EVERY POET NEEDS A MANIFESTO, OR WHAT IS THE NEW ROMANTICISM?

November 5, 2022 at 8:46 pm (Annie Finch, Ben Mazer, Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism, Dante, Delmore Schwartz, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Randall Jarrell, T.S.Eliot, William Wordsworth)

No good poem needs explaining.

Poets, however, need to explain themselves. Every poet needs a manifesto.

New Romanticism was really nothing more than my attempt to issue a manifesto.

The New Romanticism is a poorly formed and disjointed poetry movement (movement and manifesto are the same). I tried to include Ben Mazer (see my book Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism Thomas Graves, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2021) but failed, and generally, a few others (friends of Ben, mostly) and that failed, too.

Unfortunately, “New Romanticism” in poetry recalls 1980s pop music. The 60s were good, both soul and nerd-wise, Led Zeppelin was good in the 70s—then punk came with its attitude, but musically, punk was bad, and so the 80s returned to pop, but with videos and bad taste overload. Musically, the 80s was 60s lite.

New Romanticism?

And Mazer isn’t even Romantic. He’s T.S. Eliot. What was I even thinking?

Oh sure, one can take a step back, and say with Randall Jarrell, Modernism is an extension of Romanticism and make all kinds of wide historical claims, effectively blurring everything. Great. But then what’s the point of using a term like the “new” Romanticism?”

A few of the things I have written may be interesting, but the label “New Romanticism” is a problem.

The 200 year old Romantics in poetry are icons, superstars. Blake? Byron? Keats? Shelley? Wordsworth? The Romantic “manifesto” has been articulated for them by historical scholarship—and the little prose they did write in the way of manifesto was sublime, selfless and had universal importance.

The ravings of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson are narrow and cringe-worthy by comparison. T.S. Eliot said poetry should be “difficult” and Delmore Schwartz asked innocently, “why?” but the professors agreed with Eliot (naturally).

Today the manifestos of Modernism are muttered in ways few find interesting.

The verse prosody of the Moderns is too complex—you have to go back to Poe’s “Rationale of Verse” to find something well, “rational.” Simple, clear.

But since the Moderns believe “it all scans,” what are we to expect in the way of prosody from the Moderns? Something crazy and complex. The “headless iamb” and so forth. Calling Annie Finch.

The late Harold Bloom is the Manifesto King of our day, with his idea of rivalry—poets write against one another, and the original is all. This has always been true; it’s not a new idea or an interesting one; it says more about the time we live in than anything else.

Those Romantics. We can’t surpass them—and so Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” at least rings emotionally true.

“New Romanticism” isn’t really wrong. It’s suicidal.

When the 20th century dust clears, children will still be reading “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” and not a whole lot of what came after.

Ezra Pound’s manifesto said the image was vital.

Dante, however, showed in his Comedia, that even in poetry, the “image” is idol worship. According to Dante’s vision, image-in-poetry is a process. Poetry is a divine journey, not a narrow list of rules.

From a private conversation I had with Ben, in which I reminded him learned criticism by poets themselves sets them apart and truly makes them famous—and this can’t be overstated—Dante features poetry lessons in his Vita Nuova, Shakespeare shares his critical ideas in his Sonnets, Pope in works like “Essay on Criticism,” Wordsworth and Coleridge most famously in the Preface and Biographia Literaria, “The Poet,”by Emerson, Poe, the monster critic, Pound and Eliot—and wonder of wonders, just like that, Mazer has released his manifesto at last.

Here’s an excerpt.

“Art is first and foremost the constituent of God. It is on God’s authority that everything hangs there. All poetry is in praise of God.
The poet better have a very clear receptor to handle the job. 
In the human sphere, of which the arts partake, the highest form of Godliness is holy matrimony. Along the way, the languishments and yearnings of love drop their fettered implements. 

These are the byways and treadmills of art, the tithes of vanity.”

Does Mazer sound closer in this passage to Eliot, the Christian, or Shelley, the Romantic?

Eliot, of course.

So much for New Romanticism and Ben Mazer.

My quarrels with Eliot—mixed with admiration—are extended. I won’t get into them here.

I will quote one more passage from Mazer’s just issued manifesto—and this leads us into the friendly argument I began with Ben that his poetry contains “no ideas.”

“Tone is texture; it is pointed obliquity. Ideas inform poetry obliquely. They do not hit one over the head as in prose.”

The dark and cloudy imagery of Dante’s Inferno leads downwards/upwards to the clarity of visionary ideas in the “Paradiso.” Moderns are certainly allowed to write “Inferno-poetry” with clotted imagery in which no idea is clear—but the wider arc should be understood. Therefore, the manifesto.

If we take just two famous examples of Romanticism, Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” we do in fact see “ideas” that hit one over the head.

Immediately upon reading these two poems, their ideas—recalling a scene, in one, the vanity of statuary, in the other—could not, to all readers, be less “oblique.”

What makes poetry great? Two things. Phraseology: “the lone and level sands stretch far away” —and ideas.

It is the phraseology itself, not the phraseology hiding the idea (“obliqueness”) which is poetry’s virtue.

Unfortunately legions of sophisticated poets—of the oblique Difficulty School, the ones who travel no further but pause forever in the shadowy recesses of the “Inferno” (the Comedia’s most popular section by far)—reverse the formula, convincing themselves obliquity itself is the virtue.

It is this reversal, despite Mazer’s endless talent and his strong feelings of divinity and sublimity—which bar him from the popularity of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. At his lyric best, Mazer weaves a magic spell, but obliquely:

And end in rain. Just as it begins.
To wade through the perpetual hieroglyphs,
one constant stranger, visiting to tea.
The afternoon sinks down. Chinee! Chinee!
And though you have a lot to say to me,
blankets the evening and conceals the night—
as if one starry fog were shining bright
to be repaid with afterthoughts. One bliss!
Sinking into an opiatic haze
as if there were no number to its days.
I can’t recall! I can’t recall the sights
but, as if the silent film restarts,
and has a lot to say, the broken lights
serve to remember what they cannot name.

(from “The King”)

Salem, MA 11/5/22

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WHY DO WE MAKE FORMAL POETRY TOO COMPLEX?

October 23, 2022 at 10:01 pm (Annie Finch, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Hayden, Scarriet Editors, William Wordsworth)

The poet these days can’t win.

Either free verse is the rule—and the poet wonders, “wait, so what is poetry?” —or those who like metrical verse make it so complicated, the poet is confused going in that direction, too.

It is bad enough good poetry is really hard to write, but the “wisdom” out there says:

1) poetry must be “difficult.” The end of difficulty is difficulty. A cheery thought.

2) the free verse you write “may not be poetry” and

3) formal poetry has too many impossible, contradictory rules.

Annie Finch, who has written an entire book to explain poetic form, informs us a simple line of trochaic rhythm is actually iambic rhythm—the very opposite of trochaic.

How is this possible?

Trochaic is DAA da and Iambic is da DAA.

The line is Robert Hayden’s and it scans very simply:

SUN-days, TOO, my FATH-er GOT up EAR-ly.

Trochaic.

Ms. Finch decides to call “SUN” a “headless iamb.”

In the expert’s imagination, an invisible syllable hovers in front of this trochaic line, changing the whole sequence to the iambic rhythm.

[hey!] SUN/ days TOO/ my FATH/ er GOT/ up EAR/ ly.

Welcome to verse pedagogy! Learning about the iamb (the most common foot in English poetry) is not enough. The “headless iamb” (an iamb which is not an iamb) must be in the mix, too, for no apparent reason —just to be more “difficult” perhaps. “Difficult” is the great mantra of modern poetry.

And then Ms. Finch tells us with a straight face that:

“the line from Hayden is not only headless, it also has an extra syllable at the end.”

“It also has an extra syllable at the end.”

Well what do you know? It does!

Mr. Hayden, the poet, has counted wrong.

Hayden’s line has an “extra” syllable—because Ms. Finch, who has spent a lifetime studying and celebrating verse (and witchery) declares his perfectly trochaic line is actually an iambic line—with an unaccounted-for syllable at the end waving in the wind.

Annie Finch cannot be wrong. It would embarrass one who has given a lifetime to verse.

Annie Finch is correct to say that a trochee can sometimes stand-in for an iamb. This is common and has nothing to do with her mystical reading of Hayden’s poem. Well, it does, to a degree. A poet establishes an iambic rhythm—da DAA—and for variation’s sake, throws in a trochee—DAA da. But there’s never any confusion between da DAA and DAA da, unless the reader over-thinks the whole matter.

