Stoning Of The Devil (PHOTOS): Muslims Cast Stones On 3rd Day Of Hajj

Stoning Of The Devil (PHOTOS): Muslims Cast Stones On 3rd Day Of Hajj

The reason I post this is that at the foot of the article is some rare and amazing footage of the Hajj pilgrimage -- smuggled out by an American journalist, because apparently it's against the rules to film this kind of thing. I found it truly spellbinding -- a voyage into another world.

Keith Waldrop

"If you read a review of Keith Waldrop's 'Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy,' this year's winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, there's a good chance it will include the word 'postmodern' or 'avant-garde.' These are terms that put a lot of readers on guard, signaling experimental verse."

CAN POETRY MATTER? 15 YEARS AFTER (Part 3)

(See Parts I, 2)

John Palattella’s “10 Years After, Poetry Still Matters”*, published in 2002 in The Higher Education Chronicle, aims to take Gioia to task for a certain smugness and presumptuous excess. What he does manage to do is make himself gratingly annoying with some rather poorly aimed pot-shots at a man who has managed, with arguable success, to marry mammon and the muse. Although bios I have accessed on Palattella list him only as a “writer on poetry” for The Nation, London Review of Books and a number of other august publications, I can’t help but imagine him firmly ensconced in Higher Education himself, what with his thinly-veiled condescension towards the mere “executive who ... once managed the Jell-O account at General Foods”, who had the audacity to shake up the poetry world by publishing a book of essays on contemporary poetry. Aside from suggesting that Gioia’s argument in "Can Poetry Matter?" is couched primarily in unsubstantiated assertions and “bombastic” analogies, the most disingenuous aspect of Palattella's review is that he doesn’t clearly acknowledge that Gioia, whatever the limitations of his purview, went to considerable lengths in later writings to show how the growth of spoken word has changed the character of the poetry scene since the publication of his landmark essay. Palattella does, however, make some interesting points along the way. I like this one:

In 1991, the year Gioia's argument appeared in The Atlantic, nearly 5,000 poets were listed in A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers. According to the Directory of American Poetry Books, which is maintained by Poets House, in New York City, nearly 7,000 volumes of poetry were published in the United States from 1990 to 2001. (That figure excludes poetry CD's, audiotapes and videotapes, and other multimedia recordings of poetry.)

The situation in the mid-20th century, which Gioia treats as a golden age of poetry-writing and poetry-reviewing, was considerably different. According to a bibliography published in the magazine Accent, there were 151 American poets in 1941; from 1931 to 1940, they published a total of 264 books of poetry (excluding doggerel and inspirational verse).

Commenting on those Accent figures in 1989, in an essay later collected in Outside Stories, 1987-1991, the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offered an explanation that remains sound today: American poetry "was once a village where neighbors chatted and feuded. Now American poetry is a little nation of citizens who are unknown to each other, a federation of cantons where the passes are snowed in and the wires are down."

...Not all of the wires have remained down, since the Internet has not only facilitated communication among cantons but also opened up territory for new cantons. But the poetry world is still a federation, not a republic, and whether its decentralization has fostered pluralism or balkanization remains an open question.

How about pluralistic balkanization – is that a possibility? Reading that last sentence, my own tongue feels balkanized. But I love the Weinburger quote. Palattella’s concluding remarks, despite my differences with him, mirror my own evolving view of the contemporary poetry world I as explore its permutations:

What's certain is that, given the changes in the country's demographics, the rise of mass university education, and the growth of poetry as a middle-class profession, that little mid- century village has vanished for good. Perhaps the term that best sums up the current state of affairs is motley -- a mix of dazzling, foolish, and banal work that cuts across styles, movements, and schools. The murky certainties of the title essay of "Can Poetry Matter?" have grown only murkier in 10 years' time, which is why wandering around a motley poetry world remains more appealing to me than the solicitude of Dana Gioia.

*now only available by subscription

QWF Awards

Congrats to the winners.

