PURE AND IMPURE, PART FIVE

July 13, 2022 at 6:27 pm (Allen Ginsberg, Byron, Charles Olson, Dana Gioia, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Louis Ginsberg, New Criticism, Paul Engle, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Shelley, Understanding Poetry, William Carlos Williams, William Logan)

SO we have established the early 20th century Modernists were “impure”—to the consternation of the Romantic and Victorian “purists.”

We have established this truism—with the help of Pulitzer Prize winning Robert Penn Warren, Southern Agrarian, New Critic, author of the essay published in John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review, “Pure and Impure Poetry.”

Warren was also co-author of the 20th century textbook Understanding Poetry— whose four editions dominated pedagogy for more than half of the last century, with the last fifty years seeing no change to that legacy except that no one talks about New Criticism, even though that is still what we are doing.

What is New Criticism? It’s nothing. It’s just a kind of vacant, rambling, dumbing-down, with half-finished arguments of the “proof of the pudding is in the eating” variety. New Criticism (and this will save you a lot of time) is empty discursiveness— with cynical gestures inserted towards “grounding in the text”—and this was, and is, the whole point of New Criticism. There’s no rationale or philosophy to it. It’s smoke, not fire.

The textbook, Understanding Poetry greeted every GI Bill recipient who went to college to learn poetry—when the arts changed forever and modern art became “establishment” after WW II. As recently as the 1930s, the American public looked at modern art and said “what is this crap?” as they were still admiring the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay and reading Plato and Keats in school.

The following has also been established: there is nothing different about the Modernist clique of Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (who all happened to be college buddies and ripped off Haiku as “radical” Imagistes in the early 20th century) and the New Critics—these two groups were allies, who saw the world in the same, opportunistic, unsentimental and impure manner. This is proven by the New Critic textbook Understanding Poetry’s explicit praise of Williams’ Red Wheelbarrow and Pound’s “In A Station at the Metro” and its trashing of Poe’s “Ulalume” with its purist rhyming. The first edition of Understanding Poetry launched in the 1930s—when “conservatives,” “purists,” and the vast majority of the American public, were still resisting the “new impure art.” The New Critics, despite paying lip service to Tennyson and Shakespeare, were fully on board with the “experiments” of Williams and Pound.

The next wave of the avant-garde, it is also established, the one associated with The New American Poetry 1945-1960, belongs entirely to the Williams/Pound sensibility of impurity—a seamless extension of what Pound was doing 50 years earlier and which the New Critics explicitly supported. The Red Wheelbarrow chapter in Understanding Poetry, which praises that poem as a “fresh” way of seeing, akin to looking through a “pin prick in a piece of cardboard” is similar to Charles Olson’s “field” theory reproduced in the New American Poetry 1945-1960. Louis Ginsberg, the poet who frequented nudist camps, belonged to the same social circles as William Carlos Williams, and it is well known that Williams and Louis’s son, Allen Ginsberg, mutually admired one another. New Critic John Crowe Ransom was known to be squeamish about homosexuality. Aesthetically, however, the Modernists of the early 20th century (the ones who hated Edna St. Vincent Millay), the New Critics, and the Olson/Duncan/Creeley/Ginsberg clique were one and the same, a bunch of very white, very male, “radicals,” whose code word, as articulated, by Robert Penn Warren, was “impurity,” in opposition to all that was aesthetically “pure,” i.e., uptight and old.

The cool kids went for the “impure,” obviously; the “pure” was easily mocked as prudish, small-minded, timid, and old-fashioned. It was no contest. No wonder the landscape shifted in a few short years. Both the “radical” Modernists and the “conservative” New Critics were hip to the Red Wheelbarrow, and naturally the “new” was knocking on the door.

That “door” happened to be this—and this sealed the deal. Paul Engle hired Robert Lowell (who left Harvard to study with John Crowe Ransom) to teach in his Writing Workshop. The Writing Program at Iowa (and soon the Creative Writing model would find a home everywhere) welcomed the “new” not just aesthetically, not just pedagogically, but practically. You, new poet, will be paid to teach the new, and we will get rid of all those professors teaching nothing but the old. You will be paid to be new. The new is guided by the New Criticism, which means the “new” can be whatever you want it to be. As long as you can get the academic, professional, New Critic patter down, the world is yours. There’s no need to be creative. And just like touring (1969—present) made the Rolling Stones rich, once they established their catalog (mostly 1965 to 1969) the template of Modernism (1913 to 1962) is all you need.

The door opened. Modernism has swept the field. Byron is in the bin.

Conservatives today, who complain, are ridiculed. “Go home, purists! This is our game, now.”

The New Critics are rejected as “conservatives” today, but this “rejection” is just because the New Critics only seemed to be conservatives in order to lead the radicals into the middle of the camp. If one calmly reads “Pure and Impure Poetry” and sees what that sensibility really is, or reads chapter after chapter of Understanding Poetry and its scattered inanities, chirping bright nonsense, like a car salesman’s pitch, one will get it. Here’s an old fart, a crackpot, winning the day by abetting the kids.

No one dares to defend “purity.” It’s so much easier to defend “impurity,” which is too cool to mock.

Even the “conservatives” today are helpless to resist. Dana Gioia finds the Red Wheelbarrow “scans” exactly like “To Be or Not To Be.” Unable to escape the maze of: Red-Wheelbarrow-approved-by-the-New-Critics, the dead white male, WC Williams is pathetically brought in by Gioia for the sake of the conservative cause. Williams is really Shakespeare!

William Logan, another “conservative,” astute enough to lampoon bad modern poets in his many brilliant reviews, rates Pound high above Shelley.

But this is how much radicalism has triumphed in poetry. All the conservative can do is read purist masterpieces in private. The public square belongs to the radical.

Even this “conservative” has been fooled. I am as guilty as the rest. I fell into Robert Penn Warren’s deception by using his terminology: “pure and Impure.”

I did so in this essay—the “pure/impure,” half-truth, fraud (“a little learning is a dangerous thing”) is now established coinage.

I defended the “pure” against the “impure.” Sucker!

For truly, it is Modernism, it is the Red Wheelbarrow, which is “pure.”

The Raven is a thousand times more “impure” than white petals on a black bough. One has diverse elements in service to something, the other has diverse elements in service to—nothing.

Prometheus Unbound by Shelley and Don Juan by Byron are extremely “impure.”

The theories of Pound and Olson, the aesthetic ideas of the New Critics, are “pure.” Pure bullshit. Olson is a bigger crackpot than Pound—and Pound failed as a pedagogue: the “musical phrase” arises out of a metronome (even Mozart used one) and talent, not because Ezra Pound demands it. And what does “make it new” even mean? What is “it?” Does Pound want originality? That’s not a new desire.

Poe said: The senses sometimes see too little, but they always see too much.

So yes, the impressionist symbolism of the Romantic narrows and “purifies” to a certain extent—which is what the Red Wheelbarrow was pathetically attempting.

Too much “purity” and narrowing finally leads to the death of poetry, just as too much expanding “impurity” does.

Purity and Impurity are stupid terms, finally, just as the Raw and the Cooked, are. We need to stop falling for this crap.

The only escape is a radical calling out of all the bullshit which for the last hundred years or so has hindered us—as we look at the past again, without selling it out in the name of the trendy new and its manifesto short-cuts. A hundred years is not that long, and the pertinent texts are relatively few. This doesn’t have to be overwhelming. We can do this.

And no one has to be a big baby about this, either. No one is saying we can’t also have our cakes and ale, our eclectic likes and dislikes, our politics, our sense of social justice, in every sense, as we call out the bullshit. No one is saying “the old is good and the new is bad,” or any such “pure/impure” nonsense. The only thing is: the bullshit will be called out.

Scarriet Editors

July 13, 2022

37 Comments

WAS THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY ANTHOLOGY A FRAUD?

June 14, 2022 at 12:37 am (Allen Ginsberg, Black Mountain, Charles Olson, Dana Gioia, David Lehman, Donald Allen, Donald Hall, Ezra Pound, Louis Ginsberg, New American Poetry 1945-1960, Peter Coyote, Robert Duncan)

The New American Poetry: as American as Cold War propaganda.

The New American Poetry 1945-1960, features, with the bios and the actual poems, a short preface by Donald Allen, the editor, who was, as far as I can tell, a former English teacher from Iowa and a Grove Press suit.

Mr. Allen is the man.

He makes every American, Cold War-era, avant-garde, poetry, gesture one could expect: half-truths, name-dropping, geography, it’s like jazz! (No formal, literary, apology needed.) It is what it is, daddy-o!

In his preface, Mr. Allen tells his readers it is difficult for him to put his anthology together, since so little of the poetry he includes is actually published. He all but admits the project is a fraud.

Anthologies reflect established taste. This anthology attempted to impose it, simply by offering to the public poets—except for Allen Ginsberg due to an obscenity trial—the public had not seen.

This anthology was not the Zeitgeist but the ghost of the Zeitgeist, the most insidious type of propaganda there is. The poetry was not the poets’—but Donald Allen’s.

The poets compiled by Mr. Donald Allen did not need to be good. It would be odd if they were good. The avant-garde act was the anthology itself—and this would only make sense if the poets were bad. Genius.

The first 60 pages are devoted to Charles Olson and Robert Duncan: semi-learned lunatic raving, which sets the table wonderfully, because it makes the average poets who follow in the volume seem good. More genius.

The mad house which greets the reader in the opening 60 pages of New American Poetry 1945 – 1960 also provided a wonderful opportunity for cult followers: just pretend to understand the rants of Charles Olson—the Black Mountain/Gloucester cult figure—and you, a nobody college student, who thinks Pound is cool in a comic book sort of way, now achieves sudden, secret-handshake, superiority. Still more genius.

The Top Poet of the Cool New Poetry Cult, of course, was Pound. One cannot read of the poets who gained a bit of notoriety in the period which this classic of Modernist poetry anthology covers, 1945 (when Pound was in a cage and close to being shot by soldiers who risked their lives fighting the Nazis) to 1960 (Pound won the Bollingen Prize in 1949) without scenes of religious-type visits by young poets to the hospital of the insane to see Pound (whose life was saved by the official interventions of his politically reactionary friend, T.S. Eliot.)

Ezra Pound (b 1885) himself wrote (translated, stole?) a few good poems (and there are a handful of good poems in Allen’s anthology) but good poetry isn’t the point—the gist is that Pound’s long work, the Cantos, affirms that one only need put in a great deal of educated effort towards a poetry project in any sort of haphazard manner one pleases. This is to be “modern,” allowing one to escape the inhibiting accomplishments of the past and bring oneself into the 20th century world of letters (there must be such a “world” after all) which must have its figures who spread influence—these of course cannot exist abstractly.

What I have stated truthfully and clearly in a negative manner, can—by looking at it from a slightly different angle—be flipped on its head, and seen in a positive light. I completely understand this.

Scholarship places Dante in Florence. Scholarship names Dante’s contemporary associates. Likewise, scholarship places Ginsberg in San Francisco. You see immediately where this is going.

The million anecdotes of Ginsberg—his connected friends will scribble poetry—in and around San Francisco, or New York, or any locale deemed significant, becomes scholarship, which, like a Visiting Deity, connects all and makes sacred all which my factual description offends, making me an outcast more damned than any clown who might strip naked in public poetry readings.

But to pursue the negative just a little further:

And so the question naturally arises, “who are the young, new, avant-garde poets?” I’m glad you asked, says the Iowa, avant-garde, anthologist, car salesman, hoping one doesn’t wonder what the old avant-garde can possibly have to do with the new avant-garde—if, in fact, avant-garde is a real word. Was Shakespeare or Keats avant-garde before they were published? Hush, don’t ask these questions.

For here is the real nub of the matter. The “avant-garde” or “new writing” label is of no use to those who simply love poetry, who swoon and marvel at verses Keats wrote at 20 (“I Stood Tiptoe,” “Sleep and Poetry”) and look at a little prose poem by Denise Levertov at 40 which they really want to like—but think, “well, okay, I guess this is pretty good…”

The ancient poets used all the same strategies which the “new” poets claim for themselves as “new,” whether it is suggestive imagery, metrical deficiency, a baroque manner, or plain, rude speech. To place a line of poetry in front of one’s eyes and to judge it as pleasing or not, has as much to do with the city of San Francisco or the adventures of Ezra Pound, as it does with Britney Spears or yesterday’s ball scores.

The fame of Shakespeare does not belong to the individual who was Shakespeare—who once upon a time also wrote in a “new” manner—Shakespeare is an excellence which the wider public knows and loves and understands as such. It has nothing at all to do with derobed individuals featured in Life magazine.

Here is how Donald Allen’s preface begins:

“In the years since the war American poetry has entered upon a singularly rich period. It is a period that has seen published many of the finest achievements of the older generation: William Carlos Williams’…Ezra Pound’s…H.D.’s later work culminating in her long poem…and the recent work of E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, and the late Wallace Stevens.”

Williams, Pound, H.D., Cummings, Moore, and Stevens all belonged to the same tiny, 1920s, circle of well-connected friends who met at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, or Harvard—all of them—except Stevens—“won” the annual “Dial Prize,” a large sum of money handed to them individually by a wealthy patron, Scofield Thayer, whom Eliot befriended at prep school (Eliot also “won” a “Dial Prize.”) Stevens and Williams belonged to a tinier group which included the poet Louis Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg’s dad). They were only read by, and published by, each other, until they were turned into syllabus copy in universities by a few well-placed academic carpet-baggers from the South (the Fugitive/New Critics, as it turned out). The preface continues:

“A wide variety of poets of the second generation, who emerged in the thirties and forties, have achieved their maturity in this period: Elizabeth Bishop [she knew Dial editor, Moore; taught at Harvard]…Robert Lowell…[Lowell left Harvard to study with the influential New Critics; was friends with Bishop; Lowell taught for Paul Engle at Iowa]…”

“And we can now see that a strong third generation, long awaited but only slowly recognized, has at last emerged.”

The anthology editor finds a “history” angle to puff his offering. I’m sure this patter (he was smart enough not to go on at length) impressed the undergraduates—and even impressed the graduate students (creative writing) who picked up the book. (A college book, purporting, dishonestly, to be an anti-college book.)

Back to the preface:

“These new younger poets have written a large body of work, but most of what has been published so far has appeared only in a few little magazines, as broadsheets, pamphlets, and limited editions, or circulated in manuscript; a larger amount of it has reached its growing audience through poetry readings.”

Then we get from Mr. Donald Allen a writ-large, avant-garde falsehood:

“As it has emerged in Berkeley and San Francisco, Boston, Black Mountain, and New York City, it has shown one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”

This “one common characteristic” is not a characteristic at all. 

