Squandermania and other foibles

The Poems of Basil Bunting (2016)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 20:33:00 +0000

Available now from Faber and Faber

FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE (and best price) via The Book Depository

New Statesman Book of the Year, 2016

Sunday Times of London Book of the Year, 2016

London Review Bookshop Poetry Book of the Year: An astonishing scholarly undertaking, beautifully produced and sensitively annotated.

Richard Burton, author of A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting: A fantastic achievement.

Rory Waterman, Essays in Criticism: A considerable work of scholarship... the only book of Bunting’s poetry any reader needs.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times: Splendidly edited.

Paul Batchelor, The Poetry Review: A major event in the literatures of this...archipelago.

Chris Miller, PN Review: The annotations are magisterially organized. Well done, Don Share.

Mark Hutchinson, TLS: Deft and meticulous... More than fulfills the task he has set for it... You'll have a field day exploring the notes and commentaries.

Peter Robinson, Poetry London: Don Share has provided a canonical Bunting in a thoroughly convincing and usable edition. He has done the poet, these poems, and their readers, an invaluable service.

Matthew Hollis: A rigorous, unquestionably thorough and well-presented piece of scholarship that tells us very much more than we once knew about Bunting's work and working background.

Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers: The book of my dreams! What a gift to readers.

Peter Quartermain: What an accomplishment this book is!

Steve Silberman: One of the most significant poetry books of the last 25 years.

Devin Johnston: The editing is excellent. This volume cleanly replaces a ragged stack on my shelf of books and photocopies, as well as gaps and question marks. It will be an immensely useful book for me, as Bunting's poetry is always a technical resource (as well as an active pleasure). I'm sure it's bringing new readers to Bunting.

David Wheatley, The Literary Review: Masterfully harvested by Don Share... Bunting has been more than lucky in his editor.

Ian Pople, Manchester Review: This collection of Bunting’s poetry and Don Share’s meticulous editing of them will keep us reading and re-reading the poems for a very long time.

Anthony Howell, Fortnightly Review: By including anything and everything Bunting wrote about his poems in the annotations, we get to know a lot about the man through Don Share's painstaking scholarship and his discreet editing.

Emily Van Houton, Research English at Durham: Don Share has completed more than just an unprecedented task but a greatly needed one.

Steven Waling, Write Out Loud: Is it worth the money? I would say, every penny. Basil Bunting was one of the greatest British poets of the 20th century.

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Link to errata/corrigenda

One Small Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 14:29:00 +0000

The author constructs a very cogent argument about contemporary culture, in particular its narcissism. “Bad art is from no one to no one”, she states. “Aspiring to fame is aspiring to a life of small talk.” She draws a very sharp line between writers under thirty and writers over forty. “The former, like everyone their age, already know how to act like famous people whose job it is to be photographed.” Turn forty (she was born in 1974) “and suddenly you’re too old to die tragically young, but at least you have a chance of dying fascinatingly old”. Manguso’s advice for aspiring authors is about craft, not outcome, the mastery of what she calls “one small thing”. Small might be the most important word in this book, small as an aesthetic principle, a way of constructing sentences, but also small as a way of being in the world and being with other people. “The smallest and shortest pieces of art strive for perfection; the largest and longest strive for greatness.” In the context of a noisy political arena in which greatness is seen as an unambiguous good, Sarah Manguso’s philosophy of smallness is more radical than it seems.

Jonathan Ellis, on Sarah Manguso, in the Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 2017

Poems for PRINCE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 15:15:00 +0000

"what other dude you know own a whole color?" - Nate Marshall

As a public service, I offer a compendium, the compilation of which is still in progress, of legit PRINCE-related poetry.

The poetry of Prince's lyrics. - via Slate

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, "Purple Elegy"

Excerpt from Michael Robbins' poem "New Bridge Strategies" from "Alien vs. Predator" -

"Poems I wrote for Prince." - E. Kristin Anderson reads from her chapbook Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I Wrote to Prince in the Middle of the Night (Porkbelly Press, 2015), a collection of poems penned to, and inspired by, the late Prince.

"When Doves" by R.A. Villanueva - "Consider this, from Carl Phillips' 'The Art of Daring': 'The poem is a form of negotiation with what haunts us ... insofar as what haunts us is, in part, who we are.' To believe that means trusting in echoes and spirits and strange rhymes. And so, I am: secret frescoes and cave churches; the drum loops and distortions of Prince and the Revolution; my mother's devotionals, her defiance." - R.A. Villanueva

"Starfish and Coffee (after the song with the same name, by Prince)" by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"Dearly Beloved," by Aaron Belz

"for prince," by Jonathan Jacob Moore

"Sitting in the Cell Phone Waiting Lot at the San Francisco Airport, Awaiting My Father’s Arrival, I Write a Poem on the Day of Prince’s Death," by Dean Rader

"Alphabet Street," by Randall Mann

(Note: the image heading this post is from the Folger Shakespeare Library, an image from a book containing Josua Sylvester’s poem Lachrymae Lachrymarum, mourning the death of Prince Henry. See the full post here.)

