I HAVE A BOLLINGEN AND YOU DON’T

January 5, 2010 at 12:45 am (Barack Obama, Bollingen Prize, George Bush, Uncategorized)

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.  For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.”

Who said this?

A. George Bush in 2002?

B.  Barack Obama in 2009?

The answer is B.

Spoken while accepting his Nobel Peace Prize.

The dubiousness of prize-giving drives human behavior. We all want to win the prize, grab the ring, possess that tangible token of our worth in the eyes of the world; this tangibility is what our invisible souls desire.  We cannot keep being fire or air or water forever; we want the earth, we want to hold the heavy trophy aloft and say, ‘This is mine, and you are all witnesses to the fact that I have won.’

This desire to make our dreams visible is not a bad thing, per se.

But we must watch that prostitution does not get tangled up in our love.

The dignity of our triumph depends on a system that gives, on another pair of hands which presents the prize, and the power to give a prize is a power that eclipses the prize itself, for prizes are useful to promote all sorts of wrong, and superstition would as quickly produce a symbol as science would question a symbol.

The poet, who lives by the symbol, is especially tempted to glory in a prize; but true poets are not beholden to symbolism; on the contrary, the poet learns symbolism to be free of it.

Behavior which bends towards a prize is not to be trusted.  The prize which stirs behavior a certain way should make us wary.   The behavior is finally all, and the prize merely a glimpse of it, and truth and modesty should attend, at every step, the receiving and the giving.

Foetics does not damn the prize.  It merely prizes the courage to look deeply into that crucial instant when giving becomes taking.

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POETRY BELONGS TO POETS, NOT INSTITUTIONS

January 4, 2010 at 3:44 am (Academy of American Poetry, Poetry Foundation, Poets & Writers, Robert Frost, Uncategorized)

Poetry should belong to poets, not institutions.

Trying to enrich poetry with endowments and gifts is pointless.

Poetry is not like a highway or a school; it doesn’t require funding like that.

Popular appeal is, we feel, an important resource, one which poets once used, but which has dried up due to institutional machinations.

Poetry in China was a required skill for government employees for years. But this was not some charity move to enhance poetry; poetry was seen as a legitimate part of a well-rounded person.

Poetry has historically been a subject in school, but not because efforts were being made to give poetry special protection; poetry, as it existed, was a worthy example for those studying language and history.

Now the cart is before the horse. Poetry does not drive human excellence as an independent force; it is a mere charity case.

Treated as a charity case, this is what it has, in fact, become.

It is precisely the idea that poetry needs special institutional support which prevents poetry from retaining its former glory, since the resource of popular appeal is barred from the poet unable to compete with institutional might.

We cannot get our minds around the fact that billions of dollars of institutional support for poetry has actually hurt poetry.

If you took all that money away, and allowed the poet who appeals to the people to triumph—just allow that process to play out—there’s no telling how much more important poetry would be to us as a culture. Were the muse permitted to be on its own and survive through poetry’s appeal to the public alone, there is no telling how this might enrich us as a people.

Let there be a genuinely popular poet, rather than ten thousand endowed poets, and let us see what follows. We don’t know what that poetry would look like in this scenario, because it hasn’t been allowed to exist. We’re not talking about a Robert Frost either, who was in some ways an institutional product, and somewhat popular as well. We’re talking about a Robert Frost x 100.

How would poetry flourish without any institutional support? Let’s see what poetry would look like, that in order to survive, must intoxicate the masses.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF U.S. POETRY: HAPPY NEW YEAR!

January 1, 2010 at 5:03 am (Alan Cordle, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Allen Tate, Anne Sexton, Ben Franklin, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Blog:Harriet, Brook Farm, Byron, Charles Bernstein, Cleanth Brooks, David Lehman, Delmore Scwartz, Desmond Swords, Dial Magazine, Dial Prize, Donald Justice, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Wilson, Edna Millay, Ellen Wheeler Wilcox, Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazarus, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, Frank O'Hara, Gertrude Stein, Haiku, Harold Bloom, Harriet Monroe, Helen Vendler, Iowa Writers Workshop, John Ashbery, John Berryman, John Crowe Ransom, Jorie Graham, Longfellow, Mark McGurl, Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Southern Agrarians, T.S.Eliot, W.H.Auden, William Blake, Yone Noguchi, Yvor Winters, christopher woodman)

1650 Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America: By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts published in London.