The three generations of poetry to which Donald Allen refers in his preface lived and breathed academia and are known only because of academia; Pound and Williams were not read until they were put in a textbook, Understanding Poetry, edited by two New Critics, used everywhere in schools—four editions—from the 1930s to the 1970s. Were Shakespeare Keats, Poe, Byron, the Brownings, Tennyson, Dickinson, professors?

How can Donald Allen say the “one common characteristic” was a “total rejection” (“total”?) “of all (“all”?) those qualities typical of academic verse.”? What does this even mean? Which “qualities of academic verse?” Does he mean the use of words and their meanings?

I understand Donald Allen refers to “qualities” and not to plentiful associations within academia itself, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is what he wants to imply, as well—and neither implication holds any water. To be sexy, his new poets need to be (falsely) separated from academia. But alas. They were as academic as they could be. It was precisely like Charles Bernstein, a generation later, claiming to despise “Official Verse Culture” while constantly angling for it.

Did college students keep poetry afloat in the 19th century? No—that would be the 20th century.

Here is Peter Coyote remembering the Donald Allen anthology phenomenon:

“When I was in college, my friends and I (the black turtle-neck sweater, Camel cigarette crowd), were all fledgling writers and took writing and reading extremely seriously. Our “bible” was Don Allen’s New American Poetry 1945-60. We tore that book apart, reading everything, dog-earing pages, sharing quotes, and inhaling the works of Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure and others. When I left college I came to San Francisco State to pursue a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing, largely because Robert Duncan was teaching there.”

Allen’s “the one characteristic” assertion of anti-academia is without merit. The “one common characteristic” of Allen’s poets was not the rejection, but the embracing, of academia—whether support, influence, milieu, or “types of verse.”

He is telling an untruth, even if Donald Allen means that the poets in his anthology rejected time-honored poems which happened to be taught in school long after their authors had passed away. If this is what Mr. Allen meant, he doesn’t quite say it this way—and it would certainly not be in his best interest to say it this way. He wants to give the impression that his anthology’s poets belong to the “open road.”

It’s a myth, of course. The 20th century “open road” leads straight to graduate degrees in creative writing.

But Donald Allen knew exactly how he wanted to present his book. In a thorough, but brilliantly understated manner, he did just that, and as an editor of these poets he deserves kudos, if not cooties.

Another brilliant move was to put an American flag on the cover. America was a big and sexy place, especially in 1960, so this didn’t hurt. Only American poets were allowed in the anthology.

Mr. Allen also divides his anthology into five parts: Black Mountain, Black Mountain, Black Mountain, Black Mountain, and Black Mountain.

The essence of the five groups is captured here in a nutshell (from the preface, again):

“While both publication and instruction at Black Mountain College align Robert Duncan with the first group, he actually emerged in 1947-1949 as a leading poet of the second group, the San Francisco Renaissance…”

Some of Mr. A’s unknown poets met at Harvard— before they drifted to New York. Some went to college together in the Pacific Northwest—before they migrated to San Francisco. Some hitchhiked to Black Mountain (when they weren’t hitchhiking to see Pound) and some thumbed it back to Black Mountain. We are really not talking about a large nation, so much as a small clique, with a few women and one black man.

Young poets will drift about, but Mr. Donald Allen is clever enough to give his Grove Press flock various geographical identities, so he can assign a “San Francisco Renaissance” here and a “New York School” there, to the poets who were writing the kinds of poems which no one, except Grove press—and their own cool cat companions—wanted to read or publish.

Unpublished poets—imagine the nerd factor!—drifting about, with a few magnetic, cult-leader, mentors, Ginsberg, Olson, Duncan, keeping the classroom in line. Donald Allen made this mess seem renowned and sexy. It led to polished publications and decent jobs in academia.

Pure genius.

Nice job, Mr. Allen!

And screw you, Donald Hall, Dana Gioia and David Lehman!*

Scarriet Editors

Salem, MA June 11, 2022

*Donald Hall, with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, edited the “rival” anthology, The New Poets of England and America, 1957. Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” 1991, savaged the state of poetry in America as (just like Allen’s anthology) incestual, institutional, egotistical, and lacking critical vigor. David Lehman (BAP editor 1988 to present) is hated for those he leaves out. All are considered too mainstream.

12 Comments

MAN, THOSE DECADES IN AMERICAN POETRY WENT BY FAST

July 11, 2021 at 8:15 pm (Allen Ginsberg, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Delmore Schwartz, Dorothy Parker, E.E. Cummings, Edgar Allan Poe, Ellen Wheeler Wilcox, Ernest Fenollosa, Francis Scott Key, Franz Wright, Joel Barlow, John Ashbery, John Quincy Adams, John Whitcomb Riley, Lydia Sigourney, Philip Freneau, Robert Frost, Sidney Lanier, Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant)

BEN MAZER: POEM FROM HIS FORTHCOMING BOOK | Scarriet

1770-1780 Phillis Wheatley (On Virtue)

O thou bright jewel in my aim I strive
To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare
Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach.
I cease to wonder, and no more attempt
Thine height t’explore, or fathom thy profound.
But, O my soul, sink not into despair,
Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand
Would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head.
Fain would the heaven-born soul with her converse,
Then seek, then court her for her promised bliss.

Auspicious queen, thine heavenly pinions spread,
And lead celestial Chastity along;
Lo! now her sacred retinue descends,
Arrayed in glory from the orbs above.
Attend me, Virtue, thro’ my youthful years!
O leave me not to the false joys of time!
But guide my steps to endless life and bliss.
Greatness, or Goodness, say what I shall call thee,
To give an higher appellation still,
Teach me a better strain, a nobler lay,
O Thou, enthroned with Cherubs in the realms of day!

1780-1790  Philip Freneau  (The Indian Burying Ground)

In spite of all the learn’d have said;
I still my old opinion keep,
The posture, that we give the dead,
Points out the soul’s eternal sleep.

Not so the ancients of these lands —
The Indian, when from life releas’d
Again is seated with his friends,
And shares again the joyous feast.

His imag’d birds, and painted bowl,
And ven’son, for a journey dress’d,
Bespeak the nature of the soul,
Activity, that knows no rest.

His bow, for action ready bent,
And arrows, with a head of stone,
Can only mean that life is spent,
And not the finer essence gone.

Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way.
No fraud upon the dead commit —
Observe the swelling turf, and say
They do not lie, but here they sit.

Here still lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace,
(Now wasted, half, by wearing rains)
The fancies of a older race.

Here still an aged elm aspires,
Beneath whose far — projecting shade
(And which the shepherd still admires
The children of the forest play’d!

There oft a restless Indian queen
(Pale Shebah, with her braided hair)
And many a barbarous form is seen
To chide the man that lingers there.

By midnight moons, o’er moistening dews,
In habit for the chase array’d,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer, a shade!

And long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.

1790-1800  Joel Barlow  (The Hasty-Pudding, excerpt)

Ye Alps audacious, through the heavens that rise
To cramp the day and hide me from the skies;
Ye Gallic flags, that o’er their heights unfurl’d,
Bear death to kings, and freedom to the world,—
I sing not you.  A softer theme I choose,
A virgin theme, unconscious of the Muse,
But fruitful, rich, well suited to inspire
The purest frenzy of poetic fire.

Despise it not, ye bards to terror steel’d,
Who hurl’d your thunders round the epic field;
Nor ye who strain your midnight throats to sing,
Joys that the vineyard and the still-house bring;
Or on some fair your distant notes employ,
And speak of raptures that you ne’r enjoy.
I sing the sweets I know,—the charms I feel,—
My morning incense, and my evening meal—

1800-1810  John Quincy Adams (The Wants of Man, excerpt)

“Man wants but little here below,
Nor wants that little long.”
‘Tis not with me exactly so;
But ’tis so in the song.
My wants are many and, if told,
Would muster many a score;
And were each wish a mint of gold,
I still should long for more.

1810-1820  Francis Scott Key (Defence of Fort McHenry, excerpt)

O! say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

1820-1830  William Cullen Bryant  (Thanatopsis, excerpt)

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

1830-1840  Lydia Huntley Sigourney (Indian Names, excerpt)

Ye see their unresisting tribes,
With toilsome step and slow,
On through the trackless desert pass,
A caravan of woe;
Think ye the Eternal’s ear is deaf?
His sleepless vision dim?
Think ye the soul’s blood may not cry
From that far land to him?

1840-1850  Edgar Poe (The Raven, excerpt)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door –
Only this, and nothing more.’

1850-1860   Stephen Foster  (Old Kentucky Home, excerpt)

Weep no more, my lady,
Oh! weep no more today!
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky Home,
For the old Kentucky Home far away.

1860-1870  Walt Whitman (O Captain! My Captain! excerpt)

O captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.

But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red!
Where on the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

1870-1880   Sidney Lanier  (Hymns of the Marshes, excerpt)

Over the monstrous shambling sea,
Over the Caliban sea,
Bright Ariel-cloud, thou lingerest:
Oh wait, oh wait, in the warm red West,—
Thy Prospero I’ll be.

1880-1890  Ellen Wheeler Wilcox  (Delilah, excerpt)

She touches my cheek, and I quiver
I tremble with exquisite pains;
She sighs – like an overcharged river
My blood rushes on through my veins;
She smiles – and in mad-tiger fashion,
As a she-tiger fondles her own,
I clasp her with fierceness and passion,
And kiss her with shudder and groan.

1890-1900   Ernest Fenollosa  (Fuji at Sunrise)

Startling the cool gray depths of morning air
She throws aside her counterpane of clouds,
And stands half folded in her silken shrouds
With calm white breast and snowy shoulder bare.
High o’er her head a flush all pink and rare
Thrills her with foregleam of an unknown bliss,
A virgin pure who waits the bridal kiss,
Faint with expectant joy she fears to share.
Lo, now he comes, the dazzling prince of day!
Flings his full glory o’er her radiant breast;
Enfolds her to the rapture of his rest,
Transfigured in the throbbing of his ray.
O fly, my soul, where love’s warm transports are;
And seek eternal bliss in yon pink kindling star!

1900-1910   John Whitcomb Riley  (Little Orphant Annie)

You better mind yer parents, and yer teachers fond and dear,
An’ churish them ‘at loves you, ‘an dry the orphant’s tear,
‘An he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,
Er the gobble-uns ‘ll git you Ef You Don’t Watch Out!

1910-1920    Robert Frost  (The Road Not Taken)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

1920-1930    Dorothy Parker (A Very Short Song)

Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.

1930-1940 Delmore Schwartz (Sonnet: O City, City)

To live between terms, to live where death
Has his loud picture in the subway ride,
Being amid six million souls, their breath
An empty song suppressed on every side,
Where the sliding auto’s catastrophe
Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high
The office building rises to its tryanny,
Is our anguished diminution until we die.

Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
Of a voice speaking the mind’s knowing,
The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing
Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
When in the white bed all things are made.

1940-1950   E.E. Cummings  (Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town, excerpt)

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

1950-1960   Allen Ginsberg  (Howl, excerpt)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix;
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

1960-1970    Sylvia Plath  (Daddy, excerpt)

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

1970-1980    John Ashbery  (Daffy Duck in Hollywood, excerpt)

But everything is getting choked to the point of
Silence. Just now a magnetic storm hung in the swatch of sky
Over the Fudds’ garage, reducing it–drastically–
To the aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on
A Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover.

1980-1990     Dana Gioia  (My Confessional Sestina, excerpt)

Let me confess. I’m sick of these sestinas
written by youngsters in poetry workshops
for the delectation of their fellow students,
and then published in little magazines
that no one reads, not even the contributors
who at least in this omission show some taste.

1990-2000    Billy Collins  (Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey, excerpt)

Something will be missing
from this long, coffin-shaped room,
the walls and windows now
only two different shades of gray,

the glossy gardenia drooping
in its chipped terra-cotta pot.
And on the floor, shoes, socks,
the browning core of an apple.

Nothing will be as it was
a few hours ago, back in the glorious past
before our nap, back in that Golden Age
that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.

2000-2010   Franz Wright (A Happy Thought)

Assuming this is the last day of my life
(which might mean it is almost the first),
I’m struck blind but my blindness is bright.

Prepare for what’s known here as death;
have no fear of that strange word forever.
Even I can see there’s nothing there

to be afraid of: having already been
to forever I’m unable to recall
anything that scared me, there, or hurt.

What frightened me, apparently, and hurt
was being born.  But I got over that
with no hard feelings.  Dying, I imagine

it will be the same deal, lonesomer maybe,
but surely no more shocking or prolonged—
It’s dark as I recall, then bright, so bright.

2010-2020 Ben Mazer (It rains. One steps up through the haze)

It rains. One steps up through the haze
of tan and violet to the maze
of memory—misty where one stands,
twisting, separating strands.

The hour’s dim, and no one calls;
obligation mutely falls
through floors of mountains, origin:
anonymously you begin.

The blasted lantern of the nerves
lights up the sky, where starlight curves;
below, on earth, some few pass by
sheer constructs of identity.

They swirl and plaster every sense,
unto a law of difference:
not clear how long, or what direction,
subsume the nerves in their inspection.

The skeleton’s examination
evokes, incites, brief procreation:
filed away, some future date
astonished memories locate.

The seraphs of pedestrians
seep into violets, into tans,
breaching desire’s boulevards;
throw down the last of evening’s cards.

There is no way to formulate
identity’s raw nervous state:
it seems to slip into the world,
by stellar facts and atoms hurled

into the mythic stratosphere.
Ideas formulate the seer.
Genesis sans generation.
A change of trains at London station.

3 Comments

LAUREATES ARE CHAMPS

October 24, 2020 at 5:00 pm (Alexandre Dumas, Anthony Hecht, Aphra Behn, Bob Dylan, Charles Dickens, Dana Gioia, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Burke, Gore Vidal, H Bloom, Ibsen, J.D.Salinger, James Wright, Jean Cocteau, JK Rowling, Juvenal, Leigh Hunt, Livy, Maya Angelou, Mirza Ghalib, Nahum Tate, Oliver Goldsmith, Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Johnson, Sara Teasdale, Scarriet Baseball Poetry League, steven spielberg)

60 Best Fascination Creators images | phyllis diller, jacques tati, jaques tati
Sara Teasdale, lead off hitter for the Dublin Laureates

GAMES THREE AND FOUR:

LAUREATES 6 UNIVERSE 5

Robert Louis Stevenson pitches a little bit better than Harriet Beecher Stowe as the Laureates edge the Universe 6-5 in Game 3 to take a 3-0 series lead. Stevenson was hammered in his only other start in the post-season, 17-1, by Merv Griffin’s LA Gamers. Stowe came into the game with a 3-1 playoff record. The Universe took a 3-0 lead, as Stevenson surrendered 3 solo home runs in the first three innings to Delmore Schwartz, Anthony Hecht and Philip Levine. The Laureates climbed back into it, by playing small ball. In the fourth inning, Sara Teasdale walked, stole second, went to third, as catcher Maya Angelou’s throw went into center field, and scored on Mirza Ghalib’s sacrifice fly. In the fifth, Teasdale walked again, was caught in a run down trying to steal second, but made it all the way home when second baseman Bob Dylan’s throw went into left field. In the sixth, the Laureates’ JK Rowling bunted her way on, went to second when Stevenson’s slapped grounder happened to hit the third base bag, and both scored on a two base error—a dropped fly by Juvenal. The Laureates now led 4-3, but the sixth inning wasn’t over. Teasdale walked, and with two outs, no one having hit the ball hard against Beecher Stowe yet, Charles Dickens hit a long home run. With the Laureates now up 6-3, and their pitcher Stevenson having retired 12 straight, James Wright singled with one out in the seventh for the Universe. Delmore Schwartz then hit the next pitch for a home run (his second of the game and fifth of the post-season!) to make it 6-5, and that’s how it stayed, as Stevenson handed the ball off to Leigh Hunt, Edmund Burke and Livy, who got the final out, Delmore Schwartz on a swinging strike three.

