to look for HH in Vegas. Gets turned away by bodyguards. SM hatches a new publicity coup: he sends telegram from Vegas to himself in London, demanding immediate withdrawal of Gunslinger, signed 'Howard Hughes'. Goes back to London and leaks this to the press. They make a news story of it, and Fulcrum sales shoot up. Postscript is he subsequently hears from Hughes's actual lawyers, who are no more in touch with Hughes than he was, saying, 'Our client sent that telegram; why haven't you withdrawn the book?'"

On the individual-versus-society motif

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:10:00 +0000

A.

Absurdism communicates a certain willingness to play with symbols that suggests a familiar ease with the world, with meaning, and with authority. This is the domain of elite class privilege, and particularly of white male privilege. We can go further still: absurdism not only reflects acquired status, it also enables access to that status. Mastering absurdism signals one’s ability to speak a certain class language; it flags participation in a distinctly white-collar world of college educated youth.

-- New Left Project, "The ‘Harlem Shake’ and the Western Illusion of Freedom"

B.

Poets should get back to saying crazy shit
All of the time
I am sick of academics or businesspeople telling poets
What we should do...

-- Dorothea Lasky, "What Poets Should Do"

Pictured: Persephone supervising Sisyphus pushing his rock in the Underworld. Side A of an Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 530 BC.

Numbers trouble?

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:31:00 +0000

Al Filreis's response to an interviewer who asked him to comment on the decline in readership of poetry:

I think I don't agree with the premise here. I think there is a huge readership of poetry. The problem is that it's not coherent, no longer trackable (through book sales, etc.), and doesn't fit existing categories. My sense is that despite cliches to the contrary, poetry is very much alive and well. The usual hyperbolic lament - that there are more poets than readers - only underscores how the writer/reader relationship is now complex and merged.

I was asked to comment on the same thing, by a reporter for a big newspaper - doing a story for National Poetry Month, natch. As evidence of decline, he said, "When I go into a Barnes and Noble, the poetry shelves have very few books, and bookstores have pretty much the same few poetry books wherever you go." I replied that bookstores are dying, not poetry...

The Voice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:06:00 +0000

Seven Types of Literary Argument

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:46:00 +0000

1. but this is newer, no this is

2. nothing is really new

3. but they were left out, no they were

4. this is better because it's clearer

5. I don't like you, etc.

6. why do they ignore us (no, they do)

7. -- Larry Sawyer

The intellect of man is forced to choose

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:57:00 +0000

As someone who never took an English class post-high school, I had to teach myself literature, which I did, like most autodidacts, by reading as widely as possible – and indiscriminately. If there was any method in my madness (which involved getting a shit job in a library so I could read through the stacks from one side of the building to the other), it was to read the collected poems of anybody, famous or not, who had one. Toward the end of this weird and rather lengthy curriculum, which is to say, the end of the alphabet, I arrived at the work of William Butler Yeats. What a relief it was! Rhymey, romantic, folkloric, woman-crazy stuff with a fair amount of politics for flavor; oblivious to the fascism and self-absorption (I had those leanings myself, at that age, perhaps) what, I thought, was there not to love about Yeats? My tendency was to read the way young people do, if not untampered with: that is to say, innocently and without anxiety; in any case, I would have been too naïve or insecure to make critical judgments. Thankfully, no papers were ever due, and no professor was going to ask me to explain away a poem. If I liked one, it was good, if not, I didn’t disparage it – I just set it aside as a possible subject for further thought..

Read the rest, including a meditation on Yeats, politics, and bad poetry, here, at Voltage Poetry

The Next Big Thing: A Meme about New Books

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:00:00 +0000

What is the working title of the book?

Miguel Hernández. For a while it was The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández. But now it's just... Miguel Hernández.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Before many people reading this were born, I found myself digging around for Spanish-language poetry to read, in the innards of Columbia University's Butler Library. I'd studied Spanish in high-school and college, and was on the prowl. Well, in no time, I found poems by this incredible poet - yet nobody I took them to seemed know about him. So, I translated a clutch of his poems for myself, and for my friends.