GG's

Congratulations to the winners. And all those on the short list too.

My review of Sina Queyras' Expressway is up at The Rover. It's been nominated for the GG; tomorrow we'll find out if it's a winner. If she wins, I feel it'll be richly deserved, although not having read any of the other books on the short list, I can't claim this to be an unbiased opinion.

Sky of Ink Press and Signature Editions will share a table at Expozine this Sunday, between 10am and 6pm. If you're in town have the yen to browse this lively literary flea market, feel free to come by!

My writing room

There's a little feature about my favourite place to write here at Ms. Julie's blog.

More installments of "Can Poetry Matter? -- 15 Years Later" to come. (The lines come out all zig-zaggy and it takes a while to rearrange them... what a chore!) Have been busy with supply teaching, regular classes, a hefty head cold that turned out not to be swine flu. Now a book review for The Rover -- Sina Queyras' Expressway -- is pushed right to deadline. So I must turn to that, expressly.

"Can Poetry Matter -- 15 Years After" (Part 2)

(See Parts I, 3)

Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” was written at least partially to gainsay boosters like Hall. One of Gioia’s rhetorical devices is to lump Hall in with the thirty other nameless writers who felt moved to rebut Epstein’s polemic; only one, Henry Taylor, who went to the seemingly desperate length of writing two rebuttals, is named. It is beyond the scope of this article to deal point by point with Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter.” To my view it is excellently written, most of its observations are quite astute, and the six recommendations that conclude the article would most certainly enhance the practice and presentation of poetry if put consistently into effect (one recommendation I’ve already taken to heart is to share, where time permits, at least one poem by another poet when I do readings). Don Hall's feisty essay, however, injects a positive note that makes necessary reading for anyone with vital interest in the issue. Personally, I wish I had read it back in ’89 when it appeared.

Looking over these articles, I wondered, has anyone convincingly raised the cudgels since? Or could these essays, dating from more than 15 years ago, be considered "the last words" in that debate? In many ways of course things remain very much the same in the poetry world: many of the same institutions dominate, as do the same writing programs and journals; MFA poets keep being churned out by the thousands, prizes have proliferated to the point where it almost seems a distinction not to have won one, and contemporary poetry continues to be all but ignored by major media. But it would be hard to believe that no one has made commentary on some major ground shifts, especially considering the onset of the internet and the continued popularity of spoken word. To satisfy my own curiosity I decided to simply type “Can Poetry Matter” into Google and see what came up. Sure enough, my search yielded about a dozen articles, of which at least three or four were well worth reading in their entirety.

In “Does Poetry Matter: The Culture of Poetry”, originally a talk given at a 1997 Raven Chronicles poetry forum, poet Bart Baxter starts off in an amusing fashion:

Before I begin my prepared remarks, let me ask for a show of hands in the audience, a scrupulously honest show of hands. How many of you here tonight are poets? [Half the audience raised hands.] How many of you would like to be a poet, have maybe written some verse, are looking for a publisher? [1/4 raised hands.] And how many here are friends of the moderator or someone on the panel? [1/4 raised hands.] Now, everyone in the audience who did not fall into any one of those three categories, who did not raise your hands before, please raise your hands now. [One hand was raised.]

I think if Dana Gioia were here tonight, he would simply say: I rest my case.

In this short article, Baxter gives a good synopsis of Gioia’s main points in “Can Poetry Matter?”, and describes also how Gioia's opinion has since changed since writing that article:

Dana Gioia wrote "Can Poetry Matter?" long before he realized what was going on in the urban centers across the country, in the night clubs and cabarets, at the Greenmill Tavern in Chicago and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, at the open readings and poetry slams. In a lecture he presented at Poets House in New York on October 26 [1995], which became an essay published in Poetry Flash, "Notes Toward a New Bohemia," his greatest fears about the future of poetry seem to be assuaged.