LAUREATES 10 UNIVERSE 6

The Dublin Laureates, owned by Nahum Tate, sweep Steven Spielberg’s Phoenix Universe, four games to zero, to win the 2020 Scarriet Poetry Baseball championship. Trailing 6-5 entering the top of the ninth, the Laureates scored five runs off closer Jean Cocteau, who yielded his first runs of the playoffs. Henrik Ibsen, Delmore Schwartz, and the Universe’s starting pitcher, Raymond Carver, homered against the Laureates’ Samuel Johnson to give the Universe a 5-0 lead. Dana Gioia relieved Johnson and allowed a home run to Juvenal as the Universe lead grew to 6-0. J.D Salinger, the fourth pitcher for the Laureates, shut out the Universe for the final three innings, fanning six, and picked up the win. Sara Teasdale began the scoring for the Laureates in the sixth against Carver, when she singled in JK Rowling. Oliver Goldsmith then tripled in Teasdale and scored when Alexandre Dumas reached on an error. Dickens doubled in Dumas; Aphra Behn then doubled, to score Dickens, chasing Carver, and making the score 6-5. Gore Vidal, Oliver Sacks, and Harold Bloom of the Universe kept the Laureates from scoring through eight, as the Universe held onto a 6-5 lead. Jean Cocteau, who had been invincible for the Universe, started the ninth by walking Dumas and allowing an infield hit to Dickens. Aphra Behn then doubled off the wall to drive in two, as the Laureates now took the lead for good, 7-6. Dublin added three more runs in that fateful ninth, capped by a run scoring double by Sara Teasdale, as the Laureates prevailed, 10-6, to sweep the World Series.

Nahum Tate, 17th century poet and owner of the Dublin Laureates, known for writing and producing King Lear with a happy ending, gradually became the story of the season, as ridicule turned to respect, with his team’s increasing success—led by the pitching of Jonathan Swift and the hitting of Aphra Behn. The story of the Dublin Laureates finally eclipsed others—One, the collapse of Ezra Pound and the Berlin Pistols in the Glorious Division, (the Laureates winning the Glorious Division by a hair over the Florence Banners, led by Dante and Keats.) Two, Merv Griffin’s “Light Verse” Los Angeles Gamers winning the Peoples Division in a 3 team race by one game over the Kolkata Cobras with a pitching staff led by Tagore, Rumi, and Gandhi, and Chairman Mao’s Bejing Waves, managed by Jack Dorsey, and their starting crew of Voltaire, Lao Tzu, Lucretius and Rousseau. Three, Ben Franklin’s Boston Secrets (“America’s Team”) with the dominating Plato (25 wins) crushing the Society Division with a league-leading 95 wins (eliminated by the Wild Card Banners in the playoffs). Four, the Madrid Crusaders, and their “religious” team finishing first in the Emperor Division, with help from Handel, Beethoven and Mozart, over the Rome Ceilings of Milton, Michelangelo, Petrarch, and William Blake. And finally, the Phoenix Universe winning the Modern Division over John D. Rockefeller’s Chicago Buyers—who stuck with the team they had all year, including a pitching staff of Whitman, Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Paul Engle, while Steven Spielberg opened the bank to add players like Martin Luther King Jr. mid-season.

Congratulations to the Dublin Laureates!!
~~~
Champions, Glorious Division 91-63
World Series Champions, Playoff Record 8-2
Manager, Ronald Reagan
Motto “Luck is bestowed even on those who don’t have hands” –Mirza Ghalib

~~~
2020’s Starting Line up
1. Sara Teasdale 2b
2. Oliver Goldsmith cf
3. Alexandre Dumas lf
4. Charles Dickens 1b
5. Aphra Behn rf
6. Mirza Ghalib 3b
7. Boris Pasternak c
8. JK Rowling ss
9. Jonathan Swift, Blaise Pascal, Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, J.D. Salinger, Livy p

~~~

Ronald Reagan, in the champagne-soaked club house, after game 4, hugged by Teasdale and Ghalib,”What’s wrong with happy endings, again?”

1 Comment

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE BERLIN PISTOLS?

May 16, 2020 at 2:42 pm (Andrew Marvell, Ben Mazer, Dana Gioia, Ezra Pound, Livy, Martin Heidegger, Mary Angela Douglas, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Victoria, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Randolph Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Scarriet Baseball Poetry League, T.S.Eliot, William James)

General Snobbery | Film and Philosophy

The philosopher. Heidegger. Pitching coach for the Berlin Pistols in the Glorious League.

The Scarriet Poetry Baseball League is organized this way:

The Emperor Division (5 teams)   LAST WEEK

The Glorious Division (5 teams)   THIS WEEK

The Secret Society Division (5 teams)

The Peoples Division (5 teams)

The Modern Division (5 teams)

We already looked at the Emperor Division—two teams (11-5) with ancient and renaissance grandeur are tied for first; Napoleon’s Codes (Homer, Hesiod) and the Ceilings of Pope Julius II (Milton, Spenser), followed by the sturm & drang Goths of Charles X, featuring Goethe, Baudelaire, and Wilde, and these two teams are tied for last: the Broadcasters of Fellini, a modern unit of Jim Morrison, Rilke, Nabokov—and the Crusaders, owned by Philip of Spain, a devout team of Thomas Aquinas, Mary Angela Douglas, Bishop Berkeley, and St. John of the Cross.

WH Auden (Codes), Henrich Heine (Goths) and Aeschylus (Crusaders) lead the Emperor Division with five home runs.  Milton of the Ceilings is the ERA leader with 1.15.  Chauteubriand (Goths) and Kant (Codes) have 3 wins.

Some wonder why Auden is playing for Napoleon, but some teams hire anyone they think can help them win.

The season has just started, but the pitching of the Ceilings (11-5), led my Milton, is the story of the Emperor Division so far; they’re allowing about two runs per game, and that’s how you win titles.

~~~

The Glorious Division is dominated by British icons from Shakespeare’s time to our day.

On top of that division right now, with a 12-4 record, are the Carriages, led by Tennyson’s 7 homers and Andrew Marvell’s 3 wins and 1.30 ERA.

As you know, versifying skill means good defense in the field and the ability to get on base, popular works of fiction of any kind means power, and philosophical, transcendent, or critical acumen translates into great pitching. Marvell was more than just a great lyric poet; he was a politician, wrote long satires, and convinced the new government after Cromwell not to kill Milton.  Marvell is the ace of a pitching-rich ball club.

The Carriages, owned by Queen Victoria, with manager Prince Albert, pitching coach Joseph Priestly, are a tough, no-nonsense, team, marked by high seriousness. Look at their pitching staff: Marvel, Virginia Woolf, William Hazlitt, Henry James, Jeremy Bentham, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Lamb. (The more introverted Emily Bronte recently joined the Goths.) George Bernard Shaw has slammed 5 home runs off the bench, including two pinch hit game winners, giving the Carriages a tremendous boost; Longfellow has 4 round-trippers from the cleanup spot, and Robert Browning has also drilled four home runs batting fifth. Paul McCartney has 3 home runs and seven stolen bases at the top of the order. The Carriages are absolutely the team to watch in the Glorious Division.

The Laureates are owned by 17th century Poet Laureate of England Nahum Tate, who was born in Dublin. His most popular work was an edition of King Lear, re-written with a happy ending. This gives you an idea, perhaps, of the nature of this team. The Laureates are in second place in this division full of strong modern teams, and much of it is thanks to Livy’s strong work in the bullpen, and the offense led by Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, and Aphra  Behn (14 homers between them). Sara Teasdale has hit 3, and JK Rowling, 2.  The Laureates, who play in Dublin, are similar to London’s Carriages: popular writers tend to have pop in their bat, and the Laureates have plenty of that, and clutch hitting, too. Their starting pitchers are not overpowering, but manager Ronald Reagan and pitching coach Bobby Kennedy feel they can get the job done: Edmund Burke, Thomas Love Peacock, Samuel Johnson, and Leigh Hunt are all healthy and have pitched fairly well. The Irish-Anglo scientist Robert Boyle was picked up to help Dana Gioia and Livy in relief.

The Sun are in third place with a .500 record. They are owned by PM Lord Russell. Winston Churchill (!) is their manager. Lord Palmerston is their pitching coach. The Sun has a modern, worldly scope, fed by the pride of the British Empire, and could dominate this division if it ever clicks into gear. Ralph Waldo Emerson (if one looks deeply into his biography, Waldo is just as British as he is American) is their ace; John Stuart Mill will be out for a while, and John Ruskin will replace him as the no. 2 starter, Aldous Huxley is starter no. 3, followed by Thomas Carlyle. Bertrand Russell, Thoreau, Joshua Reynolds, and Christopher Ricks are in the bullpen. Basil Bunting has been an unlikely power source for the Sun, with 6 home runs batting eighth! Kipling, Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold are the big bats, but largely silent, so far.  Aside from two unusual games, totaling 60 runs, team Sun has not scored much.  They massacred the Pistols 27-3, and also beat them 23-18.

The Banners, of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the fourth place team at 7-9, have not been hitting much either, but their pitching staff may be the best in the whole league: Dante (Ficino filled in recently), Shelley, Virgil, Leonardo da Vinci, Boccaccio, Bronzino, Botticelli, and William Rossetti.  The Banners hitting features Keats (no home runs yet), Friedrich Schiller (5 homers to lead the team), and DG Rossetti (one home run) in the 3,4,5 part of the lineup. Ben Mazer has been a pleasant surprise for the Banners, with 3 homers from the lead off position.  The Banners will certainly give the Carriages a run for their money. Queen Victoria has to respect de’ Medici.

What’s wrong with Eva Braun’s Pistols?  They are 5-11, but it feels like they are doing much worse. The pitching coach, Martin Heidegger, has been under fire, as the team has allowed a whopping 121 runs.  The Pistols have been hitting, especially Joyce and Yeats (8 homers each!). T.S. Eliot, their ace, is 0-4, and has been getting worse with each start. Three of the Pistols’ five wins have come when William James has started, and James had to leave a tough 3-1 loss with depression. Pound is 1-1, and started the horrendous 27-3 loss; he didn’t want to come out, and people are wondering whether Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son who married Pamela Harriman, has the stuff to manage this team. It’s great that Randolph’s father is Winston Churchill, but do the Pistols need someone tougher to lead them?

Standings

Carriages 12-4  —75 runs, 57 against

Laureates 9-7  —82 runs, 76 against

Sun 8-8  —-95 runs, 73 against

Banners 7-9 —48 runs, 49 against

Pistols 5-11 —82 runs, 121 against

Leaders  WINS

Marvell 3-0, ERA 1.30  –Carriages
Shelley 3-1 ERA 1.78    –Banners

Hazlitt 2-1 ERA 3.09     -Carriages
W James 2-0 ERA 3.10  -Pistols
Woolf 2-2 ERA 3.65      -Carriages
Carlyle 2-1 ERA 4.42     -Sun

Livy 3-1 ERA 2.99   –Laureates   Relief Pitcher
Gioia 3-1 ERA 3.20 –Laureates   RP

C Bronte 2-0 ERA 2.33 -Carriages RP
B Russell 2-0 ERA 2.73 -Sun  RP

Leaders HRS

Joyce, Pistols 8
Yeats, Pistols 8

Tennyson, Carriages 7

Bunting, Sun 6

GB Shaw, Carriages 5
Dumas, Laureates 5
Dickens, Laureates 5
Schiller, Banners 5

Behn, Laureates 4
Longfellow, Carriages 4
Browning, Carriages 4

Scarriet Poetry Baseball News

 

Leave a Comment

SCARRIET POETRY BASEBALL: LAUREATES TAKE ON MERV GRIFFIN’S GAMERS

May 11, 2020 at 12:40 pm (Bob Hope, Bono, Casey At The Bat, Charles Bernstein, Charles Dickens, Dana Gioia, E.E. Cummings, Joe Green, John Lennon, Livy, Loren Michaels, Merv Griffin, Noel Coward, Poetry Baseball, Ronald Reagan, The Waste Land, Thomas Hood, Thomas Love Peacock)

HD wallpaper: baseball stadium, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Dodgers ...

Laureate fever is sweeping Los Angeles.

A small band of fans have gathered in an undisclosed location near Hollywood to vocally cheer on the Laureates, the “Irish” team of the Scarriet Poetry Baseball League.

A few supporters had signs saying, “We Want Yeats!  We Want The Beatles!”

One of the fans could be heard saying, “The Beatles were Irish, you know…”

John Lennon plays on the Tokyo Mist with Yoko Ono.

George Harrison plays on the Kolkata Cobras.

Paul McCartney plays on The Carriages, the team owned by Queen Victoria.

And William Butler Yeats plays with Ezra Pound on Eva Braun’s The Pistols.

Laureate fans wants these players on their team.

“It’s only fair!  We’ve got a good team, already, but we want to be better” said one young, brown-haired, brown-eyed, beauty, giggling.

~~~

Scarriet readers will recall that in game one of this series, in Los Angeles, the host Gamers of Merv Griffin, led 8-3 going to the ninth.

The Gamers then yielded 6 runs in the final frame—an Aphra Behn grandslam off bullpen ace Menander the winning blow. The Laureates had loaded the bases against relief pitcher Charles Bernstein.

The Dublin Laureates are owned by Dublin-born, 17th century English poet laureate, Nahum Tate.

Tate made a name for himself re-writing King Lear with a happy ending.

The Laureates are guided by popularity and kindly humor.

The Gamers and the Laureates, of the twenty five teams in the Scarriet Poetry Baseball League, are most representative of Light Verse and Satire, though the Laureates tend to be sagacious and moral; the Gamers are more playful and slapstick.

