SAM HAMILL AND STEPHEN DUNN COLLIDE!

March 31, 2011 at 2:37 am (March Madness, Sam Hamill, Stephen Dunn)

Hamill: No, it’s not basketball March Madness, it’s poetry March Madness…

Sam Hamill’s (10th seed, West) “What the Water Knows” is a poem Robert Bly or Gary Snyder probably wish they had written. It’s a hopeful lament set in nature, with an Eastern feel.

Stephen Dunn’s (7th seed, West) ”What They Wanted” belongs to the Poignant Speech school of poetry.  Dunn is a prose poem virtuoso in the manner of Stephen Dobyns and James Tate.

Here’s Sam Hamill’s entry:

What the Water Knows

 What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.
A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.
Still, the heart is a river
pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.

It opens on a bay
and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
of the unutterably human.

A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
upstream until he disappears
into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.

Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,
where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow?
Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience
of young maple or what the willows confess?

Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
Listen to what the water says.
Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

–Sam Hamill

Stephen Dunn had some victories last year in the BAP March Madness tournament. He’ll be a tough opponent.

What They Wanted
 
They wanted me to tell the truth,
so I said I’d lived among them,
a spy, for year,
but all that I wanted was love.
They said they couldn’t love a spy.
Couldn’t I tell them other truths?
I said I was emotionally bankrupt,
would turn any of them in for a kiss.
I told them how a kiss feels
when it’s especially undeserved;
I thought they’d understand.
They wanted me to say I was sorry,
so I told them I was sorry.
They didn’t like it that I laughed.
They asked what I’d seen them do,
and what I do with what I know.
I told them: find out who you are
before you die.
Tell us, they insisted, what you saw.
I saw the hawk kill a smaller bird.
I said life is one long leavetaking.
They wanted me to speak
like a journalist. I’ll try, I said.
I told them I could depict the end
of the world, and my hand wouldn’t tremble.
I said nothing’s serious except destruction.
They wanted to help me then.
They wanted me to share with them,
that was the word they used, share.
I said it’s bad taste
to want to agree with many people.
I told them I’ve tried to give
as often as I’ve betrayed.
They wanted to know my superiors,
to whom did I report?
I told them I accounted to no one,
that each of us is his own punishment.
If I love you, one of them cried out,
what would you give up?
There were others before you,
I wanted to say, and you’d be the one
before someone else.  Everything, I said.

–Stephen Dunn

 
MARLA MUSE:  I love both these poems.  I’m speechless. 
 
The John Crowe Ransom Arena, though, is full of noise.
 
MARLA MUSE: The Dunn poem gives me the chills.
 
Dunn scoring early and often…it’s Dunn over Hamill, 80-72.
 
 
 

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THE FICTION POETS BATTLE: STEPHEN DOBYNS V. JIM HARRISON

March 30, 2011 at 2:16 am (Jim Harrison, March Madness, Stephen Dobyns)

 

Jim Harrison: You want a poem? I’ll give you a poem…You want a novel? I’ll give you that, too. And a movie script. You can have one of those. Now let’s go have some lunch.

Dobyns and Harrison are both known for their fiction, and each has had two films produced from their work; one of Harrison’s: “Legends of the Fall,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt.

Stephen Dobyns (7th seed in the South bracket) is a late 20th century prose poem master, using the form for limitless accessible expression (there is no end to the possibilities of accessible poetry). 

Allegorical Matters

Let’s say you are a man (some of you are)
and susceptible to the charms of women
(some of you must be) and you are sitting
on a park bench. (It is a sunny afternoon
in early May and the peonies are in flower.)
A beautiful woman approaches. (Clearly,
we each have his or her own idea of beauty
but let’s say she is beautiful to all.) She smiles,
then removes her halter top, baring her breasts
which you find yourself comparing to ripe fruit.
(Let’s say y ou are an admirer of bare breasts.)
Gently she presses her breasts against your eyes
and forehead, moving them across your face.
You can’t get over your good fortune. Eagerly,
you embrace her but then you learn the horror
because while her front is is young and vital,
her back is rotting flesh which breaks away
in your fingers with a smell of decay. Here
we pause and invite in a trio of experts.
The first says, This is clearly a projection
of the author’s sexual anxieties. The second says,
Such fantasies derive from the empowerment
of women and the author’s fear of emasculation.
The third says, The author is manipulating sexual
stereotypes to acheive imaginative dominance
over the reader—basically, he must be a bully.
The author sits in front of the trio of experts.
He leans forward with his elbows on his knees.
He scratches his neck and looks at the floor.
where a fat ant is dragging a crumb. He begins
to step on the ant but then he thinks: Better not.
The cool stares of the experts make him uneasy
and he would like to be elsewhere, perhaps home
with a book or taking a walk. My idea, he says
concerned the seductive qualities of my country,
how it encourages us to engage in all fantasies,
how it lets us imagine that we are lucky to be here,
how it creates the illusion of an eternal present.
But don’t we become blind to the world around us?
Isn’t what we see as progress just a delusion?
Isn’t our country death and what it touches death?
The trio of experts begin to clear their throats.
They recross their legs and their chairs creak.
The author feels the weight of their disapproval.
But never mind, he says, Perhaps I’m mistaken;
let’s forget I spoke. The author lowers his head.
He scratches under his arm and suppresses a belch.
He considers the difficulties of communication
and the ruthless necessities of art. Once again
he looks for the ant but it’s gone. Lucky ant.
Next time he wouldn’t let it escape so easily.

