June 30, 2010 at 10:32 am (Uncategorized)
Had I dreamed you, poet,
I would have known you,
And lost in what the old poets found, thought
How uncanny! How strange! How sweet!
But instead I saw your ambition living on the stage,
I saw you sniffing creative writing meat.
My voluntary powers of comparison intact,
You suffered slings under the light
Of my ambitious mind.
Beauty requires shadows, poet,
But I lent you none.
You were the labyrinth, poet,
And I was the cruel sun.
June 29, 2010 at 11:11 am (Aldous Huxley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Ron Silliman, Scarriet Baseball Poetry League)
Was April T.S. Eliot’s cruelest month?
On April 30, Ron Silliman (6-4) pitched the New Jersey Williams to a 3-1 victory over London, dropping the Eliots to 12-9. At the time, it looked like April had been good for Thomas Stearns Eliot, for 12-9 is not a shabby mark (.571).
On May 1, Matthew Arnold (who had just been signed) threw a complete game shutout against New Jersey. In May and June London is 38-13, a .745 winning percentage. The Eliots are 11-1 against the Williams this year.
Who can stop these guys? London leads the Scarriet AL with 50 wins and 22 losses. The next best record in Scarriet Poetry Baseball 2010 belongs to the New England Frost, second in the AL at 42-30. The Philadelphia Poe owns a slim lead in the NL with a 41-31 showing.
The Eliots have won 18 of their last 22 games with a microscopic team ERA of 1.73 during that span. The Frost, who added Jesus Christ (4-0) to their pitching staff, are 15-7 in their last 22 games, with a slightly better ERA than the Eliots in those 22 games, and yet London has increased their lead over the Frost from 5 to 8 games, thanks to London’s current incredible run.
The Eliots pitching staff: Bertrand Russell 11-3, James Frazier 11-3, Tristan Corbiere 8-3, Winston Churchill 8-2, and Matthew Arnold 5-5 (with 2 shutouts). Sir Edward Howard Marsh is 2-0 in relief.
Lady Ottoline Morrell is batting almost .400 from the leadoff spot, while Arthur Symons, John Donne and Aldous Huxley are providing the power.
But it’s been the pitching and defense which has been miraculous.
Vivienne Haigh-Wood is playing well at second, providing excellent double-play defense with shortstop Rudyard Kipling.
“I’m proud of my team, ” Eliot said yesterday. ”It is a long summer, though, and anything can happen.”
June 28, 2010 at 11:26 am (Allen Ginsberg, Jorie Graham)
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Jorie Graham, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a Fullbright self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into your volume “The End Of Beauty,” dreaming of your enumerations!
What marbles and what marimbas! Whole workshops stopping in your volume! Poems full of husbands! Wives in the paragraphs, a baby in the caesura!–and you, Helen Vendler, what were you doing down by the iambics?
I saw you, Jorie Graham, mother, fashionable grubber, poking among the discourses, eyeing the poetry prizes.
I heard you asking questions of each: who smelled my students? What price betrayal? Are you my winner?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant derailments following you, and followed in my imagination by the editor of the American Poetry Review.
We strode down the open stanzas together in our solitary fancy tasting insinuations, possessing every parenthetical, and never passing the denouement.
Where are you going, Jorie Graham? I close the book in an hour. Which way do your locks point tonight?
(I touch your Pulitzer and dream of our odyssey in the committee and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through Cambridge? The blurbs add light to light, lights out in the classrooms, we’ll both be happy.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past the little shops outside of Harvard Yard?
Ah, dear mother, husky-voiced courage-teacher, what America did you have when Ramke and Sacks quit poling the ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
June 26, 2010 at 1:18 pm (John Crowe Ransom, John Dewey, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Randall Jarrell, T.S.Eliot, Thomas Mann)
When you make yourself into a god, you always have problems.
The English Romantics were anti-religious egotists.
We got the genius of beauty (Keats and Shelley) but also the quixotic anti-intellectualism of Byron (who bragged from Italy of reading no English magazines), the bucolic bathos of Wordsworth and the goth-pedantry of Coleridge. (It can be argued that the two friends, Wordsworth and Coleridge, invented both modern and post-modern letters and culture between them. Throw in Poe to fill in some popular and professional niches, and there you have it.)
