crusherrun

what's form for 1

2009-09-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

A series of observations through which I hope to get into this subject.

Start, I think, with Aristotle. Form is a way of treating so-called chaos, as one would treat a patient. It was an accepted fact in fifth century BC Athens that reason could be applied to life so as to improve it, Plato's REPUBLIC being an obvious gesture in that direction. The underlying assumption of the Athenian mind (and much mind since) seems to have been that in its natural state life is disorganized and hence to a degree incomprehensible. Hence the need for form. Art may be an imitation of reality, as Aristotle says, but it is also an improvement on it, if only because it allows for an understanding of it. No surprise that the persons saying such things were thinkers, i.e., philosophers. The poets were not allowed in Plato's republic, as Stanley Diamond has told us, because poetry as practiced in Plato's time eschewed reason, in fact celebrated irrationality, believing I would gather in the viability of all that we know in imagination and fear in madness.

Two and a half millenia later, having come to many understandings of life, deep insights, and made many improvements on life or nature as given, we have begun to question the wisdom of human reason. Many scientists, Darwin included, have given us reason to think that nature is by nature logical and that it might be best for us to see the so-called chaos of life as something we have still not reached a sufficient understanding of. That there is form "out there." We even have a name for some of it: Chaos Theory.

This is starting from a long way out, I realize, but I want to suggest that form in poetry is tied to some of the oldest and deepest arguments we've had with ourselves. We have an almost instinctive sense that form is good and formlessness is not, and where we have our greatest differences is in knowing where the boundary between the two lies. It is perhaps a reasonable question to ask, Is anything formless? It is too soon to say, perhaps, but my sense is that if it occurs in language, it probably can't be.

still looking

2008-08-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Still looking for the point of it all? Writing poetry, that is. The looking is either a sign of serious derailing, never having known to begin with, or, more likely, the point of it all.

Try this, from Stanley Plumly's latest book, POSTHUMOUS KEATS. "If poetry 'makes nothing happen' [Auden's lament] and if we despise any poetry 'that has designs' upon us[Keats's complaint], then what are we left with? If poetry is dreaming, what makes it real?" Plumly, of course, is trying to locate the function of poetry as Keats saw it, and since Keats thought of poetry as dreaming--waking dreaming, dreaming done with something like a purpose, not a 'design', behind it--, to what end? Plumly concludes: to see. "To see as a poet, a true dreamer, is to see as a healer and a knower." The seer being a visionary, not a photo-journalist. This idea has big arms, arms with which to clasp a great deal, hence room for not a little difference.

Which is why we have poetry.

besmilr brigham

2008-02-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

Every now and then you stumble into a poem that gets it right. I mean the kind of poem that wants to "tell" something and manages to do that with deftness and quickness. The nice irony in Besmilr Brigham’s "Our Sons," from RUN THROUGH ROCK, ed. C.D. Wright (Lost Roads, 2000), is that what she wants to tell us is that maybe the best thing you can do in bringing up boys is teach them to find out things, as she says, "by watching." Don’t tell them anything, she tells us. Ignore, or at least start by ignoring, the old ways and conventions. Sweep the over-riding abstractions out of the way, and just look.

Our Sons

tell them
nothing
it is best to start with

not the value of money
obedience
or power
or what it is to be a man

let us
find out a few things
by watching

aren’t we
getting tired of reproducing

ourselves

it is best
to take the uninformed
approach
look at the rock
how firm it stands
yet when the rain
touches its sides
how the hidden colors
show

it is best we tell our sons nothing

[Blogger’s comment.] Not too many parents have tried this, I believe.

some thoughts on Garrigue's "Grand Canyon"

2008-02-09T08:22:00.000-08:00

The poem that came to typify or best represent Jean Garrigue was one that tried to present essences or states of perception and feeling just beyond the reach of language, almost always of a kind that called for exuberant joy. To try to reach beyond language means, paradoxically, that what we finally hold in our minds is not so much a thing in nature as a construct of language or, as we used to call it, thought. "Grand Canyon," for instance, is not a portrait of that geological marvel. Rather, it is a rapture about being in the world, the occasion for which is experiencing this most unusual example of what she calls "the brute Sublime." That state is oxymoronic, brutal but sublime, as the condition of being is both exhilarating and terrifying. Garrigue makes no allusion to herself in the poem except the simple (and repeated) statement, "I am lonely," a bald utterance which looms larger once we know that she had just been diagnosed in California with cancer. Out there on a short teaching assignment, she nevertheless rushed back home to New York City to ready herself for what little life she had left. The poem, of course, turns immediately away from its bald utterance toward an elaborate, operatic performance of astonished joy.

Taking the switchback trail,
slipping and sliding,
forever slantwise descending
into new confrontations of parapets,
chimneys, mantels, segments of angles,
modelings of rock of slacknesses and accidental tensions
combined with the effects of its weight--
the total effect never total for never can you see it all, not even guess
at mazes of the proliferation...

To take an almost random sample which nevertheless conjures up a Dantesque descent into death.

In discussing "Grand Canyon" in her excellent review of SELECTED POEMS [Parnassus, 18/19 (1993)], Lorrie Goldensohn reminds us that in line 11 Garrigue begins a sentence that doesn’t end till 108 lines later. This is one way to push beyond the representational purposes or boundaries of most language, loading it down with detail, qualification, and repetition to the point where we lose touch of what "point" is being made or even what the subject of the current verb might be. Or, we come to believe that the point is less to make a point than to sustain a rhythm, a feeling, a verbal equivalent of the thing which is brutal in being without consciousness or language and perhaps for that reason also sublime.

This is a strategy in several of Garrigue’s best poems and reminds me of an exercise Marguerite Young used to give her students in fiction, namely, to write a sentence that went on for two or three pages. Jean and Marguerite, of course, were old acquaintances from girlhood days in Indianapolis and roomed together for a while as students at the University of Chicago. Pure coincidence, I realize.