—Stephen Dobyns

Jim Harrison’s poem is taken from a series of prose poems published in APR called Letters to Yesenin. (Yesenin was a Russian poet who hung himself in prison.)  Harrison (10th seed in the South) is no stranger to the prose poem, either. He wrote these poem-letters in the early 70s while living on a farm (all the poets lived on farms in those days).  He was in his early 30s at the time, but he makes it sound like he’s an old man: a litany of ills verging on acute self-pity, resembling a Richard Hugo rant. (Has Harrison had a hard life? Yes.)  Anyway, the crumbling wreck of a soft/hard, self-pitying American man was all the rage in the 70s.

#9  (Letters to Yesenin)

What if I own more paper clips than I’ll ever use in this
lifetime. My other possessions are shabby: the house half
painted, the car without a muffler, one dog with bad eyes
and the other dog a horny moron. Even the baby has a rash on
her neck but then we don’t own humans. My good books were
stolen at parties years ago and two of the barn windows are
broken and the furnace is unreliable and field mice daily
feed on the wiring. But the new foal appears healthy though
unmanageable, crawling under the fence and chased by my wife
who is stricken by the flu, not to speak of my own body which
has long suffered the ravages of drink and various nervous
disorders which made me laugh and weep and carress my shotguns.
But paperclips. Rich in paperclips to sort my writings which
fill so many cartons under my bed. When I attach them I say
it’s your job afterall to keep this whole thing together. And
I used them once with a rubberband to fire holes into the
face of the president hanging on the office wall. We have freedom.
You couldn’t do that to Breznev much less Stalin on whose
grave Mandelstam sits proudly in the form of the ultimate
crow, a peerless crow, a crow without comparison on earth.
But the paperclips are a small comfort like meeting someone
fatter than myself and we both wordlessly recognize the fact
or meeting someone my age who is more of a drunk, more savaged
and hag ridden until they are no longer human and seeing
them on the street I wonder how their heads which are only
wounds balance at the top of their bodies. A manuscript of
a novel sits in front of me held together with twenty clips.
It is the paper equivalent of a duck and a company far away
has bought the perhaps beautiful duck and my time is free again.

–Jim Harrison

MARLA MUSE: The Harrison poem sounds a bit rambling, though of course it’s charming. The Dobyns poem has more art. I rather like the Dobyns; it’s very clever.

And Dobyns proves his worth on the court, Marla.  Dobyns wins 66-54.

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JACK SPICER V. LESLIE SCALAPINO: NERD POETRY

March 29, 2011 at 2:35 am (Jack Spicer, Leslie Scalapino, March Madness, T.S.Eliot)

 

The unloved nerd in poetry is a tradition that only began recently: the Greek and Roman boasts, the Italian loves, the English ballad-making, poetry of wars and romances and images…love may have been crippled or mad in old poems, but T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock may have been the first to manifest what is now commonplace: the poet so estranged and miserable they create new aesthetics.

The nerd’s self-torture is an endless field for poetic creation.

The alienation of Leslie Scalapino’s narrator obviously shapes the writing:

that they were at the beach (excerpt)

Playing ball— so it’s like paradise, not because it’s in the past, we’re on a field;
we are creamed by the girls who get together on the other team.
They’re nubile, but in age they’re thirteen or so—so they’re strong.

(No one knows each other, aligning according to race as it happens, the
color of the girls, and our being creamed in the foreground—as part of
it’s being that—the net is behind us)

A microcosm, but it’s of girls—who were far down on the field, in another
situation of playing ball—so it was an instance of the main world though
they’re nubile but are in age thirteen or so.

My being creamed in the foreground—so it’s outside of that—by a girl
who runs into me, I returned to the gym.

—Leslie Scalapino

The adolescent team-sports setting is classic nerd territory: this is where we typically first comprehend that we are nerds.

The narrator lacks confidence—the vision is recorded not with clarity or gusto—but obsessively, with frequent repetition,desperately and passively: passive not only in terms of the narrator’s actions, but in the syntax itself: “my being creamed,” etc.

One gets the idea these are not aesthetic choices by Scalapino, but psychological ones.

Psychology eclipses art: this may be the key to modern art and the nerd artist.

Like pleasant melancholy discords in music, Scalapino’s poetry is deliciously self-wounding. There is something organic and cinematic about Scalapino’s work; an experiment in making poetry come alive, albeit on a fragmented, deranged, fearful, and obsessive level.

Art is not considered ill by society as it once was; brute life has been tamed by civilization and schools and art; but art, to succeed, has lost its ability to surprise, to radically differentiate itself from itself; the psychological ‘sees through’ art and life tamed by art, and the psychological vision returns life (and art) to scary sensation, to the elements of the primitive, the crazy, the longing, the way art must have seemed to the ancients when it emerged as tragedy.