Here's a link to one of the poems that got me going; it's one of Miguel's most famous works: the lullaby of the onion he sent to his wife and baby son on hearing that they had nothing to eat but a bit of bread and onion.

Much later, Derek Walcott was talking to me about translation, said I should try it. When I told him I'd already been working on some Hernández, he got excited (he loves Spanish poetry!), and read through the poems. He said, in his oracular way: "You must do a book." I was a bit flummoxed - like every other yokel, I wanted to work on "my own book." But Derek is very wise, so I kept going with the translations. My work on them got me a PEN/New England Discover Award, so... I pressed ahead.

When at last I had a book together, I sent the typescript off to Carcanet, New Directions, Houghton Mifflin, and some other places. Carcanet turned them down, saying I should work on somebody important, like Machado, instead. N.D. wrote a very polite note, saying there was no room on the list, etc. To my amazement, Peter Davison at HmCo told me he would publish the book, complete with foreward by Robert Bly - but... I didn't hear anything more for almost a year. I was living in Boston then, where Peter's Atlantic office was, but after a few nice conversations that got my hopes way up, he wouldn't even answer the phone when I called to see what was what. Finally, I got a strange note saying it wasn't within the purview of HmCo to publish the work of "long-dead masters."

But... I'd sent the work to Bloodaxe, and the wonderful Neil Astley took it on with heartening enthusiasm, and had many great suggestions for a book that I was very proud of. It was awarded the Times Literary Supplement / UK Society of Authors / Premio Valle Inclan translation prize. Christopher Ricks threw me a party in his office that I'll always remember!

Long story, but... It was time to expand and tweak the translations, and Neil wanted to hive off the non-UK rights to the book so... Yet another terrific editor, Edwin Frank at New York Review Books, took Miguel on. So now, we have an updated, expanded version. I'm thrilled as can be. It will be available in time for the AWP conference in Boston, March 6 - 9, 2013.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

James Franco. Kidding! I have no idea who could play Miguel.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Poems treasured around the world for their courageous political stance and personal power.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

At least a year, working six hours every day.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The magic of discovering poems in the magical quiet and odd lighting of a huge library; Derek Walcott; Rosanna Warren; the spirit of the poet himself.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Hernández's amazing and poignant story. I'm going to cheat a bit by putting the bit about him that NYRB is using, but there's a more detailed introductory essay about him in the book, as well as prose about him from Lorca, Neruda, Octavio Paz, and others.

Miguel Hernández Gilabert was born into a poor family in the small city of Oriheula in south-eastern Spain in 1910. For most of his short life he was a pastor and a goatherd. His authoritarian father often beat him and discouraged his innate gift for words. Like Rimbaud, Hernández was a poet-prodigy, but unlike Rimbaud, being a poor peasant, he was largely self-educated. He eventually married the daughter of an officer of the Guardia Civil, Josefina Manresa. He fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and for a time read his poetry daily on the radio and organized poetry readings for soldiers on the front lines. After the war, Hernández was condemned to death for his poetry by Francisco Franco, who called him “an extremely dangerous” man; the sentence was later reduced so that he would not become a martyr, like Lorca. Though imprisoned, Hernández continued to write until his death from tuberculosis on March 28, 1942, at the age of thirty-one. On the wall next to his cot, he wrote his final poem: “Farewell, brothers, comrades, friends: Give my goodbyes to the sun and the wheat fields.”

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Heh. N/A.

Make up a question you think is pressing in way of poetry today.

Why do we think American poetry is so important?

*

TAGS: I was tagged by Susana Gardner to whom I am grateful. In this post, I am tagging the poets Clarie Trévien, George Murray, Robert Archambeau, Susan Schultz, and Henry Gould - read their blogs next Wednesday to find out about their Next Big Things!