JEAN GARRIGUE: A Fitness of Things

2008-01-21T17:15:00.000-08:00

Jean Garrigue’s "Amsterdam Letter" partakes of a number of ancient modes in the writing of poems, two of which are indicated in the title, the letter poem and the poem of travel, both of which received considerable impetus in the poetry she came to as a young poet. Pound’s "River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter" revived a kind of poem that certainly thrived in ancient China, though of course that particular poem was written not by the traveler but by the one who stayed at home. The letter poem may have gotten its impetus from Petrarch’s invention of the sonnet, a form that mixed description of the loved object with appeals to her. It also owed something to the dedicatory epistle poets wrote in the Renaissance hoping to secure patronage from the wealthy. "Amsterdam Letter" represents a sub-category of this genre in that it is addressed to no one, meaning everyone, in the manner of a journalist’s letter from a foreign capitol, Edward R. Morrow’s from London, say, during the Blitz.

Travel gave the writer an opportunity to report back on the marvels of distant lands, as in "Amsterdam Letter." A non-fictional genre originally, which still thrives, it also gave structure to the novel in its early days as the examples of Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Moby Dick would indicate. Poetical traveling, though perhaps begun in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, would have to wait for Wordsworthian rambles, journeys to Renaissance Italy conducted by Browning and, in Garrigue’s day, the post-World War II Fulbrighter who, having fought in Europe, returned after the war to study the culture he had tramped over only a few years before in uniform. Jean Garrigue had the additional desire to travel in wanting to recover as much as she could of her European, particularly French, heritage. In such poems as "Pays Perdu" and "Cortege for Colette," she did just that.

"Amsterdam Letter," however, is one of many (and one of her best) celebrations of travel alone. Her first publication, Thirty-Six Poems and a Few Songs, included "From Venice Was That Afternoon." Other poems followed, including "Swiss Altitudes," "Primer of an Italian Journey," "Soliloquy in Pere Lachaise," "For the Fountains and Fountaineers of Villa d’Este," "Discourse From Firenze," the whole of Chartre, and Prose Poems, "French Country Circus," "The Water Wheel by the River Sorgue," "St. Sulpice," "Of a Provincial City," "Country Junction," "Song for ‘Buvez Les Vins du Postillon," "Cannes," "The Grand Canyon," "Song in Sligo," "Grenoble Café," "Beaucaire," to which I would add "After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs" and "On Going by Train to White River Junction, Vt." The little girl who grew up in Indianapolis in the 1920's wanted desperately to see the world, and a poem like "Amsterdam Letter," as we’ll see, was giddy with delight at what for her was the newness and particularity of that place.
"Amsterdam Letter" also participates in one of the most ancient of poetical practices, the list. From Homer’s catalogue of ships in The Odyssey to the present day, the list has served many poets well as an underlying structure. E.B. Browning’s "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," for one. Garrigue’s letter begins,
Brick distinguishes this country,
And broad windows–rather, rectangles
Of wide and glittering scope--
And cabbages.
Cattle a specialty, and cheese, storks–if they are not all dead
Or abandoned–and flowers, oh, flowers!
Some say as well, quick humor.
Brick, windows (rectangles), cabbages, cattle, cheese, storks, flowers and humor. A capricious list, but that will be the form that her "delight" takes in the poem, reminding us not so vaguely of that other Manhattanite’s celebrations of the city, Frank O’Hara. Garrigue, for all her travel, was a lifelong citizen and resident of Greenwich Village, coincidentally once a part of Nieuw Amsterdam. "Amsterdam Letter" ends with another list, this time of words she was taught the Dutch versions of by an"old Frisian lady," "Horse, sky, cow, tree, thank you," followed by the two large abstractions that emerge from her experience of Amsterdam itself which come to anchor the poem, namely, "Beauty, and love." I take this as a small but serious correction to Keats’s famous ode, love replacing truth in his short list of "all ye need to know."

Garrigue’s poem, of course, is written in free verse with lines ranging from four to twenty-one syllables, a liberty with line-length that mirrors the wandering and distracted delight of her attention. But, rather than producing a poem that operates at a purely sensuous level, seeing, smelling, tasting only what is put immediately before her, she draws past–perhaps the word is "through"–such experiences a series of observations that reflect an enlarged, abstract sense of what the good life contains. Out from behind a surface arbitrariness emerges something resembling an essay on right living, one conducted in an abstract and formal diction that contrasts with the concrete imagery of the poem. Beginning with the word "distinguishes" in the first line, we are gradually introduced to features of life in Amsterdam that make it highly civilized. The windows of line two are said to be of "wide and glittering scope," a quality that one could easily apply to many aspects of life catalogued here. The old Frisian woman becomes a model citizen of the city in being "affable," "amusing and helpful." Even the cab driver proposed to her, an act she likens to a "specimen of humor." The sky is "dense, heavy, fragrant," the water "rich." While the gabled houses are "sedate," the bicyclists, six abreast, "skimming around corners like swallows," display quickness, as the Dutch do humor, and quietness. "How quiet they are! Even the trolleys!"

The list of enviable qualities goes on. The "bravura" of carved animal heads, the "elegance" of panels, "the clear meaning" of glass. Bravura, elegance, clarity of meaning. What more could there be in such a world of perfection?
...that delicacy of manner, that responsiveness to many,
That prevalence of what seems self-possessed, contained, and easy--
Not only that, but the Dutch are "Amiable conversationalists...
Who by a manner suggested
What I have no word for--
Unfeigned it is and unblighted,
That "generous, free disposition"
That so strongly confirms
A fitness of things.
Here we enter Shakespeare’s great romance of love, Twelfth Night, where Olivia corrects the vain, curmudgeonly Malvolio (act I, scene v) to remind him of the greatest of human dispositions, one which if practiced widely enough "confirms/ A fitness of things," as Jean Garrigue found it in the city of Amsterdam. "There by the water beds/ And the ancient, calmed passions of their reflections," she (re)learned the meaning of not only beauty and love, but of calmed passions, bravura, elegance, amiability, sedateness, quickness, all summed up as a fitness of things.

"Amsterdam Letter," in other words, becomes a grid on which Garrigue can bring together a real place and her sense of a personal utopia, the real and the ideal. Notice, though, that the speaker is only a visitor to this place and that she does not speak the language. She is, in fact, the merest initiate to its secrets and, without saying it in so many words, must be content with a brief encounter, however insightful and intense.

ending and stopping II

2008-01-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

Strange how a subject once entered turns up around the next corner.

From C.D. Wright's COOLING TIME: AN AMERICAN POETRY VIGIL(2005): "I am not sure of where it is I am going. Important, I believe, to resist finality in one's own work while assiduously working toward its completeness." And, "Closure can be avoided by as many strategies as can beginning. 'Endings just drag me,' Miles Davis said in a DOWN BEAT interview."