Jack Spicer’s poem is nerd literature as well, from the title to the end:

A Poem Without A Single Bird In It

What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad
But the calmness of poetry.

–Jack Spicer

With “I don’t know the future,” Spicer invokes the first Great Nerd Poem, Prufrock’s “am no prophet.”

“Go mad. Better people than either of us have tried it” is nerdy defeatism.

MARLA MUSE: I find the Scalapino more interesting, though the Spicer has a certain Baudelaire Lite quality I like.

Scalapino is a force, and she easily defeats Spicer, creaming him, 91-66.

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FINAL 6TH SEED V. 11TH SEED MATCHUP: REED WHITTEMORE V. HEATHER McHUGH

March 27, 2011 at 11:29 pm (Heather McHugh, March Madness, Reed Whittemore)

Reed Whittemore, no. 6 seed in the West and Heather McHugh, 11th seed in the APR March Madness tournament, both bring haunting poems to their contest, Whittemore’s poem painting a mind helpless in the body, McHugh’s a mind helpless out of it—hers surrendering a hand, his surrendering his life within a coffin; yet both somehow manage an uncanny joy within an endless sorrow.  Both poets pour genius over us; it’s an honor to contemplate these poems.

Smiling Through

Who are these figures in the street?
They are my friends.
They are wearing armbands.
They are marching along with my coffin, and smiling,
Pleased to be taking me to the boneyard,
Wishing me well and dreaming of all the brave toasts to me
That they will make when they have disposed of me.

And who are these figures in dozens of windows upon the street?
They are my strangers.
They are happy too.

Yes, everyone is happy, even I,
Smiling in my box in the new world that is mine and theirs,
Wearing my old tuxedo.
It had a dull time when I was living.
It was always hanging in closets dreaming of ballrooms.
At last it has found its niche.
Its lapels shine. It is happy.

And now they have lowered and left me.
Alone at last.
I have infinite riches in a little room.
I travel much here.
And other quotations.
Also I have my smile, I have my body, I have my body fluid.
I look at my ceiling,
Which is very low and pasted with my past.
There is my mother in a yellowing snapshot,
Wearing her blue traveling suit and beret
And standing smiling into the sun beside a lifeboat
On The Duchess of Richmond.
And there is my father beside the very same lifeboat.
He is wearing a wrinkled white suit, shading his eyes,
Smiling.
But where am I? Oh yes I am there too, by the lifeboat.
I am busy being sixteen,
With my hair slicked back and my sullenness showing,
Asking, Why are there people broadening me with travel?
But I am smiling also, thinly. It is de rigeur.

Yes, and my old dog Totty is there, the samoyede,
But not by the lifeboat.
He is sitting beside me, a child in a gravel driveway,
And he is grinning, ear unto ear, down the long years.

So here we are, happy. But quiet. For it is quiet.
If I were to breathe, the sound of breathing would be like the sound of waterfalls.

If I were to move, the rustling would frighten the cemetary caretaker in his ugly stone house.
If I were to speak—ah, but I am speaking.
It is a trick of mine, to speak as I speak without speaking.
Almost as good as to die as I die without dying.
So I am lying here. Why am I lying here?  What is my state?

So hard to know sometimes. And so I am smiling.

–Reed Whittemore (1919-)

After You Left

It is better to say ‘I am suffering’
Than to say ‘This landscape is ugly.’ -Simone Weil

From the piling’s kelp I drew
the five blunt fingers of a starfish.

First I thought the creature
less than handsome, less of a hand

than I expected it to be, too rigid,
with a stumpy gray asymmetry of grasp. It hadn’t

kept its grip, so maybe it was dead? It took
a while for me to look, after I claimed to see:

I turned the matter over, and beheld
its thousands of minute transparent

footlets, feelers, stems,
all waving to the quick, and then

the five large radials beginning
gradually to flail

in my slow sight
and then (in my thin air)

to drown. I’d meant
to send it, as a gift

to you who were my missing part, so far
inland. Instead

to a world the sighted have no rights to,
to the dark that’s out of mind, I made

myself resign it,
flinging the hand from my hand.

–Heather McHugh

MARLA MUSE: The economy of the McHugh poem is breathtaking.

Both of these poems are remarkable. This is one of those contests where you hate to see a winner.

Whittemore 77, McHugh 76

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RICHARD HUGO V. TESS GALLAGHER

March 26, 2011 at 12:29 pm (March Madness, Richard Hugo, Tess Gallagher)

This is Dick. He writes poems.

Richard Hugo published letter poems in the 70s, which for the time seemed pretty clever, another victory in the war against formalism by workers who wanted to be free; the poem as a letter, just a regular letter, why not?

You can tell when a poet is writing a letter, can’t you?

Like most 20th century experiments, this paraded around arrogantly for a while, and, when no one paid any attention, sat down, red-faced, in disgrace, one more chapter in the great 20th century poetry collapse.