~~~

The motto of the Gamers, written by starting pitcher, Lewis Carroll, is “He thought he saw an elephant that practiced on a fife.”

The third baseman of the Laureates, Mirza Ghalib, the Urdu/Persian poet, is responsible for the Laureates motto: “Luck is bestowed even on those who don’t have hands.”

~~~

The muses are jealous of these proceedings; it is only with great difficulty, and with the assistance of the one muse who talks to us, Marla Muse, that we are able to broadcast our spotty coverage of full season play. This game was played weeks ago, but we’ll get the general news out to you, more or less, in a timely manner.

Marla Muse: All the muses covet this league. Only imagination itself is more dear.

Idealist philosophy gets news every day.  We just can’t possibly get it all.

~~~

The 19th Century English Thomas Love Peacock, who befriended the much younger Percy Shelley, and wrote satires of elaborate conversation (with no plot), liked, more than anything, as most writers did then, to walk the British Isles up and down, finding he could not write very well on long voyages aboard ship. Thomas Peacock is the Laureates’ game two starter.

Facing Peacock is the L.A. Gamers wry and fanciful poet, E.E. Cummings.

Cummings went to Harvard, and eloped with the wife of Scofield Thayer, owner of the revitalized Dial Magazine of the 1920s, which gave T.S. Eliot his prize for “The Waste Land.”  Scofield Thayer’s uncle, Ernest Thayer, wrote “Casey At The Bat.”

Ernest Thayer has no desire to play for Scarriet Poetry Baseball—which he thinks is silly.  But Merv Griffin is putting tremendous pressure on Thayer to play for the Gamers. We’ll see.

Alex Trebek is calling balls and strikes behind home plate here in Los Angeles, on a beautiful sunny day.

Ronald Reagan is the newly named manager for the Dublin Laureates.

The first base coach for the Laureates is Arthur Guinness and coaching at third for the Laureates is Bono.  

Bob Hope is the Gamers manager. Groucho Marx is the first base coach, and over at third for the Gamers is Moe Howard.

Here are the Lineups…!

The 1-0 Laureates have Sara Teasdale leading off, playing second base, followed by Oliver Goldsmith in center, Alexandre Dumas in left, at first base, Charles Dickens, Aphra Behn in right field, Mirza Ghalib holding down third base, Boris Pasternak, the catcher, JK Rowling at short, and Peacock, the pitcher.

The Gamers will try again to get their first win of the season with Noel Coward at short, Betjeman in center, Billy Collins in left, Eugene Ionesco, catching, Thomas Hood at second, W.S. Gilbert at first, Ogden Nash in right, Joe Green at third, and the pitcher, Cummings, batting ninth.

~~~

Bob Hope’s Gamers take a 4-2 lead into the eighth—Dorothy Parker, a new Gamer acquisition, pinch hitting for Cummings in the bottom of the seventh, ripped a double (as we see in this replay) off relief pitcher Dana Gioia to drive in Billy Collins and Thomas Hood, to break a 2-2 tie.

But here, in the top of the 8th, when Menander allows a single to the Laureates Teasdale, and walks Goldsmith, scattered boos and groans can be heard around the LA ballpark.

Lorne Michaels, the Gamers pitching coach, hops out of the dugout to talk to Menander:

“Go right after him, let’s get a double play ball,” Michaels says.

What else can he tell him? Menander complies, and Dumas hits one on the ground…but by the diving Noel Coward at short!!—a single. The bases are loaded!

Out comes Bob Hope, the Gamers manager. The call to the bullpen is going out to Christian Morgenstern!

Morgenstern earned a spot on the Gamers roster with this gem:

The Two Asses (Die Beiden Esel)

Not too enchanted with his life,
An ass once told his lawful wife,

“I am so dumb, you are so dumb,
The two of us should die, now, komm!”

But it should come as no surprise,
That they decided otherwise.

Charles Dickens greets Morgenstern with a double down the line in right, clearing the bases.

The Laureates, for the second straight game, have rallied in the late innings, as they take a 5-4 lead!

Charles Dickens, the most popular author of all time, claps his hands vigorously over his head as he stands on second base, Noel Coward and Thomas Hood a picture of disappointment on either side.

~~~

In the bottom of the ninth, the Laureates Gioia walks Joe Green on four pitches!

Livy, the closer for the Laureates, is warming up.

The pitching coach for the Laureates, Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, slowly walks out to the mound.

The Laureates Gioia stays in!

Gioia faces Gamers pinch hitter James Whitcomb Riley—who also walks!

The New Formalists are known for being too careful sometimes, Marla.

Marla Muse: That’s two walks in a row for Gioia. Reagan’s got to take him out now!  Come on Ronnie!

Out of the dugout comes manager Ronald Reagan. That’s all for Gioia.

In comes Livy, and he will face Tony Hoagland, pinch hitting for Coward.  There are two on and no outs for the Gamers!

Strike three!  Got him swinging…

John Betjeman, centerfielder for the Gamers is now at the plate (bit of an irony, Betjeman is a poet laureate of England—his amusing verses are why he signed with Griffin’s team)…

Oh! Livy’s fastball goes right by Betjeman, a swinging strike three.

Two down.

Here’s Billy Collins for the Gamers. Remember, Collins scored the go ahead run for the Gamers back in the seventh.

Livy delivers…

Billy Collins hits it sharply to Teasdale at second…she’s got it! Nice play! Over to Van Morrison (defensive replacement for Dickens at first,) and that’s it!

Laureates 5, Gamers 4!

The Laureates go to 2-0, as they prevail again in Los Angeles!

Dana Gioia earns the win. Livy picks up the save.

“Another one in the bag,” said a smiling Ronald Reagan after the game.

Is that really Ronald Reagan?  It’s difficult to see. Is that him?

Marla Muse: That’s him.

Tomorrow it will be James Tate of the 0-2 Gamers against the 2-0 Laureates Samuel Johnson.

This is Scarriet Poetry Baseball News.

 

Leave a Comment

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2017 SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100

January 4, 2017 at 2:30 pm (A.E Stallings, Alan Cordle, Alice Notley, Anne Carson, Ben Lerner, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Bollyverses, Cate Marvin, Charles Simic, Christopher Ricks, Chumki Sharma, Claudia Rankine, Cristina Sanchez Lopez, Daipayan Nair, Dan Chiasson, Dan Sociu, Dana Gioia, Derrick Michael Hudson, Don Share, Donald Hall, Donald J. Trump, Edgar Allan Poe, Eileen Myles, Frank Bidart, George Bilgere, Harold Bloom, Joe Green, John Ashbery, Joie Bose, Jorie Graham, Kay Ryan, Kushal Poddar, Laura Kasischke, Lyn Hejinian, Marie Howe, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Mary Oliver, Nikky Finny, Paige Lewis, Patricia Lockwood, Richard Blanco, Rita Dove, Robin Coste Lewis, Ron Silliman, Scarriet Hot 100, Sharon Olds, Stephen Burt, Stephen Cole, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, Yellowface)

Image may contain: 2 people, sunglasses

1 Bob Dylan. Nobel Prize in Literature.

2 Ron Padgett. Hired to write three poems for the current film Paterson starring Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani.

3 Peter Balakian. Ozone Journal, about the Armenian genocide, won 2016 Pulitzer in Poetry.

4 Sherman Alexie. BAP 2015 ‘yellow-face controversy’ editor’s memoir drops this June.

5 Eileen Myles. Both her Selected Poems & Inferno: A Poet’s Novel making MSM lists.

6 Claudia Rankine. Citizen: important, iconic, don’t ask if it’s good poetry.

7 Anne Carson. The Canadian’s two latest books: Decreation & Autobiography of Red.

8 Paige Lewis. Her poem “The River Reflects Nothing” best poem published in 2016.

9 William Logan. In an age of poet-minnows he’s the shark-critic.

10 Ben Mazer. “In the alps I read the shipping notice/pertaining to the almond and the lotus”

11 Billy Collins. The poet who best elicits a tiny, sheepish grin.

12 John Ashbery. There is music beneath the best of what this New York School survivor does.

13 Joie Bose. Leads the Bolly-Verse Movement out of Kolkata, India.

14 Mary Oliver. Her latest book, Felicity, is remarkably strong.

15 Daipayan Nair.  “I am a poet./I kill eyes.”

16 Nikky Finny. Her book making MSM notices is Head Off & Split.

17 Sushmita Gupta. [Hers the featured painting] “Oh lovely beam/of moon, will you, too/deny me/soft light and imagined romance?”

18 A.E. Stallings. Formalism’s current star.

19 W.S. Merwin. Once the house boy of Robert Graves.

20 Mary Angela Douglas. “but God turns down the flaring wick/color by color almost/regretfully.”

21 Sharon Olds. Her Pulitzer winning Stag’s Leap is about her busted marriage.

22 Valerie Macon. Briefly N.Carolina Laureate. Pushed out by the Credentialing Complex.

23 George Bilgere. Imperial is his 2014 book.

24 Stephen Dunn. Norton published his Selected in 2009.

25 Marilyn Chin. Prize winning poet named after Marilyn Monroe, according to her famous poem.

26 Kushal Poddar. “The water/circles the land/and the land/my heaven.”

27 Stephen Burt. Harvard critic’s latest essay “Reading Yeats in the Age of Trump.” What will hold?

28 Joe Green. “Leave us alone. Oh, what can we do?/The wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.”

29 Tony Hoagland. Tangled with Rankine over tennis and lost.

30 Cristina Sánchez López. “I listen to you while the birds erase the earth.”

31 Laura Kasischke. Awkward social situations portrayed by this novelist/poet.

32 CAConrad. His latest work is The Book of Frank.

33 Terrance Hayes. National Book Award in 2010, a MacArthur in 2014

34 Robin Coste Lewis. Political cut-and-paste poetry.

35 Stephen Cole. “And blocked out the accidental grace/That comes with complete surprise.”

36 Martín Espada. Writes about union workers.

37 Merryn Juliette “And my thoughts unmoored/now tumbling/Like sand fleas on the ocean floor”

38 Daniel Borzutzky. The Performance of Being Human won the National Book Award in 2016.

39 Donald Hall. His Selected Poems is out.

40 Diane Seuss. Four-Legged Girl a 2016 Pulitzer finalist.

41 Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf published his 2014 Pulitzer winner.

42 Sawako Nakayasu. Translator of Complete Poems of Chika Sagawa.

43 Ann Kestner. Her blog since 2011 is Poetry Breakfast.

44 Rita Dove. Brushed off Vendler and Perloff attacks against her 20th century anthology.

45 Marjorie Perloff. A fan of Charles Bernstein and Frank O’hara.

46 Paul Muldoon. Moy Sand and Gravel won Pulitzer in 2003.

47 Frank Bidart. Winner of the Bollingen. Three time Pulitzer finalist.

48 Frederick Seidel. Compared “Donald darling” Trump to “cow-eyed Hera” in London Review.

49 Alice Notley. The Gertrude Stein of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

50 Jorie Graham. She writes of the earth.

51 Maggie Smith. “Good Bones.” Is the false—“for every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird”— poetry?

52 Adrian Matejka. His book The Big Smoke is about the boxer Jack Johnson.

53 Elizabeh Alexander. African American Studies professor at Yale. Read at Obama’s first inauguration.

54 Derek Walcott. Convinced Elizabeth Alexander she was a poet as her mentor at Boston University.

55 Richard Blanco. Read his poem, “One Today,” at Obama’s second inauguration.

56 Louise Glück. A leading serious poet.

57 Kim Addonizio. Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life came out in 2016.

58 Kay Ryan. An Emily Dickinson who gets out, and laughs a little.

59 Lyn Hejinian. An elliptical poet’s elliptical poet.

60 Vanessa Place. Does she still tweet about Gone With The Wind?

61 Susan Howe. Born in Boston. Called Postmodern.

62 Marie Howe. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time is her latest book.

63 Glynn Maxwell. British poetry influencing Americans? Not since the Program Era took over.

64 Robert Pinsky. Uses slant rhyme in his translation of Dante’s terza rima in the Inferno.

65 David Lehman. His Best American Poetry (BAP) since 1988, chugs on.

66 Dan Sociu. Romanian poet of the Miserabilism school.

67 Chumki Sharma. The great Instagram poet.

68 Matthew Zapruder. Has landed at the N.Y. Times with a poetry column.

69 Christopher Ricks. British critic at Boston University. Keeping T.S. Eliot alive.

70 Richard Howard. Pinnacle of eclectic, Francophile, non-controversial, refinement.

71 Dana Gioia. Poet, essayist.  Was Chairman of NEA 2003—2009.

72 Alfred Corn. The poet published a novel in 2014 called Miranda’s Book.

73 Jim Haba. Noticed by Bill Moyers. Founding director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

74 Hessamedin Sheikhi. Young Iranian poet translated by Shohreh (Sherry) Laici

75 Pablo Larrain. Directed 2016 film Neruda.

76 Helen Vendler. Wallace Stevens champion. Helped Jorie Graham.

77 Kenneth Goldsmith. Fame for poetry is impossible.

78 Cate Marvin. Oracle was published by Norton in 2015.

79 Alan Cordle. Still the most important non-poet in poetry.

80 Ron Silliman. Runs a well-known poetry blog. A Bernie man.

81 Natalie Diaz.  Her first poetry collection is When My Brother Was An Aztec.

82 D.A. Powell. Lives in San Francisco. His latest book is Repast.

83 Edward Hirsch. Guest-edited BAP 2016.

84 Dorianne Laux. Will always be remembered for “The Shipfitter’s Wife.”

85 Juan Felipe Herrera. Current Poet Laureate of the United States.

86 Patricia Lockwood. Her poem “Rape Joke” went viral in 2013 thanks to Twitter followers.

87 Kanye West. Because we all know crazy is best.

88 Charles Bernstein. Hates “official verse culture” and PWCs. (Publications with wide circulation.)

89 Don Share. Editor of Poetry.

90 Gail Mazur. Forbidden City is her seventh and latest book.

91 Harold Bloom. Since Emerson, Henry James, and T.S. Eliot are dead, he keeps the flame of Edgar Allan Poe hatred alive.

92 Alan Shapiro.  Life Pig is his latest collection.

93 Dan Chiasson. Reviews poetry for The New Yorker.

94 Robert Hass. “You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.”

95 Maurice Manning.  One Man’s Dark is a “gorgeous collection” according to the Washington Post.

96 Brian Brodeur. Runs a terrific blog: How A Poem Happens, of contemporary poets.

97 Donald Trump. Tweets-in-a-shit-storm keeping the self-publishing tradition alive.

98 Ben Lerner. Wrote the essay “The Hatred of Poetry.”

99 Vidyan Ravinthiran. Editor at Prac Crit.

100 Derrick Michael Hudson. There’s no fame in poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

22 Comments

SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100 IS HERE AGAIN!!!