VIDA interview, part one

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 15:19:00 +0000

Confusion that exists on the subject of what is meant by "understanding" a poem

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 18:50:00 +0000

This is no place to add my mite to the confusion that exists on the subject of what is meant by "understanding" a poem. "Understanding" is something that people more respectable than myself assure me that they burn to apply to everything. If they look, for example, at a picture, and are in danger of feeling pleasure from it, they either declare that "they don't understand it" or they apply their understandings to some object which, but for their assurances to the contrary, I should have suspected wasn't the picture: in either case, it seems, they feel better for having avoided submitting to the dignity of pleasure. With a poem, the same sort of difficulty arises.

-- C.H. Sisson, from a review of Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 15:16:00 +0000

... there’s very little that you ever actually need when it comes to appreciating and getting something very valuable from a poem. You probably need to be able to read and write, except that people could read poems to you; you probably need to know English, though you and I have probably had the experience of reading poems in a language that we don’t know and being very thrilled by their music and by a strong sense of emotion and pulsation that is in them. I don’t know any Portuguese but when I heard Alberto de Lacerda read his poems and I thought, these are very beautiful, and I wanted to read them in translation...

Do people need to know all the bootleg versions of Bob Dylan songs? Do they need to know all the different outtakes? No, they don’t need to. I think there is a wonderful bonus, repeatedly, in finding out how these poems came to be written, exactly what they may be suggesting, all the ways in which you might have missed this pun here because there was something you didn’t know. You might have missed some things that are going on in a line. I think there was a review of the Larkin edition [by Archie Burnett] where Paul Muldoon said, “anybody reading Larkin for the first time would think…”, but you wouldn’t read Larkin for the first time in an edition which had a hundred pages of notes. So it’s the difference between reading for pleasure, and reading with the pleasure that comes from study. Some of us get terrific pleasure from study—others, my brother was one of them, never read poems for study. He read them solely for pleasure, and that was great except he didn’t have the pleasures of study.

-- Christopher Ricks, interviewed at Prospect

They Are Back, the Angry Poets

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 22:45:00 +0000

They are back, the angry poets. But look! They have come with hammers and little buckets, and they are knocking off pieces of The Monument to study and use in the making of their own small tombs.

-- Mark Strand

Open Letter to White Poets from Danez Smith

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 16:18:00 +0000

An open letter from Danez Smith, whose poem "alternate names for black boys" has been sadly all too resonant with recent events.

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We Must Be the New Guards: Open Letter to White Poets

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security,--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

- The Declaration of Independence

To my kin and colleagues in letters and art, I come to you out of ink, of breath, of patience, & almost emptied of any belief that there is anything this country that doesn’t seek to end me, keep me and my black & brown loved ones from living lives that are not designed around your comfort and benefit. I’m not mad at you. I, in my best mind, believe in a borderless world of unified citizenship, not a utopia, but a place where justice is birthright and peace is promised, protected. But we live in a history well versed in repetition, where the people who built this country on burdened, wound-red backs are the same people today waiting for some declaration of independence, equality, or ceasefire.

The skin tone of the oppressed along color lines in this country’s history reads like bad alliteration, our skin a hard sound echoing endlessly in a unjustified fear we have renamed “self defense” or “probable cause.” I’m not saying that self-defense doesn’t exist, but I question what men like Darren Wilson and George Zimmerman were defending themselves against except a fear they nursed since elementary school, a fear that screams “SHOOT” somewhere deep in their minds, their hands.

I did not come here to talk about these men. I came to talk to you, my partners in verse who build a life’s work documenting their brief time on this earth. I come you to asking to question the landscape of our pastoral muse. I ask you to question to what makes you safe? What frees you to write odes of the low country of America, to mention the trees and not their wicked history, to write the praise song of night, but not sing of what dark bodies hide cold in daylight? My family, and I pray we can call each other family, I am asking you to do what you do best: Write.