1773 Phillis Wheatley, a slave, publishes Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

1791 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is published in Paris, in French.  Ben Franklin’s Autobiography appears in London, for the first time in English, two years later.   Had it been published in America, the Europeans would have laughed.  The American experiment isn’t going to last, anyway.

Franklin, the practical man, the scientist, and America’s true founding father, weighs in on poetry: it’s frivolous.

1794  Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey make plans to go to Pennsylvania in a communal living experiment, but their personalities clash and the plan is aborted.  Southey becomes British Poet Laureate twenty years later.

1803  William Blake, author of “America: A Prophecy” is accused of crying out “Damn the King!” in Sussex, England, narrowly escaping imprisonment for treason.

1815  George Ticknor, before becoming literature Chair at Harvard, travels to Europe for 4 years, spending 17 months in Germany.

1817  “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant appears in the North American Review.

1824  Byron dies in Greece.

1824  Lafayette, during tour of U.S, calls on Edgar Poe’s grandmother, revolutionary war veteran widow.

1832  Washington Irving edits London edition of William Cullen Bryant’s Poems to avoid politically offending British readers.

1835 Massachusetts senator and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier mobbed and stoned in Concord, New Hampshire.

1835  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow appointed Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard.

1836  Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes 500 copies of Divinity School Address anonymously.  He will not publish another book for 6 years.

1838  Poe’s translated work begins appearing in Russia.

1843  Transcendentalist, Unitarian minister, Harvard Divinity School student Christopher Pearse Cranch marries the sister of T.S. Eliot’s Unitarian grandfather; dedicates Poems to Emerson, published in The Dial, a magazine edited by Margaret Fuller and Emerson; frequent visitor to Brook Farm.  Cranch is more musical and sensuous than Emerson; even Poe can tolerate him; Cranch’s poem “Enosis” pre-figures Baudelaire’s “Correspondences.”

T.S. Eliot’s family is deeply rooted in New England Unitarianism and Transcendentalism through Cranch and Emerson’s connection to his grandfather, Harvard Divinity graduate, William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington U., St. Louis.

1845  Elizabeth Barrett writes Poe with news of ”The Raven’s” popularity in England.  The poem appeared in a daily American newspaper and produced instant fame, though Poe’s reputation as a critic and leader of the Magazine Era was well-established.  During this period Poe coins “Heresy of the Didactic” and “A Long Poem Does Not Exist.”  In a review of Barrett’s 1840 volume of poems which led to Barrett’s fame before she met Robert Browning, Poe introduced his piece by saying he would not, as was typically done, review her work superficially because she was a woman.

1847  Ralph Waldo Emerson is in England, earning his living as an orator.

1848  Charles Baudelaire’s first translations of Poe appear in France.

1848  James Russell Lowell publishes “A Fable For Critics” anonymously.

1848 Female Poets of America, an anthology of poems by American women, is published by the powerful and influential anthologist, Rufus Griswold—who believes women naturally write a different kind of poetry.  Griswold’s earlier success, The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) contains 3 poems by Poe and 45 by Griswold’s friend, Charles Fenno Hoffman. In a review, Poe remarks that readers of anthologies buy them to see if they are in them.

1848  Poe publishes Eureka and the Rationale of Verse, exceptional works on the universe and verse.

1849 Edgar Poe is murdered in Baltimore; leading periodicals ignore strange circumstances of Poe’s death and one, Horace Greeley’s Tribune, hires Griswold (who signs his piece ‘Ludwig’) to take the occasion to attack the character of the poet.

1855 Griswold reviews Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and calls it a “mass of stupid filth.”  The hated Griswold, whose second “wife” was a man, also lets the world know in his review that Whitman is a homosexual.  Whitman later includes the Griswold review in one of his editions of Leaves.

1856  English Traits, extolling the English race and the English people, saying it was English “character” that vanquished India, is published in the U.S. and England, by poet and new age priest Ralph Waldo Emerson, as England waits for the inevitable Civil War to tear her rival, America, apart.

1859.  In a conversation with William Dean Howells, Emerson calls Hawthorne’s latest book “mush” and furiously calls Poe “the jingle man.”

1860  William Cullen Bryant introduces Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union; the poet advises the new president on his cabinet selection.