Everyone likes to sound authoritative in his opinions, but it’s getting harder and harder these days to say anything authoritative about anything. We have to give Gioia an E (Excellent) for Effort in trying his best to update his perceptions. In “Notes Toward a New Bohemia”, Gioia concludes along these lines (quoting again from the Baxter article):

1. The primary means of publication of new poetry is now oral. This applies to older established poets as well as new unknowns.

2. This represents an enormous paradigm shift away from print culture, in that:
a. The government is neither involved with subsidizing events nor appointing particular poets.
b. The physical audience listening to poetry greatly outnumbers the people who read poetry in books. (Do we need one more professor to tell us that the important thing is whether the poem will translate from the "stage to the page"?).

3. This is a populist revolution, a distinct move from print to oral tradition, largely among groups long alien to the traditional, dominant, literary, academic culture:
a. e.g., rap lyrics, in music and poetry.
b. Cowboy poetry.
c. Poetry slams.

4. Surprisingly, most of this new populist poetry is formal:
a. e.g., the four-stress lines in rap.
b. The English ballad form in cowboy poetry.
c. The merger of poetry and experimental theater in performance poetry at poetry slams often uses elaborate rhyme schemes.

5. As for the University, an institution better equipped to preserve old culture than foster the creation of new art, it will probably hold on dearly to Modernism, and will continue to do so until Post-modern poetry's last gasp.

Poor Modernism! (As for myself, a writer for whom Post Modernism mostly occurs when he sends his work in the mail, I’m already beginning to lose my breath…)

(See Parts I, 3)

CAN POETRY MATTER? 15 YEARS AFTER (Part 1)

Have been away a rather long bit from this blog -- a lot of work and a number of personal matters to attend to. Even now I have a number of deadlines I'm working on. But I thought, over the coming week or so, I'd share with you this: an essay I wrote that first appeared in Rock Salt Plum Review in Spring, 2006, that surveys reactions over the previous 15 years to Dana Gioia's seminal essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" Unfortunately, RSPR, one of the finest online literary reviews on the net, ceased publication a couple of issues later. Now I discover it's gone *Poof!* out of existence, taking down not only this essay, but interviews and poems by the likes of Li Young-Lee, Denise Duhamel, Duane Ackerson and other noteworthies I can't rightly recall: yet another prime illustration of the ethereal nature of this etherish medium. Since it's a lengthy essay, I thought I'd publish it in serialized form over the coming days, and then do an update, providing links to more recent material that bears on the topic. That'll be four or five installments altogether. Here's the first:

CAN POETRY MATTER? 15 Years After

by Brian Campbell

(first published in Rock Salt Plum Review, Spring, 2006)

In 1991, poet and business executive Dana Gioia published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly called “Can Poetry Matter?” While it may seem to readers today a self-evident summary of a well-established state of affairs, it caused a storm of controversy (tempest in teapot? saké cup?) in the North American poetry world when it first appeared. Its opening, oft-quoted paragraph reads as follows:

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

Gioia goes on to describe what he aptly calls a “Zen riddle of cultural sociology”, wherein poetry publishing and programs proliferate on a historically unprecedented scale, while the art itself remains a “distressingly confined phenomenon” that has all but disappeared from public view – much of it, as always, of highly questionable worth, appreciated, if at all, by only a tiny coterie of other poets. Here he writes very much along the lines of Joseph Epstein’s mordant "Who Killed Poetry?", a polemic he references and which I remember both impressed and very much depressed me when it came out three years previously in Commentary. In it, Epstein argues that poetry is "flourishing in a vacuum", that an overwhelming production of essentially insipid work is being artificially stimulated by the grants and MFA system, which has helped to choke off poetry appreciation in the culture.