We must be members of the New Guards for those whose futures have been deemed questionable and expendable. I am asking you to explode the canon with what we must make sure is remembered in this nation. We cannot leave the duty of elegy for black bodies and calls for our fellow citizens to rise, even if wounded or enraged or scared, to the catalogues of solely black artists. We must write the American Lyric like Claudia Rankine so fearlessly writes, no matter now brutal or reflective it might be for you. There are people I cannot reach because what I make is degraded (& why not glorified?) for its label of black art. I implore, I need you to make art, black, dark art that shines an honest light on the histories of your paler kin. I ask you to join those fighting, under the cry of “Black Lives Matter”, in whatever way you can. Research ways you can be involved in your local community, think critically about how you can use your privilege and influence, effect change; I challenge you to make art that demands the safety of me, of many of your writing siblings, of so many people walking the streets in fear of those who are charged to protect us, even of people who we hesitate at times to call our fellow Americans.

And this is not the only fight we must rage, there are many suffering the awful weight of a society and judicial system that has edited “for all” from “with liberty & justice”. We must create work that refuses to leave this world the same as when we entered. We do not have the luxury of only writing the selfish confession, we must testify in our court of craft that these poems we write are bold, unflinching, and unwilling to stale idle in a geography of madness. We must demand of ourselves to write the uncomfortable, dangerous, shift-making poems. How much longer will we write casually in the face of a beast? Submit your facts to the candid world! I ask you to join me and others in utilizing verse to not rewrite our shared, grizzly history. I end this letter by not begging you “please”, but by telling you “you must.”

What matters about asking "Does Poetry Matter?"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 21:41:00 +0000

Poetry has been slammed by Harpers. It’s been declared dead at the Washington Post. It’s been called AWOL by NPR Books. Whenever recent observers announce poetry’s demise, their autopsies tend to offer impalement by ivory tower as a major cause of death. They tell us that poetry is out of touch, that the genre is too much a part of the incestuous relationship between graduate creative writing programs, literary journals, and publishers, all of which are controlled and operated by (mostly academic) insiders. This has marginalized what was allegedly once a mainstream art and disconnected it from those masses apparently yearning for poetry out there in the wide world. The critics, then, are standing up for the vague notion of a “general” public when they attack the academic version of poetry, though I’m still not sure how any of these folks writing for Harpers, the Post, or NPR is any less a part of the overeducated middle-class literati than any member of the AWP.

The editors of the New York Times took a more conciliatory approach in addressing the state of the art by posing the question “Does poetry matter?” to a forum of highly decorated poets. (As far as I’m concerned, Jonathan Farmer’s response to this exercise in the LA Review of Books far outshone anything included in the original forum.) The editors’ introduction included the sub-question “Can poetry ever regain its relevancy?” Even if I ignore their frame of reference—I’m not sure when poetry ever was “relevant” or ever did “matter” in the way they mean—the fact that these questions are being asked at all suggests there’s a crisis in the art so severe that its very existence needs to be interrogated. On the other hand, even while the editors question poetry’s validity, their decision to present this particular forum seems an endorsement of poetry’s viability as a topic of interest for their general readership, which is a funny thing for dying art. The Times seems to be banking on the idea that there’s enough merit in the question for it to be taken seriously and that there are enough people seriously invested in poetry for the forum to attract traffic to their site in serious numbers. I suspect the argument did exactly that for the Times as well as for the Post, Harpers, Slate, and even here at the Poetry Foundation—and wherever else it tumbled onward.

If there’s a credible complaint in the criticism, it’s that we can’t distinguish art from the context in which it’s produced. The critics, however, focus on factors of aesthetics and personality when they ought to be paying attention to factors of economics and market forces. There is a desire in graduate-educated poets to write for the sake of readers, but there’s also a desire to leverage that writing into a career. We need to impress each other as much or more than we need to impress those outside of our immediate industry. A consequence of this is an interiority to the poetry we produce, but I don’t think that interiority is the result of snobbery, meekness, or obliviousness among poets the way critics have alleged. Too many of us are politically motivated in our writing and politically active in our lives for those accusations to hold up. I think it has more to do with the subtle effects that academia and the privilege inherent to it has on our language. If we intend for our work to appeal to an audience outside of ourselves, the first step might be to acknowledge the isolating effects of that privilege and admit that we need to learn as much about WIC checks and second shifts as we do about disjunctive narrativity and postmodernism. If we come from places that have taught us something about the former, our writing might benefit from not losing that culture and language to the culture of graduate schooling.