A furtive cousin: more on unoriginal genius

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:58:00 +0000

A furtive cousin of the untraceable allusion is the unconscious allusion. A poet writes a line that turns out to be an echo, or even a facsimile, of something he or she has long ago read or heard and then has apparently stored away and forgotten, like a squirrel with too many caches of nuts. A line in a poem I wrote in 1978 about my wedding called the grass “green as glass”, a phrase I was abashed to find I had apparently borrowed from a Golden Book, The Color Kittens, which my mother read to me before I could read to myself – that is, before about 1954. In another poem, written later, the image “the bath of silence”, which at first I thought I’d come up with all by myself, turned out to owe something, even if not its precise phrasing, to the description in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, one of the first books I could and repeatedly did read to myself. The Princess’s great-great-grandmother lays the little girl down in an apparently bottomless blue bath, an otherworldly image both alluring and alarming. Recently, though, I came upon a claim that the phrase “bath of silence” originates with Meister Eckhart; both unconscious and untraceable, perhaps.

-- Rachel Hadas, TLS, February 1, 2013

Plagiarisms, paraphrases, cryptomnesias, and borrowings, then and now

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:52:00 +0000

The question of Coleridge’s plagiarisms, paraphrases, cryptomnesias, or borrowings has intrigued scholars and biographers for nearly two centuries, and is of special interest in view of his prodigious powers of memory, his imaginative genius, and his complex, multiform, sometimes tormented sense of identity. No one has described this more beautifully than Richard Holmes in his two- volume biography.

Coleridge was a voracious, omnivorous reader who seemed to retain all that he read. There are descriptions of him as a student reading The Times in a casual fashion, then being able to reproduce the entire paper, including its advertisements, verbatim. “In the youthful Coleridge,” writes Holmes,

this is really part of his gift: an enormous reading capacity, a retentive memory, a talker’s talent for conjuring and orchestrating other people’s ideas, and the natural instinct of a lecturer and preacher to harvest materials wherever he found them.

Literary borrowing was commonplace in the seventeenth century—Shakespeare borrowed freely from many of his contemporaries, as did Milton. Friendly borrowing remained common in the eighteenth century, and Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey all borrowed from one another, sometimes even, according to Holmes, publishing work under each other’s names.

But what was common, natural, and playful in Coleridge’s youth gradually took on a more disquieting form, especially in relation to the German philosophers (Friedrich Schelling above all) whom he “discovered,” venerated, translated, and finally came to use in the most extraordinary way. Whole pages of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria consist of unacknowledged, verbatim passages from Schelling. While this unconcealed and damaging behavior has been readily (and reductively) categorized as “literary kleptomania,” what actually went on is complex and mysterious, as Holmes explores in the second volume of his biography, where he sees the most flagrant of Coleridge’s plagiarisms as occurring at a devastatingly difficult period of his life, when he had been abandoned by Wordsworth, was disabled by profound anxiety and intellectual self-doubt, and more deeply addicted to opium than ever. At this time, Holmes writes, “his German authors gave him support and comfort: in a metaphor he often used himself, he twined round them like ivy round an oak.”

Earlier, as Holmes describes, Coleridge had found another extraordinary affinity, for the German writer Jean-Paul Richter—an affinity that led him to translate and transcribe Richter’s writings, and then to take off from them, elaborating them in his own way and then, in his notebooks, conversing and communing with Richter. At times, the voices of the two men became so intermingled as to be hardly distinguishable from one another.

[...]

We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

-- Oliver Sacks, "Speak, Memory," in the New York Review of Books, February 21, 2013

The Utopian Millennial Wish Department

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:08:00 +0000

What are your predictions for American poetry in the [21st] century?

In the Utopian Millennial Wish Department, I foresee no great changes in [US]American general dominant cultural views of and attitudes toward poetry or any of the inventive arts. I wish, however, that toilers in the field of poetics oppositional to those dominant attitudes would bear in mind that they, too, often succumb to corporate culture's desire to have everything (not just poetry) clearly labeled and classified.