1867  First collection of African American “Slave Songs” published.

1883  “The New Colossus” is composed by Emma Lazarus; engraved on the Statue of Liberty, 1903

1883  Poems of Passion by Ella Wheeler Wilcox rejected by publisher on grounds of immorality.

1888 “Casey at the Bat” published anonymously. The author, Ernest Thayer, does not become known as the author of the poem until 1909.

1890  Emily Dickinson’s posthumous book published by Mabel Todd and Thomas Higginson.  William Dean Howells gives it a good review, and it sells well.

1893  William James, Emerson’s godson, becomes Gertrude Stein’s influential professor at Harvard.

1897  Wallace Stevens enters Harvard, falling under the spell of William James, as well as George Santayana.

1904  Yone Noguchi publishes “Proposal to American Poets” as the Haiku and Imagism rage begins in the United States and Britain.

1910  John Crowe Ransom, Fugitive, Southern Agrarian, New Critic, takes a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.

1910  John Lomax publishes “Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads.”

1912  Harriet Monroe founds Poetry magazine; in 1880s attended literary gatherings in New York with William Dean Howells and Richard Henry Stoddard (Poe biographer) and in 1890s met Whistler, Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Aubrey Beardsley.  Ezra Pound is Poetry’s London editor.

1913  American Imagist poet H.D. marries British Imagist poet Richard Aldington.

1914  Ezra Pound works as Yeats‘ secretary in Sussex, England.

1915  Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology published.  Masters was law partner of Clarence Darrow.

1917  Robert Frost begins teaching at Amherst College.

1920  “The Sacred Wood” by T.S. Eliot, banker, London.

1921  Margaret Anderson’s Little Review loses court case and is declared obscene for publishing a portion of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is banned in the United States.  Random House immediately tries to get the ban lifted in order to publish the work.

1922  T.S.Eliot’s “The Waste Land” awarded The Dial Prize.

1922  D.H Lawrence and Frieda stay with Mabel Dodge in Taos, New Mexico.

1923  Edna St. Vincent Millay wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1923  William Butler Yeats wins Nobel Prize for Literature

1924  Robert Frost wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

1924  Ford Madox Ford founds the Transatlantic Review.   Stays with Allen Tate and Robert Lowell in his lengthy sojourn to America.

1924  Marianne Moore wins The Dial Prize; becomes editor of The Dial the next year.

1924  James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children opens.

1925  E.E. Cummings wins The Dial Prize.

1926  Yaddo Artist Colony opens

1927  Walt Whitman biography wins Pulitzer Prize

1930  “I’ll Take My Stand” published by Fugitive/Southern Agrarians and future New Critics, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allan Tate defend ways of the Old South.

1932  Paul Engle wins Yale Younger Poet Prize, judged by member of John Crowe Ransom’s Fugitive circle.  Engle, a prolific fundraiser, builds the Iowa Workshop into a Program Writing Empire.

1933  T.S. Eliot delivers his speech on “free-thinking jews” at the University of Virginia.

1934  “Is Verse A Dying Technique?” published by Edmund Wilson.

1936  New Directions founded by Harvard sophomore James Laughlin.

1937  Robert Lowell camps out in Allen Tate’s yard.  Lowell has left Harvard to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College.

1938  First Edition of textbook Understanding Poetry by Fugitives Brooks and Warren, helps to canonize unread poets like Williams and Pound.

1938  Aldous Huxley moves to Hollywood.

1939  Allen Tate starts Writing Program at Princeton.

1939  W.H. Auden moves to the United States and earns living as college professor.

1940  Mark Van Doren is awarded Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

1943  Ezra Pound indicted for treason by the United States government.

1946  Wallace Stegner founds Stanford Writing Program.  Yvor Winters will teach Pinsky, Haas, Hall and Gunn.

1948  Pete Seeger, nephew of WW I poet Alan Seeger (“I Have A Rendevous With Death”) forms The Weavers, the first singer-songwriter ‘band’ in the rock era.

1948  T.S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize

1949  T.S. Eliot attacks Poe in From Poe To Valery

1949  Ezra Pound is awarded the Bollingen Prize.  The poet Robert Hillyer protests and Congress resolves its Library will no longer fund the award.  Hillyer accuses Paul Melon, T.S. Eliot and New Critics of a fascist conspiracy.