This isn’t to say that I have no problem with the critics’ complaints. It’s true there are poets, both established and aspiring, who have long forgotten or never acknowledged the ways they’ve benefited from the class advantages of higher education. There are also poets for whom the esoteric concerns of academic scholars and critics have become the primary motivating force in their writing. Both types of writer have little need for or interest in a mainstream audience. These are aesthetes writing for aesthetes. There isn’t any sin in this, but it does contribute to the perception that poetry is out of touch with the wider culture. Still, one of the reasons I’m not naming names here is that for every staid or esoteric poem, for every too-big-to-fail poet I might offer as an example in support of these observations, I can offer another that counters them. The fact is, there’s simply too much poetry out there coming from too many sources to make for believable generalizations about the art, and the trouble with recent attacks on poetry is that they’re based on too few examples without credible knowledge of the vast numbers of alternatives.

Beyond this, when critics call for a more relevant brand of poetry, their impulses might be well-meaning, but to believe that poetry should trump Facebook, cable, the movies, music, the news, Twitter, and the fact that more than a billion people now carry the entire Internet around in their pants is a weirdly capitalist ambition. It’s a desire for the elevation of one mode of expression over all those others, and I’m not sure why these critics believe that desire should matter more than somebody else’s need for something else. The thing that’s more troubling is that their nostalgia is for a time when self-expression was available to too few, when education and publication were far more limited than they are today. The times and places poetry mattered in the way its critic-defenders mean were those in which freedom of expression wasn’t the default for all.

In other places where this continues to be the case, poetry does have a truly existential value. Poets are being executed in Iran and jailed in China. Their voices matter because there are so few of them in those countries and because they are willing to say things that nobody else is willing or able to say. Meanwhile, in this country where terrible injustices and inequities continue to persist, poetry is only one of many ways to confront them. Poems of witness and protest are being written, and they are being published, and they can be extraordinarily powerful. If they seem more difficult to find than they might have been at a moment in the past, it isn’t because they don’t exist. It’s because they’re part of a much larger cultural machine in this country founded on freedoms of speech. In such context, it doesn’t seem to me that poetry has suddenly stopped mattering. It’s that a whole lot of other modes of expression matter too.

-- excerpted from Jaswinder Bolina, "The Writing Class;" read full essay at Harriet

"New movements in literature are those which copy the last century but one."

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 17:53:00 +0000

New movements in literature are those which copy the last century but one. If they copy the last century, they are old-fashioned; but if it is quite clear that they are much more than a hundred years old, they are entirely fresh and original. It is true that there are certain literary men, claiming to inaugurate literary movements, who try to avoid the difficulty by various methods; as by writing their poetry upside down, or using words that consist entirely of consonants; or publishing a book of entirely blank pages, with a few asterisks in the middle to show that there is a break in the narrative. These or similar scribes are conjectured to be trying to copy the literature of the next century. They may freely be left for that century — to forget. Moreover, parallel perversities, if not exactly the same ones, are also to be found scattered through the centuries of the past. Of such a kind, for instance, were the Renaissance games or sports which consisted of shortening or lengthening the lines of poetry, so as to make the whole poem a particular shape, such as the shape of a heart or a cross or an eagle. Anyhow, if we eliminate a few such eccentric experimentalists, who think they anticipate the intelligence of the future by being unintelligible in the present, the general rule about change and rejuvenation in literature is much as I have stated it. It is essential for the pioneer and prophet, not so much to go forward very far, as to go back far enough. The general rule is to skip a century, as some hereditary features are said to skip a generation.

G.K. Chesterton, ca. 1936; via Berfrois, where you can read more

On sentimentality

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 16:54:00 +0000

Philip Larkin once said he didn't understand the word "sentimentality," figuring that Dylan Thomas's definition of alcoholic—"a man you don't like who drinks as much as you do"—worked as well for "sentimental:" "someone you don't like who feels as much as you do."

Sentimentality, whatever it is, is not popular in contemporary American poetry. I suppose that poems that are sentimental fall into the category, roughly, of poetry that has palpable designs upon us (though who was more sentimental than Keats, whom I've paraphrased?). Or maybe it has to do with the endless quotidian work of demolishing, or at least distrusting, subjectivity.

Anyway, there was even recently a Pleiades symposium, led by Joy Katz, on "sentimentality" (PDF of the forum here); and the subject, pardon the pun, comes up again in a review of Matthew Olzmann's book Mezzanines at The Margins. So... a few bits from my commonplace book.

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- from Oscar Wilde,"The Critic as Artist":

the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,' but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has 'nothing to say.' But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

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Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world (click link for details).

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Because of the growth of entropy, we have a very different epistemic access to the past than to the future. In retrodicting the past, we have recourse to “memories” and “records,” which we can take as mostly-reliable indicators of events that actually happened. But when it comes to the future, the best we can do is extrapolate, without nearly the reliability that we have in reconstructing the past... -- via 3 Quarks Daily

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Even for the one — before all for the one — for whom the encounter with the poem belongs to the quotidian and self-evident, this encounter has to begin with the darkness of the self-evident, [that which] makes every encounter with a stranger strange.: “Camarado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a human.”