Not being sure where one is going, but going. What is it Eliot says in FOUR QUARTETS? Does he say it in the QUARTETS? "Fare forward. The rest is not our business." Stopping is a part of continuing, just as sleep is.

Davenport, still life, the image

2008-01-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

Finally got around to reading Davenport's OBJECTS ON A TABLE, his study of still life in art. As always with Davenport, the writing is lively and the learning is vast and often arcane, assembled as one would a collage. He seems uninterested in constructing historical narrative, believing instead that the past is present and can be cherry-picked at will. So, his scholarly procedure is analogous to those artistic procedures he admires most and considers most modern.

"The art of our century is that of collage, involving quotation, parody, cultural inventory. Collage is by genre and by strategy the art of the still life, which begins as a duplication of reality in an image [Aristotle said art was an "imitation" of reality. The same thing?], grows into an enduring depiction of symbolically interacting objects in the service of one sentiment or another..."

"We can see this spirit of recycling forms and subjects in literature's propensity to follow Nietzsche in his saying that, human nature being unchanging, the same things must happen over and over again." Other bon mots include: "Reiteration is a privilage of still life denied many other modes," i.e., conserves its subjects and forms better than other modes. "It is an art that is symbiotic with civilization." Early in the book, he speaks of doing "iconographic inquiry," of which of course he is a dazzling master. But, this would seem to validate art especially (only?) as it reiterates the past, echoes it, alludes to it, cites it. As I said, art resembles and, in its extreme forms, becomes a kind of scholarship, preserving by reiterating the past. Such art is implicitly conservative, in all senses of the word. For Davenport still life is the highest form of art because it is so traditionally self-reflexive, more so than other modes. Self-relexivity in art ("recycling forms and subjects") keeps the past alive. So, when it comes to modern art, he praises first (only?) what is old in it, not what might be new. But, as Nietzsche said, human nature is "unchanging." Nothing is new. Rather, what is new is old (made new).

ending and stopping I

2008-01-15T17:24:00.000-08:00

Part of what kept me away from such a spongiform tablet as the blog was the gathering sense of not knowing what to do now. An odd shoe to be putting on after 50 years of scratching and scribbling. I suppose it has to do with some sense of age or, rather, some sense of bringing a thing like a life to some conclusion. And, as soon as said, the idea wilts, exposes its mold. I've said for years about the poem that you can bring it to an end or an ending, or you can stop. Stopping implies things that make sense, greater sense, than ending. I think Lyn Hejinian is a little harsh when she complains in "The Rejection of Closure" of "The coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry," but I understand the fatigue of being always tied to what we often find in music, the need to pull out all stops and blow the listener away with crashing, clashing chords and drums. She calls the similar thing in poetry a "negative model, with its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth....however pleasurable its effects, closure is a fiction, one of the amenities that falsehood and fantasy provide." This from her headnote to the essay in THE LANGUAGE OF INQUIRY (U. Cal. Press, 2000) , p.41.

And, too, stopping is more natural to human endeavor. Outside of the track race, that is. Stopping is what we do when the energy goes away. And the return to energy does not always connect smoothly (or at all) with what preceded it. We are energy transmitters, and most of us pick that energy up from various places, happy to do so. We chase it down for as long as we can, and when it gets away, which I think it almost always does, we let it go. If we're smart and whether we like it or not, that is.

Merrill Gilfillan's UNDANCEABLE

2008-01-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

Called back, as Emily said. From what? I hardly know. Sorry, bloggers. Will try to do better.

Anyway, I stumbled into M. Gilfillan's latest a month or two ago, published by the excellent Flood Editions. Not exactly new, being a book of 2005. But timeless, as the muses say. Full of his cryptic ellipticals strung out on a vaguely western twang. His verbal metier is southern midwest, really. A slow focussed interest in what's in front of him of note, but with little (other) reference to his self. No interest in elegy. A low-riding humorous affection for the genuine, human or natural, which is out of the way. Hints of Dorn.

brief responses

2006-12-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

I was asked recently by a magazine called BLOOM of Bloomington, IN to answer a couple of questions: How has my work been influenced by Bloomington and its surroundings? And, how have teaching and writing partnered up in my writing? Here's what I came up with (in less than 200,00 words):

I’ve always been influenced by place in my writing. It’s a trope in Romantic and post-Romantic writing to draw feelings out on the grid of what’s in front of you, particularly if it’s the natural world you’re looking at. I don’t know what that means exactly, but it feels to me as though the self and the place it’s in–even temporarily, as in travel–aren’t really separate. We are, in some way, part of the landscape. Of course, in a very big way, we’re not, as well. I’m continually stunned at how remote the world and the earth are from me. Anyway, to have lived for more than thirty years in southern Indiana, which is longer by far than I’ve lived anywhere else, has had an inevitable and, for me, a broadening effect on my writing. And, not just because I write about the region directly from time to time, but because it has been here and in its tones and imagery that I have learned to be the particular person I am. I left a message on an old friend’s voice machine a few weeks ago, one I hadn’t spoken with in years. She left one on mine in response: "Roger, you have a southern accent. Where did you get that?" Hm, I thought. I think I know.

Teaching, it seems, is not teaching unless it’s also learning. In my twenties, when I was deciding to be a poet, it seemed a logical thing for a writer to teach writing. I chose to get a Ph.D. instead of an M.F.A., but I always thought of my training in literature as training in writing. Who else can teach you better as a writer than a great writer him- or herself? Some might answer, "a great critic," and I have certainly learned much from the critics. They taught me how to read. They showed me what was going on in works I had difficulty with. At the same time, I think you can learn essential lessons from the writers of your own time, those who are struggling with the same issues, personal, public, and writerly, as you. This is what the critic, even the great critic, of literature can’t help you with. He or she is a student of the past, of a literature which is more or less completed, if not yet completely understood. The writer lives now, in the threat of the actual. He or she is drawing maps for the wilderness of the present, maps that later writers, most especially critics, will tidy up and use to "explain" the poet’s or the novelist’s rough charts. Charts that historians and philosophers sometimes turn to for help in their descriptions of existence. I think that’s what we mean when (and if) we say that artist’s are (when they are) the "antennae of the race."