-- Anselm Hollo (1934-2013), Poetry Society of America Q&A on American Poetry

A man and his "goddam verses"

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:36:00 +0000

He stands to read the title poem of News of the World:

Cold shuttered loveless star, skulker in clouds,

Streetwalker of the sky,

Where can you hide? –

Here Barker breaks off and says in his surprisingly plummy voice: “If you want utter pretentiosity, you can’t get better than that.” The audience laughs uneasily. He tries again:

In the first year of the last disgrace,

Peace, turning her face away –

before breaking off once more: “What kind of shit is this?” The whole thing is so absurd. I loathe this, don’t you? It’s absolutely ghastly. I know nothing is as ridiculous as a man standing up here, reading goddam verses.” By now the audience is loving it. Barker continues: “I have to earn my goddam forty quid, so I’ll read a goddam poem. It’s called ‘At the Wake of Dylan Thomas.’” This time he manages.

-- J.C., remembering George Granville Barker, in the TLS

Nobody Expects... the Confessional Poem!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:09:00 +0000

"We regret to say the printer announces that there are no more I's in the font."

-- Alice Corbin Henderson, Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, May 1916 issue

*

It's almost viral, and always with us, like bird flu... or hope springing eternal, or rumor: everywhere you turn you run into complaints about "confessional poets." In fact, if you want to sneer at someone's work, just call it confessional!

Who are, or were, the supposedly confessional poets? There's no excuse, in our Wiki-age, for not knowing that the term "confessional" was coined by M. L. Rosenthal in a review of Lowell's Life Studies ("Poetry as Confession," The Nation, September 19, 1959; reprinted in The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction). Like a sneeze, the impact was immediate and reasonably widespread; in no time, the term was used to make the likes of John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass look bad, different from each other as these writers are, and notwithstanding that Rosenthal himself regretted the term, calling it "both helpful and too limited." When Berryman was asked, "You, along with Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and several others, have been called a confessional poet. How do you react to that label?" he replied: "With rage and contempt. Next question!" For his part, Lowell responded that he had succeeded so well in creating a literary character in his poems named "Robert Lowell" that readers carelessly assumed that the two were identical.

It's way past time for a discussion about supposed "confessionalism" - about the way the term gets tossed around in order to pigeonhole people. Because if you believe that words are material objects that can and ought to be freed from the burden of meaning and/or should subvert hegemony, then calling a poem or poet confessional is intended to be a jeer, a de facto deathblow... What's more (and apparently worse): the implication is that the writer is - here comes another label! - bourgeois; after all, it takes money and leisure to confess or be (if it's the same thing) autobiographical - Grand Piano s, one after another, notwithstanding. At the same time, those who wish not to abandon meaning and feeling, but are simply sick of artless gut-spilling, of weeping in broken lines, also spurn the "confessional." You know: discipline is good for you, and like cleanliness will bring you closer to rectitude and virtue, etc. All man's miseries, Pascal concluded, derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.

So, shhh!

Even now, the complaint continues, with Sharon Olds's recent success winning prizes in the UK, viz - this from The Independent:

It's quite hard today to imagine a culture where anything "confessional" was in any way new. It's everywhere: in newspapers, on blogs, on Twitter, on websites, on radio, on TV. You really can't get away from it. You might want to, but you can't. In books, in interviews, in columns, and in journalism, the word that leaps out, again, and again, and again, and again, is "I". [...] "Beauty is truth," said Keats in "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and he didn't mean things that were literally true. Truth is what you find not in spilled feelings on a page, or in tearful confessions on Oprah Winfrey's sofa. Truth is what you find in art.

There's a disconnect in the above, as if a good so-called "confessional poem" can't be a good poem, or art. Or both. Or, yes, maybe even truth, whatever that may be.

In the end, this persistent silliness reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the Spanish Inquisition - nobody expects... the confessional poem!!!

Maybe people who put down the "confessional" don't have anything to confess themselves; Lowell, interestingly, did. Hopkins, the most innovative language poet writing in English, was relatively innocent - but you can take his poetry to the confessional. The great sinner T.S. Eliot famously praised Baudelaire by noting that most of us aren't man enough to be damned. I know I'm not!