Only from this touch — which is not a “making contact” — comes the way to intimacy. Aisthesis is not enough here, man is more than his sensorium. It is a question of conversation, as it is a question of language: (noesis does not suffice; it is a question of the angle of inclination under which one came together; it is a question of fate, as is the case with every real encounter, of the Here and Now, this place and this hour. -- Paul Celan, via Pierre Joris

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Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake. -- Richard Hugo

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Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. -- G. K. Chesterton

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It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time—I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen, of poets like Derek Walcott and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

One response is to look for beauty in its other and more everyday forms—the beauty of settled streets and cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial landscapes. It is possible to throw dirt on these things, too, and it is the mark of a second-rate artist to take such a path to our attention—the via negativa of desecration. But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Barber—to show that we are at home with them and that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that the early modernists once cleared for us—the via positiva of beauty. There is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it. -- Roger Scruton on "Beauty"

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And here's Kevin Prufer on "Sentimentality & Complexity."

"Instead of offering a surplus of inappropriate emotion, it seems to me that sentimental literature often reduces strong emotion to a single channel.... And it was here that it occurred to me—not for the first time!—that the way we teach poetry in our schools—the way I was taught poetry in high school!—is deeply fucked up. I remember learning that a poem was like a puzzle. If I could just sort out what each element in the poem symbolized—the window, the fly, the keepsakes, the light—then I could put them together and voila! solve the poem! Or, put another way, I’d been taught to think of poetry as a kind of coded language, a medium in which writers resisted communicating with readers. Poetry, I’d learned, is a kind of really hard crossword puzzle, but with a meaning at the end."

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FINE PRINT RE ASISTHESIS (Via Preceptaustin):

Cf. Philippians 1:9 in the New Testament:
kai touto proseuchomai, hina e agape humon eti mallon kai mallon perisseue en epignosei kai pase aisthesei
(And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment) aisthesis from aisthánomai = to apprehend by the senses, to perceive and in NT speaks primarily of spiritual perception; our English = aesthetic; the root verb is aio = to perceive) refers to the capacity to understand referring not so much to an intellectual acuteness but to a moral sensitiveness. It thus speaks of moral perception, insight, and the practical application of knowledge--the deep knowledge Paul had already mentioned. Aisthesis therefore is more of an immediate knowledge than that arrived at by reasoning. It describes the capacity to perceive clearly and hence to understand the real nature of something. It is the capacity to discern and therefore understand what is not readily comprehensible. It refers to a moral action of recognizing distinctions and making a decision about behavior.

It is interesting to note that the meaning of aisthesis is almost the opposite of the English word “aesthetic” which is derived from the Greek word. Aesthetic speaks of one who is appreciative of, responsive to, or zealous about the beautiful. It has largely to do with personal taste and preference. Paul calls believers to put aside personal tastes and preferences and to focus instead on achieving mature insight and understanding.

The English dictionary states that discernment is the power to see what is not evident to the average mind and stresses accuracy as in reading character or motives.

Not On My Shelves!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 14:42:00 +0000

The idea that somehow poets, and publishers, are failing the public at this time, in not delivering the goods, is a pernicious error that some poets (those especially who neither understand or engage in, business, much) are trying to spread, because it relieves them of having to face the wider horror of an abysmal culture barely poetry literate.

Instead, small presses... have gone out of [their] way to make books beautiful to hold, read, and share - by excellent poets - accessible and/or innovative - writing on subjects of great current interest - the economy, ecology, desire, love, sex, politics, humour, time, life, faith, science - that could hardly be of a wider range. The books are priced the same or less as novels of the same standard, and can be found in local shops and online, easily. They get reviews so people can hear about them and there are also plenty of readings, tweets, posts and status updates, to get the news out and about. There is no stone or bulletin left unturned.

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... let me remind you, the reader, of one thing: every time you don't make a poetry purchase, that poetry press lacks a sale. And, sooner, or later, without funding or patronage, presses that don't sell a lot of books have to close.

Simple as that. Salt cut its brilliant poetry list to the bone, not because the publisher hates poetry (he loves it) but because it ceased to make business sense.

Poets tend to forget that most small press publishers risk savings, and marriages or partnerships, to work for years on end, often unpaid, for very little in return. The least they should expect is that people who read, and enjoy, and appreciate poetry, should stump up and keep buying their books.

Not buying poetry books - and there are a million good reasons, but only give them to me if you are unemployed and never buy alcohol, tobacco, or food in restaurants - is like saying you love the environment, but never recycle. It's like wanting a democracy, and not voting.