This is what Annie does when she takes a trochaic line in Hayden’s poem—in which she believes an iambic meter is established—and finds a need to declare the trochaic is really iambic.

Poets substitute freely. They don’t need pedants making all sorts of excuses for their substitutions.

If you substitute too much, the established rhythm changes—but this happens when it happens; to impose a reading of an established rhythm is to let ‘what ought to be’ crush ‘what is.’

The line in question, from Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” is the poem’s first line. The poem as a whole is trochaic, with substitutions. There is no need to make the line iambic. There is no need to interfere with Hayden’s intent. This is obvious, because if we use the “extra” syllable at the end of line one to push an iambic rhythm onto line two, we get this atrocity:

[uhh] SUN/ days TOO/ my FATH/ er GOT/ up EAR/

ly AND/ put HIS/ clothes ON/ in THE/ blue BLACK/ cold.

Line two, in which the extra syllable in line one (created by Annie Finch!) forces its iambic rhythm on line two, demands the reader place emphasis on trivial words: “and,” “on,” and “the” while creating another hanging syllable at the end of the line: “cold.”

Our ears tell us this is completely nuts.

A more subtle error is made by Annie Finch when she turns to Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” and her expertise says it is iambic where it is not, simply because the poem’s established rhythm (in this case, unlike Hayden’s poem) is iambic.

The versifying skill of the poet Wordsworth uses the anapest—da da DAA—as a pleasant variation within the general iambic rhythm in his famous “daffodils” poem.

The line:

Flutt’ring and dancing in the breeze.

freaks out the pedant as they notice “flutt’ring” is DAA da (trochaic) and not da DAA (iambic). No one would say Flutt’-RING. Not even a pedant. Something must be done, then, to re-establish the iambic rhythm as quickly as possible, or the pedant will have a heart attack. So we get this piece of doggerel:

FLUTT ‘ring/ and DANC/ ing IN/ the BREEZE.

“Dancing IN the breeze” is clunky because there is a natural anapest right here:

in the BREEZE.

Wordsworth varies from the iambic this way: FLUTT’R ing/ (trochee) and DANC/ (iamb) ing in the BREEZE. (anapest)

The anapest, “ing in the BREEZE” is what Poe calls a “quick” anapest in his article, “Rational of Verse.”

da-da-da DAA. (You can see the relationship to the iamb.)

In the Wordsworth poem are several good examples of this. The “ing in the” part is pronounced with slightly more speed.

The poem is mostly tetrameter (4 beat) but Wordsworth varies it with trimeter (3 beat) lines:

“I WAND/-ered LONE/ ly as a CLOUD.”

“a-LONG/ the MARG/ -in of a BAY.”

These are free-breathing trimeter lines, just as

“FLUTT-‘ring/ and DANC/ -ing in the BREEZE.”

These variations, with their quick anapests, help to give the poem its famous sprightly character. Those fixated on conventional iambic readings will miss this. If you listen to the poem read aloud, you will notice the tendency is not to say “DANC-ing IN the BREEZE.” But the more lightsome and appropriate “DANC-ing in the BREEZE.

In poetry, the ears are wiser than the eyes.

15 Comments

LOOKING BACK AT SCARRIET 2021

January 1, 2022 at 7:03 pm (14 International Younger Poets, Alan Cordle, Amanda Gorman, Annie Finch, Ben Mazer, Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism, Blog:Harriet, Cate Marvin, Charles Bernstein, Dan Sociu, Daniel Rifenburgh, Eileen Myles, Ezra Pound, Frank Sinatra, Harold Rosenberg, Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, Kent Johnson, March Madness Poetry, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Nina Simone, Noor Hindi, Philip Nikolayev, Ruth Lepson, Scarriet Hot 100, Stephen Cole, Thomas Brady, Thomas Graves, Tom Brady, William Logan)

I’ve edited Scarriet since September 2009, when Alan Cordle, who I met on the poetry-contest-exposing website Foetry, created Blog Scarriet as an alternative to the Poetry Foundation’s Blog Harriet—which banned poets (yours truly included) from Harriet’s Comments for being “off-topic” (whatever that means; digression is a sign of intelligence in my book) and soon thereafter Blog Harriet (Poetry magazine’s online site) erased Comments as a feature altogether. Poets like Eileen Myles and Annie Finch were regulars on the Harriet Comments; it was a lively good time, I thought, but management didn’t see it that way, which is fine; Harriet managed to birth Scarriet (indirectly).

Poetry and its politics boils down to one question: Is this a good poem?

Alan Cordle’s question on Foetry.com was narrower: did you take contest fees to publish the winner’s book and was that winner your friend? I did not personally expose anyone; I was just an online participant on Foetry because I was curious about Alan’s quest, which seemed to me a sincere attempt to correct a wrong. Today I still believe this.

I broadened the investigation (watering it down to something more intellectual and benign) to Is This A Good Poem? This question is the ruling spirit of Scarriet. I understood, during my unofficial Foetry membership, that poets are allowed to be friends and help each other. This will always happen, and why not? But what ultimately matters is that the best poems are praised (no matter who writes them, or what manifesto is attached to them) and the worst poems are noticed as such.

This gives rise to a sweet philosophical complexity: how do we know what a good poem is? Who are you as a critic (and a person) to make this judgment? Are you, the judge, able to write a good poem? Who are the famous poets who write bad poems? Who are neglected poets who write good poems? What inhibits us from being honest about this?

Anyway, that’s me and Scarriet in a nutshell.

The poet Ben Mazer is a friend of mine. I have written a book on Ben Mazer—which praises his poetry. I defend him as a writer of good poetry, and the friendship matters less in the ratio of how well I defend him as a poet—and how good he actually is compared to poets not on my radar.

Ben was hanging out with the poet Charles Bernstein last year and Ben said, “Charles doesn’t like you.” This flattered me, as I hadn’t realized a poet of some note knew of me or Scarriet. There’s never any excuse to be a jerk—I have been, at times, in the past, in an effort to have strong, honest, opinions—and make a name for myself.

I’ll take this moment to apologize to anyone I may have offended.

I judge (dead and living) poets in the Scarriet March Madness “contests.” A few of these poets I know, but how good they are, and how I am able to articulate how good they are, is on display for all to see, though how well I know this or that poet, is not always known. Those who know me, know I have very few poet pals, and I try very hard not to get close to bad poets. 😆 I met Marilyn Chin as a friend (not a close friend) a long time ago at Iowa before her career took off. I know Philip Nikolayev because I know Ben. I’m a shy person; my life is not full of friendships with poets—not even close. I think this helps me as Scarriet editor. (Yes you’ll notice Mazer and Chin showing up often, but some things can’t be helped, and I honestly believe they are both really good). I also met Dan Sociu in Romania in 2016, and I do think he’s a good poet. If an unpublished poet is good, I will say so. Discovering truly good poets takes a great deal of time and work—I wish I could do more in this area, but no one alive can single-handedly offer this kind of justice to the Poetry world.

I apologize for this laborious introduction; I wanted to look back at 2021:

January “Winter Threw Its Shadow Over the River of My Years” (1/30) is perhaps the best poem of this month because of its poetic cohesion; a poem can have a great idea, but unity is all. A Jeopardy poem, a CIA poem, a NFL rigging poem (life as “rigged” courts self-pity, but Scarriet siezes on the theme a lot) a love-revenge poem (another common theme) but again, interesting topics don’t make a poem good—but (I don’t think I’m wrong) an accessible idea (no matter how simple) is necessary. “Bored” (1/4) is one of the best of the month, and “My Iranian Girlfriends” (1/3) is subtle and witty.

February “I Can Confirm” (2/1) sounds like Blake, which no Scarriet poem tends to sound like. “In The Evenings” (2/9) is richly poignant, probably the best Scarriet poem of early 2021. Scarriet Poetry Hot 100! (2/15) is always exciting. Amanda Gorman is no. 1, Cate Marvin no. 2 (“Republican Party Is Evil” poets really talk like this), followed by Louise Gluck (Nobel), Joy Harjo (3rd term laureate), Don Mee Choi (National Book Award), Jericho Brown (Pulitzer), Noor Hindi (“Fuck Yr Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”), Naomi Shihab Nye (Emma Thompson reads her poem “Kindness” on Instagram to 2.3 million views), Wayne Miller (wrote article on talking about poetry online at Lithub) and William Logan (the critic/poet) rounding out the top 10. Also on the Top 100 list, the wonderful fugitive poets Mary Angela Douglas and Stephen Cole—I discovered them not too long ago online. As an experiment, a letter to my dad is published as a poem (2/21). “Now That The Poem Is Over” (2/22) works well.