In any case, I'll confess this: I wish the label would go away - it's not good for anything.

"I suppose we make it worse by shouting a lot, do we? Confess! Confess! Confess! Confess!"

"There is no 'Wasteland' [sic]"

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:53:00 +0000

All the prestige of poetry dates back to when it was the way you got the most vital news there is — your people’s stories. “The Iliad.” “The Odyssey.” “Gilgamesh.” All literature used to be poetry. But then fiction splintered off. Then the sort of tale you sung could be recorded and the words did not have to spend any time outside the company of their music if they did not want to. We have movies now that are capable of presenting images to us with a precision that would have made Ezra Pound keel over. All the things that poetry used to do, other things do much better. But naturally we still have government-subsidized poets. Poets are like the Postal Service — a group of people sedulously doing something that we no longer need, under the misapprehension that they are offering us a vital service.

“Poetry is dead,” playwright Gwydion Suleibhan tweeted Monday. “What pretends to be poetry now is either New Age blather or vague nonsense or gibberish. It’s zombie poetry.” There is no longer, really, any formal innovation possible. The constraints of meter have long been abandoned. What is left? It is a parroting of something that used to be radical. It is about as useful as the clavichord. There is no “Howl” possible or “Song of Myself.” There is no “Wasteland.”

No, there isn't. Maybe a Waste Land, though?

-- Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post, "Poetry is Dead."

N.B. I gather that some of the errors in this piece have been corrected since its first appearance, from which the above was cut and pasted here.

The great poet and boxer Muhammad Ali

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:10:00 +0000

It's Ali's birthday.

Click here to see a KPIX Eyewitness News report from May 19th 1971 featuring scenes from a press conference where Muhammad Ali recites a poem to reporters which touches on boxing, civil rights and life choices.

It includes the lines: "Better violent to die / than to Uncle Tom and try / making peace to live a lie."

Click here for an account by George Plimpton on the collaborative poem composed by Ali and Marianne Moore:

"We will call it 'A Poem on the Annihilation of Ernie Terrell,' " Miss Moore announced. "Let us be serious but not grim."

After we defeat Ernie Terrell
He will get nothing, nothing but hell,
Terrell was big and ugly and tall
But when he fights me he is sure to fall.
If he criticize this poem by me and Miss Moore
To prove he is not the champ she will stop him in four,
He is claiming to be the real heavyweight champ
But when the fight starts he will look like a tramp
He has been talking too much about me and making me sore
After I am through with him he will not be able to challenge Mrs. Moore.

The Winters of Our Discontent

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:52:00 +0000

Once [Basil Bunting] wrote rather a sharp review or comment in Hound and Horn, on something by Yvor Winters, who in turn wrote to him in Italy, making a physical challenge of it! It so happened that Gene Tunney [World Heavyweight Boxing Champioin, 1926-28] was there, and wrote back for him, saying that he, Tunney, would accept the challenge on Bunting's behalf. They didn't hear from Winters again!

-- Gael Turnbull, "A Visit to Basil Bunting," in More Words: Gael Turnbull on Poets & Poetry, ed. by Jill Turnbull & Hamish Whyte, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:34:00 +0000

Blogging at Best American Poetry all this week, e.g., this post about being a glutton for poetry... or one about the death of a literary magazine...

BAD WRITING!

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:01:00 +0000

That Other Fellow

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:19:00 +0000

The artist can never write to satisfy himself to get, as the saying is, something off the chest. He must not write propaganda which it is his desire to write; he must not write rolling periods, the production of which gives him a soothing feeling in his digestive organs or wherever it is. He must write always so as to satisfy that other fellow, that other fellow who has too clear an intelligence to let his attention be captured or his mind deceived by special pleadings in favour of any given dogma. You must not write so as to improve him, since he is a much better fellow than yourself, and you must not write so as to influence him, since he is a granite rock, a peasant intelligence, the gnarled bole of a sempiternal oak, against which you will dash yourself in vain, It is in short no pleasant kind of job to be a conscious artist. You won't have any vine-leaves in your poor old hair; you won't just dash your quill into an inexhaustible ink-well and pour out fine frenzies. No, you will be just the skilled workman doing his job with drill or chisel or mallet. And you will get precious little out of it. Only, just at times, when you come to look again at some work of yours that you have quite forgotten, you will say, "Why, that is rather well done." That is all.