October 5, 2016 at 1:27 pm (Alan Cordle, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bollyverses, Carol Muske, Christopher Ricks, Cole Swensen, Daipayan Nair, Dana Gioia, David Lehman, Edward Hirsch, Eileen Myles, George Bilgere, Joie Bose, Jorie Graham, Kushal Poddar, Laura Kasischke, Lori Desrosiers, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Matthew Zapruder, Nalini Priyadarshni, New Criterion, Philip Nikolayev, Rita Dove, Ron Silliman, Sharon Olds, Stephen Burt, Stephen Cole, Stephen Sturgeon, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Valerie Macon, W.S. Merwin, Warsan Shire, William Logan)

Image result for masked ball in painting

1. Matthew Zapruder: Hurricane Matthew. Hired by the Times to write regular poetry column. Toilet papered the house of number 41.

2. Edward Hirsch: Best American Poetry 2106 Guest Editor.

3. Christopher Ricks: Best living critic in English? His Editorial Institute cancelled by bureaucrats at Boston University.

4. Joie Bose: Living Elizabeth Barrett Browning of India.

5. Sherman Alexie: Latest BAP editor. Still stung from the Chinese poet controversy.

6. Jorie Graham: Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard

7. W.S Merwin: Migration: New and Selected Poems, 2005

8. Terrance Hayes: “I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps.”

9. George Bilgere: “I consider George Bilgere America’s Greatest Living Poet.” –Michael Heaton, The Plain Dealer

10. Billy Collins: Interviewed Paul McCartney in 2014

11. Stephen Cole: Internet Philosopher poet. “Where every thing hangs/On the possibility of understanding/And time, thin as shadows,/Arrives before your coming.”

12. Richard Howard: National Book Award Winner for translation of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1984.

13. William Logan: The kick-ass critic. Writes for the conservative New Criterion.

14. Sharon Olds: Stag’s Leap won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2012.

15. Nalini Priyadarshni: “Denial won’t redeem you/Or make you less vulnerable/My unwavering love just may.”  Her new book is Doppelgänger in my House.

16. Stephen Dobyns: “identical lives/begun alone, spent alone, ending alone”

17. Kushal Poddar: “You wheel out your mother’s latte silk/into the picnic of moths.” His new book is Scratches Within.

18. Jameson Fitzpatrick: “Yes, I was jealous when you threw the glass.”

19. Marilyn Chin: “It’s not that you are rare/Nor are you extraordinary//O lone wren sobbing on the bodhi tree”

20. E J Koh: “I browsed CIA.gov/for jobs”

21. Cristina Sánchez López: “If the moon knows dying, a symbol of those hearts, which, know using their silence as it was an impossible coin, we will have to be like winter, which doesn’t accept any cage, except for our eyes.”

22. Mark Doty: His New and Selected won the National Book Award in 2008.

23. Meghan O’ Rourke: Also a non-fiction writer, her poetry has been published in the New Yorker.

24. Alicia Ostriker: Born in Brooklyn in 1937.

25. Kay Ryan: “One can’t work by/ lime light.”

26. A.E. Stallings: Rhyme, rhyme, rhyme.

27. Dana Gioia: Champions Longfellow.

28. Marilyn Hacker: Antiquarian bookseller in London in the 70s.

29. Mary Oliver: “your one wild and precious life”

30. Anne Carson: “Red bird on top of a dead pear tree kept singing three notes and I sang back.”

31. Mary Jo Bang: “A breeze blew a window open on a distant afternoon.”

32. Forrest Gander: “Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie/who loves the freezing trees/but cannot save them.”

33. Stephen Burt: Author of Randall Jarrell and his Age. (2002)

34. Ann Lauterbach: Her latest book is Under the Sign (2013)

35. Richard Blanco: “One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes/tired from work”

36. Kenneth Goldsmith: “Humidity will remain low, and temperatures will fall to around 60 degrees in many spots.”

37. Rita Dove: Her Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry is already 5 years old.

38. Stephen Sturgeon: “blades of the ground feathered black/in moss, in the sweat of the set sun”

39. Marjorie Perloff: Her book, Unoriginal Genius was published in 2010.

40. Kyle Dargan: His ghazal, “Points of Contact,” published in NY Times: “He means sex—her love’s grip like a fist.”

41. Alan Cordle: Foetry.com and Scarriet founder.

42. Lyn Hejinian: “You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon.”

43. Stephen Dunn: Lines of Defense: Poems came out in 2014.

44. Ocean Vuong: “Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god/to give it back”

45. Marie Howe: “I am living. I remember you.”

46. Vanessa Place: Controversial “Gone with the Wind” tweets.

47. Helen Vendler: Reviewed Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom, editor Ben Mazer, in the NYR this spring.

48. Martin Espada: Vivas To Those Who Have Failed is his new book of poems from Norton.

49. Carol Muske-Dukes: Poet Laureate of California from 2008 to 2011.

50. Sushmita Gupta: Poet and artist. Belongs to the Bollyverses renaissance. Sushness is her website.

51. Brad Leithauser: A New Formalist from the 80s, he writes for the Times, the New Criterion and the New Yorker.

52. Julie Carr: “Either I loved myself or I loved you.”

53. Kim Addonizio: Tell Me (2000) was nominated for a National Book Award.

54. Glynn Maxwell: “This whiteness followed me at the speed of dawn.”

55. Simon Seamount: His epic poem on the lives of philosophers is Hermead.

56. Maggie Dietz: “Tell me don’t/ show me and wipe that grin/ off your face.”

57. Robert Pinsky: “When you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.”

58. Ha Jin: “For me the most practical thing to do now/is not to worry about my professorship.”

59. Peter Gizzi: His Selected Poems came out in 2014.

60. Mary Angela Douglas: “the steps you take in a mist are very small”

61. Robyn Schiff: A Woman of Property is her third book.

62. Karl Kirchwey: “But she smiled at me and began to fade.”

63. Ben Mazer: December Poems just published. “Life passes on to life the raging stars”

64. Cathy Park Hong: Her battle cry against Ron Silliman’s reactionary Modernists: “Fuck the avant-garde.”

65. Caroline Knox: “Because he was Mozart,/not a problem.”

66. Henri Cole: “There is no sun today,/save the finch’s yellow breast”

67. Lori Desrosiers: “I wish you were just you in my dreams.”

68. Ross Gay: Winner of the 2016 $100,000 Kingsley Tufts award.

69. Sarah Howe: Loop of Jade wins the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize.

70. Mary Ruefle: Published by Wave Books. A favorite of Michael Robbins.

71. CA Conrad: His blog is (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals.

72. Matvei Yankelevich: “Who am I alone. Missing my role.”

73. Fanny Howe: “Only that which exists can be spoken of.”

74. Cole Swensen: “Languor. Succor. Ardor. Such is the tenor of the entry.”

75. Layli Long Soldier: “Here, the sentence will be respected.”

76. Frank Bidart: Student and friend of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

77. Michael Dickman: “Green sky/Green sky/Green sky”

78. Deborah Garrison: “You must praise the mutilated world.”

79. Warsan Shire: “I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes/On my face they are still together.”

80. Joe Green: “I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.”

81. Joan Houlihan: Took part in Franz Wright Memorial Reading in Harvard Square in May.

82. Frannie Lindsay: “safe/from even the weak sun’s aim.”

83. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright: Translates contemporary German poetry.

84. Noah Cicero: This wry, American buddhist poet’s book is Bi-Polar Cowboy.

85. Jennifer Barber: “The rose nude yawns, rolls over in the grass,/draws us closer with a gorgeous laugh.”

86. Tim Cresswell: Professor of history at Northeastern and has published two books of poems.

87. Thomas Sayers Ellis: Lost his job at Iowa.

88. Valerie Macon: Surrendered her North Carolina Poet Laureate to the cred-meisters.

89: David Lehman: Best American Poetry editor hates French theory, adores tin pan alley songs, and is also a poet .”I vote in favor/of your crimson nails”

90: Ron Silliman: Silliman’s Blog since 2002.

91: Garrison Keillor: The humorist is also a poetry anthologist.

92: Tony Hoagland: “I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain/or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade”

93. Alfred Corn: One of the most distinguished living poets.

94. Philip Nikolayev: He values spontaneity and luck in poetry, logic in philosophy.

95. Laura Kasischke: Read her poem, “After Ken Burns.”

96. Daipayan Nair: “I was never a part of the society. I have always created one.”

97. Claudia Rankine: Her prize-winning book is Citizen.

98. Solmaz Sharif: Her book Look is from Graywolf.

99. Morgan Parker: Zapruder published her in the NY Times.

100. Eileen Myles: She makes all the best-of lists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5 Comments

YES! ANOTHER SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100!!!

September 3, 2015 at 6:15 pm (A.E Stallings, Amy King, Anne Carson, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Blog:Harriet, Camille Paglia, Carol Ann Duffy, Carol Muske, Cate Marvin, Cathy Park Hong, Charles Bernstein, Charles Wright, Claudia Rankine, Cole Swensen, Czeslaw Milosz, Dana Gioia, David Biespiel, David Lehman, Derek Walcott, Don Share, Eileen Myles, Emily Dickinson, Erin Belieu, Fred Seidel, George Bilgere, Harold Bloom, Heather McHugh, Helen Vendler, Henry Gould, Joe Green, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Kay Ryan, Kevin Young, Laura Kasischke, Louise Gluck, Lucie Brock-Broido, Lyn Hejinian, Margaret Atwood, Marie Howe, Marilyn Chin, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Doty, Mary Oliver, Matthew Dickman, Michael Robbins, Natasha Trethewey, Patricia Lockwood, Patricia Smith, Paul Muldoon, Philip Nikolayev, Rae Armantrout, Richard Howard, Richard Wilbur, Rita Dove, Robert Archambeau, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Robert Hass, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Pinsky, Ron Silliman, Seth Abramson, Sharon Olds, Sherman Alexie, Simon Armitage, Stephen Burt, Stephen Dunn, Susan Howe, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Timothy Donnelly, Tony Hoagland, Valerie Macon, W.S. Merwin, William Logan, X.J. Kennedy, Yusef Komunyakaa)
Tags: , , , , ,

image

1. Vanessa Place —The High Creator does not create.

2. Kenneth Goldsmith —Death to the “creative” once and for all.

3. Simon Armitage —Best known for 9/11 poem, wins Oxford Poetry Professorship

4. A.E. Stallings —Lost the Oxford. World is still waiting for a good New Formalist poet.

5. John Ashbery —Doesn’t need to be good. Unlike New Formalists, his content and form agree.

6. Marjorie Perloff —Must confront this question: is the “non-creative” nearly racist by default?

7. Ron Silliman —Keeps tabs on the dying. Burned by the Avant Racism scandal.

8. Stephen Burt —Stephanie goes to Harvard.

9. Rita Dove —We asked her about Perloff; she laughed. No intellectual pretense.

10. Claudia Rankine —Social confrontation as life and death.

11. Juan Felipe Herrera —New U.S. Poet Laureate. MFA from Iowa. Farm workers’ son.

12. William Logan —“Shakespeare, Pope, Milton by fifth grade.” In the Times. He’s trying.

13. Patricia Lockwood —“Rape Joke” went Awl viral.

14. Lawrence Ferlinghetti —At 96, last living Beat.

15. Richard Wilbur —At 94, last living Old Formalist.

16. Don Share —Fuddy-duddy or cutting edge? It’s impossible to tell with Poetry.

17. Valerie Macon —Good poet. Hounded from NC Laureate job for lacking creds.

18. Helen Vendler —New book of essays a New Critical tour de force. Besotted with Ashbery and Graham.

19. Cathy Park Hong —Fighting the racist Avant Garde.

20. David Lehman —As the splintering continues, his BAP seems less and less important.

21. Billy Collins —His gentle historical satire is rhetoric nicely fitted to free verse.

22. David Orr —Common sense critic at the Times.

23. Frank Bidart —Student of Lowell and Bishop, worked with James Franco. Drama. Confessionalism.

24. Kevin Coval —Co-editor of Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.

25. Philip Nikolayev —Globe-trotting translator, editor, poet.

26. Ben Mazer —Neo-Romantic. Has advanced past Hart Crane.

27. Amy King —–Hates mansplaining. 

28. Sharon Olds —Best living female poet?

29. Louise Gluck —Her stock is quietly rising.

30. Jorie Graham —Her Collected has landed.

31. George Bilgere —If you like Billy Collins…and what’s wrong with that?

32. Garrison Keillor —Is he retiring?

33. Kent Johnson —Is his Prize List so quickly forgotten?

34. David Biespiel —One of the villagers trying to chase Conceptualism out of town.

35. Carol Ann Duffy —The “real” Poet Laureate—she’s Brih-ish.

36. Cate Marvin —Poet who leads the VIDA hordes.

37. Lyn Hejinian —The best Language Poet?

38. Dan Chiasson —New Yorker house critic.

39. Michael Robbins —As with Logan, we vastly prefer the criticism to the poetry.

40. Joe Green —His Selected, The Loneliest Ranger, has been recently published.

41. Harold Bloom —The canonizer.

42. Dana Gioia —The best of New Formalism.

43. Seth Abramson —Meta-Modernism. That dog won’t hunt.

44. Henry Gould —Better at responding than asserting; reflecting the present state of Criticism today.

45. W.S. Merwin —Knew Robert Graves—who recommended mushroom eating (yea, that kind of mushroom) as Oxford Poetry Professor in the 60s.