March “This Poem Can Only Speak For This Poem” (3/7) , “Happy Marriage” (3/11), and “The Object” (3/26) (on musical fame), are the best poems. March Madness—the topic is Pop Music—(3/20) runs through early April, with interesting essays on your favorite artists and bands as they compete with each other. Nina Simone and Led Zeppelin are among those who go far. The tourney includes Spanky and Our Gang (“Sunday Will Never Be The Same”), as well as Dylan, Elvis, and Frank Sinatra.

April Many good poems this month as spring 2021 inspires love poems—not maudlin but suave and biting. Failed love poems unfortunately plague Scarriet, but in certain months real wit, rather than bitterness, accompanies the love. This month seems to be one of them. A Brief History of U.S. Poetry revised (4/30). Check out this post! Scarriet literary history at its best.

May continues with lots of good poems. “When You See Me You Insult Me” (5/25) is a classic Scarriet love poem (who hurt you so badly, Scarriet poet?) and the first of many great literary essays arrives on 5/31—a look at the critic Harold Rosenberg, who hadn’t really been on Scarriet’s radar previously.

June Poems of high quality continue. Book announcement of Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism by Thomas Graves (6/26).

July I read “Weather Poem” by Dan Sociu (7/5). Another audio feature—2 of my songs on YouTube (low-fi) (7/8) Self-indulgent, perhaps; I’ve composed many pop songs never given professional treatment for one reason or another. “Man, Those Decades In American Poetry Went By Fast” (7/11) Another historical re-posting. Finally, an essay: “The Four Quartets Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” (7/19) in which an overrated work is just one of the things looked at.

August Some of the poems which begin to appear are slightly revised poems written long ago. Three reviews appear this month: The poems of Ruth Lepson (8/1), poems of 14 Younger Poets published by Art and Letters press (8/18) and poems of Daniel Riffenburgh (8/22). Many definitely prefer Scarriet’s prose to its poetry.

September A rather odd article in which the timelines of Delmore Schwartz and Giuseppe Verdi are compared and some observations on the partially neglected poet Schwartz are made. (9/12) An article on Tom Brady and NFL stats (9/26) Scarriet has a very opinionated, love-hate, relationship to sports. Old original poems continue to see the light of day.

October A great month for prose (and poems of decent quality continue) as Scarriet seems to be enjoying one of its best years. “One Hundred Years of Pulitzers” is a revealing historical survey (10/18). “The Poem Defined” (10/21) is a fine essay. Another Poetry Hot 100 (10/27) features the unstoppable Kent Johnson as no.1. The month ends with the scintilating “100 Greatest Poems by Women” (10/31).

November has more Scarriet essays. “Trickle Down Verse” (11/8). “The Good” (11/10). “The Textbook Which Changed Everything: Understanding Poetry” (11/19). In the autumn of 2021, Kent Johnson and his avant friends on FB goaded me into defending my core principles and beliefs. Thanks, Kent! Also this month, you can hear me recite Poe’s “For Annie” on video on my phone, one evening alone in my house, holding my copy of Library America Poe gifted to me by Hilton Kramer many years ago. (11/16)

December The year ends with an essay on Ezra Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, as I attempt to come to grips with this figure who was the subject of a Kent Johnson inspired online debate, “Can a bad person write good poetry?” (12/11) Poems on ‘poetry politics’ (inspired by Kent Johnson and friends) and politics—similar in theme to poems from January 2021, close out the month.

Happy New Year.

Thomas Graves (aka Thomas Brady and Scarriet Editors) Salem, MA 1/1/2022

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HERE WE GO AGAIN: SCARRIET’S POETRY HOT 100!!

July 12, 2013 at 6:14 pm (Ahsahta press, Anis Shivani, Anne Carson, Annie Finch, Ben Mazer, Bill Knott, Billy Collins, Carol Muske, Cole Swensen, Dana Gioia, David Lehman, Derek Walcott, Don Michael Jr. Painting, Don Share, Dorothea Lasky, Dymock Poets, Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Alexander, Fanny Howe, Frank Bidart, Franz Wright, Fred Seidel, Garrison Keillor, Geoffrey Hill, George Bilgere, Harold Bloom, Heather McHugh, Henry Gould, Ilya Kaminsky, James Tate, Jim Behrle, Jorie Graham, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kent Johnson, Larry Witham, Laura Kasischke, Marcel Duchamp, Marilyn Chin, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Edmundson, Mark McGurl, Mary Oliver, Meg Kearney, Michael Dickman, Michael Robbins, Natasha Trethewey, Peter Gizzi, Philip Nikolayev, Picasso and the Chess Player, POETRY, Rae Armantrout, Richard Wilbur, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Ron Silliman, Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, Stephen Burt, Timothy Donnelly, Tony Hoagland, W.S. Merwin, William Kulik, William Logan)

Dark Messy Tower

1. Mark Edmundson Current Lightning Rod of Outrage

2. David Lehman BAP Editor now TV star: PBS’ Jewish Broadway

3. Rita Dove She knows Dunbar is better than Oppen

4. Matthew Hollis Profoundly researched Edward Thomas bio

5. Paul Hoover Status quo post-modern anthologist, at Norton

6. Don Share Wins coveted Poetry magazine Editorship

7. Sharon Olds Gets her Pulitzer

8. Michael Robbins The smartest guy writing on contemporary poetry now–see Hoover review

9. Marjorie Perloff Still everyone’s favorite Take-No-Prisoners Dame Avant-Garde

10. Natasha Trethewey Another Round as Laureate

11. Ron Silliman The Avant-garde King

12. Tony Hoagland The Billy Collins of Controversy

13. Billy Collins The real Billy Collins

14. Kenneth Goldsmith Court Jester of Talked-About

15. Terrance Hayes The black man’s Black Man’s Poet?

16. William Logan Favorite Bitch Critic

17. Avis Shivani Second Favorite Bitch Critic

18. John Ashbery Distinguished and Sorrowful Loon

19. Stephen Burt P.C. Throne at Harvard

20. Robert Hass  West Coast Establishment Poet

21. Harold Bloom Reminds us ours is an Age of Criticism, not Poetry

22. Helen Vendler She, in the same stultifying manner, reminds us of this, too.

23. Dana Gioia  Sane and Optimistic Beacon?

24. Bill Knott An On-line Bulldog of Poignant Common Sense

25. Franz Wright Honest Common Sense with darker tones

26. Henry Gould Another Reasonable Poet’s Voice on the blogosphere

27. Anne Carson The female academic poet we are supposed to take seriously

28. Seth Abramson Will give you a thousand reasons why MFA Poetry is great

29. Ben Mazer Poet of the Poetry! poetry! More Poetry! School who is actually good

30. Larry Witham Author, Picasso and the Chess Player (2013), exposes Modern Art/Poetry cliques

31. Mary Oliver Sells, but under Critical assault

32. Annie Finch The new, smarter Mary Oliver?

33. Robert Pinsky Consensus seems to be he had the best run as Poet Laureate

34. Mark McGurl His book, The Program Era, has quietly had an impact

35. Seamus Heaney Yeats in a minor key

36. W.S. Merwin Against Oil Spills but Ink Spill his writing method

37. George Bilgere Do we need another Billy Collins?

38. Cate Marvin VIDA will change nothing

39. Philip Nikolayev Best living translator?

40. Garrison Keillor As mainstream poetry lover, he deserves credit

41. Frank Bidart Poetry as LIFE RUBBED RAW

42. Jorie Graham The more striving to be relevant, the more she seems to fade

43. Alan Cordle Strange, how this librarian changed poetry with Foetry.com

44. Janet Holmes Ahsahta editor and MFA prof works the po-biz system like no one else

45. Paul Muldoon How easy it is to become a parody of oneself!

46. Cole Swensen Some theories always seem to be missing something

47. Matthew Dickman Was reviewed by William Logan. And lived

48. James Tate For some reason it depressed us to learn he was not a laugh riot in person.

49. Geoffrey Hill His poetry is more important than you are

50. Derek Walcott A great poet, but great poets don’t exist anymore

51. Charles Bernstein A bad poet, but bad poets don’t exist anymore, either

52. Kay Ryan Emily Dickinson she’s not. Maybe Marianne Moore when she’s slightly boring?

53. Laura Kasischke She’s published 8 novels. One became a movie starring Uma Thurman. Who the hell does she think she is?