1950  William Carlos Williams wins first National Book Award for Poetry

1950  Gwendolyn Brooks wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1951  John Crowe Ransom is awarded the Bollingen.

1953  Dylan Thomas dies in New York City.

1954  Theodore Roethke wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1957  Allen Tate is awarded the Bollingen.

1957  “Howl” by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg triumphs in obscenity trial as the judge finds book “socially redeeming;” wins publicity in Time & Life.

1957  New Poets of England and America, Donald Hall, Robert Pack, Louis Simspon, eds.

1959  Carl Sandburg wins Grammy for Best Performance – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy) for his recording of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait with the New York Philharmonic.

1959  M.L Rosenthal coins the term “Confessional Poetry” in The Nation as he pays homage to Robert Lowell.

1960  New American Poetry 1945-1960, Donald Allen, editor.

1961  Yvor Winters is awarded the Bollingen.

1961  Denise Levertov becomes poetry editor of The Nation.

1961  Louis Untermeyer appointed Poet Laureate Consultant In Poetry To the Library of Congress (1961-63)

1962  Sylvia Plath takes her own life in London.

1964  John Crowe Ransom wins The National Book Award for Selected Poems.

1964  Keats biography by Jackson Bate wins Pulitzer.

1965  Horace Gregory is awarded the Bollingen.  Gregory had attacked the poetic reputation of Edna Millay.

1967  Anne Sexton wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1968  Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, directed by Zeffirelli, nominated for Best Picture by Hollywood.

1971  The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner published.  Kenner, a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., saved Pound’s reputation with this work; Kenner also savaged the reputation of Edna Millay.

1971  W.S Merwin wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1972  John Berryman jumps to his death off bridge near University of Minnesota.

Berryman, the most “Romantic” of the New Critics (he was educated by them) is considered by far the best Workshop teacher by many prize-winning poets he taught, such as Phil Levine, Snodgrass, and Don Justice.  Berryman’s classes in the 50’s were filled with future prize-winners, not because he and his students were great, but because his students were on the ground-floor of the Writing Program era, the early, heady days of pyramid scheme mania—characterized by Berryman’s imbalanced, poetry-is-everything personality.

1972  Frank O’Hara wins National Book Award for Collected Poems

1975  Gary Snyder wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1976  Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow’s novel on Delmore Schwartz, wins Pulitzer.

1978  Language magazine, Bernstein & Andrews, begins 4 year run.  Bernstein studied J.L Austin’s brand of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ at Harvard.

1980  Helen Vendler wins National Book Critics Circle Award

1981 Seamus Heaney becomes Harvard visiting professor.

1981  Derek Walcott founds Boston Playwrights’ Theater at Boston University.

1981  Oscar Wilde biography by Ellman wins Pulitzer.

1982  Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems wins Pulitzer.

1984  Harold Bloom savagely attacks Poe in review of Poe’s Library of America works (2 vol) in New York Review of Books, repeating similar attacks by Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot.

1984  Marc Smith founds Slam Poetry in Chicago.

1984  Mary Oliver is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1986  Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, a novel in verse, is published.

1987  The movie “Barfly” depicts life of Charles Bukowski.

1988  David Lehman’s Best American Poetry Series debuts with John Ashbery as first guest editor.  The first words of the first poem (by A.R. Ammons) in the Series are: William James.

1991  “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia is published in The Atlantic. According to the author, poetry has become an incestuous viper’s pit of academic hucksters.

1996  Jorie Graham wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

1999  Peter Sacks wins Georgia Prize.

1999  Billy Collins signs 3-book, 6-figure deal with Random House.

2002  Ron Silliman’s Blog founded.

2002  Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club wins Pulitzer Prize.

2002  Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems published.

2004  Foetry.com founded by Alan Cordle. Shortly before his death, Robert Creeley defends his poetry colleagues on Foetry.com.

2004  Franz Wright wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

2005 Ted Kooser wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

2005  William Logan wins National Book Critics Circle Award

2006  Fulcrum No. 5 appears, featuring works of Landis Everson and his editor, Ben Mazer, also Eliot Weinberger, Glyn Maxwell, Joe Green, and Marjorie Perloff.

2007 Joan Houlihan dismisses Foetry.com as “losers” in a Poets & Writers letter. Defends the integrity of both Georgia and Tupelo, failing to mention Levine is her publisher and business partner.