46. Marilyn Chin —Passionate lyricist of “How I Got That Name.”

47. Anne Carson —“The Glass Essay” is a confessional heartbreak.

48. Terrence Hayes —Already a BAP editor.

49. Timothy Steele —Another New Formalist excellent in theorizing—but too fastidious as a poet.

50. Natasha Trethewey —Was recently U.S. Poet Laureate for two terms.

51. Tony Hoagland —Hasn’t been heard from too much since his tennis poem controversy.

52. Camille Paglia —Aesthetically, she’s too close to Harold Bloom and the New Critics.

53. William Kulik —Kind of the Baudelaire plus Hemingway of American poetry. Interesting, huh?

54. Mary Oliver —Always makes this list, and we always mumble something about “Nature.”

55. Robert Pinsky —He mentored VIDA’s Erin Belieu.

56. Alan Cordle —We will never forget how Foetry.com changed the game.

57. Cole Swensen –A difficult poet’s difficult poet.

58. Charles Bernstein —One day Language Poetry will be seen for what it is: just another clique joking around.

59. Charles Wright —Pulitzer in ’98, Poet Laureate in ’14.

60. Paul Muldoon —New Yorker Nights

61. Geoffrey Hill —The very, very difficult school.

62. Derek Walcott —Our time’s Homer?

63. Janet Holmes —Program Era exemplar.

64. Matthew Dickman —The youth get old. Turning 40.

65. Kay Ryan —Are her titles—“A Ball Rolls On A Point”—better than her poems?

66. Laura Kasischke —The aesthetic equivalent of Robert Penn Warren?

67. Nikki Finney —NAACP Image Award

68. Louis Jenkins —His book of poems, Nice Fish, is a play at the American Repertory Theater this winter.

69. Kevin Young —A Stenger Fellow who studied with Brock-Broido and Heaney at Harvard

70. Timothy Donnelly —His Cloud Corporation made a big splash.

71. Heather McHugh —Her 2007 BAP guest editor volume is one of the best.

72. D.A. Powell —Stephen Burt claims he is original and accessible to an extraordinary degree.

73. Eileen Myles —We met her on the now-defunct Blog Harriet Public Form.

74. Richard Howard —Pulitzer-winning essayist, critic, translator and poet

75. Robert Hass —U.S. Poet Laureate in the 90s, a translator of haiku and Milosz.

76. Rae Armantrout —Emily Dickinson of the Avant Garde?

77. Peter Gizzi —His Selected, In Defense of Nothing, came out last year.

78. Fanny Howe —Is it wrong to think everything is sacred? An avant-garde Catholic.

79. Robert Archambeau —His blog is Samizdat. Rhymes with Scarriet.

80. X.J. Kennedy —Keeping the spirit of Frost alive.

81. Robert Polito —Poetry man.

82. David Ferry —Classical poetry translator.

83. Mark Doty —A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

84. Al Filreis  —Co-founder of PennSound

85. Frederick Seidel —Has been known to rhyme malevolence with benevolence.

86. Sherman Alexie —Is taught in high school. We wonder how many on this list are?

87. Marie Howe —Margaret Atwood selected her first book for a prize.

88. Carol Muske-Dukes —In recent Paris Review interview decried cutting and pasting of “Unoriginal Genius.”

89. Martha Ronk —In the American Hybrid anthology from Norton.

90. Juliana Spahr —Has a PhD from SUNY Buffalo. Hates “capitalism.”

91. Patricia Smith —Four-time winner of the National Poetry Slam.

92. Dean Young —His New & Selected, Bender, was published in 2012.

93. Jennifer Knox —Colloquial and brash.

94. Alicia Ostriker —“When I write a poem, I am crawling into the dark.”

95. Yusef Komunyakaa —Known for his Vietnam poems.

96. Stephen Dunn —His latest work is Lines of Defense: Poems.

97. Thomas Sayer Ellis —Poet and photographer.

98. Carolyn Forche —Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University.

99. Margaret Atwood —Poet, novelist, and environmental activist.

100. Forrest Gander —The Trace is his latest.

 

 

 

 

 

4 Comments

THE WORK OF HUNTERS IS ANOTHER THING

December 8, 2014 at 1:36 pm (Dan Chiasson, Dana Gioia, Edna Millay, Ezra Pound, Garrison Keillor, Hugh Kenner, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, Olena K. Davis, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath)
Tags: , , ,

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.

“To please the yelping dogs” ends a thought, begins an iambic pentameter line, but doesn’t finish that line, as the poet’s argument resumes in the middle: “the gaps, I mean.”

In Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall;” the poet describes the gaps in the wall which occur, strangely, because of freezing (“frozen ground-swell”) —what is ‘frozen’ moves.

The lines, as a whole, in Frost’s poem, move languidly, argumentatively, conversationally, (“The gaps, I mean”)—in case you didn’t get it, this is what I mean; the poem, flying in the face of the canon, dares to be informal, informality as slack as a poem may get: obscurity is too slack.

“I mean” is the opposite of obscurity, the poet not ashamed to add words to make himself understood better. But in pentameter!

Charm, even of the most insouciant kind, like everything else, requires context, and the canon nicely provides it. That’s what the Tradition is for: to make things more interesting as we play handball against it, not to glumly tower above us.

Pure difficulty, pure obscurity, is never charming.

I pray, before I go to bed each night, that contemporary poets understand this.

And so here is the great crossroads of Modern Poetry in this great Frost poem of the early 20th century; two types of slackness, two roads:

The informal, which bends a few rules.

And the obscure, which breaks them all.

One leads to pleasant informality, to modern charm; the other to stupid oblivion, to slack shit.

“To please the yelping dogs” is a phrase that stays in our memory and we think for a simple and mysterious reason: to us it represents that sensual, animal life which pleases those who don’t care for poetry. “Yelping dogs” perfectly describes a life without refinement, without soul, without philosophy, without poetry. Frost uses the phrase in his poem to indicate what he does not mean.

Most people are satisfied with the “yelping dog” life, and that is all they need. Everyone needs some “yelping dog” life, but those who enjoy nothing else should not stray anywhere near poetry; they will hate its simplicity, and they will spoil it. For “yelping dog” may apply to poetry, as it may apply to everything else: an eager, noisy, social, chaotic, spirited, life can, and will, invade everything, even the so-called fine arts; it can overrun them; few are able to resist the “yelping dog” life, which is why genius and truly great art is rare. How, for instance, did the wonderful poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay get trampled? Why is “yelping” poetry, rather than beautiful poetry, critically embraced today?

Dana Gioia, reviewing Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems, wrote: “Keillor’s tone is obviously designed to rile anyone who holds the conventionally high critical opinion of Moore and Plath (and the conventionally low one of Millay).”

Think on it! The “conventionally high critical opinion of Moore and Plath and the conventionally low one of Millay.”

This critical ranking is true, and it happened in a few years—Millay tumbled from her perch in the 1930s.

Except for “Daddy,”—the rhyme-song of wife-anguish which emerged from Plath as she suicidally removed herself from the world of John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review, the magazine of proper Modernism (be as dull and obscure as you possibly can)—the poems of Plath and Moore do not amount to very much, while Millay’s poems rock the house down (What Lips My Lips Have Kissed and Where and Why; Dirge Without Music; And You As Well Must Die, Beloved Dust; I Being Born A Woman and Distressed; If I Should Learn In Some Quite Casual Way); Moore and Plath present difficulty for its own sake.

Reading Marianne Moore’s poetry (“all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however…”) is like peering without understanding at the complexity of a car’s engine; reading Millay’s verse is like driving that car.

So how did this happen? How did Moore and Plath gain ascendance over Millay? It had to take a lot of “yelping dog” distraction. Moore belonged to the well-connected Dial clique of Pound, Williams, Cummings, and Eliot; Plath panted after their ascendency; Millay was rudely pushed aside by that same clique, Hugh “The Pound Era” Kenner, and a few others, providing the critical hammer blows to Millay’s reputation. The point is, it only took one well-connected clique to take Millay down, because the majority of her countrymen only cared for the “yelping dog” life. The poetry garden really has but a few gardeners (critics who set the tone).

Millay is like a supersonic jet plane—it has the potential to take a lot of people on wonderful rides, but not if it is grounded. The battle for poetry will always take place among the few, because the “yelping dogs” are so distracting, and make sure that it is only the few that care enough and focus enough on poetry to truly decide poetry’s fate. Most are simply not refined enough to fight this fight. But the fight must be fought, since poetry is a door to that which truly refines the soul.

How is the soul refined? By love, of course.

And what does poetry have to do with love?

Nothing.

Which is precisely why it takes a remarkable soul to effect the marriage; most do not see the marriage as necessary; they are like those who take for granted that light and heat permeate glass—never thinking what this common phenomenon means.

The holy marriage of poetry and love, with Beauty the priest who joins them, is a radiant truth that civilizes humanity, but tumbles into obscurity and critical censure with barely a sigh, for love is socially embarrassing, and poetry, embarrassing as well, especially in the world of the yelping dog.

Only a superhuman effort can make such a marriage accepted; the poet has to court the world, not merely describe it, and this effort makes or breaks the would-be poet. Millay wrote of love, Moore, bric-a-brac. In the fashion of the hour, bric-a-brac, while the dogs yelp, is enough for the professors’ seduction, and in the Program era, ushered in by Ransom and Moore’s Dial clique, the bric-a-brac poetry professor became all-important.

One can still see contemporary poetry critics making half-hearted, half-conscious, desultory gestures in love’s direction: for instance, see Dan Chiasson’s recent review in the New Yorker of the latest book of poems by Alaska poet Olena Kalytiak Davis, which thrills to the 51 year old poet’s “sexual power” and “romance,” going so far as to say, “authentic pining in poetry, though hard to come by, is probably necessary for any poet who wishes to become a classic.”

Here is Chiasson kind of getting it, but don’t hold your breath for a Millay revival happening any time soon.  (A few poets today following Millay confuse the vulgarity for the art.)

So many are seduced by the Marianne Moore bric-a-brac school, not because they love bric-a-brac, necessarily, but because they think ‘crunchy poetry’ will leave behind the embarrassments of heart-breaking love, and allow poetry to talk about more things, to cover more ground and more moods, pushing into areas usually confined to the political essay or the long novel. Frost, gabbing casually forever.

But the bric-a-brac wish is in vain.

Like the legendary Faust, the poet tempted by verbose worldly riches—by poetry that attempts what prose is better fitted to do—leaves behind Millay and dies beneath the heavy objects of a modern bric-a-brac poetry only the very few are canny enough to know was a terrible danger, a foolish gambit, from the start.

Even as they know of the terrible danger of love—and the pining poetry, fainting for all mankind, which dies in its arms.

5 Comments

THIRTY TOP MASS APPEAL POETRY MOMENTS IN U.S. HISTORY

April 23, 2014 at 8:49 pm (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Blondie, Bob Dylan, Bollingen Prize, Cassius Clay, Dana Gioia, Dead Poets Society, Edgar Allan Poe, Emma Lazarus, Ezra Pound, Float Like A Butterfly, I Have A Dream, JFK, Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Carson, Jr., Mick Jagger, One Small Step for Man, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Frost, Robert Pinsky, Russo-Japanese War, Song of Hiawatha, Steven Allen, Sylvia Plath, T.S.Eliot, The Music Man)
Tags: , , ,

 

image

1. “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is published in the New York Evening Mirror, January 29, 1845

2.  Robert Frost reads “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inaugural, January 20, 1961

3.  Martin Luther King delivers his “I Have A Dream” speech, August 28, 1963

4. Dead Poets  Society, starring Robin Williams, released, June 9, 1989

5. Neil Armstrong’s moon landing speech, July 20, 1969

6. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” first played at flag-raising ceremony on Fort Warren, May 12, 1861

7. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg address,” November 19, 1863

8. Cassius Clay, boxer and poet, defeats Sonny Liston,  heavyweight champion, February 25, 1964

9. “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus recited at the Statue of Liberty’s Dedication, October 28, 1886

10. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan released, May 27, 1963

11. “The Star-Spangled Banner” first published, in Baltimore, September 20, 1814

12. Sylvia Plath’s suicide in England, February 11, 1963

13. Japan wins Russo-Japanese War, starting Haiku rage in the West, September 5, 1905

14. “Old Ironsides” by Oliver Wendell Holmes published in Boston Daily Advertiser, September 16, 1830

15. Jack Kerouac reads his poetry on Steven Allen show (with Allen on piano), November 16, 1959

16. James Russell Lowell delivers “Ode” at Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865

17. Mick Jagger reads Shelley’s “Adonais” at Brian Jones’ memorial in England, July 5, 1969

18. Ella Wheeler Wilcox publishes her most famous poem in New York Sun, the year she publishes controversial Poems of Passion, February 25, 1883

19. Dana Gioia publishes his essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” in The Atlantic, May, 1991

20. “Mary Had A Little Lamb” by Sarah Josepha Hale published, May 24, 1830

21. Actor Jimmy Stewart reads poem “I’ll Never Forget A Dog Named Beau” on the Tonight Show, making Johnny Carson cry, July 28, 1981

22. Ronald Regan’s Challenger Disaster Speech, January 28, 1986

23. Maya Angelou reads “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton inaugural, January 20, 1993

24. Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” published, November 10, 1855

25. Ezra Pound wins Bollingen Prize with NY Times headline: “Pound In Mental Clinic Wins Prize for Poetry Penned In Treason Cell,” February 20, 1949

26. “Rapture” by Blondie released, January 12, 1981

27. “The Music Man” by Meredith Wilson opens, December 19, 1957

28. Elizabeth Alexander reads “Praise Song for the Day” at Barack Obama’s inaugural, January 20, 2009

29. Publisher Horace Liveright makes offers for works by Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, January 3, 1922.

30. Favorite Poem Project launched by poet laureate Robert Pinsky, April 1, 1997

 

3 Comments

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

Ben Mazer’s “Poetry Mathematics” and the 30 Best Poetry Essays of All Time

October 26, 2012 at 6:27 pm (Ben Mazer, Cleanth Brooks, Dana Gioia, Dante, Edgar Allan Poe, J.L. Austin, John Crowe Ransom, John Keats, Kant, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Philip Sidney, Plato, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Penn Warren, T.S.Eliot, William Wordsworth)

First, the List:

1. REPUBLIC (BKS, 3, 10)- PLATO
A truism, but agree or not, every poet must come to terms with Plato.

2. THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY- THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 
This essay rocks.  A genuinely great work of sweeping, historical criticism.

3. POETS WITHOUT LAURELS- JOHN CROWE RANSOM
Short essay, but historically explains Modernism…Ransom was more than just a New Critic…

4. PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION- EDGAR A. POE
Wrote a poem, then added a philosophy: cheap!  Uhh…no, that misses the point. Close writing trumps close reading…

5. POETICS- ARISTOTLE
Groundwork.

6. VITA NUOVA- DANTE
Practical document of poetry as mixture of Aristotle, romance, and religion. 

7. A DEFENSE OF POETRY- SHELLEY
Wide-ranging idealism.

8. LAOCOON: ESSAY ON THE LIMITS OF POETRY & PAINTING- G.E. LESSING
18th Century Work of Classical Rigor. A keeper.

9. AN APOLOGY FOR POETRY- SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
“Now for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.”

10. PHAEDRUS- PLATO
Tale of rhetoric and inspiration by the poet-hating poet.

11. PURE AND IMPURE POETRY- ROBERT PENN WARREN
Smash-mouth modernism from the 1930s—lots of Poe and Shelley-hating.

12. SYSTEM OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM- F.W. SCHELLING
“All knowledge rests on the agreement of something objective with something subjective.”