-- Ford Madox Ford

"The More You Ignore Me" - Poetry and Living in a Post-Truth World

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:41:00 +0000

Paul Killebrew: Not to get all Terry Gross on you, but you worked for a time at the Poetry Foundation and specifically on its blog when it was experimenting with open comment streams, which were soon taken over by some truly unlikeable voices. When you first told me about writing a novel that was one giant comment on a blog, I thought it would essentially be a spoof of those Poetry Foundation folks, but obviously it’s something much larger than that. Did the novel start out as a response to evil commenters, and if so, how did you get past that?

Travis Nichols: In the “evil commenters” big picture (by Hieronymus Bosch), the commenters on the Poetry Foundation’s site were not that bad. If, for example, you make the mistake of wading into the comments on a big Huffington Post story, you will be able to easily identify the enemy. He is the racist, sexist Neanderthal who seems to be typing with the one half of his thumb he didn’t just accidentally bite off. But on the Poetry Foundation’s site, it was much weirder. The comments section was perpetually late night at AWP on bad acid. Paranoia and erudition and endless self-aggrandizement and somebody bleeding out onto the Aztec carpet. As the designated moderator for the Poetry Foundation’s comments, I felt deeply deeply bonkers for a few months, largely because I took a lot of the rote online bullying personally. I also wanted to try to figure out how best to maintain a common space for people where not just sanctioned voices got through. Turns out, that’s a tough nut to crack and possibly the Poetry Foundation wasn’t the place for that kind of experimentation. We ended up shutting the comments on the main blog down, which led to a few choice specimens starting their own site on which to, initially, post photos of me and call me a fascist.

[...]

Comments are a revolutionary way to monetize hate, so it’s a great thing for people who can just count page views with a clear conscience. For the rest of us? Like the best poetry it’s happy and sad. The great hope of the internet was that it was going to allow universal access to information, so that you could, for example, take a philosophy class at Berkeley while sitting in New Hampshire in your jams. But what it’s turned out to be much more is a gateway to massive amounts of disinformation, leaving everyone in an atomized bubble to sort the truth alone; looking at photoshopped images of Hitler talking with aliens while Sarah Palin tells you your Grandma is going to an apology tour die-in sponsored by 4-H.

I read a pitch for a PR seminar that stated matter-of-factly that we live in a “post-truth” world, because there is as much signal as there is noise. This is probably no different than when scratches in the temple wall served as a comment stream, when rumors about witchy behavior were rampant, but I do think comment streams are a reality check for anyone who believes too strongly in the Enlightenment, or in progress. Everything you value is always under threat, always being negotiated, largely by trolls.

Comment sections also show on a minute-by-minute basis how terrible our education system is in this country. And not because the teachers are bad but because public school teachers and students have largely been left for dead by the corporate right, who, of course, love disinformation. The most fundamental attack on freedom is the attack on critical thinking skills. Comments display our universal failure to teach and value critical thinking, leaving the possibility open that both everything and nothing could be true. It’s a brilliant strategy on the part of the corporate right, and it is what makes people like the narrator of [my new novel, The More You Ignore Me] possible. He makes up his own truth, and it is endlessly adaptable to his own self-interest.

-- Full interview here.

Too many poets, deja vu!

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:49:00 +0000

Earlier this year, Marjorie Perloff asked, "What happens to poetry when everybody is a poet?" - and cited Jed Rasula. And there was another very different screed on the subject, which I discussed in my earlier blogpost, "Too many poets don't spoil the soup (or do they?)."

Is there a glut of discussions of the glut?