a note on christopher middleton

2006-11-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

What is it exactly that Christopher Middleton doesn't like when he says: "An eager-beaver rising literary man with "Eng. Lit." behind and abreast of every novelty I certainly was not." [CHICAGO REVIEW, 51:1/2 (Spring 2005), 13.] Eager-beavers have a penchant, often, for self-display, of their eagerness as much as whatever its content is. The kind of thing one finds at sports venues and, so I'm told, corporate boardrooms. "Rising," of course, signifies a distracting attentiveness to one's career. "Literary" is not a good word to someone who feels that the last thing literature should be is literary, i.e., self-reflexive. For Middleton's and other surrounding generations, that meant resisting the influence of the world's most grateful colonial author, T.S. Eliot. After THE WASTE LAND, that is. "Eng. Lit.," speaking of colonialism, is the American rendering of the term and speaks to/about the eagerness with which the middle generations of American poets embraced (re-embraced?) the traditions and forms of the mother tongue and, by implication, little outside it. "Eng. Lit." was a closed shop, into which you could put American or any other experience if you did it the right way. It was not very open to influences from elsewhere--David Jones, Stevie Smith, and maybe Robert Graves to the contrary--despite or perhaps because so much of the other world, outside Eng. Lit., was beginning to bear down on it. Such attitude, be it underscored, came from an Englishman (Middleton) who made his way to Texas and, of course, the German language, two zones resisted in the deep provincial recesses of Englishness, there and abroad. Though one can't help but point out the love of jazz (the other?) in the writings of Philip Larkin, John Wain and Kingsley Amis. "Novelty" probably explains itself. The spuriously new, the trendy, whatever prevents focus on what matters. I don't know whether America made all this happen for Middleton or whether indeed it was England that drove him from England, but the need for The New was as strong in him as it was in the man who left Crawfordsville, Indiana for Venice in 1908. And who never came back except to spend twelve years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.

an old philosopher in cambridge

2006-11-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

It’s odd reading Frank Kermode’s NOT ENTITLED: A MEMOIR. On the one hand, it’s the description of the rise of a working-class Manxman (already an outsider to British life by coming from a quaint cul-de-sac of its imperialist sprawl) to be the holder of the King Edward VII Professorship of English Literature at Cambridge, an eminence one would have thought so stratospheric as to make the holder of it winged. But the point of the book seems rather to suggest that the eminence won in this life had less to do with the obvious rise than with the simultaneous resistance to it, with, in fact, the sense that the customary avenues to success, to say nothing of the palaces at the ends of their drives, were little more than clubs. The book’s title comes from a phrase once common in the British navy whereby common sailors lined up for their monthly wages were sometimes said to be "Not Entitled" to some part of their pay for one misdemeanor or another, often trumped-up by their superiors. As the term hovers over the whole book, however, it suggests Kermode’s own sense of his not deserving the reputation that came his way and that largely for his turning critic by default (he would rather have been a poet), where he spent most of his efforts writing literary journalism rather than the "serious" scholarship and/or criticism expected of him.

An accomplished social satirist, Kermode’s description of his tour of duty in the navy during World War II contributes considerably to our wonder that the allies managed to win it. Life aboard a converted merchant ship, captained by a succession of sometimes charming alcoholics but more often by pilferers, hoarders, and those drunk not only on pink gin but on authority as well, meant that Kermode kept his head down and followed the orders of the day, week or month, often at complete odds with the orders of the prior day, week or month. When coughed up on England’s dingy shore at the end of the war, he hardly knew what to do with himself. He was hired into the English Department at Reading by a professor who knew him whom he describes with great relish as essentially an actor who regarded the lecture hall as a kind of theatre. From there he moved to Newcastle Manchester, Bristol, University of London, and finally Cambridge (and I may have skipped a post or two), always bemused at those who hired him for not seeing that he was not quite the real right thing.

No charlatinism here, of course. It’s that he preferred, quoting Tristram Shandy’s father, to sleep diagonally in his bed, a literal fact of his old age but also a habit of mind that kept him from being the kind of scholar/ critic he obviously was supposed to have become and could have become if he had wished. He was an awkward boy, he says, particularly with women, and though married twice, he slept diagonally in that bed as well by "saluting" both of them in his book but otherwise leaving them entirely out of it. When I read the relevant paragraph to my wife, you could see her hackles rise. But then he did not write the book to please anybody but himself, and the "pleasure" to be had was in part the need to get his version of certain damning episodes in his professional life before the public, but more deeply the need to tell the truth of experience and of himself with all the necessary admissions of error that go with that. His life was, and still is, filled with an intellectual omnivorousness virtually absent from our time. One hardly knows what to call him, since teacher, critic, writer, scholar all fit him, as I think would something like esthetician. The book’s final chapter concerns his "flight" from the organized life of the universities where he had "the sense of being, too painfully, where one is not entitled to be, doing what one is not entitled to do." Though he lives in Cambridge, visited by friends and by his children, this old "philosopher" in his version of Rome looks out over his back garden at a statue of Diana, and writes, under the guise of book reviewing, descriptions of our cultural life that one is tempted to say ARE our cultural life slouching toward whatever it is to become.

a few new books

2006-10-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

I used to try to keep abreast of things, read all the leading journals, the latest or newest books of poetry. I wanted to know what was going on, what was possible in the language I was participating in. I had to find out what had happened, too, in all the receding layers of the past. It was impossible, and I think I knew that, but when did impossibility ever stop anyone from trying a thing? I was relieved, though, when a poet friend said to me quite a few years ago that she had stopped trying to "keep up." The quest had moved inward, I gather, and that seemed a more reasonable place to be in at a "certain age." Part of the problem, too, was that I had come to poetry at a time when everyone believed, as Eliot had instructed us, that one had to have read everything that mattered to be a poet. Poems grew out of poems, plus a dash of experience. Poems have always done that, of course, but not quite to the extent that we felt they had to be back in the middle of the last century. Are we in a better place now? I don’t know. Maybe. We’re in a different one, certainly. And, so am I. I probably know most of what I’ll ever know that will make a difference to me, and it’s out of that residue of reading and experience that I’ll be able to grasp what lies ahead. Have I seen it all and done it twice? No, of course not. But the tools I have for coping with the future are not far away and, hopefully, not too rusty.

Which is a long-winded way to say that a few good books have come my way recently, almost by accident, one sent by a friend, one sent by a friend of a friend, one from having just learned that a friend’s wife was also a poet, one from looking for this last book on the publisher’s website (a friend from many years ago, long unheard from or about, was on the same website), and finally a book I got from being a member of a poet’s organization. So, let me tell you something about them. They’re all wonderful books.