54. Louise Gluck X-Acto!

55. Rae Armantrout “Quick, before you die, describe the exact shade of this hotel carpet.”

56. Heather McHugh “A coward and a coda share a word.”

57. D.A. Powell “Of course a child. What else might you have lost.”

58. Peter Gizzi Take your lyric and heave

59. Marilyn Chin Shy Iowa student went on to write an iconic 20th century poem: How I Got That Name

60. Eileen Myles Interprets Perloff’s avant-gardism as mourning

61. Lyn Hejinian As I sd to my friend, because I am always blah blah blah

62. Nikki Finney Civil Rights is always hot

63. K. Silem Mohammad This Flarfist Poet composes purely Anagram versions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Fie on it.

64. Meg Kearney Lectured in public by Franz Wright. Still standing.

65. Noah Eli Gordon Teaches at Boulder, published by Ahsahta

66. Peter Campion A poet, a critic and a scholar!

67. Simon Ortiz Second wave of the Native American Renaissance

68. Maya Angelou She continues to travel the world

69. Lyn Lifshin “Barbie watches TV alone, naked” For real?

70. Ange Mlinko Born in ’69 in Philly, writes for The Nation

71. Jim Behrle They also serve who only write bad poetry

72. Elizabeth Alexander She read in front of all those people

73. Dorothea Lasky The Witchy Romantic School

74. Virgina Bell The poet. Do not confuse with burlesque dancer

75. Fanny Howe Wreaks havoc out of Boston

76. Erin Belieu Available for VIDA interviews

77. Ariana Reines Another member of the witchy romantic school

78. Jed Rasula Old Left poetry critic

79. John Hennessy “Too bad I felt confined by public space/despite her kinky talk, black net and lace”

80. Timothy Donnelly “Driver, please. Let’s slow things down. I can’t endure/the speed you favor, here where the air’s electric”

81. Clive James His translation, in quatrains, of Dante’s Divine Comedy, published this year

82. Danielle Pafunda “We didn’t go anywhere, we went wrong/in our own backyard. We didn’t have a yard,/but we went wrong in the bedroom”

83. Michael Dickman Matthew is better, right?

84. Kit Robinson “Get it first/but first get it right/in the same way it was”

85. Dan Beachy Quick “My wife found the key I hid beneath the fern./My pens she did not touch. She did not touch/The hundred pages I left blank to fill other days”

86. Ilya Kaminsky Teaches at San Diego State, won Yinchuan International Poetry Prize

87. Robert Archambeau Son of a potter, this blog-present poet and critic protested Billy Collins’ appointment to the Poet Laureateship

88. Kent Johnson Best known as a translator

89. Frederick Seidel An extroverted Philip Larkin?

90. David Orr Poetry columnist for New York Times wrote on Foetry.com

91. Richard Wilbur Oldest Rhymer and Moliere translator

92. Kevin Young Finalist in Criticism for National Book Critics Circle

93. Carolyn Forche Human rights activist born in 1950

94. Carol Muske Dukes Former California Laureate writes about poetry for LA Times

95. William Kulik Writes paragraph poems for the masses

96. Daniel Nester The sad awakening of the MFA student to the bullshit

97. Alexandra Petri Began 2013 by calling poetry “obsolete” in Wash Post

98. John Deming Poet, told Petri, “We teach your kids.”

99. C. Dale Young “Medical students then, we had yet to learn/when we could or could not cure”

100. Clayton Eshleman Sometimes the avant-garde is just boring

46 Comments

METRICAL SOPHISTICATION? IS IT DEAD?

January 13, 2011 at 2:56 pm (Annie Finch, Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcus Bales, Robert Penn Warren, Swinburne, T.S.Eliot)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but my friends and I talk rhyme and meter the way others discuss fine wine.

The bouquet of a fine sequence of dactyls once caused me to faint from pure delight.   A friend once opined he could die content in a bed of trochaic tetrameter.

We scoff at those who can’t hear the difference between Swinburne’s 21 dollar Paul et Jean-Marc Pastou 2003 Sancerre, white Loire  and Poe’s 850 dollar Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou, St. Julien Medoc Bordeaux red.

The best prosodists alive today, such as Marcus Bales and Annie Finch, make this common, tone-deaf mistake, re: Swinburne and Poe, but if the experts are wrong, what about the rest? Metrical taste today is at the lowest state since poetry was first written, so it is probably best we keep Bales and Finch as friends in the barren metrical landscape of our Letters.

Metrical expertise has been hijacked by two things:

First, poor training in the nuts and bolts of the science itself, so often tainted by needless pedantry.

Second, the New Critics’ injunction (Robert Penn Warren’s essay “Pure and Impure Poetry” 1943) that “tension” between “metrical rhythm” and “speech rhythm” is the true measure of taste in judging metrical poetry.

This second obstacle is perhaps the most insidious, seducing even a poet as brilliant as Marcus Bales into error.   The most beautiful species of rhythm, combined with the most thrilling aspects of expression, are sold short by a theory that clips the wings of rhythmical flight in the name of “speech.”

Certainly, qualities such as cogency and consistency support metrical expression.  These qualities partake of all the good we mean when we refer to “speech.”  But “speech rhythm” is something else quite again.  And here is where the error resides: rhythm’s emphasis and rhythm’s surprise and rhythm’s art are all the poem needs in order to be wonderful, strange, new, and expressive, and “speech rhythm” is but an illusionary, accidental result.

For how can we really know what speech rhythm is?

This is one of those assumptions which exist only as that, an assumption, but not in reality— and all because the “real” aspect (everyday speech is real, isn’t it?) is accepted without reflection.  The metrical poem will not admit an idea merely because it is an abstract nod to something “real.”  The practice of a poem admits no hypotheticals.

We put the cart before the horse to make “speech rhythm” a notable aim or  complement to the “metrical rhythm,” because speech always implies something we’ve seen before in daily conversation, and by its very nature will drag us away from metrical excitement and novelty; the aping of “speech” will always exert inhibitory pressure on the metrical muse.  Obviously we don’t want to veer off into pure nonsense, but the speech should emerge almost accidentally from the metrical rhythm, which must be the primary focus.  Warren’s “tension” between the two implies a balancing act, but this balancing finally dilutes and weakens rhythmical  invention, which requires freedom to express, newly, terror and delight.

Let us look at some examples and see if we can detect this “tension” between speech rhythm and metrical rhythm:

So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

In these lovely, poignant lines it is pointless to credit “speech” for those powerful anapests; they belong to metrical perfection.   Any “tension” added (I doubt any would be so bold to even try) would, even if organized to Warren’s exact specifications, weaken the poem in every respect.

What of this:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

What is interesting to notice here is that the ‘modern’ example is less like speech than the Romantic song.  We might observe to an intimate acquaintace, “So we’ll go no more a-roving,” but we would never say to anyone: “The winter evening settles down with smell of steaks in passageways.”  We already observed that the first example, the Byron, is a metrical tour de force, and yet, by comparison, the Byron is also more like real speech.   The “speech” of Eliot’s first stanza from his Preludes pervades like one’s own consciousness whispering despairingly into one’s own ear about the sad state of actual things.  The Byron, poem, too, addresses the sad state of reality, too.  Both poems are melancholy, but Byron’s melancholy is heroic and elegant: “Yet we’ll go no more a-roving/by the light of the moon.”  The beauty remains in the sadness.  In the Eliot example, there never was any beauty; the melancholy is depressing and inevitable: “And then the lighting of the lamps.”

Iambic pentameter is heroic for physical reasons; the tetrameter has one less beat and thus it has less weight, less gravity.   In a different context, “then the lighting of the lamps” could be a happy line, but the mechanics of the line in the context of Eliot’s unhappy realism highlights the mechanics itself as a dull, mechanical action.

It is easy to see that the Eliot, like the Byron, combines metrical rhythm with certain descriptive actions, for its effect.  There is no “tension” between speech rhythm and metrical rhythm, per se.  “Then the lighting of the lamps” certainly has speech rhythm, but the point is that “Then the lighting of the lamps” exists in the poem as metrical rhythm—there is no speech rhythm and metrical rhythm existing simultaneously; the metrical rhythm is the speech rhythm in the poem.  There is no separation, and thus no comparison, and thus no “tension.”  We should not confuse the banal subject matter in the Eliot with speech itself; the speaking voice is not the same as the things described by that voice.  The “tension” is supposed to arise from the opposing rhythms, speech v. metrical.  But the metrical and speech rhythms are one.