You may now, at any rate, read Rasula again on the subject, in an exchange with Mike Chasar in the Boston Review called, "Glut Reactions:The Demographics of American Poetry."

It is a long exchange, but if you scroll waaay down, you'll see a comment by Bill Knott, in which he replies, "I can think of lots of occupations there are too many of," but draws the line at poets, asking:

Are all these PoBiz authorities who complain about too many poets, aren't these decrying criticrats in essence advocating genocide against poets?

I'm sure there's more discussion to come; 'tis the season of plenty!

Pictured: The preparation of a cornucopia.

In Search of David Jones

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:14:00 +0000

In Search of David Jones: Artist, Soldier, Poet by DavidJonesFilms

Enjoy your cage!

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:23:00 +0000

[David Foster Wallace argues that while lots of contemporary writing is] smart and inventive, most of the time it “doesn’t satisfy its own agenda. Instead, it most often degenerates into a kind of jeering, surfacey look ‘behind the scenes’ of the very televisual front people already jeer at….” The problem for these writers is that they

render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch. The fact is that for at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative.

. . .

The challenge... was to stop relying on an overfamiliar cynical tone that could now say little more than, Hey, isn’t this absurd? You and I are in on it, but what can we do but go along for the ride? “The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’” Wallace quotes critic Lewis Hyde (writing about John Berryman): “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

-- from Elaine Blair, "A New Brilliant Start," NYRB, December 6, 2012

Heads I praise, Tails I laugh: Edward Thomas on reviewing as unskilled labor

noreply@blogger.com (Don Share) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:08:00 +0000

THERE seem to be four principal kinds of reviews the interesting and good; the interesting, but bad; the uninteresting, but good; the uninteresting and bad. Most are of the last kind. They are reading matter, usually grammatical, which probably bears some relation to something passing in the writer's mind, but keeps it secret. Nothing is revealed by them about the book in hand, except the author's name and presumed sex, and whether it is in prose or verse; nothing about the reviewer's feeling, except that he likes or does not like, or is indifferent to the book which is not a matter of much importance unless the reviewer has somehow built up a system, or a past, to which his remarks instantly refer the reader. The bad, uninteresting review consists of second-hand words and paralysed, inelectric phrases; and the better these are strung together the worse it is, because it means that the wretched man, woman, or child, is deceiving himself, making a virtue of his necessity, his hurry, his obtuseness, his ignorance. Such work is terribly uninteresting to any- one without a superhuman interest in whatever is inhuman. Sometimes it may be read in a comatose condition by readers with a respect for all printed matter, and in a sort of enthusiasm by relatives of the reviewer. But the only thing to be said for it is that it produces money, which produces food and clothing for aged parents, fair wives, innocent children. Against it must be set the fact that it is waste of time and energy, like sending clean things to a laundry, that it is nothing, masquerading as something, that the longer it exists the more respectable it is thought by those who do not care, by the majority. Most reviews are of this kind. That is to say that people of all sorts write them. Therefore, probably, it is very easy to fall into the habit, and very hard to see that you have done so. You read a book once or twice, or half read it ; various thoughts are awakened as you proceed, about the author, his subjects, his vocabulary, the influences he has felt, and, in addition to these, at the end you have some sort of general impression. When you come to write, you do not inquire into the history of your thoughts, or try to relate them ; your object is to write without delay something continuous, and since some of the thoughts protrude too much for continuity you sacrifice them. The result is a piece of prose which only a man possessing a profound knowledge of you can accurately follow. What can anybody else do with your roundabout phrases, brought to birth by the union of unconsidered thoughts with memories of other reviews?