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There is a kind of NOMS - Not On My Shelves - idea - that it's a nice idea that other people buy books, just not me. Of course it will always mean a sacrifice, and one can't buy all the poetry books, but - and only if - if one actually wants a small press to survive, wishes won't be enough. You need to support them, by buying books.

-- Todd Swift, Eyewear blog, Wednesday, 25 June 2014

The Pejorocracy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 17:54:00 +0000

"Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated."

-- Guy Davenport in the Georgia Review ca. 1974, in his essay, "The Symbol of the Archaic;" he discusses the "pejorocracy" and much more. You can read it here.

Pictured: The narrow passage that leads to Petra.

On hierarchies of purity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:23:00 +0000

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can’t be anything but the lyric poem. If you want to do what Sylvia Plath is doing, you cannot get discursive, you can’t get philosophical. You’re caught and wriggling on the psychological pin in the way that she was, basically. And that’s the experience of the poem. Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is essayistic and discursive. A lot of Ashbery’s gestures are a part of the world of lyric poetry. But a lot of them are part of the world of the essay. He used to write art criticism, and so was steeped in prose. The barriers between genres were low for him. The barrier, on the other hand, between the short story and everything else is high, very high. The short story is protected, enclosed in its garden: what Lorrie Moore writes, what Alice Munro writes. But Ashbery wrote a book called Three Poems comprising three long pieces of prose that are extremely essayistic in the way they think and move. They don’t resolve, they don’t get anywhere, but they’re like essays.

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Phenomena are always determined by history. You abstract certain qualities and say that they define a genre. A long, discursive Ashbery poem is nothing like an essay by George Orwell, which has an intention. The intention of an essay by George Orwell, like “Such, Such Were the Joys,” is to change society by making us aware of class differences and their harmful consequences. And a long, discursive Ashbery poem has little in common with that. But it has a lot in common with an essay by Montaigne, because Montaigne is inviting you into his mind, and the movements of his mind…rather than the content of his judgment. So you can’t say, “Well, the essay is this and the poem is that.” You can’t make credible hard-and-fast characterizations, especially now, when there’s so much intermingling.

-- Vijay Seshadri, at The Believer Logger

Scandalized

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 16:49:00 +0000

I’m not, in all the foregoing, attempting either to defend or critique what conceptual poets are up to. I just don’t see why people can get so aggravated about what these poets do. Is the spectrum of contemporary poetry not broad enough to accommodate their work? If not, why not? A century ago, people were scandalized by Prufrock, The Rite of Spring, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and countless other modernist works. Are people today really so shocked or annoyed by conceptual poetry? If so, these poets are onto something. If not, then we haven’t learned from our own literary history; and worse, have arguably become inured to that which is truly shocking: the things that go on in this world. Though not without its foibles like all else in poetry, conceptual work is a legitimate and probably inevitable response to “lyric narcissicm,” text-fettered writing, dullness, complacency, boredom, and much else besides. If it didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.

Read the rest here.

"Translation is outdated"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 May 2014 16:56:00 +0000

Translation is the ultimate humanist gesture. Polite and reasonable, it is an overly cautious bridge builder. Always asking for permission, it begs understanding and friendship. It is optimistic yet provisional, pinning all hopes on a harmonious outcome. In the end, it always fails, for the discourse it sets forth is inevitably off-register; translation is an approximation of discourse.

Displacement is rude and insistent, an unwashed party crasher — uninvited and poorly behaved — refuses to leave. Displacement revels in disjunction, imposing its meaning, agenda, and mores on whatever situation it encounters. Not wishing to placate, it is uncompromising, knowing full well that through stubborn insistence, it will ultimately prevail. Displacement has all the time in the world. Beyond morals, self-appointed, and taking possession because it must, displacement acts simply — and simply acts.

Globalization engenders displacement. People are displaced, objects are displaced, language is displaced. In a global circulatory system, components are interchangeable; there is no time — and certainly not enough energy — for understanding. Instead, there is begrudging acceptance and a blinkered lack of understanding, ultimately yielding to resignation. Nobody seems to notice anymore. Translation is outdated.

-- Kenneth Goldsmith, The European, May 5, 2014

A mass of badinage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 14:35:00 +0000

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable.