If you think it is impossible for qualities to blend into one in poems, listen to what Eliot observes of Swinburne: “Now, in Swinburne, the meaning and the sound are one thing.”  This is quite an assertion: the meaning and the sound are one thing.   And does Eliot not describe precisely the claustrophobia of the romantics dwindling into the victorians which the moderns were hell-bent on escaping?  Eliot also: “When you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you find always that the object was not there—only the word.”

Poetry is always intensifying itself in what it is doing; the best poems never strike a balance, but pitch excessively forward, “annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade.”

As Warren says, free verse has none of this “tension.”

But the instant we journey away from free verse towards this “tension,” we come into possession of metrical rhythm which buys up all the prose in sight; there is never a chance for reconciliation and balance, for these two, speech rhythm and metrical rhythm, are like matter and anti-matter; they demolish each other.

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THE MURDERED POET SOCIETY

April 23, 2010 at 7:23 pm (Annie Finch, Donald Justice, Edgar Allan Poe, John Evangelist Walsh, Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Helen Whitman, Uncategorized, Walter Skold)

Annie Finch writes on Blog Harriet:

 “It is my great honor and pleasure to announce here on Harriet the founding of a new national holiday. Tomorrow will be the first Dead Poets Remembrance day.  Unlike my recent “Kegels for Poets” post, this one is completely for real:

Press Release

At the beginning stop of a 22-State “Dead Poets Grand Tour,” thirteen current and former State poets laureate, in cooperation with the Dead Poets Society of America, have chosen Shakespeare’s birthday to announce a new national literary holiday.

The holiday will be called the Dead Poets Remembrance Day, and will be held in locations around the nation next October 7th.

Fittingly, October 7th is the day that Edgar Allan Poe died.

“We are launching this tour in order to encourage groups of people in every state to get together on October 7th to honor our dead poets by reading at their graves,” said Walter Skold, the founder of the Dead Poets Society of America.

Along the way the Poemobile is going to visit the graves of some of the most and least-well known poets in the US, including Robert Lowell, Donald Justice, James Whitcomb Riley, Lydia Sigourney, John Trumball, Henry Timrod, Abram Ryan, and Sarah Whitman.”

Thanks for sharing this Dead Poets Society news, Annie.

I met Donald Justice a few times but I don’t know him well enough that his death has impacted my life;  I would rather it not.  I like to think of Donald Justice as still living.  I don’t think I would want to stand at his grave, even if people were reading his poetry.

Poe, on the other hand: he’s really dead and has always been dead for all of us who are now alive.

But another thing about Poe.   He didn’t just die.  He was murdered, and his murder was covered up.  If we’re going to use the day of Poe’s death, October 7th, to honor poets who are dead, isn’t that going to cause a lot of unrest in the land of the unliving?

I’m not a morbid person, but I do feel we should try and get to the bottom of Poe’s death, not just for the sake of Poe, but for the sake of everyone, because we’re all responsible for the cover-up of Poe’s death to a certain extent.  OK, that’s a stretch.  Just a few directly are, but if we add the scholars who have deliberately chosen to keep Poe-slander alive, that’s even more of us; but no, we can’t blame everybody.   But I think I can say this to everyone reading this now:  Every day Poe’s death remains unsolved keeps alive a curse, and most of the nine muses are not happy, not to mention Poe’s fellow citizens and all who love poetry and justice—and love a good mystery story! This one’s real, people.

Scarriet has made the case in The Lion and the Little Dog.  (scroll down past whitman)

Poe was an inventor and breaker of codes, he went by other names, he attended West Point, he was an athlete as a young man, he was raised in a household where Supreme Court Justices would drop by for dinner; Poe, was nothing like those ignorant myths that have grown up around in him in the wake of Griswold’s libel,  spun when Poe was expiring—the opposite, in fact.  Think of Poe as you know him—now think of the opposite in every respect.  The opposite is much closer to the real Poe.  

Poe was more inventive and influential in a dozen of his hobbies than the very talented and well-connected are in their chosen career; Poe was famous and famous for a reason, for the simple reason that he was enormously talented; (sometimes this happens,) and this famous writer was picked up by his enemies, not his friends, as always gets reported (remember: think opposite) in Baltimore, in a state of distress, and then imprisoned for 3 days with no word of his dark and dingy whereabouts leaked to any newspaper or friend, and when he mysteriously expired, a hurried burial, without an autopsy, was conducted by the same “friends” who miraculously “found him,” and 24 hours later his worst enemy was telling the world nothing about the actual death or any of its circumstances, and everything about the poet’s flawed character in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.

The Poe Scholar John Evangelist Walsh has done a great service in showing Poe scholarship how it should be done: look at the persons involved, the persons who fabricated stories of Poe’s death (the cooping theory, for instance), the persons who were known to dislike Poe, the persons who had reasons to want Poe dead, the persons who had plotted against Poe while he was alive—hellooo, Horace Greeley!

Misunderstood geniuses grow on trees.  Poe is that invaluable rarity: the understood genius.   His output in various genres was not large; but he created templates; he did not write at length on the same thing, he did not write endlessley in the same way, but applied his genius far and wide; one is not supposed to do what he did—succeed in so many interconnected ways; anyone can write code; Poe explained code.

This investigation of Poe will open up whole new worlds: the true nature of Horace Greeley…Greeley’s secret dealings with Boss Tweed, Greeley’s negotiations with Napolean III during the Civil War…

Also, universities will attract the best history and literature students in the world by starting a new department called “Death of Poe Studies.”   Do I kid? Perhaps.

It is very fitting, Annie, that the first “Dead Poets Remembrance Day” is on Shakespeare’s birthday, for Poe is truly our Shakespeare.

It is important to honor the dead and remember their poetry.  But if the day of Poe’s death is going to be the hook for this—as well it should, why not?—I suggest we nudge ourselves out of our long national slumber and begin to investigate the greatest mystery and tragedy of American Letters, the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe.

Thanks again, Annie!

26 Comments

AND IF YOU HAD TO CHOOSE NOW, SCARRIET OR HARRIET?

March 29, 2010 at 5:34 am (Annie Finch, Harriet, J.D.Salinger, March Madness, Poetry Foundation, Scarriet, Sina Queyras, Uncategorized)

We hadn’t checked it out since New Years, so what a shock to find it simply hadn’t moved on at all — same shops, same chaps, same figures.

Yes, there’s Christopher Woodman’s name still down there at the bottom, as if the PFoA were just waiting for him to come in again. The last time he tried was in response to Annie Finch on J.D.Salinger comin through the rye, poor body, but the comment he submitted just drew a blank. So he hasn’t tried again, though sometimes he’d like to.

Because he’s not at all happy with what’s happening at Scarriet either, and feels he might be happier back in the PFoA fold, he’s that old. True, there’s no commentary there (how many comments did you say there were  last week?), but at least he wouldn’t have to compete with Marla Muse praising Bob-and-Tom for dunking a new poem a second — or listen to that awful deaf-to-English-Fox that Scarriet calls our ‘coverage’ of the big Poetry Game.

Not a parody but a travesty!

And what an irony, because Scarriet’s numbers are truly running riot! But is this really what you want, my friends? Are you here just for the beer, is that it, or are you laughing at us, at the comics and antics we offer instead of poetry?

Why are you here, in fact? To watch us self-destruct on that rock in the Rhine, or sail on for another day and more questions than answers down the river?

Give us some feedback before it’s too late!

8 Comments

Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten dass ich so traurig bin

March 28, 2010 at 10:48 am (Annie Finch, Bob Dylan, Emily Dickinson, Heinrich Heine, Langston Hughes, Lyric Poetry, Uncategorized, W.F.Kammann, Walt Whitman)

Lyric Poetry

Sung to the lyre, it has a certain fascination. American lyrics from Irish ballads to Emily Dickinson to Annie Finch. Whitman, that lyric maelstrom. What about Heine? Could any man write these lyrics now? Is lyric poetry only written by women today? And then there’s Dylan (Bob) with the “lowest form” of lyric: the song lyric.

Most poetry is lyric, isn’t it?

W.F.Kammann

.

………………………………….Harlem

………………………………….What happens to a dream deferred?

………………………………….Does it dry up
………………………………….like a raisin in the sun?
………………………………….Or fester like a sore—
………………………………….And then run?
………………………………….Does it stink like rotten meat?
………………………………….Or crust and sugar over—
………………………………….like a syrupy sweet?

………………………………….Maybe it just sags
………………………………… like a heavy load.

………………………………….Or does it explode?

………………………………………………………………..Langston Hughes

.