So here’s the APR anthologist Hugo poem:

Letter to Blessing From Missoula

Dear Dick: You know all that pissing and moaning around I’ve
been doing, feeling unloved, certain I was washed up with
romance for good. That has come to an orgiastic halt.
From nowhere came this great woman. I wasn’t looking
even when she was suddenly bang in my life. I mean
bang in all the best ways. Bang. Bang. Richard Blessing. And years
of loneliness faded into some silly past where I
stared moodily out my windows at the grammar school girls
passing each morning and fantasized being young again
but with circumstances better than the first time and with
an even newer than new morality current. To
say nothing of saying to myself over and over
“I am retired from romance. I am a failure at love.
Women don’t like me. Lecherous, treacherous, kindless klutz.
Oh, that this too too flabby flesh should grow solid. Do not
go gentle into that defeat. Let us go then, you and I
into the deserts of vast eternity.” As you can no doubt
see, things became warped, including my memory of how
certain lines go, and all for the wisest of causes:
self-pity. Do not depend on others for sympathy.
When you need sympathy, you’ll find it only in yourself.
Now, I need none but I still defend self-pity. I still
say, if this woman hurts me I’ll crawl back to my cave.
The snow doesn’t get me down. The solid gray overcast
doesn’t make me moody. I don’t get irritated by
cold clerks in the markets, or barbers who take too long
trimming my hair. This woman is statuesque and soft
and she loves me; meaning she is at my mercy. Have you
noticed when women love us how vulnerable they are?
How they almost challenge us to test them, to be bastards,
to see how much outrageous shit we can fling their way?
Maybe, that’s why we’ve been ripping them off for centuries,
I don’t blame them for bitching, turning to movements, fem lib
or whatever they call it. This time, I’m not saying prove it,
prove your love by not objecting as I steal your money,
set fire to your hair and break your toes with the boots
I took off a dead German soldier at Tobruk. I am
simply going to prove I’m worthy of her love and I feel
I am, which must mean I love her. Boy, am I becoming
tender, and am I ever certain she will not hurt me.
I’ll give her no cause. I accept maybe for the first time
love and I luxuriate in it, a glutton, a trout
who had a hard time finding the spawning ground, who swam time
after time the wrong river and turned back discouraged
to the sea, though at moments the sea was fun. Those sex crazed
sharks and those undulating anemones, can’t beat them
when you’ve had a few drinks though you wake up diseased and raw,
your gills aching and your fins stiff with remorse. That’s enough
metaphor. This morning I feel as masculine as you,
and I regard you as the C.C.Rider of poetry,
criticism and trout. This woman will curve from now on
lovely in poems and streams. Look for her in the quarterlies
and pools. I mean real pools, the ones you come to
with Lisa when you take her on picnics. And take Lisa
on picnics. Give her and her cooking my love. Your friend, Dick.

–Richard Hugo

Tess Gallagher’s poem, like Dick Hugo’s, is about affection, vulnerability, embarrassment, late 20th century luxuries in America when the greatest country on earth could afford to indulge in such luxuries, Aquarius dawning and all that—well, not living them, but self-consciously indulging in them from time to time.

These poems are period pieces and they are embarrassing, like some of the songs which became big hits in the 70s, such as ”Muskrat Love.”  

Gallagher’s poem feels as if we took a Victorian platitude and fleshed it out to see what it would look like. The rigid Victorian-poet speech is gone, but something almost worse is in its place, the sentimental residing not in the speech but in the simple actions the plain speech depicts.

MARLA MUSE: The Hugo poem depicts nothing; we don’t see one detail of him or how he lives his life, we don’t see his “woman” at all; it’s just a mass of cliched phrases. It’s ghastly.

So you think Gallagher will beat him easily?

MARLA MUSE: Yes.

Let’s see:

The Hug

A woman is reading a poem on the street
and another woman stops to listen. We stop too,
with our arms around each other.
The poem is being read and listened to
out here in the open. Behind us
no one is entering or leaving houses.

Suddenly, a hug comes over me and I’m
giving it to you, like a variable star shooting light
off to make itself comfortable, then
subsiding. I finish but keep holding
you. A man walks up to us and we know he hasn’t
come out of nowhere, but if he could, he
would have. He looks homeless because of how
he needs. “Can I have one of those?” he asks you,
and I feel you nod. I’m surprised,
surprised you don’t tell him how
it is — that I’m yours, only
yours, exclusive as a nose to
its face. Love — that’s what we’re talking about, love
that nabs you with “for me only” and holds on.

So I walk over to him and put my
arms around him and try to
hug him like I mean it. He’s got an overcoat on
so thick I can’t feel
him past it. I’m starting the hug
and thinking, “How big a hug is this supposed to be?
How long shall I hold this hug?” Already
we could be eternal, his arms falling over my
shoulders, my hands not
meeting behind his back, he is so big!

I put my head into his chest and snuggle
in. I lean into him. I lean my blood and my wishes
into him. He stands for it. This is his
and he’s starting to give it back so well I know he’s
getting it. This hug. So truly, so tenderly
we stop having arms and I don’t know if
my lover has walked away or what, or
if the woman is still reading the poem, or the houses—
what about them? the houses. 

Clearly, a little permission is a dangerous thing.
But when you hug someone you want it
to be a masterpiece of connection, the way the button
on his coat will leave the imprint of
a planet on my cheek
when I walk away. When I try to find some place
to go back to.