-- Walt Whitman, ca. 1870

An Interrogation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 21:26:00 +0000

If we are to think about poetry as a kind of violence, we will have to rethink form itself. It can no longer be the fence which separates poetry from other kinds of discourse. It must instead betray that difference, inciting us to imagine poetry as a separate and protected sphere, and then disappointing the desire that it has itself created. It’s easy to imagine how this argument applies to texts in the modernist tradition—texts which ostentatiously betray their own formal limits. But these betrayals involve a set of assumptions about traditional forms: that they need to be broken open, dismissed, discarded. That, in other words, their machinery protects poetry from generic rupture and ensures its difference from ordinary language. In this centennial year of Anglo-American modernism, it might be profitable to interrogate this foundational conceit. Can we conceive of traditional forms as themselves as a false and porous fence between poetry and its other?

-- Toby Altman, "Against Procrustes," referencing Slavoj Žižek, "The Poetic Torture-House of Language," in Poetry, March 2014

The Voice of the Thing Outside

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:59:00 +0000

"Little magazines (and I wish to god they wouldn’t call themselves “little” but literary; it is a mind state that builds smallness—let’s use the good words) tend to start well if they are going to start at all, but it is not long before they begin to be formed by pressures, the pressures of opinions and other editors, critics, readers, writers, printers, street car conductors, lady friends, university libraries, eunuchs, soothsayers, subscribers, punks, dilettantes, clowns, fame-seekers, and the steam and stench and grip and strappade of going down to the heavy Voice of the Thing Outside telling us what to do."

-- Charles Bukowski ca. 1963, quoted by Garrett Caples, "What's Big in Littles"

You do not really feel that.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 20:02:00 +0000

"Sentimentality" is often the accusation brought by the critic when he would refuse some experience or idea arising in the poem that does not satisfy or support his personal world of values but would threaten, if it were allowed, to undo that world. The word "sentimental" means "supposed" experience, I suppose. "You do not really feel that" or "you are letting your feelings get away with you" is the reproof often where we would not like to allow the feeling detected to advance, lest we too feel what the advancing feeling brings with it. Much of modern criticism of poetry is not to raise a crisis in our consideration of the content or to deepen our apprehension of the content, but to dismiss the content. When such critics would bring the flight of imagination down to earth, they mean not the earth men have revered and worked with love and awe, the imagined earth, but the real estate modern man has made of Earth for his own uses.

-- Robert Duncan, "The Truth and Life of Myth"

Poetry totters when she licks us with her tongue

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 20:03:00 +0000

"It totters when she licks it with her tongue." - Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in yellow wood. And then converged. And that has made no difference.

*

Is the new Sappho a bit disappointing--the fragment the best. Or is it that we need some cleaning by Pound. Still, it was always a life-long dream of mine that we would find a Sophocles around, a few Euripides, a book that Eco wanted: the golden book of Comedy by Aristotle. Let's all get together and translate the Sappho again. When my son was 12 he wrote a love poem that was: "You burn me." That seems a fairly authentic fragment. Most archaeologists tell me that what they want is a laundry-list, and one told me she particularly loved the listing of the boats. She hated poetry, she loved Egyptology.

*

Funny that Frost is as great as the idiots think. Poetry totters when she licks us with her tongue. Purposely and for him I like to play tennis at night with the net down, up and down. It's very difficult to play tennis without nets; but try it. You have to guess a lot and be quite accurate.

*

One week years ago I was studying Plath for an essay and felt bad except that it seemed no scholars had seen the Trakl in her work particularly the sudden expressionism in some late poems. But she appeared in a dream one week and I said to her: Sylvia, I like some of your poems but I don't like those who prefer the tape-recordings of your screams. She looked hard at my apology and slunk back into the dream--unappeasable it seemed. Years later I was asked in Prague whether I wanted to hear a recording of Jan Palach's last agony and screams. I said No. I preferred the paragon of freedom to his fearful cries...

*

One day Richard Kostelanetz asked me who was my favorite living poet. I said Wallace Stevens. He said But he is dead. I said Not for me. Many other poets are not yet alive. Pasternak received special medicine from Dr. Zhivago. All my favorite poets are alive: Keats, Sappho, Akhmatova. Native American artist told me she had no word for art but used another:

Alive!!

*

Tap my phones, keep my papers free.

-- David Shapiro

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 21:50:00 +0000

He’s become one more entertainer.
      His drunken bouts, fornications, his medical history,
his alliances or fights with the other clowns in the circus,
      or with the trapeze artist or elephant tamer,
have guaranteed him numerous fans
      who no longer need to read the poems.

-- José Emilio Pacheco

Forms of circulation and address

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:20:00 +0000

Virginia Jackson, in Dickinson’s Misery (2006), reminds us that we cannot understand the what of lyric without understanding the when. She traces the process by which, since the 19th century, “poetic and lyric have come to seem cognate.” These terms were not always equated and, increasingly, they are no longer. Jackson looks at Dickinson’s work in the context of letters, wide-circulation magazines, and other materials, and reminds us that the subsequent century saw the migration of the lyric from the popular press to the classroom. Jackson writes, “What has been left out of most thinking about the process of lyricization is that it is an uneven series of negotiations of many different forms of circulation and address.”