English Romanticism was foul and fair, golden-tongued but satanic-milled, a Tory workshop-empire of mercenary, merchant, soldier and mad king, the opium-trading empire America sometimes, in its better moments, defined itself against.
Southey and Coleridge dreamt of going to America to live on a commune like Brook Farm; this noble communist impulse was strong among intellectuals and artists during the Romantic era, both in England and America.
In places like India and China, the people there were on England’ s farm whether they wanted to be, or not.
Randall Jarrell could not have been more wrong in his dyspeptic, “modernism is dead” essay, “The End of the Line” (1942) when he claimed that Modernism was not a counter to Romanticism but an extension of it. T.S. Eliot was an extension of Shelley? Er…I don’t think so. Jarrell was actually giving too much credit to Modernism; Eliot seems increasingly like nothing more than a Victorian with an added drop of the sordid picked up from the 19th century French.
Thomas Mann’s early 20th century trope that the artist was a misfit and art was essentially a symptom of disease is well-known.
Modernism’s rejection (see T.S. Eliot’s essays) of overly emotional and egotistical Romanticism played into the whole notion that the once-revered Romantic artist was a clown, a fop, a seducer, a low-life, a dabbler, an amateur, not only quixotic, and deluded, but even irresponsibly vicious, and worse, a bad-dresser, bad hair, and finally, unwashed. To Eliot, the Romantics were not in the least respectable.
It’s no surprise Mann and the Modernists were closer to the Nazis than the Communists, especially during the “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s before the war.
Influential reactionary Fugitive and Writing Program founder John Crowe Ransom (a friend of Paul Engle’s), who defended the ways of the Old South with “I’ll Take My Stand” (1930), was a suit-and-tie poet who called for a new university professionalism of poetry criticism in his 1937 essay, “Criticism, Inc.”
The early to mid-20th century Modernist poets were suit-and-tie men.
Harvard-connected Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot were not exceptions because they were poets who wore suits and worked in offices, as many have naively pointed out, they were the rule: the Thomas Mann/Modernist and reactionary professionalism counter to Romanticism’s fevered amateur-ism.
And, it goes without saying, that mad-scientist Post-modernism and its post-war, nutty-professor manifesto-ism, is nothing more than an academic extension of reationary, professional-crackpot Modernism.
The mad scientist (Modernism) descends to the mere nutty professor (Post-modernism). But all very professional, of course.
June 25, 2010 at 10:56 am (Uncategorized)
Where is a shore for my song?
Born at sea, fed by longing,
Born of endless spaces
Where weather hurls itself headlong
With melody shrieking at the fore,
A harmony of winds upon the flanks,
Stunning silence just behind
And silence above, small crying below,
A crying like an oozing from the flow of water
Of a small green island, green trickling
Water which descends gushing among
The little complicated water ways of rock
And wandering banks of fallen overgrowth
Of my tiny imagined island in the sea.
I am the venus of poetry not spotted yet by Botticelli,
The unthinkably large thing, out, out
In the universe alone.
Where is the store for my song?
It goes everywhere,
It spills over the mountains of the moon,
Flows wasted over desolate orbs which circle
The icy bounds of the dark outer universe,
Trapped in asteroids’ silence,
Their journeys through miles meant for some other god.
Where is a home for my utterance?
It sings to immense distances, howling
With the storms which triumph over dying stars,
Throwing its lyrics into the long
Bowels of the silence and the distance, dark
And cold, not seen, not heard, not echoed
By even the coldest mountain tops
Into lost and ruined valleys of stone and snow.
I know as much as you but I am dead to you.
Let me bring my face closer to the pines,
The ships which hurry with their bounties,
The seasons, the blue air, the mothers with their children,
Let me press my eyes closer to the breathing air,
Let me stick my tongue into your atmosphere,
Let me put my nose nearer to the buildings,
Shrouded in wispy clouds, let me push my hands closer
To the day, let me arrive on earth, even to fail!
I promise not to break anything.