The more a man tries who was not born to write unless he has an aim clearly before him the worse he writes. Most reviewers have no aim clearly before them, except of covering space and putting the name of the book at the top. At best they want to get in a striking phrase, relevant or not. God help them. It is not a man's, certainly not a reviewer's, task, to better them, or persuade them that they could be bettered. Nor is it necessary here to attempt to throw light upon bad writing. I mention this class only because I believe that they hope to be interesting. They are distant, perhaps unconscious, disciples of Wilde's "Critic as Artist." They are expressing themselves apropos of the book sent them for review: if they succeed, it is in this world a thing to be thankful for. The so-called review relating to one detail in the book, and then branching off to something which the reviewer has at heart, is justified if well done. Good writing is always justified. But this bad, interesting review is not of importance here. Both kinds are bad, because they are not reviews.

What, then, is a review? A review gives an account of an unknown book its substance, aim and achievement; or it discusses a known book, or some point in it or connected with it, in a manner assuming some knowledge of it on the reader's part. To this second class belong most of the better reviews. Any good writer can write good reviews of this kind. But good reviews of the other kind are seen scarcely ever; for it by no means follows that if a good writer tries to produce them he will succeed. Few try, and perhaps the good writer tries least of all. He has established a scale of values, a system, a metaphysic, for which he is known among the scattered school of followers which at the same time he has created. For the most part he trusts to a few shorthand phrases, indicating to the intelligent that he likes a thing or not, and, to some extent, how and why. This, of course, is valuable in proportion to the merits of the critic. According as he has a wide or peculiar knowledge of men, and things, and words, and holds a vigorous and not stereotyped view which has survived or sprung out of this knowledge, so must he be valued. At present he is not likely to reach very far. He will be read chiefly by literary people. The rest of the world, learned and unlearned, will go on discovering what suits them, unconsciously applying standards based on experience.

... The worst of it is that the critic is usually looking out for what is good or bad, along certain lines; whereas it is rather his business to find, like a plain man, "something to read" as intense a pleasure as possible in reading, not something that would, he imagines, be perfect to a different imagined being, though unreadable to himself. No man is a final judge of what he cannot enjoy, whether eggs, caviare, or castor oil, however brilliant he may be at telling us that what he cannot enjoy is bad. But by taking pains he can give an account of it. ...Nearly all reviews of verse are either loosely complimentary or have a bantering tone as if the bards were tiny little odd unreal creatures who earn no wages and have no human feelings. When a new book by an accepted verse writer appears, the reviewer's task is to compass some variation of the ordinary compliments. As to the unaccepted, it is Heads I praise, Tails I laugh. More often it is Heads, because those are the publisher's orders. No matter: mere praise is better than mere laughter, and the letter of praise does not exclude the spirit of criticism.

The reviewer lacks not excuse. In most cases he has no idea whom he is addressing, if anyone. He is writing in an indifferent vacuum. He does not care; his editor does not care ; so far as he knows, nobody cares, provided he is not libellous, obscene, or very ungrammatical. Is he to address the author? Is he to address readers who know the book reviewed, or readers who do not ? Is he to hold forth simply to his equals who happen not to write for a living ? These questions will come up and ought to be answered. A careful answer might help to turn reviewing from unskilled into skilled labour. No one wants to interfere with good writers ; I am speaking of the average reviewer. His unsupported opinion is mostly worthless. I believe it would be a useful and pleasant change if he were to cease expressing opinions and take to giving as plain and full an account of the book in hand, as time, space, and his own ability permit. The skill required would be of an order which no man need be ashamed to display, and few could achieve without labour. Gradually, efficient chroniclers would be, not born, but made. They might become as efficient as the best ot the newspaper staff is held to be ; they might form a standard which plain, hurried men could reach by moderate efforts, and would not fall short of without disgrace. The pioneers would perhaps have a hard time in getting rid of all those degraded loose phrases caused by uncertainty, or ignorance, or imitation, all the words like the advertiser's 'unequalled' and 'absolutely pure.' Even the egoistic reviewer, even the egoistic reviewer with a following, might learn from this method. In any case he would not be superseded, while personality and a corresponding metaphysic and literary power are respected, and he would be served by a rank and file of decent workers, instead of being surrounded and confused by a rabble of ridiculous and unlovely muddlers.

-- from Edward Thomas, "Reviewing: An Unskilled Labour"