-- B.K. Fischer, "Sieves of Consciousness," Boston Review

And certainly, writers who stay afloat in terms of reputation are willing to self-promote and to indulge in the networking that connects them – via readings and workshops and signings and conferences and and and — with insiders in the world of media and publishers. Ponsot, in a 2003 interview with Benjamin Irvy, had this to say about her interrupted career: “I was very busy. It’s really that I was entirely out of all those professional poetry loops. That’s worth saying, because it’s easy to keep writing without tremendous agitation in whatever time you have. If you don’t imagine yourself as a career poet but rather as a person who writes poems, you can just go on doing that.” She goes on to say, “You really have to believe me when I say my dissociation from the idea of publication was not deliberate, contemptuous or passive-aggressive; it just didn’t occur to me. Think of all those seventeenth-century cavalier poets who had no interest in publishing their work – it didn’t occur to them either. Frequent publication of poems is a nineteenth-century development.”

-- Julie Larios, "Undersung | Marie Ponsot: Wandering Still," Numéro Cinq

Yes, servile.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 16:23:00 +0000

“The language they think of as democratic anti-elitist are really the scraps of the English language that have dropped from the feasting tables of the oligarchs. This sort of ordinary-language poetry isn’t democratic at all: it’s servile. Yes, servile.”

- Geoffrey Hill

On Veterans' Day / Remembrance Day

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 14:07:00 +0000

On the El not long ago, I met a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who is now a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. We discussed what it means for a country to suffer from the deterioration of its ideals and infrastructure. I dedicate this post to him.

Every Veteran's Day, I feature the following story, told by Katy Evans-Bush on her outstanding blog, Baroque in Hackney; this year, I'm posting it with gratitude to my seatmate, and to countless others like him who are doing, have done, work that few of us can imagine - but all of us can appreciate.

*

In June 1918, a young poet called Eloise Robinson, touring the Front on behalf of the YMCA, was giving a poetry recital to an audience of American soldiers. Guy Davenport tells it: “Reciting poetry! It is all but unimaginable that in that hell of terror, gangrene, mustard gas, sleeplessness, lice, and fatigue, there were moments when bone-weary soldiers, for the most part mere boys, would sit in a circle around a lady poet in an ankle-length khaki skirt and a Boy Scout hat, to hear poems.”

I can’t find a picture of Eloise Robinson. But she was reciting poems, and in the middle of one poem, Davenport tells us, her memory flagged. “She apologized profusely, for the poem, as she explained, was immensely popular back home.” A hand went up, and a young sergeant offered to recite the poem. Here is what (in, as Davenport reminds us, “the hideously ravaged orchards and strafed woods of the valley of the Ourcq, where the fields were cratered and strewn with coils of barbed wire, fields that reeked of cordite and carrion”) the soldier recited:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree...

Eloise Robinson was surprised and impressed that he should know it. “Well, ma’am,” he told her. “I guess I wrote it.”

Joyce Kilmer was killed by a German sniper less than two months later, only three months before the Armistice. His most famous poem had been published in Poetry (Chicago) in 1913.

Eloise, for her part, continuing about her duties at the Front, wrote to Poetry that August: “I wish I might tell you of my visit to the French front, and how for two nights I slept in a ‘cave’ with seven Frenchmen and had a hundred bombs dropped on me. Not directly on top, of course. The nearest hit just in front of the house. And for five days and nights after that I was taking chocolate to advance batteries, to men who can never leave their guns.”

Davenport mentions how Kilmer’s Trees is in fact a self-reflective poem, about poetry itself. These days that’s a sort of no-no, a workshop cliché, but - even though the poem rates itself as second to a tree - the fact nevertheless gives us a clue to something ...

Please click here to read the rest of this wonderful post commemorating Remembrance Day/Veteran's Day, in which Katy moves forward to Tom Disch's reworking of the Kilmer poem (also published in Poetry magazine), complete with a comment from the legendary Samuel R. Delaney!

As Katy sums up:

"Disch’s poem [which is called "Poems"!] also gets at something else, something important, that Kilmer – however conventional and pious – knew very well, and knew while he was writing Trees: the reason why he would bother to write a poem about a thing like a tree in the first place – and the reason Eloise Robinson was reciting poems to soldiers."

In appreciation for those who have served.

Pictured above: The poet and solider, Joyce Kilmer.