Off the Grid Press (see www.offthegridpress.net) has just published Henry Braun’s LOYALTY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, a beautifully-produced book by a press devoted to publishing poets of a "certain age." Braun belongs to the generation that dropped out of mainstream culture in the sixties by demonstrating against the government’s policies in Viet Nam and later by constructing a life that was, in fact, off the electric, as well as the political, grid. The result in these poems is a tone of unwavering mildness, a kind of stern placidity, in the face of so much that is misguided and downright wrong with the way we inhabit ourselves and the world. The poems, like the life they mirror, stay close to the earth and, too, to a language that evokes the astral vastness as well as the feel of the local. Here’s "Coming From Childhood":

When I come from childhood
with all my bridges alight behind
the stars are already named.

Pages of readouts
bulk in the observatories
with enough stars to shame Sumer.

I slow my breath to name
the burning bridges stars
still shining as my own.

Sumer (the civilization that gave us writing) and the astounding discoveries of the most modern science, and between them the small flame of a life kept burning.

Tom Hansen, a poet from South Dakota, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize this year with FALLING TO EARTH, published by BOA EDITIONS. This is a first book, as I understand it, from a man in his mid sixties, one who has served a long and careful apprenticeship to his craft and his life. The poems are as artful as they are apparently effortless, these meditations on the obscure purposes and the equally clear endings. This one is "Walking the Dogs in January":

We stumble out into winter.
Half a foot of new snow.
It squeaks when we walk and
keeps track:
who comes and who goes and where
and whether or not they turn back.

Cold crawls up my nose.
Snakes its way down my throat.
With every breath I see
a piece of my soul leak away.
None of it ever comes back.
What if I use it all up?

But the dogs are happy,
they bound on ahead,
and what can I do but follow?
We have nowhere to go
and race through the snow
to get there as soon as we can.

When we arrive
we will become
citizen-inmates of winter:
a country so cold only four words
of its lost language survive:
WIND and SNOW and DESOLATION--

and one there is no
human sound for.
Soon enough, we will be fluent
in that unspeakable tongue--
our footprints limping in circles,
dying to follow us home.

Hansen makes you feel as though the meaning of your life is always right there in front of you in the things you do every day. All you need to do is understand that and then write it down. Except that it takes a lifetime of looking and another lifetime of writing to be able to do that.

JAM is also published by BOA, in 2001. It is by Joe-Anne McLaughlin. Go to: www.boaeditions.org. Here is a dramatic, funny, dead serious voice that borrows from several corners of the world, as good poets must. Also a sense of form that’s as tight as a noose. The "take" in these poems is almost always from a position of severe strain, i.e., the earth and its heaven-sent arbiters leaning hard on mortal flesh. Hence her borrowings from jazz, the blues, and in a succession of poems, from Frost. Not the Frost of birch-bending, but the one who glanced once in the direction of Abishag. Little did he know what else she had up her sleeve. McLaughlin show’s us, though. Here’s "Abishag’s Brag" (which should be centered on the page, not aligned to the left):

Girl, in my foxtails
and fishnets, I was all
city. Exotic
as a Vatican
bagel, accessible
as Port Authority.
I wiggled, lightning
would fork,
sidewalks buckle,
wrong numbers ring,
Earth speak. I was
so out of this world
gorgeous men had to
use raincoats and
boilermakers
for protection.
And cool?–Sister,
I was Antarctica Express.
One night of me
and a fellow would
be lonely
all ways.

No time for lament here. These poems show us a woman who’s thrown herself into and at life in the same gesture.

Another poet who waited. How I admire the patience. Mary Rose O’Reilly published her first book this year, HALF WILD (LSU Press), and with it won the Walt Whitman Award. Where’s she been? Well, she’s written five (5) books of essays, and as the jacket copy says, is "active in Quaker ministry" and "also taken Buddhist precepts as a lay practitioner." A long lineage, that: Herbert, Hopkins, Merton, Snyder. The poems are narrow and quiet and don’t let go. "Scene of the Crime Photos" is aligned to the left:

I know
the trajectory
of this crumpled doll
to the bathroom floor.

I know
why the suicide
dropped his glasses.

I know
where you lie
with a rinse of darkness
under your head

in a ruin of faces
tried on,
discarded

in the uncontrollable gush
of words
you should never
have said.

This is a poet who has traveled far. I’m tempted to say, far FROM anything resembling concord. Only, thankfully, to return to it. When she starts a poem, "This might be considered/ a waste of time: to sit/ still at a window, telling/ one bud from another," as she does in "Durham," you know someone is lost and about to be found again.

Rochelle Ratner’s BALANCING ACTS just came out from Marsh Hawk Press (www.marshhawkpress.org). If I count right, this is her fifteenth book. She dedicates the book to her students "who have continually pushed me to redefine the borders of poetry," and it is always "out there" that we find her, trying to get further dimensions of life into poetry, trying to make poetry as big as life. BALANCING ACTS is a book of prose poems that hangs clearly but loosely on a narrative of the speaker’s life. It is funny and terrible at the same time, which is one of the balancing acts of this work. Here’s "Going to Bed Alone":

Whenever she sleeps with her lover she doesn’t wear anything, so it’s just as well he’s out of town. Or in town, actually, she’s the one who’s away for the summer. As far away as she can get from noise and drunks and streetlights. So when the speeding car leaves the road, clips a telephone pole, ruptures a gas main, airborne, crashes through her bedroom wall, flies over her bed, then partly out through the bathroom wall, pinning her under it only momentarily, its tires leaving deep impressions on the mattress but her body sinking even further (it’s one of those pillow-top mattresses), she’s virtually unharmed except for cuts here and there, but she’s extremely glad she has an old T-shirt and panties on.

Was the lover driving the car, in a rush to see her? Probably not. Is the crash through the bedroom symbolic? I leave that to you, dear reader.