Looking up the Epstein piece on the net for further parallels (it was not readily available), I came across this 1989 article by Donald Hall, “Death to the Death of Poetry”, one of a spate of about thirty articles written around that time intended to refute it. I daresay that I loved it. It convincingly nays the naysayers of contemporary poetry (excuse my neighing!), and gives a bang-on diagnosis of much of the so-called "problem" of poetry appreciation in our culture. Vis-a-vis an oft-lamented decline in quality of contemporary verse-writing, Hall describes how, because readers in general and particularly the media are slow to catch on to a poet’s significance (as compared to say a novelist’s), a paradox ensues that we could call “The Giant/Pigmy Syndrome”:

Time, which reported The Waste Land as a hoax in 1922, canonized T. S. Eliot in a 1950 cover story. Certainly Time's writers and editors altered over thirty years, but they also stayed the same: always the Giants grow old and die, leaving the Pygmies behind. After the age of Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Moore, and Williams, the wee survivors were Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, and Bishop. When the survivors died, younger elegiac journalists revealed that the dead Pygmies had been Giants all along--and now the young poets were dwarfs. Doubtless obituaries lauding Allen Ginsberg are already written; does anyone remember Life on the Beat Generation, thirty years ago?

Hall argues with considerable force that there is a definite and growing audience for poetry, evidenced in the numbers of readings and sales of poetry books, that latter of which, at the time of the writing of his essay, had gone up at least tenfold over the previous thirty years. A dozen or more American poets, he reports, had recently sold books by the tens of thousands: Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Forché, and certainly others. Galway Kinnell approached fifty thousand with Book of Nightmares, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind, a trade paperback, sold more than a million copies. These sales figures, as always with poetry, are cumulative over years; this means of course that they consistently fall under the radar of best seller and yearly book sale lists.

The problem, Hall is ready to acknowledge, is one of cultural perception: Although there is more poetry today than ever, there is less poetry reviewing in national journals. Examples are plenty, and he mentions some of them: Harper's and The Atlantic had recently abandoned quarterly surveys of poetry, New York Times Book Review had diminished its attention, etc. Aside from any deliberate editorial policy on the part of these journals, one reason he pinpoints is purely socio-economic:

In the past, men and women like Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Cowley, and Louise Bogan practiced literary journalism to make a living. Their successors now meet classes MWF. People with tenure don't need to write book reviews.

(Tenure? It seems permanently provisional contracts are enough.) This dearth of course leaves poetry – and poetry readers – greatly disadvantaged:

… we need a cadre of reviewers to sift through the great volume of material. The weight of numbers discourages readers from trying to keep up. More poetry than ever: How do we discriminate? How do we find or identify beautiful new work? When there are sufficient reviewers, who occupy continual soap-boxes and promote developing standards, they provide sensors to report from the confusing plentitude of the field.

(See Part 2, Part 3)

Links

• The Last Poet To Win The Nobel Prize
• Found: Dorothy Parker poem reveals pain of rejection
• Do You Believe in Magic? {congratulations!}
• I was about to say that I don’t understand how people can get upset at a lowly little poetry magazine that runs at a loss for the love of the game — but I guess I do understand
• Writers share the rituals of writing — or not —

Author Interview/Passenger Flight review at Concordia Link

Brian Campbell explores modern techniques of torture and technology in Passenger Flight. GRAPHIC JONAS PIETSCH

PASSENGER FRIGHT
Brian Campbell publishes post-9/11 prose poems
by Christopher Olson

We’ve come a long way since Leonard Cohen wrote those famous lyrics, “She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.”

“Now everything comes from China,” said Brian Campbell, whose book of prose poems, Passenger Flight, invokes global warming, globalization, 9/11 and state-sanctioned torture.

“The Angel,” originally published in the 1980s, views torture from the point of view of the torturer and resonates a tad differently post-Abu Ghraib. When Campbell wrote about torture, he was referring to German SS physician and lead human experimentalist Josef Mengele.

Most of the book, however, was written starting in 2006... read on.

That's me reading from and giving a talk about Passenger Flight at the U. of Winnipeg last week. If the picture's a little blurry, it's because it was taken without a flash. It was a really enjoyable event -- made me wonder if I had missed a vocation (i.e. being a prof). I read about 7 poems, talked about how they came to being -- and the audience, about 45 (mostly) creative writing students, were attentive and asked good questions.