48 Comments

NEWS, NEWS, READ ALL ABOUT IT: ANNIE BUNDLED OUT OF HARRIET!

February 7, 2010 at 4:40 am (Alice in Wonderland, Annie Finch, Harriet, J.D.Salinger, Poetry Foundation, Robert Burns, Scarriet, Travis Nichols, Uncategorized)


“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her; she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

~

Robert Burns and J.D.Salinger have indeed been blathered, and despite Annie Finch’s best intentions, both on Harriet and Scarriet, and our own attempt to bridge the divide as well (we were yet again deleted for our efforts!), Harriet remains in the dumps, otherwise known as denial.

Here’s what Harriet sounded like last summer:

Great to see this here, posted ipso facto in honor not only of of Salinger’s deathday but also of Robbie Burns’ birthday two days earlier–for those who don’t know, a huge national and global celebration of the poet and of Scotland. It’s one of my favorite Burns poems (I have another posted for the occasion at my blog AmericanWitch http://annieridleycranefinch.blogspot.com/)

This has one of the best singing tunes of any of his poems imho, and it is one of the relatively few where female sexuality is celebrated in its own right..it really feels like a poem that could have been written by Jenny herself, coming through dew-wet fields early in the morning to slip into bed after a night out. Thanks, Travis!

POSTED BY: ANNIE FINCH ON JANUARY 31, 2010 AT 11:37 AM

This is, in fact, a comment Annie Finch posted on Harriet a week ago in a vain effort not only to make a discussion on Burns and Salinger more relevant but to breathe some life back into the moribund Poetry Foundation community.

And did she succeed? Did she strike a chord, arouse some enthusiasm for poetry, get some rewarding feedback?

Hardly. The following is the only subsequent comment after Annie Finch’s generous, warm, independent and sexy brave effort:

Just because Salinger died.

Stephen

POSTED BY: STEPHEN STURGEON ON FEBRUARY 1, 2010 AT 1:28 PM

In other words, a good kick up the backside!

~

And as if that weren’t 52 Pickup enough, here’s the latest spectacle in The Poetry Foundation’s limelight, yes, right up there to welcome you on Blog:Harriet’s masthead. And you bet how Travis Nichols is glad-handing the regulars —  tailors, courtiers, and suckers!

FRED MOTEN
5
At circle time on Thursday, Lorenzo declared that when he makes smores for Julian (which I wasn’t aware that he’d ever done) he makes them with bricks, sticks and snow.

CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY » 02.06.10 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

FRED MOTEN
4
A lot of it is just trying to figure out how to say something. How to read. Not how to offer a reading, or even an interpretation, but a performance of a text, in the face of its unintelligibility, as if one were forced/privileged to access some other world where representation and unrepresentability were beside the point, so that the response to the terrors and chances of history were not about calculation, not bound to replicate, even in a blunted and ethically responsible way, the horrors of speculation, where new materialities of imagination were already on the other side of the logic of equivalence.

CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY » 02.06.10 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

FRED MOTEN
B 3
Dear Evie,

Remember when we read together in November, and afterwards you asked me about a particular poem of mine, and seemed to wonder, rightly, why my reading of it didn’t acknowledge or account for the spacing of/in the poem? I figured that question was a statement and you were right. Philip’s theater is this fragmentation of the sentence and the word, where every fragmentation is also an augmentation, bespeaking multiplicity.

CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY » 02.06.10 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

FRED MOTEN
Backlog 2
The commitment to repair is how a refusal to represent terror redoubles the logic of representation. The refusal of our ongoing afterlife can only ever replicate a worn-out grammar. The event remains, in the depths. The event-remains are deep and we stand before them, to express them, as their expression.

CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY » 02.06.10 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

FRED MOTEN
Backlog
I didn’t stop logging, I just stopped posting. I think I got waterlogged from not being able not to try to get too deep. I got into some kind of double trouble from blowing bubbles, I guess. Anyway, here’s some more stuff, along the lines I promised, though I might want to make another promise now. The other thing is that this is driven by the chance to see some of Hong-An Truong’s film and installation work and from reading Gerald Barrax’s poetry and from a friend sending me the catalog from the Xenakis exhibit at the Drawing Center in New York. I just wanted to mention these not in order to provide the key to what I’ve been trying to write but just to commend them all to you because they are beautiful! As is Beth at the Jordan Lake School of the Arts, refuge for the new X-Men, where the superkids go to play. OK: back to my misbegotten ideas on poetics, in approximately 300 word installments.

CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY » 02.06.10 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

12 Comments

EVEN ROBERT BURNS GETS BLATHERED ON HARRIET

January 31, 2010 at 4:22 am (Annie Finch, christopher woodman, Harriet, J.D.Salinger, Kent Johnson, Peter Greene, Robert Burns, Scarriet, Thomas Brady, Travis Nichols, Uncategorized)


…………….Peter Greene…………….Kent Johnson

@Kent: The thing that confuses me is the way most poetry blogs contain…little poetry. Here at Harriet, that’s normal – this is not a ‘personal’ poetry blog but a discussion room and (for me) education centre. But on the blogs of so many poets…no pomes. Are the things so hard to come by? Valuable, yes, but a poet is wealthy with the things, notebooks running empty, mystery scrawls everywhere. More poems on poetry blogs today!
PG

POSTED BY: PETER GREENE ON JANUARY 27, 2010 AT 11:10 AM

Did it ever occur to anyone on Onan:Harriet that there were other poems out there beside the ones that bloggers write themselves? Has anyone noticed the Robert Burns that just got posted by Travis, for example — who is obviously still sensitive to our criticism here at Scarriet that,  since we left, nobody at Harriet talks about poetry anymore, just about themselves?

Check out the 3 Comments on that thread for a shock on that, how they ignore the poetry to show off what they know/don’t know about Salinger. Even Holden Caulfield could have done better!

And can you imagine what Thomas Brady would have had to say, Burns being one of his favorite poets? Or Christopher Woodman on how to pronounce the scots, his children having been to a one-room school house in the hills up above Dumfries? Their dialect became so broad he couldn’t understand them in the kitchen after they had walked home from school, he says, two miles in the gloaming. His daughter Sophia even won 1st prize in the annual Robert Burns Poetry Contest — she recited the master’s poetry by heart even better than the shepherd children, who still spoke the dialect.

Eskdalemuir 1969, he says. The end of the world.

But then that’s precisely why Christopher Woodman got banned, for talking that way. Hi-jacking, Travis would have called it had Christopher come in on his Robert Burns thread. Making it relevant, we would say, empowering the poetry to speak for itself, not for the brown-nosed poetaster.

And we say good point in your sage comment, Kent Johnson. You know your Burns even if you’re deaf to his poetry and have no interest whatever in the best move Travis Nichols ever made. Indeed, you’ve condemned yet another Harriet thread to oblivion in your comment — set the mood for more cynical blather.

Who would dare to talk about poetry under such an asthmatic shadow?

~

In another way, all the comments on Poetry & Gender (Part 1): Why Don’t More Women do Blog-Oriented Writing? are under the shadow of Annie Finch’s truly expansive threads on Harriet last summer (Muse Goddess, Why I am a Woman Poet, and Women’s Work, those three in particular) all on the same topic, and which sparked some real participation, some of it so fiery it had to be deleted. And not because of unacceptable language or content either, but because of the fascinating glimpses the comments gave into various conflicts behind the U.K. poetry scene, Harriet was reaching out that far back then!

Frankly, we agree with those deletions — the deleted comments were too raw, the authors not ready yet for hanging out such linen. Indeed, some of the deletions were of comments by quite well-known U.K. female poetry figures who were letting too much hair down, and needed protection — from themselves!

Sensitive editing we’d say that time, Travis, and we feel sure that Annie Finch herself must have been consulted.

Was Annie Finch consulted when you deleted Christopher Woodman over and over again, Travis, and finally banned him altogether for talking about poetry in a manner you and your friends found threatening?

Did you learn anything at all from the Burns either? Do you have any feeling for what it might have been like for Holden Caulfield to be banned from his school, and why he might have brought that particular poem out into the real world with him?

8 Comments

THE DIGERATI SHOVEL BACK: Shoveling and Shoveling on Blog:Harriet..