Well, this was fun. I wonder what the future weeks and months will bring.

standing by

2006-10-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Arthur Gregor, in his memoir, A LONGING IN THE LAND, describes what it felt like as a teenager in Vienna in 1938 to have the Anschluss, the Nazi takeover, suddenly dropped on you. A friend of his had to leave the country almost at once, at a time when thousands were getting out and the train stations were filled with weeping parents sending their children away, etc. Here's his description of that feeling:

"Even his departure had for me that curious aspect of unreality--or is it reality?--we experience when confronted by something beyond our control, something that runs entirely counter not only to our wishes but to what we are able to comprehend, and we stand by, utterly helpless, letting what is happening happen as though will had been wiped away, choice an illusion, and something we sense dimly as destiny has taken over, and what must be, is, and we can do nothing about it."

the costless average, divine, original concrete

2006-10-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

What is SPECIMEN DAYS but a life as told by blogging? Here's Whitman's last entry:

Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature--just as much as Art is. Something is required to temper both--to check them, restrain them from excess, morbidity. I have wanted, before departure [that's "death," in case you missed it], to bear special testimony to a very old lesson and requisite. American democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices--through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophicticated life--must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. [Does anyone even understand such an utterance any more, much less believe in it?] I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element and beauty-element--to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.

Finally, the morality: "Virtue," said Marcus Aurelius, "what is it, only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature?" Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same--to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete.

[I'm not sure what "free skies" are, but I'm pretty sure we ought to go find out.]

Early Fall Report

2006-09-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

Much reading of late, off in many directions. Whitman's SPECIMEN DAYS, for one. Elinor Langer's bio of Josephine Herbst, which does the great service of re-acquainting me (again) with the radical past which we have nearly erased from our consciousness. I read Herbst's last book, NEW GREEN EARTH, three or so years ago. A well-written, informed biography of John and William Bartram which ought to be better known than it is. I trust the scholars of "nature writing" know it, but they need to get it into their canon, in the hopes, of course, that it will get into the larger canon. (Do we still have them? Canons, that is.)

But, I was in fact on my way to a getting-to-know Jean Garrigue when I ran into Herbst, a poet who has not got her due. She and Herbst were an item for a while in the early fifties. Anyway, the dazzle of this poet's best work also needs greater circulation. She was, at her best, an ecstatic, barely able to control the rush of her wit and enthusiasm (and so not easy to read in large doses). But, read her "Amsterdam Letter" or the inimitable "Grand Canyon." She wrote the latter on her drive back to New York from UC-Irvine, where she was a visiting poet, and where she had just learned she had Hodgkin's disease. She died a year later (1972).

I leave you with this small jewel from an immensely large rock, called "For the Fountains and Fountaineers of Villa D'Este."

...we are more water than earth
And less of flesh than a flame
Bedded in air and run by the wind

re-railed

2006-08-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

Whoever you are, and whether you really exist or not, you might have begun to wonder where I’ve been these past weeks, and the truth is, trying to find out if there is an external world (a world external to my thinking mind, including you) and if there is some way I might prove it. I.e., I got caught in the biggest philosophical web around. Try reading Timothy Chappell’s The Inescapable Self and see if you, too, don’t disappear for a few weeks, if not forever. At any rate, philosophy has this language game (a term Wittgenstein likes) in which you try to prove to yourself or another that there is no ground for doubting the existence of a world exterior to your mind. Here’s how it goes:
1. We seem to know about the external world by experiencing it.
2. But our experience could be exactly the same even if there were no external world.
3. We don’t know that our experience has been produced directly by an external world, rather than by a dream or an evil demon, or by the Matrix, or by Putnam’s (a philosopher) nefarious neurosurgeons manipulating brains in vats.
4. If we don’t know that crazy sceptical hypotheses like the one like the ones in step 3 are false, then we don’t know anything much about the external world.
5. So scepticism is justified.
[Be it noted that my spell-checker has never heard of the word "sceptical."] I just woke up from a nap, and here’s what collected in the puddle of my mind as I was sleeping. The problem here is with the mechanism of proof. That mechanism is language. The fact that even the best philosophical minds in the world can’t get language to bridge this gap and prove conclusively that there is a world external to the mind (Descartes painted himself into a famous corner on this one, you’ll recall: I think, therefore I am. He could make no further reliable proof of anything.) does not, logically, mean that it is not there. All it means, logically, is that our minds, using our language(s) can’t conclusively and rationally prove the existence of the external world. But, you and I know it is there. Our senses show it to us every day. And, too, we do not need to fall back on that worn-out word "faith" to prove it. We need no proof. We have it in our sensory tentacles all the time. Now let’s get back to work.

peter o'leary's DEPTH THEOLOGY

2006-06-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Peter O’Leary, author of GNOSTIC CONTAGION: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, is author also of DEPTH THEOLOGY, a book of poems published by University of Georgia Press. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. It is no surprise, then, that his poems are learned and theologically driven. In a long endnote called "Notes and Acknowledgments," he explains that depth theology is "a religious knowledge of the unconscious." The four parts of the book are "components" of this theology. Explanation is revelation in these poems, except that what is revealed is usually mysterious or remains at the level of human poetic incomprehensibility, a kind of highly charged stammering before the divine. To pick a passage at random, here’s the opening of "A Supersensual Utility in the Sun, and Stars, Earth, and Water."

Confined to the innermost shrine, something gentle settles, homotropic buzz.
Fertile. Theologic. Glue burns inhalant throughout the minor swale of
divination. Objects on the altar decorated with shells of crabs &
freshwater pearls.
What phantom hugs your breath to its chest, motionless?
In conjuring the image of God, dislodged by a turbulence
from a pinched diaphragm, I have chosen
a transcendent lammergeier massive with alpine
strength.

Even the poetry explains, even in the midst of its fevered rush to capture the ineffable. That’s where the excitement and tension lie in these poems. This is a poetry of instruction in religious mystery delivered by a modern-day priest with no orthodoxy, as we imagine early desert hermit monks to have been, other than what can be assembled out of a good library. What other poetry than Milton’s, were he alive today, would give us such words as petrific, theophony, psalterium, limbic, prolactin, theriomorph, thurifer, Torahtic, insufflating, etc.? Or, to put it in more recognizable terms from our intellectual life, this is another poetry committed to "primitive," pre-industrial consciousness AND knowledge of a sort we have had since industrial man discovered the noble savage or Robinson Crusoe found himself almost alone on a southsea island. Direct homage is paid in these poems to that aspect of Charles Olson’s thinking, its Mayan incursions, its defenses of the pre-Socratic mind, its allegiance to Carl Sauer and Stanley Diamond.