13. ON THE SUBLIME- LONGINUS
The sublime, baby!

14. TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT- T.S. ELIOT
The avant-garde reigned in by humdrum?

15. PREFACE, 2ND ED., LYRICAL BALLADS- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Speaking like real men!

16. LETTERS- KEATS
Selfless excess.

17. THE POET- EMERSON
Walt Whitman, Inc.

18. WELL-WROUGHT URN- CLEANTH BROOKS
A Defense of Close-Reading New Criticism: Poetry As Paradox and Non-Paraphrasable Ambiguity

19. THE ARCHETYPES OF LITERATURE- NORTHRUP FRYE
Jungian rebuke of the New Criticism…

20. CAN POETRY MATTER?- DANA GIOIA
Yes, believe it or not, this one belongs to the ages…

21. ESSAY ON CRITICISM- POPE
Iconic, metrical…

22. THE STUDY OF POETRY- MATTHEW ARNOLD
High seriousness, dude…

23. ON NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY- FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
Supremely Romantic criticism

24. THE ION- PLATO
A curt and elegant reminder for the poetic blowhard…

25. PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE- SAMUEL JOHNSON
Always a place for the moral conservative…

26. CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT- KANT
“An aesthetical judgment is not an objective cognitive judgment.”

27. RATIONALE OF VERSE- POE
The best user guide for the craft of verse, period.

28. PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES- J.L. AUSTIN
This clever-ass essay blows everything to hell, making Language Poetry possible…

29. THE ENGLISH POET AND THE BURDEN OF THE PAST- W. JACKSON BATE
Published prior to, and is more cogent than, Harold Bloom’s more famous work…

30. FOUNDATIONS OF POETRY MATHEMATICS- BEN MAZER
A useful look at what the cool kids are saying…

Tedious, unscientific, hare-brained manifesto-ism (Pound, Charles Olson, etc) did not make the list.

We found Mazer’s “Mathematics” eccentric and odd at points, yet despite its uncanny moments, sincere and earnest throughout.  The work, just recently published, seems the natural outcome of an “end of the line,” “uncertainty principle” post-modernism looping back to classical German Romantic idealism, which is exactly what we take the dual “incomprehensible and incontrovertible” (2.1 b) to mean.

We like the sly rebuff of “The classics are static. They do not change.” (2.3)  This could be censor or praise, and Mazer’s ambiguity is a good thing.  It seems to solve something.

Here is the Romantic Mazer: “A greater amount of emotion is the effect of a greater work of art.” (2.4)  “There is no poetry higher than the music of Beethoven.” (2.11)

Here is the Mazer of J.L. Austin: “Poetry differs from nonsense in being incontrovertible. It cannot be proved to be nonsense, that nothing is being said.” (2.2)

Here is the great puzzle.  We are not sure, but it seems Mazer implicitly agrees with Austin—who said (to the satisfaction of some) that “nonsense” cannot be proved to exist since language is a “performance,” not an “imitation.” 

If art is essentially imitative, reality, within the frame of the picture, is boiled down to essense, order, and beauty. If poetic language is imitative (the default belief for thousands of years) there needs to be correspondence between subject and object, between understanding and nature; this is the basis of science, society, and art.  Keats’ “Beauty is Truth” formula is that supreme correlation, which, in a mere 100 years, has fallen into its opposite—because the imitative function of art has been rejected.

In poetry, J.L. Austin provided the reason. Language, Austin said, is a “performance,” and not just performative in obvious ways (“I now pronounce you man and wife” or “Move your ass, bud!”) but in every way.  “Truth is Beauty” is not verifiable, because all language-use is an action, and acts in a specific context.

No one who is honest, however, buys Austin’s rhetoric, and we think Mazer only buys it against his better judgement.  Mazer’s example of Beethoven is telling; Mazer’s “Mathematics” has great merit in saying a lot in a few words. What says more than ‘Beethoven?’  Genius often surprises, not with its complexity, but with its simplicity, and we cannot think of another poetry critic who would casually toss Beethoven on the table—and yet why not?  What artistic work is more “incomprehensible and incontrovertible” than Beethoven’s?  Beethoven is “incomprehensible” in a very real sense: listening to Beethoven’s music, we have no idea what he is saying, or what he means.  Yet the artistic impact of Beethoven’s music is “incontrovertible.”  No one would say Beethoven’s music is “nonsense,” a word Austin specifically uses in his argument (“Performative Utterances” no. 28 above).

And since Beethoven is a Romantic era figure and belongs to the classical Romantic tradition—one which seeks correspondence between understanding and nature, it is useful to examine Beethoven (as poet) in light of Austin’s explicit attempt to invalidate correspondence, with the result that every linguistic trope is controvertible.  But even if we take every utterance to be performative, this does not mean that we as speakers and writers do not still seek correspondence between understanding and nature.  Speech (poetry, art) without correspondence is still nonsense. 

The metaphoric nature of poetry attempts to stretch correspondence; but stretching is not breaking.

The Language Poetry school, the unfortunate result of Austin’s philosophy, is what happens when anything breaks instead of stretches.

Mazer, trapped in a post-J.L. Austin universe, longs to reunite with Romanticism, a shameful act in today’s Letters—burdened by the nonsensical spasms of modernism, as the bodily correspondences come apart—but this only makes Mazer’s yearning that much more profound and leads to the success of his poetry.  As any good Romantic knows, the longing for correspondence is more important than the correspondence itself.  The Language poet is inevitably too self-pleased.

When Mazer says, “Beauty is characterized by being indefinable,” (2.9) we read between the lines and find Romantic longing.

8 Comments

ANOTHER SCARY SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100!

October 17, 2012 at 7:36 pm (Alan Cordle, Alice Oswald, Anne Carson, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Blog:Harriet, Brenda Shaughnessy, Camille Paglia, Charles Baudelaire, Christian Bok, Cole Swensen, Dan Chiasson, Dana Gioia, Dana Levin, David Lehman, David Orr, Dean Young, Don Share, Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Alexander, Frank Bidart, Franz Wright, Fred Seidel, Galway Kinnell, Garrison Keillor, Geoffrey Hill, Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, James Tate, Jim Behrle, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Kay Ryan, Kevin Young, Louise Gluck, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Doty, Mark Strand, Matthew Dickman, Natasha Trethewey, Neilson Poe, Patricia Smith, Paul Muldoon, Peter Gizzi, Ron Silliman, Seth Abramson, Sharon Olds, Sherman Alexie, Stephen Burt, Stephen Dunn, Terrance Hayes, Tony Hoagland, Tracy K. Smith, X.J. Kennedy)

1. Natasha Trethewey   Beautiful! Black! Poet Laureate!
2. Billy Collins  Still sells…
3. David Lehman  Best American Poetry Series chugs along…
4. Stephen Burt  Harvard Cross-dresser takes Vendler’s mantle?
5. William Logan  Most entertaining poetry critic…
6. Christian Wiman  He’s the “Poetry” man, he makes me feel alright…
7. Sharon Olds  Sock-in-the-gut, sexy frankness…
8. Tracy K. Smith Young Pulitzer winner
9. David Orr  The New York Times Poetry Critic…
10. Harold Bloom  Not sure on Naomi Wolfe; we know he abused Poe….
11. Matthew Dickman  OMG!  Is he really no. 11?
12. Anne Carson  Professor of Classics born in Toronto…
13. Dana Gioia  Famous essay still resonates & not a bad formalist poet…
14. Jorie Graham Judge not…
15. Rita Dove The Penguin Anthology really wasn’t that good…
16. Helen Vendler Almost 80!
17. John Ashbery Has he ever written a poem for no. 16?  Where’s the love?
18. David Ferry This translator is almost 90!
19. Kevin Young We hear he’s a leading poet of his generation…
20. Robert Pinsky The smartest man in the universe…
21. Cole Swenson  The Hybrid Queen, newly installed at Brown…
22. Marjorie Perloff  “Poetry on the Brink” praises cut-and-paste…
23. John Barr Financial leader of Poetry Foundation and poet worth reading?
24. Seamus Heaney  The inscrutable Irish mountain…
25. Geoffrey Hill  A mountain who is really a hill?
26. Robert Hass  West-coast cheerleader.
27. Stephen Dunn  Athlete, philosopher, poet
28. Laura Kassichke  Championed by Burt.
29. Mary Oliver  The John Clare of today…
30. Kay Ryan  Come on, she’s actually good…
31. Don Share  Riding “Poetry” gravy train…
32. W.S. Merwin  Noble, ecological, bull?
33. Dana Levin Do you know the way to Santa Fe?
34. Susan Wheeler Elliptical Poet.  At Princeton.
35. Tony Hoagland Has the racial controversy faded?
36. Mark Doty Sharon Olds’ little brother…
37. Frank Bidart The Poet as Greek Tragedian
38. Simon Armitage Tilda Swinton narrates his global warming doc
39. D.A. Powell He likes the weather in San Francisco…
40. Philip Levine Second generation Program Era poet
41. Ron Silliman Experimental to the bone, his blog is video central…
42. Mark Strand Plain-talking surrealist, studied painting with Josef Albers…
43. Dan Chiasson Influential poetry reviewer…
44. Al Filreis  On-line professor teaches modern poetry to thousands at once!
45. Paul Muldoon If you want your poem in the New Yorker, this is the guy…
46. Charles Bernstein Difficult, Inc.
47. Rae Armantrout  If John Cage wrote haiku?
48. Louise Gluck Bollingen Prize winner…
49. Ben Mazer 2012 Scarriet March Madness Champ, studied with Heaney, Ricks…
50. Carol Muske-Dukes California Laureate
51. Peter Riley His critical essay crushes the hybrid movement…
52. Lyn Hejinian California Language Poet…
53. Peter Gizzi 12 issues of O.blek made his name…
54. Franz Wright Cantankerous but blessed…
55. Nikky Finney 2011 National Book Award winner 
56. Garrison Keillor Good poems!
57. Camille Paglia  She’s baaaack!
58. Christian Bok Author of Canada’s best-selling poetry book
59. X.J. Kennedy Classy defender of rhyme…
60. Frederick Seidel Wears nice suits…
61. Henri Cole Poems “cannily wrought” –New Yorker
62. Thom Donovan Poetry is Jorie-Graham-like…
63. Marie Howe State Poet of New York
64. Michael Dickman The other twin…
65. Alice Oswald Withdrew from T.S. Eliot prize shortlist…
66. Sherman Alexie Poet/novelist/filmmaker…
67. J.D. McClatchy Anthologist and editor of Yale Review…
68. David Wagoner Edited Poetry Northwest until it went under…
69. Richard Wilbur A versifier’s dream…
70. Stephen Cramer His fifth book is called “Clangings.”
71. Galway Kinnell We scolded him on his poem in the New Yorker critical of Shelley…
72. Jim Behrle Gadfly of the BAP
73. Haruki Murakami The Weird Movement…
74. Tim Seibles Finalist for National Book Award in Poetry
75. Brenda Shaughnessy  Editor at Tin House…
76. Maurice Manning  The new Robert Penn Warren?
77. Eileen Myles We met her on the now-dead Comments feature of Blog Harriet
78. Heather McHugh Studied with Robert Lowell; translator.
79. Juliana Spahr Poetry and sit-ins
80. Alicia Ostriker Poetry makes feminist things happen…
81. William Childress His ‘Is Free Verse Killing Poetry?’ caused a stir…
82. Patricia Smith Legendary Slam Poet…
83. James Tate The Heart-felt Zany Iowa School…
84. Barrett Watten Language Poet Theorist.
85. Elizabeth Alexander Obama’s inaugural poet.
86. Alan Cordle Foetry changed poetry forever.
87. Dean Young Heart transplanted, we wish him the best…
88. Amy Beeder “You’ll never feel full”
89. Valzhyna Mort Franz Wright translated her from the Belarusian…
90. Mary Jo Salter Studied with Elizabeth Bishop at Harvard…
91. Seth Abramson Lawyer/poet who researches MFA programs and writes cheery reviews…
92. Amy Catanzano “My aim is to become incomprehensible to the machines.”
93. Cate Marvin  VIDA co-founder and co-director
94. Jay Wright First African-American to win the Bollingen Prize (2005)
95. Albert Jack His “Dreadful Demise Of Edgar Allan Poe” builds on Scarriet’s research: Poe’s cousin may be guilty…
96. Mary Ruefle “I remember, I remember”
97. John Gallaher Selfless poet/songwriter/teacher/blogger
98. Philip Nikolayev From Fulcrum to Battersea…
99. Marcus Bales Democratic Activist and Verse Poet
100. Joe Green And Hilarity Ensued…

96 Comments

DANA GIOIA TAKES ON LOUISE GLUCK, ROUND 2 NORTH

June 2, 2012 at 8:12 pm (Dana Gioia, Louise Gluck, March Madness)

Dana Gioia: not Dove material

Neither Gluck nor Gioia are represented by Dove in her 20th century poetry anthology.

Looking over Dove’s book, one is struck how prevalent rhyme is in the first 25% of the book (Masters b. 1868 through Roethke b. 1908 ), and then how it dwindles (Bishop b. 1911 through Sexton b. 1928) over the next 25%, and finally disappears altogether over the last half (Rich b. 1929 to Terrance Hayes b. 1971), as if no one rhymed in the second half of the 20th century to the present.

All the more interesting is the fact that all the poems known by the public, from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to “Emperor of Ice Cream” to “Prufrock” to “Waste Land” to “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” to “We Real Cool” to “Her Kind” rhyme.  Has a famous American poem been written in the last 50 years?  All those Workshop poems—and nothing has caught on.  All those poems not tied down by meter and rhyme—and not one has caught on.

The public no longer exists which simply takes pleasure from poems and celebrates that fact; today publishers are the last ones who can make a poem famous—and the publishers haven’t a clue, since rhyme makes them uncomfortable for reasons  too numerous to mention.

Here is New Formalist Dana Gioia’s poem, languishing on his website, but brought out here to fight for Sweet 16 in the Scarriet 2012 Tournament:

THE ANGEL WITH THE BROKEN WING

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadows up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.

Louise Gluck, Yale Younger Judge 2003-2010, did not make it into Dove’s book, for whatever reason—we might point out that none of her Yale choices have made an impact (think of Auden picking Rich, Merwin, Ashbery, James Wright, Hollander, and Dickey). Here’s her poem:

A FANTASY

I’ll tell you something: every day
people are dying. And that’s just the beginning.
Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born,
new orphans. They sit with their hands folded,
trying to decide about this new life.

Then they’re in the cemetery, some of them
for the first time. They’re frightened of crying,
sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,
tells them what to do next, which might mean
saying a few words, sometimes
throwing dirt in the open grave.

And after that, everyone goes back to the house,
which is suddenly full of visitors.
The widow sits on the couch, very stately,
so people line up to approach her,
sometimes take her hand, sometimes embrace her.
She finds something to say to everbody,
thanks them, thanks them for coming.

In her heart, she wants them to go away.
She wants to be back in the cemetery,
back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows
it isn’t possible. But it’s her only hope,
the wish to move backward. And just a little,
not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.