Let my voice have a try beneath this dome,
Where poets flourish decidedly only in death,
And genius is usually lost among the leaves,
Where this one’s meter died within his scenery,
Where this one’s assonance died of luxury,
Where this one’s rhyme was killed by pedantry,
Where this one’s poetry died under the carpet,
Where this one’s poetry was smothered by wit,
Where her poetry was over-mathematical,
Where his poetry was detained by a story,
Where a rush of sudden feeling ambushed hers,
Where his was too pleasant,
Where hers had no intensity in its melody,
Where his had no harmony when most intense,
Where hers was too reflective,
And his poetry was spoiled by sighs,
And her verse was trivial,
And his poetry was not understood,
And her poetry was ruined by its rebuke,
His poetry had too many odors,
Her poetry took off for the moon,
His verse had too many pauses,
Her poetry overslept,
His poetry believed the blurbs,
Her verse had no verse,
His poetry died in purple liquid,
Hers died in the plains,
His died upon a glacier,
Hers was a fiddle with no bow,
His was a bow with no fiddle,
Her poetry had too much ale,
His chant trampled his thought,
Hers killed her roses,
His died by its own monument,
Hers died in the mouth,
His died in the brain,
Hers had no house,
His had no sun,
But mine I feel will succeed,
Mine will be heard,
Like the murmuring of bees is heard,
And the single sigh of a lover is heard,
For the earth is kind because
There are echoes, and every sweet thing
Has a chance to touch the tongue,
To find the tip of the desperate tongue,
Or the heart, just as red,
Or the eye, the eye which strikes long distance,
Or the ear, your ear,
Which now listens to my song.
June 23, 2010 at 10:32 am (Hilton Kramer, New Criterion, Roger Kimball)
Hilton Kramer and his magazine the New Criterion’s sniffy attitude towards popular culture is well known.
Here’s what is not well known.
Conservatives have been betrayed by Hilton Kramer.
What Hilton Kramer has been ultimately doing is giving a conservative legitimacy to Modernism. This was always the whole sneaky agenda from the beginning, when Kramer left his full-time position at the NY Times and started the New Criterion with Samuel Lipman in 1982.
Hilton Kramer’s whole raison d’etre was to forge an insidious alliance between the cretins of Modernism and decent folk who found themselves aligned with conservative beliefs.
The New Criterion professes ignorance of how the real high-brow culture of 19th century Romanticism, its Greek & Roman revival, its great musical composers like Brahms & Dvorak, Beethoven, its great poets like Heine and Keats and Shelley, the greatness of Poe in that tradition, how all that beauty and ecumenical greatness was hijacked by hateful, crackpot, narrow Modernist con-men like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Dewey and William James.
It’s fine to appreciate the sort of abstract art found in the little New York art galleries advertised in the New Criterion; one can certainly adore Modernism and Abstract Art if one wants, but to pretend that High Modernism somehow represents the sole legitimate fine arts culture of our time is a lie—one that needs to be confronted and rejected, whether one is a liberal or a conservative.
The New Criterion, despite its free market rhetoric, is heavily subsidized; I doubt there’s much editorial freedom for change possible; its template is well-established, but nonetheless we make sincere a plea to Mr. Roger Kimball and anyone else involved in the production of that magazine to take a fresh look at so-called High Modernism and then join the rest of us in the real world who love fine arts and popular culture. We still hold out hope, that in the long run, this betrayal can be overturned.
June 22, 2010 at 1:50 pm (Uncategorized)
Doctor and mourner die, too,
After mourning over you.
So everything’s equal in the end:
In the world, nothing to defend
But another moment of giving
By those fortunate to be living.
What we strain—with our souls—to say
Cannot be articulated anyway,
Except in vague gestures understood
By ceremony and the common good.
So do not panic about your fate–
The poetry prize arrives too late.
The happy do not heed fame.
After burying you,
Doctor and mourner will be buried, too,
With furious indifference the same.
June 21, 2010 at 10:21 am (Uncategorized)
Let us call this thing a rhymed jeu d’esprit, a burlesque, or what not? — and, even so called, and judged by its new name, we must still regard it as a failure. Even in the loosest compositions we demand a certain degree of keeping. But in this poem none is apparent. The tone is unsteady fluctuating between the grave and the gay — and never being precisely either. Thus there is a failure in both. The intention being never rightly taken, we are, of course, never exactly in condition either to weep or to laugh.