–Tess Gallagher

You’re right, Marla, Tess Gallagher does win, 88-69.

2 Comments

“MY BEAUTIFUL ENEMY:” ALAN DUGAN BATTLES HAYDEN CARRUTH!

March 25, 2011 at 1:00 pm (Alan Dugan, Anne Sexton, Hayden Carruth, March Madness)

Anne Sexton: not in the APR tourney as a poet, but as a lover

Wine and poetry go way back. (In fact we’re afraid meds replacing wine has ruined poetry.)

Wine intoxicates the body, just as poetry intoxicates the mind, and both make us mad. Both have refinements, and since a little madness is deemed good, poetry is taught in school and wine is served in public houses.

Alan Dugan, 6th seed, brings “Drunken Memories of Anne Sexton” to the APR tourney.

Every story (memories) is a piece of a larger one; what we leave out is the key to story-telling. If we leave almost everything out, it’s a poem—or so many poets think.

Even a long story still leaves a lot out, but even a short poem is about what we put in. So are many poets mistaken in their art, thinking to write poems by leaving things out, confusing the poem with the story. Stories tease and poems infuriate—when they try to be stories.  As soon as a poem tries to be a story by leaving things out, it fails, because after we read a poem we should feel nothing has been left out. A poem is what’s there, a story is what is not there.

For this reason, I like this Dugan poem:

Drunken Memories of Anne Sexton

The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring at me
full in the face and then said
“I don’t care what you think,
you know” as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover
what? and just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her
“Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue and one green”
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others’ beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine.

–Alan Dugan

MARLA MUSE: What is the point of the story? I don’t get it.

The story?  You mean the poem?

MARLA MUSE: The poem…the story…you know what I mean…!

The point is not to be sentimental, even when drunk. To be bad-ass.

MARLA MUSE: But it has no point precisely because it’s sentimental.

When it comes to sentimentality all poems have leaky roofs; the sentimentality gets in. Isn’t it true?  The Victorians, according to the moderns, were sentimental, but isn’t it funny how looking back at modern poetry now it’s sentimental, too. Sentimentality is poetry’s coin. All poetry is sentimental.

MARLA MUSE: Sigh. I think you’re right.

Hayden Carruth is a tough old son of a gun. Here’s how he battles Dugan:

The Quality of Wine

This wine is really awful
I’ve been drinking for a year now, my
retirement. Rossi Chablis in a jug
from Oneida liquors, the best
I can afford. Awful. But at least
I can afford it. I don’t need to go out and beg
on the street like the guys
on South Warren in Syracuse, eyes
burning in their sockets like acid.
And my sweetheart rubs my back when I’m
knotted in arthritis and swollen
muscles. The five stages of death
are fear, anger, resentment, renunciation,
and—? Apparently the book doesn’t say
what the fifth stage is. And neither
does the wine. Is it happiness? That’s
what I think anyway, and I know I’ve been
through fear and anger and resentment and at least
part way through renunciation too, maybe
almost the whole way. A slow procedure,
like calling the Medicare office, on hold
for hours and then the recorded voice says, “Hang up
and dial again.” Yet the days
hasten they
go by fast enough. They fucking fly like the wind. Oh,
Sweetheart, Mrs. Manitou of the Stockbridge Valley,
my Red Head, my Absecon Lakshmi of the Marshlights,
my beautiful, beautiful Baby Doll,
let the dying be long.

–Hayden Curruth

That may not be Victorian sentimentality, but this poem is still swimming in sentimentality.

MARLA MUSE: Those Roman poets! Now they could put away the wine and still ravish me…

Let’s focus on the contest before us, Marla.

MARLA MUSE: I like the Dugan poem because it brings a scene to life: for a moment you feel you are there, in the presence of Anne Sexton herself, but the Carruth, as sweet as it is, is just talk.

Yes, the Dugan has a cinematic quality which the garrulous Carruth poem lacks, and it’s the key to the memorable poem, isn’t it, almost as if cinema pre-dates story-telling, predates looking, even. The term some poets use is ‘the camera is running’ or ‘there’s film in the camera;’ look, right here:

She drank
it all down while staring at me
full in the face and then said
“I don’t care what you think,
you know” as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover
what? and just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her

So there it is, that ‘cinematic, real time’ effect which we get from all the famous poets, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to Milton to “Stopping By A Woods On A Snowy Evening.”  We’re there in the scene.

MARLA MUSE: Does Dugan win, then?

Yes–Dugan wins, 72-68.

5 Comments

“BEFORE THERE WAS BILLY COLLINS & TED KOOSER, THERE WAS EDGAR GUEST” –RON SILLIMAN

March 23, 2011 at 6:42 pm (Billy Collins, Charles Bernstein, Charles Olson, Edgar Guest, Gerald Stern, Language Poets, Ron Silliman, T.S.Eliot)

 

Billy Collins: hated by the Olson-ites.

Ron Silliman knows that Billy Collins does not write like this:

And I can live my life on earth
Contented to the end,
If but a few shall know my worth
And proudly call me friend.

–Edgar Guest (1881–1959)

Every poet knows Billy Collins is nothing like Edgar Guest.