November 1, 2009 at 2:41 am (Alan Cordle, Annie Finch, Blog:Harriet, Catherine Halley, christopher woodman, Desmond Swords, Eileen Myles, Foetry, Kenneth Goldsmith, Martin Earl, Poetry Foundation, Scarriet, Thomas Brady, Travis Nichols, Uncategorized)

Shovel Grab 0 copy

Today on Blog:Harriet, November 1st, 2009, marks The 60th day After the Banning of Thomas Brady, Desmond Swords, Alan Cordle and Christopher Woodman. To commemorate the occasion, we take the opportunity to examine the only thread in that period that has attracted more than a handful of desultory comments, and that is Kenneth Goldsmith’s rip-roaring, The Digerati Strike Back with a staggering 55 Comments!

To read the most recent of those comments and some even more staggering statistics, click here.

But don’t expect much about poetry, as even the posters themselves acknowledge it’s just shoveling, and because they are Travis Nichols‘ friends and colleagues, they’re obviously proud just to snip, snap and snuggle. Because that’s how you comment if you’re really on the  ‘in’ in the poetry establishment, unlike Thomas Brady, Desmond Swords or Christopher Woodman who actually read and write it, or Alan Cordle, so passionate and well-informed on the ethical and social issues, and a well-trained librarian.

But no passion please, we’re Blog:Harriet — no risk, no commitment, no challenge, no outrage or devotion, no Annie Finches, no Martin Earls, no Eileen Myles, no one who posts poems because they actually love them like Catherine Halley, or poets they would like to understand better like Joel Brouwer, and who give others both the space and the encouragement to explore difficult subjects in depth. Excellent Contributing Writers, and there are still some of those left, deserve better respondents — not just cynics and academics and a handful of groupies, insiders and glad-handers.

How sad, and nobody at The Foundation seems to care that Harriet is vacant. I guess that’s the way the Management  likes it, though how that serves Ruth B. Lilly’s larger mission remains to be seen!

9 Comments

WE WERE THERE TOO: But We’re Banned from Blog:Harriet now. And WHY? Did Martin Earl find us troublesome? Or what about you, Annie Finch, or you Camille Dungy? Don Share? Cathy Halley? You were all there along with Gary Fitzgerald and Michael Robbins? Who in the light of the International Poetry Incarnation of 1965 could possibly have allowed this to happen in 2009, and at The Poetry Foundation of all places???

October 30, 2009 at 8:33 am (Alexander Trocchi, Allen Ginsberg, Andrei Voznesensky, Annie Finch, Blog:Harriet, Camille Dungy, Catherine Halley, Chogyam Trungpa, christopher woodman, Don Share, Gary Fitzgerald, Gregory Corso, Harry Fainlight, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Martin Earl, Michael Robbins, Pablo Neruda, Poetry Foundation, Scarriet, Thomas Brady, Uncategorized, William Burroughs)

International Poetry Incarnation,
The Original Program,
The Royal Albert Hall, June 11th, 1965,
Smoking Permitted.

Albert Hall 1aAlbert Hall 2

FISH II GRAB

Thomas, Gary, Christopher, Camille, Annie, Michael, Don, Cathy, others…

I certainly don’t see a problem, and I second Thomas’s drift in this comment. The thread is about open space, cornfield, Nebraska style space. Thomas has a point. You read what you want to read. Volume can only be stimulating, especially when the discourse is conducted at such a high level. I’m sure this is exactly what Ms. Lilly had in mind, free and open forums which grow organically. Any given post can sustain pointed commentary for only so long before drift, meta-commentary, opinion, personal ideology and the gifts of individual experience begin to take hold. I, for one, feel extremely lucky, as one of the hired perpetrators these last few months that the threads unfold the way they do. Maybe Gary has a point – some people could be scared away by the clobbering breadth of the most enthusiastic threaders. But perhaps not. I suspect a lot of people are reading just for the fun of it, for the spectacle, without necessarily feeling the need to contribute. And I’ve seen enough examples of people, late in the day, breaking in without any trepidation. Thomas has brought up a lot of good points here about the way things are supposed to work. And I would say, having observed this process over the last six months, that, given the lawlessness, there has always been a sense of decorum, even decorum threaded into the syntax of insult (a wonderful thing to see). We are all at a very lucky moment in the progress of letters. A kind of 18th century vibrancy is again the order of the day. We should all thank the circumstances that have led to this moment. We should drink a lot of coffee and get to work.

Martin
POSTED BY: MEARL ON JULY 6, 2009 AT 12:02 AM

Honestly, you all, go and read such passionate and well-informed commentary, and BLUSH! Go and read it right here, and then look at Harriet today!

Christopher

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MULTICULTURAL WRATH IN ALABAMA: LEVERTOV SCOLDS PANEL

October 21, 2009 at 12:51 pm (Annie Finch, Charles Bernstein, Foetry, Gerald Stern, Helen Vendler, Iowa Writers Workshop, Louis Simpson, Modern Poetry, Scarriet, T.S.Eliot, Thomas Brady, Uncategorized, Wallace Stevens)

BAMA PANEL III:  Indeed, Denise Levertov is increasingly appalled…

The third in a series of 5 articles on the 1984 University of Alabama Poetry Conference by THOMAS BRADY.


Denise Levertov

A perception of Wallace Stevens as participant in the “common life” was all Helen Vendler had in her defense against Louis Simpson’s charge that she (Helen Vendler) was a living embodiment of the staus quo.  Vendler’s “aim in life,” she said, was to “change the status quo,” and the example she produced in Alabama that morning was that she was on a life-long quest to find some way to convince people that tubby Wallace Stevens was not a wealthy, racist snob who wrote show-offy, goofball verse. (Good luck with that, professor Vendler.   You might want to check out William Logan’s review of the new ‘Selected Stevens’ in this month’s New Criterion.)

Charles Bernstein, with his back against the wall, finally…after a ‘Stern’ grilling…named… T.S Eliot.

Hendler Vendler…zonked by the poet Louis Simpson…attempted to save herself… with… Wallace Stevens.

Both Eliot and Stevens were students of the aesthetic philosopher George Santayana at Harvard.

Vendler was a full professor at Harvard.

Bernstein studied under Stanley Cavell at Harvard.

Denise Levertov, poetry editor for The Nation in the 1960s and Mother Jones in the 1970s, had heard enough.  She exploded.  She hit the ceiling.  She yawped.

“I’m getting increasingly appalled…”

Uh Oh…

“OUR DISCUSSION KEEPS GETTING MORE AND MORE PROVINCIAL, PAROCHIAL…”

A feeling of shame moved through the panelists…

“WE KEEP IGNORING…”

“The Crimson began to turn red…”

“THERE IS A WHOLE BODY OF LITERATURE…”

Sweat trickling down the faces of every professor in the room…

“VERY EXCITING LITERATURE…”

Panelists frozen in horror…

“DEVELOPING AND BEGINNING TO FLOURISH WILDLY AND WONDERFULLY…”

“Wildly and wonderfully?”  Denise, get this over with!  Kill us now!

“BLACK POETS…”

The panelists and the audience  (all white) were suddenly drained of color.

“AND CHICANO POETS.”

Damn!  Not Chicano poets, too!

(Maybe she said Chicago poets!  no…no…Chicano poets.  We’re cooked.)

Denise Levertov wasn’t finished.

The panelists didn’t move.

“All this is totally ignored and perhaps even more important…”

No one breathed.  Not even Louis Simpson, the WW II vet, batted an eyelash…

“we are talking away here…talking about prizes and naming names…”

Bernstein and Stern looked at the floor…Vendler began to chew on her lip…

“and all this is absolutely parochial irrelevancy and IGNORES THE FACT…”

The panelists, one by one, began to slowly hide under the table…

“THAT AS A SPECIES WE ARE STANDING ON THE VERY BRINK OF EXTINCTION…”

Vendler, under the table, drank a glass of water very fast…

“THAT WE LIVE IN A TIME OF UNPRECEDENTED CRISIS.”

Louis Simspon, WW II vet, is now weeping into Vendler’s shoes…

I MEAN…TALK ABOUT FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS!!

It brings the house down.  Furious applause.  Papers, books, flying everywhere.   Spontaneous suicides.

Alabama has never seen anything like this.

It’s unprecedented.

End of Part III.

Part IV will examine  everything else you’ve wanted to know about how American poetry got to be where it is but didn’t know how or what to ask.
STAY VERY FINELY TUNED…

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‘BAMA CONFERENCE, PART II: HELEN VENDLER, LOUIS SIMPSON

October 20, 2009 at 2:19 pm (Annie Finch, Charles Bernstein, David Ignatow, Delmore Scwartz, Foetry, Gerald Stern, Helen Vendler, Iowa Writers Workshop, Jorie Graham, Louis Simpson, Modern Poetry, Scarriet, T.S.Eliot, Thomas Brady, Uncategorized, Wallace Stevens)

BAMA PANEL II:  Foetry covered up in leaves, Vendler style.