2007  Paul Muldoon succeeds Alice Quinn as poetry editor of The New Yorker.

2008 Poets & Writers bans Thomas Brady and Christopher Woodman from its Forum. The Academy of American Poetry On-Line Editor, Robin Beth Schaer, is shortlisted for the Snowbound Series prize by Tupelo at the same time as Poets.org bans Christopher Woodman for mentioning the P&W letter as well.

2009  The Program Era by Mark McGurl, published by Harvard University Press

2009  Following the mass banning of Alan Cordle, Thomas Brady, Desmond Swords and Christopher Woodman from Harriet, the blog of The Poetry Foundation, a rival poetry site is formed: Scarriet.

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IMITATION IS FLATTERY — COPYING IS PATHETIC.

December 31, 2009 at 4:46 am (Abigail Deutsch, Alan Cordle, Desmond Swords, Harriet, Poetry Foundation, Scarriet, Thomas Brady, christopher woodman)

As everybody who’s interested in poetry  knows, The Poetry Foundation has banned me, Alan Cordle, along with Christopher Woodman, Thomas Brady, Desmond Swords, and who knows how many others.  So it seems odd that staffers there incessantly and obsessively read this blog and our side projects.

Granted, they seem to be out of ideas and desperately unable to encourage dialogue, and the statistics are certainly painful.  It’s no wonder they’re now “borrowing” from Scarriet.  And by borrowing, I mean “stealing.”

On December 8, 2009, The Poetry Foundation published the following article by Abigail Deutsch:


___________________________________________________________

This would have been fine if Scarriet’s Thomas Brady had not published a post entitled The Good Bad Poem just 10 days earlier.

___________________________________________________________


___________________________________________________________

“This is no coincidence,” Thomas Brady tells me.

“My article originated because I happened to take an old book out of the library, it wasn’t from any current event . . . Abigail got her idea from Scarriet. Well, well, well. I’ve commented on it just now on ‘The Good Bad Poem’ on Scarriet.”

New Year’s Resolution for The Poetry Foundation and Harriet: stop preying on the intellectual property of Scarriet. After all, some organizations make plagiarists walk the plank.

Others just vaporize the opposition!

Alan Cordle

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QUICK, FIND THE RACIST

December 29, 2009 at 6:03 pm (Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson)

It’s the guy on top, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose most ambitious work, “English Traits,” is a treatise on the superiority of the English race to all others: Africans, Indians, the French, and the Irish.

Poe abhorred the sort of pedantic sermonizing for which Emerson was famous; elevating American literature with his breakthrough brand of scientific  populism, Poe navigated the pre-Civil War years working and living in the North as a compromise figure, despised by militants on both sides.  It is easy to forget, even today, that a middle ground between militant pro-slavery and militant abolitionism did exist, where Poe chose to stay, as he transformed and modernized world literature.

So what was a Yank like Emerson thinking, writing his race-baiting tract, in the years leading up to the America civil war?   “English Traits” was published in 1856,  a few years before the gunfire at Fort Sumter.  Poe died in 1849, before the Compromise of 1850, before John Brown’s raids, and Poe never published any papers on slavery or race, staying clear, in a time when it was almost impossible to do so, of those hot topics which eventually produced the divisive holocaust of 1861–1865.

English Traits?  Why English?  Wasn’t Emerson a leading American author?    Wasn’t Emerson aware that England’s global ambitions were responsible for America’s system of slavery in the first place, that England wanted her American colony back and that England was exploiting American division on race to effect that end?  Why, in his “English Traits,” would Emerson assert that India belonged to England because the English race was superior to the Indian race?  Why did Emerson go so far as to remind his readers in “English Traits” that the English “sea kings” had a “long memory” and might rise up and take back their colonies if the times were right?

It kind of makes a Yankee scratch his head—and wonder.

Poe and Emerson famously did not get along.

Perhaps their quarrel was more nuanced and subtle than has been  previously thought?  Perhaps it was more geopolitical, in nature?  Emerson, when he wasn’t living in comfort in Cambridge, Massachussets, was wined and dined in England.  Poe, after visiting England as a boy, and perhaps sailing to Paris as a young man, spent his literary career attempting to establish (while almost starving) America’s literary independence while living in Boston, Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York.