Silliman’s remark is nothing but a rankle: he and his friends are not popular, and he fears they never will be popular.   How sad, then, that Ron feels it necessary to equate a witty, free-verse writer like Billy Collins with a hack doggerelist who happened to be popular for a time.

Dorothy Parker (another popular poet like Collins) wrote of Edgar Guest:

I’d rather flunk my Wasserman test
Than read the poetry of Edgar Guest

We ought to pause here and ask a simple question: what is the popular?

The answer is simple: the popular is neither good nor bad in itself, though all want it; the popular may be vain—but it is also human.

A popular poet, as instanced by Edgar Guest, may not be original or intricate or profound and it’s true that popularity and sentimentality go hand in hand.

But if Silliman and his friends are to ever have the popularity Billy Collins enjoys, and that they so obviously want, they will need to reach out to the public.  The public is sentimental—sentimentality is the stuff of which the  public’s interest in poetry is made.  There are levels of sentimentality, of course, but the trick for the poet is to be sentimental artistically, or artful sentimentally.  The sentimental is human and the human is popular and none of this can be avoided, not even in the hearts of the Language Poets. 

Did Charles Bernstein have Edgar Guest in mind when he coined the term ‘official verse culture?’ Does Bernstein feel personally oppressed by the aesthetic failure of doggerel? Is there an official culture of doggerel? 

When Gerald Stern asked Bernstein to “name names” at a 1984 poetry conference in Alabama, Bernstein was rather tongue-tied; when pressed to name names of poets who belonged to this official verse culture of Bernstein’s, he could only name one poet: T.S. Eliot. The reasons we might entertain for such a choice are obviously complex, but Bernstein has wanted critics to be included as poets; include the theoretical, not just the pretty, is the real issue, quite obviously, for Bernstein.

But sentiment, the key to the public, to popularity, can certainly co-exist with intellectuality and theory. That’s what the genius is able to do. That defines the artistic genius.  If you asked the Language Poets to point to specific elements in their poetry that cannot be popular, would they be able to point to such elements? And if they couldn’t, the question then must be asked, ‘Why aren’t they popular?’

If the public expects certain attributes in their poetry, should the Language Poets refuse them? I shouldn’t be speaking of the Language Poets as a group, since they don’t compose as a group, except to include them in that large group of poets who have no popular poems.

It will not do to pretend that sentiment can be avoided (in poetry it can’t), or to pretend sentiment cannot be avoided except when one is making jokes at its expense—one will never be popular if one persists in either of these two approaches. Sentiment is the clay, and how it is shaped makes all the difference; but when one attempts to deny the clay itself, one will inevitably be obscure. Without sentiment, you lie under sediment.

It is not that Guest or Collins are more sentimental than the poetry of the Language poets, than the poetry of Silliman and Bernstein and Armantrout; Billy Collins shapes sentiment into more interesting shapes than the Language Poets do, and thus Collins enjoys and deserves more popularity. If repeated successes in publishing and award-giving finally push the Language poets, all pushing 70 now, onto a threshold of potential popularity, the only thing that will push them over the threshold into real popularity will be a sincere appeal to the public and its sentimental nature.  There is no other way. If the other elements in the Language poetry agenda are crucial to mankind’s well-being, all the more reason for that poetry to be popular and reach as many people as possible.

No excuses, such as I am not Edgar Guest, are allowed.  

Silliman and his Language Poet friends are a self-enclosed tribe whose secret handshake is: ‘do not write like Edgar Guest.’  They learned this from their forerunners, the Modernists. Successful, these poets all, in killing the ant, Edgar Guest, but meanwhile the real dragon, Obscurity, wounds them. The Olson-ites are pleased to have killed all the villagers of Guest-town and they are looking for thanks and applause, but the villagers of Guest-town are all who might have loved them, and now they are dead.

Silliman and his friends oppose themselves to the “Quietists.”

But they are so quiet themselves.

176 Comments

NATURE’S GAME: AMMONS V. LAUX

March 23, 2011 at 12:57 am (A.R. Ammons, Dorianne Laux, March Madness)

 

About a quarter of the participants in the 2011 APR March Madness run by Scarriet also vied for the Best American Poetry title in Scarriet’s 2010 tourney. 

Billy Collins won the BAP championship in 2010, but he’s nowhere to be seen in the 25% APR overlap in 2011. 

The highest finisher in the 2010 BAP tournament who is also in APR is William Kulik. (Take note, future anthologists.)

Our next contestants, 6th seed A.R. “Archie” Ammons and 11th seed Dorianne “D-low” Laux, were both in the 2010 BAP March Madness.

Dorianne Laux’s “The Shipfitter’s Wife” was in last year’s BAP March Madness and that poem alone is sure to guarantee her immortality. Laux belongs to the Sharon Olds school of unabashed love and sexuality.