Guy Davenport gives a quick digest of this movement in the arts in his essay, "The Symbol of the Archaic" from The Geography of the Imagination (1981). It was part of Modernist (call it Romantic and post-Romantic) thinking to disparage what we had become. We no longer make "our clothes or houses or anything at all." We have "drained our symbols of meaning," "divorced poetry from music, language from concrete particulars." "Modernity" has become "a kind of stupidity." Davenport is here speaking of Olson, but it’s a condition he says we find at the heart of the work of Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, several movements in painting beginning with cubism, and so on. Hence the yearning backwards we find in so much Modernist work. "If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, we mean that as the first European renaissance looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a range of models and symbols, the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of civilization." (Pp.20-21) This is the ideology, if you will, out of which these poems spin, rather than, as one might suspect from much of the material quoted and discussed, the contemporary re-interest in standard religions.

One of the late poems, "Lux Contemplatio," offers a description/explanation of "prayer." Given the book’s Modernist roots, this description is quite ecumenical, trans-orthodox, but steeped in texts out of which Christianity arose. Said to be a form of migration (much of the book’s information and imagery comes from birds), prayer, now that the physical globe has been seen, must be understood as an "inward" migration. No more outwardness. Antarctica, the last wild place reached by man "means now an interior domain." Not, not certainly, to be reached by Freudian means, but by prayer.

Prayer is our migration; stillness is our movement....
Come then to the house of your own knowledge:
strive to confine
your incorporeal being within
your bodily house.

Strong echoes here of Olson’s essay, "Projective Verse."

Fine, but at some point, it seems, someone has to say, wait a minute. The Enlightenment has been villified enough. Modernism continues early Romanticism’s critique of the Industrial Revolution, what the Enlightenment achieved in the area of industrial production. No one denies that the Enlightenment was not as fully informed as we would like it to have been. Mistakes (and worse) were made in its name. Man’s intellect can only reach so far. Man’s desire for improving the lot of humanity, like everything else, runs up against what is perhaps too easily called the lust for power. Pound called it usury, Williams cupidity. As the conservatives among us are quick to say, everything is corruptible. That being true, shouldn’t we have expected things to go awry when ideas and inventions were found to improve man’s lot? Must we conclude that what the philosophes unleashed came to absolutely nothing? Should we revoke ether, return electricity to the sky, tear up the U.S. Constitution because we had the guillotine in France and the Cultural Revolution in China? Is "progress" simply a dirty word, a euphemism that hides brutality and not very well? These are, perhaps, over-heated questions to be putting to Peter O’Leary’s poetry, but his book brings us to these issues in ways that raise questions. As a poem with the telling title, "The Revival of the Religious Sciences," says,

We’ve spent millennia chasing the outward world, hapless
experts at exploring it. We need now to look inside. In exchange
for any lost progress, I will give you one hundred years of inwardness, a century
of the soul’s spiral movement, labor,
prayer, reading, inner energies coalescing from lower domains,
a private flaming ministry, the most Miltonic knowing.

I’m sorry, but this being a platform, albeit a poetic/spiritual one, it is thereby arguable. I don’t see how it will address our "outward" needs, which seem to me to be as large as they ever have been. Extinction is in the wind, and I don’t mean just for the spotted owl. Of what use are "a hundred years of inwardness" or "inner energies coalescing from lower domains" to people dying of starvation, aids, and genocide in Africa? To a family of six in West Virginia living in a mobile home on $18,000 a year? To a species that is running low on safe drinking water? And what of real science which today probes deeper into our physiology and brain function? I remember, in the collapse of political consciousness in the 70's, those who said hopefully that if we just took care of our inwardness, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, that turned quickly into a platform for looking out for number one and a license for greed.

Well, ok, we can’t expect poetry to address all issues. But we can expect a poetry to know the limits of its reach, its own futility, if it comes to that. I like the crazy energy in O’Leary’s best poems, his fascination with arcane and unpronounceable diction, his faith in persuasive utterance. It reminds me at times of Christopher Smart. But Smart was commitably crazy when he wrote his best, and his appeal to us comes from our seeing and knowing the limits of his mind (he would appear not to have known them) and, surprisingly, his joy inside it.

interruptions

2006-05-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

"Mosley cannot tell a story because there never is a story; the interruptions are what interest him. He wants to track the orbits of thought, each of which constitutes its own stab at the truth." Mark Rudman describes the writing of Nicholas Mosley, son of the British fascist, Oswald, in his (Nicholas’s) Catastrophe Practice series. Right away, three pages into it, I want to stop reading Rudman’s essay on Nicholas, skip the reading of Nicholas himself, whom I’ve never heard of (Oswald I do know), and go where the interruptions live with the orbits of thought in the land of the stabbed-at truth. I’m convinced that it’s right next door, where I have poached many a poem merely by driving by and waving at the man leaf-blowing his lawn into submission. He wears those dark glasses that airline pilots and state troopers wear and never smiles. Never has grass been clipped so close to the ground. It makes me want to pet it.

a poetry

2006-05-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

a poetry that doesn't blink when the world/life rears up in all its voraciousness.

a poetry that comes from/goes to feeling, but knows the snares of self-delusion contained therein.

a poetry committed to seeing whatever is real, whatever can stand up to a scepticism as to its (reality's) nature.

a poetry, however private and individual, that knows no experience is either.

a poetry gentle with the gentle, quick with the cruel, uncompromising with those who hide their cruelty under a veneer of gentility or ignorance.

If we have to choose between truth and beauty, let it be truth. But let us look forward to the day Keats thought had arrived two hundred years ago, when they become the same.

A poetry unafraid of ideas or the mind (one cannot see without them), but one that recognizes that "things" can sometimes be ideas. Sometimes; not always.

And, experiment, the new? It's included above, along with the archaic. Not foregrounded; included. "True imagination makes up nothing; it is a way of seeing the world." (G. Davenport)

other matter

2006-04-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

The demands of blogging are severe, and we must not falter further.

So, how about Guy Davenport, 1969, introducing Ronald Johnson's VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASSES: Speaking of 'the ideal western poem,' he says, "the credentials of this [kind of poem] tend to lurk not in the poem but in the personality of the poet. All that Byron wrote is somehow not as great as Byron. This illusion, fostered by the scandal-mongering of professors and the Grundyism of psychology, is a lazy and essentially indifferent view of poetry. The poet, who writes not for himself but to provide the world with an articulate tongue, longs to be as absent from his finished work as Homer."