It does cause one to scratch one’s head just a little bit, and wonder.

Does it not?

14 Comments

IN THE SUNLIGHT

December 26, 2009 at 7:41 pm (Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Hamlet, J.M. Robertson, John Quinn, Milton, Modernism, Romantic poets, Scofield Thayer, Shakespeare, T.S.Eliot, Thomas Kyd, Uncategorized)

One of the most curious episodes in Letters is T.S. Eliot’s declaration in 1920, in the wake of J.M.Robertson’s similarly-themed book in 1919, that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an “artistic failure.”

In that infamous essay, Eliot attacks the Bard’s greatest work as “puzzling and disquieting…” Eliot berates Hamlet chiefly because, according to the young banker, Hamlet’s “madness” and the “delay” in killing the king are dubiously presented, and the fault is that Shakespeare sloppily complicates Thomas Kyd’s straight-forward “revenge” tragedy by relying on “the guilt of a mother” which lacks emotional correlation in Hamlet’s updating of Kyd.

Eliot’s hackneyed notion that Gertrude’s guilt and Hamlet’s torn feelings are not sufficiently developed is ludicrous, but what’s even funnier is the way the author of The Waste Land, makes his point:

“The subject [Hamlet’s delay and Gertrude’s guilt] might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these [Othello, Antony, Coriolanus], intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.”

The sickly hodge-podge of The Waste Land—which saw publication thanks to the efforts of Eliot’s wealthy friend, Scofield Thayer, Ezra Pound, and the slick, modern-art-collector-and-lawyer, John Quinn—and all the rat’s nest poetry from Pound and Pound’s insane asylum visitors which followed in its wake, are the last things anyone could, or would want to, “drag to light.”

Eliot’s “objective correlative” dagger, used to cut Milton, Pope, the Romantic poets, and whole swathes of literary eras, flashes forth for the first time in this crazed essay’s attempt to assassinate Hamlet.

Is the young employee of Lloyd’s Bank writing of Shakespeare when he cites poetry “full of some stuff the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art?”

Or himself?

8 Comments

HAPPY CHRISTMAS to all Men and Women Blessed by Wings in a Similar Fix!

December 25, 2009 at 12:38 am (Beloit Poetry Journal, Burma VJ, Pushcart Prize, Sam Kalayanee, Wifredo Lam, christopher woodman)


……………………………………………………….Wifredo Lam, Gravure, Uno, 1967

.

………………HE MISTAKES HER KINGDOM FOR A HORSE

………………………………He heard horses
………………………………when she meant writing,

………………………………he heard sweat,
………………………………the creamy lather where

………………………………the taut skin
………………………………works against the leather.

………………………………He heard writing
………………………………when she meant

………………………………riding her journal,
………………………………the words a broad back

………………………………beneath her, pressed
………………………………up and caught between

………………………………her long phrases and the
………………………………need to be heard by him,

………………………………the naked verb,
………………………………the taut joy ridden

………………………………but prepositional,
………………………………the taut thorn,

………………………………a word, a horse
………………………………working between them.

……………………………………..      Christopher Woodman
…………………………………………. The Beloit Poetry Journal, Fall Issue, 2009
………………………………………….  2010 Pushcart Prize Nomination

.


…………..“Sunrise at Bhatam,” Ubonrajathani, Thailand. Photograph (2009). …………..Sam Kalayanee, Co-Producer, ‘Burma VJ’ (Oscar Nomination).
…………..Christmas greetings from New Delhi. www.imagesasiamedia.com

1 Comment

GOING RUG

December 24, 2009 at 5:16 am (Blog:Harriet, Harriet Monroe, Ruth Lilly, Uncategorized)

Harriet’s policy is sure to win admirers in the banal, small-minded circles of po-biz.

Did Ruth Lilly give all that money so her memory could lie down with pettiness and paranoia?

The dear lady, who loves all Harriet Monroe stood for, must be outraged.

Readers of this blog: shouldn’t you be, too?

The Poetry Foundation’s Blog-Harriet has deleted on-topic posts and comments without explanation. Yes, Harriet has inhibited discussion with secretive, autocratic vitriol.

Please make your feelings known on Harriet.

We are banished—no reason ever given—so we cannot express our feelings on Harriet.

Which is just as well.

We are having such an awfully good time — right here.