The Lovers

She is about to come. This time,
they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other’s spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she’s sure, once again,
she can’t bear, she opens her eyes
and sees his face is turned away,
one arm behind him, hands splayed
palm down on the mattress, to brace himself
so he can lever his hips, touch
with the bright tip the innermost spot.
And she finds she can’t bear it—
not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded,
not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass,
not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin
with daylight, deep pink of the inner body—
what she can’t bear is that she can’t see his face,
not that she thinks this exactly—she is rocking
and breathing—it’s more her body’s though,
opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth.
So that when her hand lifts of its own violation
and slaps him, twice on the chest,
on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple,
slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child
trying to get a mother’s attention,
she’s startled by the sound,
though when he turns his face to hers—
which is what her body wants, his eyes
pulled open, as if she had bitten—
she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder,
not hard, but with the power infants have
over those who have borne them, tied as they are
to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure,
the exquisite pain of this world.
And when she lifts her face he sees
where she’s gone, knows she can’t speak,
is traveling toward something essential,
toward the core of her need, so he simply
watches, steadily, with an animal calm
as she arches and screams, watches the face that,
if she could see it, she would never let him see.

–Dorianne Laux

MARLA MUSE: Wow.

Ammons, on the other hand, is our modern Wordsworth.

Widespread Implications

How sweetly now like a boy I dawdle by ditches,
broken rocky brooks that clear streams through

the golden leaves: the light so bright from
the leaves still up, scarlet screaming vines

lining old growths high or rounding domes of
sumac: how like a sail set out from harbor

hitting the winds I flounder this way and that
for the steady dealing in the variable time:

old boys are young boys again, peeing arcs
the pleasantest use of their innocence, up

against trees or into boles, rock hollows or
into already running water! returned from

the differentiation of manhood almost back to
the woman: attached but hinge-loose, flappy,

uncalled for and uncalled, the careless way
off into nothingness: where, though, but in

nothingness can the brilliance more brightly
abide, the ripple in a brook-warp as gorgeously

blank as a galaxy: I dropped the mouse,
elegantly supersmall, from the trap out by the

back sage bush, and all day his precious little
tooth shone white, his nose barely dipped in

blood:  he lay belly up snow white in the
golden October morn, but this morning, the

next, whatever prowls the night has taken him
away, a dear morsel that meant to winter

here with us

Here is the classic battle, Marla, humans v. nature.

MARLA MUSE: I prefer humans. Because there you get nature, too.

But you automatically get the human in any poem about nature…

MARLA MUSE: Tut, tut. No you don’t.

Let’s stop philosophizing; we have millions of simple—I mean, TV viewers…

MARLA MUSE: Millions who are turning away in embarrassment from Laux’s poem…

But the human…

MARLA MUSE: Ammons has made the mouse human, which is far more charming than Laux’s rather blatant camera-work…

But isn’t Ammons being sentimental with that mouse—

MARLA MUSE: Dead mouse…

And I don’t quite see how we get from the boys peeing in the first part of the Ammons poem to the mouse in the latter part of the Ammons poem, although it is a beautiful poem…

MARLA MUSE: “The Lovers” has more unity, true, though I find it trying too hard to be profound. Anyway, that’s not how I make love…

It’s not your opinion that decides, Marla…it’s the game…the game…

Look…the sweat coming off the players…

Laux 84, Ammons 80!    Dorianne Laux advances!

2 Comments

THE OTHER NO. 5 SEEDS BATTLE

March 21, 2011 at 10:08 pm (Gregory Corso, James Schuyler, Robin Becker, Sharon Olds, Stanley Kunitz, Stephanie Brown)

No. 5 Stanley Kunitz (“Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation”) falls to Gregory Corso (“30th Year Dream”) in the East, 73-70.   Corso was anxious and fell behind early, but woke up and went crazy. Kunitz killed his chances with a disgusting image and his last shot: “Who can understand the ways/of the Great Worm in the sky?” fell short.  Corso dreams he is handed an address and told “Christ wants to see you,” and ends: “‘Damn/impulsive goon-faced proletariat-Shelley greaseball dopey fuck!/And cried, ‘denied…denied…denied’” Yea!  Go Corso!

Sharon Olds has no trouble with her opponent, the 12th seed in the South bracket, Robin Becker, winning 91-72.  “A History of Sexual Preferance” by Becker is about a giddy first date in historical Philadlephia and coyly references the ‘pursuit of happiness/pleasure.’  “The Request” by Olds may be one of the greatest love poems of all time, and we quote it in full:

He lay like someone fallen from a high
place, only his eyes could swivel,
he cried out, we could hardly hear him,
we bent low, over him, his
wife and I, inches from his face,
trying to drink sip up breathe in
the sounds from his mouth. He lay with unseeing
open eyes, the fluid stood
in the back of his throat, and the voice was from there,
guttural, through unmoving lips, we could
not understand one word, he was down so
deep inside himself, we went closer, as if
leaning over the side of a well
and putting our heads down inside it.
Once—his wife was across the room, at the
sink—he started to garble some of those
physical unintelligible words,
Raas-ih-AA, rass-ih-AA, I
hovered even lower, over his open
mouth, Rassi baaa, I sank almost
into that body where my life half-began,
Frass-ih-BAA—”Frances back!”
I said, and he closed his eyes in his last
yes of exhausted acquiescence, I
said, She’s here. She came over to him,
touched him, spoke to him, and he closed his
eyes and he passed out and never
came up again, now he could move
steadily down.