We do not pretend to be the Oracles of Dodona, but it does really appear to us that Mr. ____ intended the whole matter, in the first instance, as a solemnly serious thing; and that, having composed it in a grave vein, he became apprehensive of the poem exciting derision, and so interwove sundry touches of the burlesque, behind whose equivocal aspect he might shelter himself at need. In no other supposition can we reconcile the spotty appearance of the whole with a belief in the sanity of the author. –EA Poe
A Worldly Country
Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,
the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,
not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,
not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occured
in real time, it was O.K., and if it was time in a novel
that was O.K., too. From palace and hovel
the great parade flooded avenue and byway
and turnip fields became just another highway.
Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens
and geese, who squawked like the very dickens.
There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet
or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit,
In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon.
By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon
hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch.
Departing guests smiled and called, “See you in church!”
For night, as usual, knew what it was doing,
providing sleep to offset the great ungluing
that tomorrow again would surely bring.
As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing
puzzled me: What had happened, and why?
One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness,
and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness.
So often it happens that the time we turn around in
soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in,
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.
–John Ashbery
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.’
—sample of verse from Edgar Poe
June 20, 2010 at 8:00 pm (Uncategorized)
Poets love the silence.
In silence they do best,
As the heart needs the song
To put the heart at rest.
The agitated heart
Sees an image at dawn
Which vanished yesterday
And is forever gone.
The agitated heart
Longs to hear the sound
Of a loved one’s voice
Now sleeping in the ground,
Or the agitated heart
Would leave the world behind
For mournful silence,
Where silences are kind.
June 19, 2010 at 10:01 pm (Uncategorized)
We had to let a lot of things go.
Our safety. Our principles. The cat, sleeping,
the laundry basket we came to know,
The joy that would tap upon our door
and leave us just like that,
cinnamon and sun and overflow;
Ceiling staring down and Kim
in the kitchen mixing spices;
the clutter; the TV and the radio
turned down low;
the escargot; the spit; the illustrated vices,
A replica that would lie silent in the corner
and occasionally go,
my captain that made rhymes,
Yours that would push plastic trains;
Gods who would kiss us and tell us
they loved us sometimes,
mother who would stand, for an evening,
worried when the journey was slow;
intense pleasure doing nothing;
whaling vessels in classic novels;
We had to let a lot of things go.
Our youth; knowing and pain that together grow;
matters just beyond reach; fires on the porch;
ropes in the tool-shed; chimes that would chime faintly and low;
you, the first one to speak because you would always know,
I, who had to hope because I wasn’t able to concentrate
entirely on the path or where, slightly
off the path, you and I were supposed to go.
You saw him, once; his big toe.
Art-shows in the shadows, the sun standing
perfectly still to make bright maps
for the understanding, intricate and slow;
the holding of breath in immense places;
the day we saw lying on our backs;
the priest who said, “off you go, off you go;”
someone in the distance claps
or laughs, there is always something,
there is always something we don’t know,
Off in the trees, there he was, with someone;
Places for our games, and designs we couldn’t show;
the path that virtue struggled against;
We had to let a lot of things go.
The violent triumph over us of someone we didn’t know;
Moths, leaks, letters. The movement of verses to-and-fro.
Players, positions, horses, scattered ladders,
money floating in space, meetings,
rocky hills we rolled down, ignorant of woe.
Decisions we made at dawn;
sleeping without dreaming;
planning all night a song
cancelled the next morning,
the night’s invitation to lie down,
to lie down and stay, without
saying yes or no.
Playing with memory, making memorial play,
stopping at the middle of the court to
turn back for the ball,
to run back, and retrieve the ball,
the calculations behind the tree;
vibrations, stamina, the try alone, a moon desultory;
Observing the singular crow.
After the job and the dream, another hallway,
The loss of loss, the poem’s end, the question,
You must have seen, you must have known,
but now, remembered in sorrow,
we hardly remember—but no,
There is the fish, yes, the fish in the brown stream;
The routine we never quite got to know;
The jar and the glass and the tumbler;
We had to let a lot of things go.