11 Comments

“I GAVE UP EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING TO BE A POET” –FRANZ WRIGHT

December 23, 2009 at 4:47 am (Allen Tate, Blog:Harriet, Franz Wright, George Doty, Henry Gould, James Wright, John Berryman, Kent Johnson, Robert Bly, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, Uncategorized)


James and Franz Wright, poets, and miserable sons-of-bitches.

“A Blessing” by James Wright is maudlin crap, perhaps the worst poem ever published.

The lust for horsies and the ’break into blossom’ trope is embarrassing in the extreme.

“Northern Pike” is a close second: “we prayed for the muskrats”

“I am so happy.”    Good grief.

His football poem isn’t much better; “gallup terribly” is a trite way to describe the violence of football.  One can tell he’s just a nerdy observer.

“Their women cluck like starved pullets,/Dying for love.”  Lines like these are destined for the ash heap.

Don’t get me started on the treacly, self-pitying exploitation of George Doty, the executed killer.

What to do with James Wright, who is nothing more than smarmy Whitman-haiku?

[Note: No woman poet seeking entrance to the canon would be permitted to get away with Wright's metaphorical slop.]

“Depressed by a book of bad poetry…”

“I have wasted my life.”

Yea.

The times (1972) were right for Whitman-haiku poetry, so James Wright’s Pulitzer is no surprise.  Plus, Wright was associated with a lot of big names: Roethke, Kunitz, Tate, Berryman, Bly.

Franz faced a difficulty as a poet.  His father was a name.  Say what you will about Whitman-haiku, his father did it well.

Franz seems to have genuinely admired his father’s poetry and made no attempt, as a poet, to get out from under his father’s shadow.

Junior poet looks up to senior poet and uses the same straight-forward, plain-speaking, self-obsessed, sentimentality of approach: Look, reader, here is my transparent chest; take a look at what I am feeling.  You might think I’d be sad—and good Lord, I have reason to be—but something about the inscrutability of the universe and my inner faith makes me happy.

Recently on Harriet, Franz Wright wrote the following, which Franz never should have written and which Harriet never should have published, and which we publish here because…oh, we forget why.

[Warning: Wright's comment on Harriet does contain abusive language]

Henry–I have no opinion about your “work”, or the “work” of others like little Kent and the others you masturbate with. My suggestion to all of you is: give up everything for the art. Everything. Can you do that? I did it 35 years ago–do you think that might have something to do with what you little whiners call “being on the inside”? I am not on the inside of shit. I gave up everything, everything, to be a poet. I lived in financial terror and homelessness, sometimes, for nearly 40 years. Can you do that? You little whining babies. –Franz Wright, 12/20/2009 Blog:Harriet

Now, that’s poetry.

Granted, it’s hyperbolic to say you gave up everything to be a poet.  What does that even mean? No one wants to suffer, and to say in hindsight that you suffered for your art is arrogant, because even if you thought it were true, it can never be proven by anyone, anywhere, that the more outrageously you suffer, the better your art will be.   There’s no substance to such a “brag.”

But we love the balls of it.

6 Comments

HARRIET GOES DIRECT: DON’T JUST HIDE, DELETE!

December 23, 2009 at 1:39 am (Gary B. Fitzgerald, Harriet, Margo Berdeshevsky, Poetry Foundation, The New Thing, Travis Nichols, W.F.Kammann)

Harriet has just lost its last shred of dignity. The recent Comment posted by W.F.Kammann on December 21st has been deleted.

All the Comment  said was that for a more balanced and in depth look you might want to check something else out, a piece of information Travis Nichols obviously felt was too disturbing for the Harriet readership.

We wonder how Gary B. Fitzgerald and Margo Berdeshevsky feel about this new move, both having expressed such relief at the decision to lift the Like/Dislike regime which had so spoiled Harriet for them  since September.

Do you feel this is better,  Gary and Margo? Do you feel relieved that the velvet glove has come off at last, and that there’s no more pretense at openness or respect for opposing views?

Can The Poetry Foundation not accept the fact that the real world is full of contrary opinions, not to speak of poetry? Will there be no more awkward discussions in the lab of  Travis Nichols’ new “experiment?” Is that the idea, to surrender all our differences as well as our hopes for a better world?

Dah Daa. Enter The New Thing!

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