In the final 5 seed v. 12 seed matchup, over in the West, Stephanie Brown looked to upset James Schuyler with her “Interview with an Alchemist in the New Age” which begins

Someone, if you pay the price, can hypnotize you
and you can speak, from memory, oh so long ago imbedded in your soul,
about the past, and history, and your place in it, how you struggled
in the heat and the dust near the Great Pyramid of Giza,
how you gazed into the mirror of your beloved,
how you took a bow with your fellow thespians, in Greece,
how a sycophant betrayed you in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

And wouldn’t it be neat, she says.  The poem (one can see the chatty tone in the quotation above) doesn’t really say more than that, unless there’s some deep, ironic point I’m missing.  Go to the rim, Stephanie!  Make sharper passes!  (She fell behind early.)

Schuyler’s APR entry pulverizes a life into a candy roll and lays it out before us; a sample from “Red Brick and Brown Stone” :

He arises. Oriane
the lurcher wants
her walk. Out into
the freeze. Oriane
pees and shits…

…Off by cab to
Florentine palasso
racquet club: naked,
the pool, plunge, how
Many laps? Home. (Through
out the day, numerous
cigarettes. I forget
which brand. Tareytons.)
A pencil drawing of
a vase of parrot tulips.
Records: Richter:
Scriabin: Tosca:”Mario!
Mario! Mario!” “I
lived for art, I
lived for love.” Sup
per: a can of baked
beans, a cup of raspberry
yogurt. Perrier. Out?
A flick? An A.A.
meeting? Walk Oriane.
Nine p.m. Bed. A
book, V.Woolf’s let-
ters. Lights out, sleep
not quite right away.
No valium. The night
passes in black chiffon.

Shhhhh.  G’nite, James. Sleep well. You’ve advanced to the next round, beating the charming librarian from California, Stephanie Brown 71-64.  Well played!

9 Comments

OFF THE GLASS: ANNE CARSON V. MAURA STANTON

March 21, 2011 at 1:20 am (Anne Carson, March Madness, Maura Stanton)

Maura Stanton: both her parents fought in WW II; she was admitted to Iowa’s MFA program in poetry and fiction.

Anne Carson, the whizz from Canada, tries to advance out of the first round as a no. 5 seed against 12th seed Maura Stanton of Illinois, Yale Younger winner, and wife to Richard Cecil, also in this tourney, and winner in his first round play.

Both use the glass in fascinating ways.

My Religion

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves.

I had a vision
of all the people in the world
who are searching for God

massed in a room
on one side
of a petition

that looks
from the other side
(God’s side)

transparent
but we are blind.
Our gestures are blind.

Our blind gestures continue
for some time until finally
from somewhere

on the other side of the partition there we are
looking back at them.
it is far too late.

We see how brokenly
how warily
how ill

our blind gestures
parodied
what God really wanted

(some simple thing).
The thought of it
(this simple thing)

is like a creature
let loose in a room
and battering

to get out.
It batters my soul
with its rifle butt.

–Anne Carson

MARLA MUSE: Rifle butt? Ouch!

A little anti-war commentary thrown in from Carson at the last minute? It can’t hurt, I suppose.  I’m sure all our readers recognized Carson’s style.  Now let’s look at Stanton’s:

The Veiled Lady

In the 19th Century, clever mediums
Would rap a table, making the dead speak.
Ghostly hands would hover in the air,
Heads would appear, Caesar, Napolean.
Sometimes the whole immaterial body
Of someone’s beloved, dead daughter or sister
Glided through a room allowing swords
To pass though it. Once a husband rose
And tried to caress what was never there,
A Veiled lady he thought was his wife,
While others in the room almost fainted
To see him step right through her crinoline.
D.D. Home could levitate out windows
And float above a busy London street.
Imagine sitting on the horsehair sofa
Almost hysterical, watching that miracle…
But it was done with thick plate glass and lights,
A conjuror’s trick, just like the accordian
Played by a ghost in front of Robert Browing
Who shuddered when a spirit hand reached out
And put a wreath of flowers on Elizabeth
Though afterwards he called it sham, imposture.
But that’s what I am, that’s what we all are
To one another, a trick of light and glass
Projected before an audience of dupes.
Don’t you see I’m only an illusion?
You look aghast. You think I’m cynical
But when you touch me in the dark at night
You touch biology, twitchings and snores,
Wetness, jerking muscles. Wild images
Flicker across my convoluted brain
As it constructs a person out of dreams.
That woman you say you love doesn’t exist.
Look at the way our faces have appeared
On the black glass of the picture window
Now that it’s evening, and the lights are on.
There she is, standing beside you, smiling.
Go to her. Embrace her if you can.

–Maura Stanton

MARLA MUSE: Wow. That’s glorious.  Carson’s was good, but this poem…

You’re right, Marla. Stanton went Carson one better, I think, in using the glass. 

The game was tied, until, in the second half, with “But that’s what I am…” Stanton went on a 12-2 run and pulled away to win it, 78-63.

Maura Stanton, like her husband, Richard Cecil, advances to the second round in APR March Madness: Scarriet 2011.

7 Comments

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