Both of these poems are better than the majority of poems by living poets in Dove’s anthology.  Helen Vendler tried to make Dove’s shortcomings all about Wallace Stevens, but the real issue is editors lacking the courage to forget everything else and choose the best poems.  Gluck’s poem has a formal quality: there’s a lot of empty talk about how content is form, but here’s a real example: the poignant traveling backward of the widow.

We admire the Gioia more, but the Gluck gives us an emotional jolt: the heartbreaking “Just a little, not so far back as the marriage, the first kiss.”  Bravo, Ms. Gluck.

Gluck 72 Gioia 70

12 Comments

MORE MADNESS FROM THE NORTH BRACKET: GIOIA V. SHAUGHNESSY

April 6, 2012 at 4:22 pm (Brenda Shaughnessy, Dana Gioia, March Madness)

Brenda Shaughnessy is thrilled to be in Dove’s anthology—and Scarriet’s 2012 Tournament

Dana Gioia is not in Dove’s anthology.  Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991) is better known than his poems.

PITY THE BEAUTIFUL

Pity the beautiful,
the dolls, and the dishes,
the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes.

Pity the pretty boys,
the hunks, and Apollos,
the golden lads whom
success always follows.

The hotties, the knock-outs,
the tens out of ten,
the drop-dead gorgeous,
the great leading men.

Pity the faded,
the bloated, the blowsy,
the paunchy Adonis
whose luck’s gone lousy.

Pity the gods,
no longer divine.
Pity the night
the stars lose their shine.

This poem reminds us of the poet Heine—how the German’s lyric sweetness supports bitter irony.  Nice job, Mr. Gioia!

Brenda Shaughnessy (b. 1970) is the youngest poet in Dove’s 20th century poetry anthology.

She has two poems reprinted by Dove.  She’s banking on the following poem to advance her to the next round:

POSTFEMINISM

There are two kinds of people, soldiers and women,
as Virginia Woolf said. Both for decoration only.

Now that is too kind. It’s technical: virgins and wolves.
We have choices now. Two little girls walk into a bar,

one orders a shirley temple. Shirley Temple’s pimp
comes over and says you won’t be sorry. She’s a fine

piece of work but she don’t come cheap. Myself, I’m
in less fear of predators than of walking around

in my mother’s body. That’s sneaky, that’s more
than naked. Let’s even it up: you go on fuming in your

gray room. I am voracious alone. Blank and loose,
metallic lingerie. And rare black-tipped cigarettes

in a handsome basket case. Which of us weaves
the world together with a quicker blur of armed

seduction: your war-on-thugs, my body stockings.
Ascetic or carnivore. Men will crack your glaze

even if you leave them before morning. Pigs
ride the sirens in packs. Ah, flesh, technoflesh,

there are two kinds of people. Hot with mixed
light, drunk with insult. You and me.

This must be that new genre, Creative Non-fiction. 

The poet begins by quoting Virginia Woolf and then launches into a rumination on the roles of men and women, or “virgins and wolves,” in terms of power relations. 

The implication, surely, is that there can be virgin wolves and wolfish virgins, but Shaughnessy chooses not to anchor her poem in a narrative; she gives us a series of witty observations that are never quite fully explained—if they were, her poem might be mistaken for an essay.  But we’re not sure about this—or any number of things she’s apparently trying to say. 

There’s no doubt she’s thoughtful on the subject of nature and gender, but the fruit of the poem itself seems a little unripe.  The point at the end is a grand one: “You and me” are finally the “two kinds of people,” but how she arrives at this seems tenuous, at best.  The material seems to handle her, not the other way around; the ‘non-fiction’ part appears to slam her poem to the ground.  How many poets succumb to this?  I’ll make my poem interesting with charged things written in essays and newspapers, or discussed with anxiety in bedrooms.  The non-fiction rides the poem. It always feels like an act of desperation.  The poet is rarely in control.  It’s the Muse’s punishment.

Gioia 78, Shaughnessy 66

16 Comments

SCARRIET’S POETRY HOT 100!!

December 31, 2011 at 6:27 pm (Abigail Deutsch, Adrienne Rich, Alan Cordle, Anis Shivani, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bin Ramke, Camille Paglia, Dan Chiasson, Dana Gioia, David Lehman, David Orr, Dean Young, Derek Walcott, Foetry, Garrison Keillor, Gary B. Fitzgerald, Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, James Tate, Jim Behrle, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Landis Everson, Louise Gluck, Lyn Hejinian, Marcus Bales, Marjorie Perloff, Mark McGurl, Mark Strand, Michael Robbins, Poetry Foundation, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Seth Abramson, Sharon Olds, W.S. Merwin, William Logan, Yusef Komunyakaa)

All ye need to know?

1. Rita Dove—Penguin editor reviewed by Helen Vendler in the NYRB
2. Terrance Hayes—In Dove’s best-selling anthology, and young
3. Kevin Young—In Dove’s anthology, and young
4. Amiri Baraka—In Dove’s anthology
5. Billy Collins—in the anthology
6. John Ashbery—a long poem in the anthology
7. Dean Young—not in the anthology
8. Helen Vendler—hated the anthology
9. Alan Cordle—Time’s masked Person-of-the-Year = Foetry.com’s once-anonymous Occupy Poetry protestor?
10. Harold Bloom—you can bet he hates the anthology
11. Mary Oliver—in the anthology
12. William Logan—meanest and the funniest critic (a lesson here?)
13. Kay Ryan—our day’s e.e. cummings
14. John Barr—the Poetry Man and “the Man.”
15. Kent Johnson—O’Hara and Koch will never be the same?
16. Cole Swensen—welcome to Brown!
17. Tony Hoagland—tennis fan
18. David Lehman—fun lovin’ BAP gate-keeper
19. David Orr—the deft New York Times critic
20. Rae Armantrout—not in the anthology
21. Seamus Heaney—When Harvard eyes are smilin’
22. Dan Chiasson—new reviewer on the block
23. James Tate—guaranteed to amuse
24. Matthew Dickman—one of those bratty twins
25. Stephen Burt—the Crimson Lantern
26. Matthew Zapruder—aww, everybody loves Matthew!
27. Paul Muldoon—New Yorker Brit of goofy complexity
28. Sharon Olds—Our Lady of Slightly Uncomfortable Poetry
29. Derek Walcott—in the anthology, latest T.S. Eliot prize winner
30. Kenneth Goldsmith—recited traffic reports in the White House
31. Jorie Graham—more teaching, less judging?
32. Alice Oswald—I don’t need no stinkin’ T.S. Eliot Prize
33. Joy Harjo—classmate of Dove’s at Iowa Workshop (in the anthology)
34. Sandra Cisneros—classmate of Dove’s at Iowa Workshop (in the anthology)
35. Nikki Giovanni—for colored girls when po-biz is enuf
36. William Kulik—not in the anthology
37. Ron Silliman—no more comments on his blog, but in the anthology
38. Daisy Fried—setting the Poetry Foundation on fire
39. Eliot Weinberger—poetry, foetry, and politics
40. Carol Ann Duffy—has Tennyson’s job
41. Camille Dungy—runs in the Poetry Foundation forest…
42. Peter Gizzi—sensitive lyric poet of the hour…
43. Abigail Deutsch—stole from a Scarriet post and we’ll always love her for it…
44. Robert Archambeau—his Samizdat is one of the more visible blogs…
45. Michael Robbins—the next William Logan?
46. Carl Phillips—in the anthology
47. Charles North—What It Is Like, New & Selected chosen as best of 2011 by David Orr
48. Marilyn Chin—went to Iowa, in the anthology
49. Marie Howe—a tougher version of Brock-Broido…
50. Dan Beachy-Quick—gotta love that name…
51. Marcus Bales—he’s got the Penguin blues.
52. Dana Gioia—he wants you to read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, so what r u waiting 4?
53. Garrison Keillor—the boil on the neck of August Kleinzahler
54. Alice Notley—Penguin’s Culture of One by this Paris-based author made a lot of 2011 lists
55. Mark McGurl—won Truman Capote Award for 2011’s The Program Era: Rise of Creative Writing
56. Daniel Nester—wrap your blog around my skin, yea-uh.
57. Yusef Komunyakaa—in the anthology
58. Adrienne Rich—in the anthology
59. Jeremy Bass— reviewed the anthology in the Nation
60. Anselm Berrigan—somebody’s kid
61. Travis Nichols—kicked us off Blog Harriet
62. Seth Abramson—poet and lawyer
63. Stephen Dunn—one of the best poets in the Iowa style
64. Philip Levine—Current laureate, poem recently in the New Yorker  Movin’ up!
65. Ben Mazer—Does anyone remember Landis Everson?
66. Reb Livingston—Her No Tells blog rocks the contemporary scene
67. Marjorie Perloff—strutting avant academic
68. John Gallaher—Kent Johnson can’t get enough punishment on Gallaher’s blog
69. Fred Viebahn—poet married to the Penguin anthologist
70. James Fenton—said after Penguin review hit, Dove should have “shut up”
71. Rodney Jones—BAP poem selected by Dove riffs on William Carlos Williams’ peccadilloes
72. Mark Doty—no. 28’s brother
73. Cate Marvin—VIDA and so much more
74. Richard Wilbur—still hasn’t run out of rhyme
75. W.S. Merwin—no punctuation, but no punk
76. Jim Behrle—the Adam Sandler of po-biz
77. Bin Ramke—still stinging from the Foetry hit
78. Thomas Sayer Ellis—not in the anthology
79. Henri Cole—poetry editor of the New Republic
80. Meghan O’Rourke—Behrle admires her work
81. Anne Waldman—the female Ginsberg?
82. Anis Shivani—get serious, poets! it’s time to change the world!
83. Robert Hass—Occupy story in Times op-ed
84. Lyn Hejinian—stuck inside a baby grand piano
85. Les Murray—greatest Australian poet ever?
86. Sherman Alexie—is this one of the 175 poets to remember?
87. Geoffrey Hill—great respect doesn’t always mean good
88. Elizabeth Alexander—Frost got Kennedy, she got Obama
89. A.E. Stallings—A rhymer wins MacArthur!
90. Frank Bidart—in the anthology
91. Robert Pinsky—in the anthology
92. Carolyn Forche—in the anthology
93. Louise Gluck—not in the anthology
94. Keith Waldrop—his Hopwood Award paid her fare from Germany
95. Rosmarie Waldrop—her Hopwood helpled launch Burning Deck
96. C.D. Wright—born in the Ozark mountains
97. Forrest Gander—married to no. 96
98. Mark Strand—translator, surrealist
99. Margaret Atwood—the best Canadian poet of all time?
100. Gary B. Fitzgerald—the poet most likely to be remembered a million years from now

60 Comments

YAWN TAKES BISHOP: ELIZABETH BISHOP AT ONE HUNDRED

February 11, 2011 at 5:23 pm (Christopher Ricks, Dana Gioia, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell)

Just as sitting in a train traveling 20 MPH can make us think a plane traveling 200 mph is flying backwards because of nearer objects we are passing, so a minor figure fawned over in our day can seem major.

Elizabeth Bishop is a spectacular example of near and dear fawning distorting actual merit.  She’s not even a good writer, much less a great one, but she has mattered to a clique which seems to be growing by the hour: the friendship with Miss Moore and Mr. Lowell has snowballed into a situation where all the Critics have fallen asleep.

What a ghastly creature Elizabeth Bishop was!

She understood the universe by the age of six (“In the Waiting Room”).

She had “three loved houses”—one, apparently, wasn’t enough (“One Art”).

She ridiculed what she perceived as the greaseball working class (“Filling Station”).

She overheard the conversations of regular folk riding buses with a thinly disguised, haughty scorn (“The Moose”).

Bishop feeds our inner spinster aunt who not-so-secretly hates and lords it over all (“those awful hanging breasts!”) with delicious ease.

To Elizabeth Bishop, actual human beings going about their business always elicited the faint whiff of gasoline.

Elizabeth feeds our aesthetically-hidden inner snob.

This would be fine, if her aesthetic project wasn’t also shallow and condescending.  After all, the quaint aesthetics of magical symbolism which she indulged in can lend a certain amount of pleasure; but rather than beauty, she merely proferred the current fashion of WC Williams modernism then extant, so we get ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ writ large: ordinary objects are everywhere “glazed” with something or other (oil or gasoline, mostly) and we get that patronizing tone of the Children’s Book author, constantly telling us the wheel barrow was red and the chickens, white and everything is seen not through our eyes, but hers, the over-descriptive one.   We get description, description, description and no thought, or, substituting for thought, a symbol, like a moose, or a fish, that we are supposed to ooh and aah over, never suspecting the poet has really nothing to convey but a bunch of cranky prejudices and snotty preferences. She likes beaches .  She doesn’t like filling stations.

What should one expect, after all, from someone who had the world figured out by age six, was miserable all her life, and had profitable friendships with the brittle Marianne Moore and the psychotic Robert Lowell?

Last night at an auditorium at Boston University, twenty members of po-biz sat on folding-chairs on a small stage, before a scattered audience of about 200, and mostly without fanfare, read poems and excerpts of letters and prose with varying degrees of intensity.

Two readers called what they read “perfect.”

All the readers felt rather pressed for time, since there were twenty of them, but that didn’t stop some from going on much too long.

Anything more than a page felt winding and obscure.

The delicate lyrics worked the best, but even there it was apparent we were not in the presence of a major poet; even “One Art,” her most famous rhymed work, is spoiled by that odd interjection—write it!—which doesn’t work when read aloud.

The evening was bland, except for two moments:

One female poet attempted to refute Dana Gioia’s recent remarks that Bishop was not much of an abstract thinker and she made the mistake of reading a passage of Bishop’s on the concept of time which was so befuddling and weak, it only proved Gioia’s point.

Christopher Ricks—no one introduced themselves, as one was supposed to match up the arrangement of the readers’ stage-seating with the order of the readers listed in the program—but we all know Christopher Ricks—Professor Ricks felt impelled to announce that Bishop appreciated prose as much as poetry and proceeded to point out that poetry has not, and will never, solve the problem of the prose paragraph.  Prose, Ricks, said, can quote poetry, but poetry cannot quote prose.  A pity this didn’t get discussed, and then Ricks read an exquisite one page prose excerpt from a Bishop story which quoted Keats.  At times, Bishop the aesthete emerges, which all aesthetes can love.  She just needs to be presented correctly, by thoughtful fellows like Christopher Ricks, who showed in a matter of seconds, the pure charm that is Christopher Ricks.

If all this seems demeaning and even sexist, it should be remembered how really sexist the Modernists were: not only did men, in terms of pure numbers, dominate po-biz in the 20th century, but the sexism is even deeper and more insidious than supposed: the male poets would decide what women poets would be allowed to have respectful poetic reputations.

The Bishop who loves Keats, we love.  But the Bishop we were meant to love, like the Marianne Moore we were meant to love, is the one not quite as good as Robert Lowell.

6 Comments