Well, now, there's a point of view. Anyone care to respond?

Or, how about Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the betwitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

more on voice

2006-04-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

Helen Vendler’s Coming of Age as a Poet (2003) has one of the best discussions of voice in poetry and what it means to come into or “find” one’s voice. She doesn’t quite subscribe to the descriptions of this process given by Yeats in his “General Introduction” or by Hayden Carruth: “Before a man can create a poem he must create a poet.” [Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews (1982), p. 145], though in her essay on Plath’s “Colossus,” she says, at one point, “Suddenly, one is reading the person who became “Plath”.” (p.126) Here, she seems to separate the person from the poet, Plath from “Plath,” but her basic metaphor, as the book’s title indicates, is that what happens to a poet is that he or she “comes of age,” a standard, if unscientific, term of child development. Such a term strongly implies that becoming a poet is a process, however slow and difficult, of maturation. It is a natural, if not biological, transformation found in all life forms, one that, in announcing that transformation, also implicitly preserves the idea of a natural continuity or evolution of selfhood. There is no serious wrenching of the self, nothing that would allow a critic to say, for instance, that the man who wrote the River Duddon sonnets was different from he who wrote the Intimations Ode.
Vendler’s definition of voice comes to have many dimensions. She uses the word “style” interchangeably with “voice,” and describes four “discoveries in style” that a poet must make to come into full voice. They are: “the accurate expression of inner moods and attitudes,” an ability to identify “the salient elements of the outer sense-world that speak to his idiosyncratic imagination,” the devising of “particular axes of time and space” (the “living and non-living beings who will populate his work”), and finally, finding “a convincing cosmological or metaphysical frame of being within which the activity of the poem can occur.” (pp.4-5) While I agree that all of these discoveries have a relation to voice, to call them the vital components of voice blurs the meaning the word can have.
When she stays closer to what I think of as more evident components in a definition of style, she claims that a poet’s coming of age is a matter of forming “a coherent personal style.” (p.1) This corresponds to the “psychological search for identity—that is, for an authentic selfhood.” (p.1) “Coherence” (of character or self) and “authenticity,” along with “individuality” are her repeated terms for measuring or describing voice. “What sorts of discoveries in style does the youthful poet need to evoke? A governing stylistic decorum.” (p.4) I would have thought Eliot’s work—one of her four poets—would have given these criteria serious problems with its intense polyvocality (I’m referring only to the work he took the effort to preserve), but Vendler rightly finds the most readable, but not the only, version of Eliot in “Prufrock.” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “The Waste Land,” the Sweeney poems, the cats, these all seem to be either holidays or vaguely psychotic departures from the authentic, and this despite the fact that Prufrock is, however similar, not Eliot, just as Pound was not Mauberly nor Browning Fra Lippo Lippi. When Vendler says that “a poem can’t veer uncontrollably from attitude to attitude, tone to tone. It must discover a fit governance of its evolving material.” (p.5), I hear a kind of fear of loss of control that reminds me of Arnold, say, or John Crowe Ransom reviewing “The Waste Land,” a kind of nineteenth century longing for fitness and governance and evolution (not revolution), which is the very set of attitudes that spurred the upheaval in the arts that gave us the twentieth century.
We are talking about voice, but it comes as no surprise that we are also talking about cultural value and its preservation. To Vendler, authenticity relates to consistency and coherence (being a predictable, coherent self) or at least to a comprehensible evolution of tone. Governance and control are keys to preserving the kind of familiarity that makes for idiosyncratic individuality. Individuality is, indeed, the cornerstone to this aesthetic, which is, at once, the ground on which our political life is said to be built.
But, what if it isn’t? What if our political life is no longer what we hoped it was and would continue to be? It would seem we would then be confused. We might not know who we are. We might think the idea of a “governing stylistic decorum” did not fit an age where individuality is a quant throwback like the butter churn. We would, instead, if we still thought poetry worth writing, think that other things than “one’s own voice” would matter more. (On the other hand, we might think that we had nothing to cling to but that old, but now unmoored, self of the past.) One of the things that might matter more would be our voicelessness. Another concern might be to avoid a “governing stylistic decorum” if it fit too unchallengingly into a social and political condition where consistency, coherence, governance and control became the
ideals under which we, in fact, lose our individuality rather than discover and preserve it.

Seidel

2006-03-07T04:41:00.000-08:00

Who said confessionalism was dead? Just about everyone. Read Frederick Seidel and learn the limits of one's awareness. Here is a poetry larger than most everything written these days that comes straight from the planet Lowell-Berryman-Plath. "Straight" may be the wrong word for so knotted a consciousness, one so cosmically and personally tormented. "He hid his life away in poetry," says the poem "Frederick Seidel." Boring? It's like being bored at a beheading, bored at the final judgement of what we have amounted to. If they find anything in the dust millennia from now (whoever or whatever "they" are), the only chance the best of us has to be is what we had the courage and perception to see and say about ourselves. The "confessors" wont be alone out there, but they'll up there at the front of the parade. As Seidel shows us in THE COSMOS TRILOGY, we're caught between a cosmos that can't see us or care for us and an ego we can't turn off except by self-laceration.

proust's sentence

2006-03-04T08:39:00.000-08:00

Not all of Proust's sentences are alike, but there is one he's fond off which, by its behavior, suggests that P. grew weary of the limits of the sentence. He wants so badly at certain monents to include everything, thought, feeling, plus some sense of the physical world where the thought and feeling are taking place, that the sentence begins to distend, hemmoraging with parentheses, backpedaling into the past with dependant clause inside dependent clause, to the point almost of bursting. It seems as though he's showing us that the sentence can't really contain what there is of life, and yet he will not quite break it, believing, I would assume, that no other communicative protocol can approach the sentence's omnivorous jaws.

on (or near) the floe edge

2006-02-28T08:14:00.000-08:00

Too many days since I weighed in. Blogging makes demands, one of which might be to get out on the floe edge of perception and see what might be there. There's always the stuff out the window. Today, very cold. And white. Snow spread across the field like a butter by the wind. I like sliding across the field on skis. Why am I not doing it? I try sliding across the page, too. That, too, feels like a disappearance into essentials. What do I mean? Maybe that beyond meaning is something better than meaning. Which, of course, is a meaning, too. The wind has no obstacle to itself today. It blows and blows. The little white pines out front shiver.