The second in a series of 5 articles on the 1984 University of Alabama Poetry Conference by THOMAS BRADY.


..Helen Vendler,…………Louis Simpson,…….Simpson, Vendler and Bernstein

There were more fireworks at Hank Lazer’s 1984 Tuscaloosa Conference.

The distinguished poet Louis Simpson, steely, feet-on-the-ground, World War Two veteran, rebuked panelist Helen Vendler’s attempt to take the high road above the foetic mire.

Simpson to Vendler: “The status quo. If the establishment ever spoke, it would say exactly, I’m sorry, what you just said.”

What did Vendler say to elicit this response?

Vendler was obviously taken aback by Simpson’s remark.   She had just addressed what she termed the panel’s “ill feelings” (especially those of Bernstein’s) with a long speech.

Simpson’s reply must have felt like a slap in the face.

The distinguished poet Louis Simpson was like knight royal at the conference; he was the only male U.K. member, rather elderly, and he was also the best poet there.

In her speech, Vendler, the plumpish bird of Keats/Stevens plumage, played her ‘Tenured Queen of the Criticism Priesthood’ card, obviously an attempt to 1) restore order to the proceedings, 2) give dignity to the proceedings, 3) soothe hurt feelings as a mother might and 4) impress everyone.

Simpson’s remark was so wounding that all Helen of Harvard could make in the way of reply was that she had worked  hard all her life to make people realize Wallace Stevens was no snob, but a real man, and…and…if that wasn’t using the High Road of Criticism to challenge the status quo, then, what was?

Simpson, silent and unmoved, must have thought to himself, ‘Wallace Stevens?  Is that all you’ve got?’

All Bernstein had was T.S. Eliot.

Now all Vendler had was Wallace Stevens.

O O O O that Official Verse Culture-

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

 Vendler began her speech by juxtaposing the practice of high and beautiful Criticism with the practice of low and necessary Reviewing.

Contemporary reviewing, like the game of love, was bound to make people unhappy; rejected by a lover because you are not a beautiful blonde, rejected by a tenure committee because you are not Helen Vendler,  rejected by a prize committee because you are not Jorie Graham, are just parts of life and it’s best not to nurse grudges and throw stones at tenure committees and call them old fogies because, dear Charles, you just have to be patient, OK, sweetie?  What really matters is how we feel about the dead, with all personal jealousies and animosties removed, time and death fostering a love of what is true.

Foetry covered up in leaves, Vendler style.

“When we are all safely dead…”

“Temporary abrasiveness between prize committees & reviewers and the poets they’re judging or giving prizes to shouldn’t be confused with differences between poetry & criticism.”

Ah, but Helen, this sort of abrasiveness isn’t temporary.

It lasts forever.

One can hear the anger even in the playing of that blue guitar.

Vendler: “Milton cannot feel bad that Dr. Johnson didn’t think well of his poem, ‘Lycidas.'”

Stern: “He’s furious.”

End of Part II.

Part III will deal with multicultural wrath in Alabama.
Sound good? STAY EVEN MORE TUNED…

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25 YEARS ON: FOETICS DOMINATES 1984 ALABAMA POETRY CONFERENCE

October 19, 2009 at 12:40 pm (Alan Cordle, Annie Finch, Charles Bernstein, David Ignatow, Foetry, Gerald Stern, Helen Vendler, Iowa Writers Workshop, Modern Poetry, Scarriet, T.S.Eliot, Thomas Brady, Uncategorized)

BAMA PANEL I:  Charles Bernstein does NOT name the ‘Official Poetry Policemen.’

The first in a series of 5 articles on the 1984 University of Alabama Poetry Conference by THOMAS BRADY.


Charles Bernstein, Gerald Stern, and T.S.Eliot.

Gerald Stern: “Names…of the policemen.”

If this October 20, 1984 panel discussion had taken place in London or Paris, or one of America’s major universities, it might have struck a mythic chord in American Letters.  If poetry mattered more to the American public, we might still be discussing the poetry session which took place 25 years ago this month.

Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Burke, Louis Simpson, David Ignatow and Gerald Stern put on a show in sleepy Tuscaloosa, as post-modernism faced off against modernism in a throat-ripping dog fight

Modern poetry’s factions exploded in the flesh, as po-biz insiders erupted in a spontaneous public quarrel.

The more dignified members of the panel probably regret their trip to U. Alabama in those controversial days of the 1980s culture wars.   I’m guessing most of the participants would prefer this conference be forgotten, but we at Scarriet would hate to miss an opportunity  to see big players like Helen (of Coy) Vendler and (Prince) Charles Bernstein naked.

We want to thank Annie Finch for finding the transcript of the panel discussion–we would have missed it otherwise.

Scarriet will do a series of posts on the ‘Bama Panel, as we observe its 25th anniversary.  There’s too much great stuff here for just one post.

So here we are back in 1984.  When asked a bland question by the conference host:

“What do you perceive the function of poetry to be, Charles?”

Bernstein, the unemployed ex-editor of the magazine, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,  quickly got himself in a foetic tangle:

“[it] has to do with audiences, distribution, jobs, professional networks, things like that, which I think we tend to underrate.  It seems interesting to me that professional academic poets are making this particular issue apparent in this context…”

“I think it’s unfair not to realize that it’s actually poets who are the policemen of official verse culture in the United States.  And so from the perspective of a poet outside the academy and from the perspective of many people that I know who are not associated with academics, cannot get teaching jobs…”

Iowa Poetry Workshop teacher and poet Gerald Stern broke in:

“I don’t think you’re right, Charles. Who? What poets are the policemen? Would you like to name some poets who are the policemen?”

This was the defining moment of Bernstein’s career.  Had Bernstein “named names,” backing up his claim that ‘policemen poets’ were oppressively enforcing ‘official verse culture,’ he might never have found a job in academia.

Bernstein replied, “Yeah, I’ll give you a group, I’ll give you a group.”

Stern was a bulldog.  He would not let the matter drop.

“Names…of the policemen.”

Bernstein:  I’ll give you a group.  You want me to?  No, I’m not going to, I’m going to give you institutional groups, I’m going to say those poets, those poets who…

Stern: I’ve got the names of thirty-seven hard, fast Communists in the State Department…McCarthy never named one…

Hank Lazer, ‘Bama host, and friend of Bernstein, attempted to smooth things over by leading the discussion back to the ‘function of poetry’ question.  Lazer must have been thinking: ‘My conference is going to destroy the career of my friend!’

But Stern wouldn’t quit: “Would you tell me who the policemen are, please, Charles?  Would you give me a list of names?”

Bernstein answered foetically: “Yeah, I’m talking about those poets who are involved in the award networks, the creative writing programs, and the major reviews.”

Charles Bernstein was explicitly talking foetry 20 years before Cordle and Foetry.com.

The only difference between Cordle and Bernstein was Bernstein was not naming names–and not naming names was, to the poet Gerald Stern, an even worse McCarthyist offense.

Stern had won the Lamont Poetry Selection 7 years prior, when Stern was 52: judges Alan Dugan, Phil Levine, and Charles Wright.  Doors had obviously opened for Stern since then, leading to his job at Iowa, and his invitation to this conference.

Did Stern think Bernstein was going to name Dugan, Levine, and Wright?  Who did Stern think Bernstein was going to name?   Who did Bernstein have in mind back there in 1984?

In the end, after more McCarthyism talk from Stern, Bernstein saved his career and meekly mentioned one poet, a dead one:

T.S. Eliot.

Bernstein used another dead poet to save himself:

“I would give you as a central instance the person that William Carlos Williams called the great disaster for our letters, T.S. Eliot…”

Bernstein made a non-answer.

Eliot’s “officalizing role” as a poet is a truism.

Everyone knows Williams and Eliot shared many mutual friends, including Pound.   Williams and Eliot both gained credentials by their accentuated differences: Williams’  obscure career was made to seem more ‘popularly American,’ while Eliot was assured high-brow points in the comparison to the Jersey scribbler.  The whole matter is the very opposite of the played-out platitude in the po-biz press.  Rather than shedding crocodile tears for Williams, was Bernstein instead playing on the opposition between revolutionary secular Jew and conservative Christian?  This is more likely.

To the Eliot v. Willams charade,  Ignatow said, “You’re right there.”

Bernstein: “Thank you.”

Indeed.

End of Part I.

Part II will examine Helen Vendler’s role in the same 1984 panel.
 STAY TUNED…

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