As for the reading at Aqua Books, well, it could have been better for a bunch of reasons, most of which I won't go into here. The limited attendance (8 -- typical for a bookstore poetry reading featuring a relatively unknown out-of-towner) was made to feel skimpier by the huge mausoleum-like upstairs room (I mean, it has a stage and about a hundred seats in rows) the organizers chose to hold it in. The bookstore is funky and attractive, and to their credit, they hold a lot of events, but relative unknowns be forewarned: if you're coming in from out of town, request that the reading take place in some intimate nook among the books, as is pictured on their website.

ADDENDUM:

This blog has been receiving a lot of visits lately via a post by the owner of Aqua Books. Granted, this was not my best reading. Combining music and poetry in the way I did (it had been suggested by a couple of audience members) was not a great idea; I did read too long. Some people told me they enjoyed it nevertheless. There was a multitude of factors behind this reading going the way it did. However, it does not warrant the kind of personal attack this individual has leveled against me. I’ve delivered excellent readings before, and will again. If anything positive has happened besides this having been a learning experience, it's the fact that he's brought people to my site. I invite all those readers to look around, read recent reviews of Passenger Flight, and enjoy the discussion, quotes, and links to other fine articles about literature and the poetic life.

Free Rice

I am thankful to be having 2 Thanksgiving dinners this weekend. The World Food Program is running out of food. Go to the Free Rice site and by playing a word game, donate a dinner to someone who might die without it! I just donated 1,400 grains of rice. http://www.freerice.com/index.php

(NB. Thanks to Elise Moser (facebook post) for this -- most of the wording is hers, but applies to me as well.)

Links

-- Herta Mueller wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (Manchester Guardian)
-- Mueller's win: is the Nobel committee Eurocentric?
Other articles:
“The first function of a literary magazine is to introduce the work of new or little-known writers of talent.”
— At first glance it seems the relationship is largely one way – that modern cinema is less enamoured with poetry than with poets’ life stories. —
— One burning question I remember having at the time was: Why doesn’t poetry rhyme anymore? —
-- Sina Queyras on reading styles --
— Killer poet pleads for release —

... the tour continues...

Click thru to see large...

Passenger Flight lands in Winnipeg

WINNIPEG LAUNCH OF PASSENGER FLIGHT
Featuring Brian Campbell + Lori Cayer
Aqua Books
Friday, October 2, 2009, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
274 Garry Street (between Graham and Portage)
Winnipeg, MB


Please join us in welcoming Montreal poet and singer-songwriter Brian Campbell, who published his latest book with Winnipeg's Signature Editions. Brian will be joined by Winnipeg's Lori Cayer.

PASSENGER FLIGHT gets its second review

Winnipeg Uptown Magazine Online: "Brian Campbell's Passenger Flight (Signature Editions) is a collection of prose poems about very contemporary concerns: the depiction of women in advertising, big-city life, sex tourism, high blood pressure and global commerce. One poem, Pastorale, uses language from postings at an abandoned missile site in California.

Other pieces tackle the current relevance of poetry. A poem called Edmonton notes that 'Poetry is compared to the filling of potholes here and found wanting.' Fishy suggests a novel use for ground-up poetry manuscripts.

On the other hand, Nota Bene concerns that old standby, sex. Meanwhile, the ghost of Charles Baudelaire whispers in some of the poems: the French master also wrote about sex and the city, so maybe these concerns are universal.

Campbell finds beauty in chaos and the eternal in the seemingly transient."
-- Quentin Mills-Fenn

TWO WENT TO SLEEP

My contribution to the Leonard Cohen, You're Our Man anthology is a literary palimpsest of his poem "Two Went To Sleep", which I found in the
15 Canadian Poets anthology edited by Gary Geddes back in the early '70s.

A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book that has been scraped off and used again -- where legible traces of the original writing are still visible. A literary palimpsest is a rewrite of a literary work, where the outlines of the original are still apparent, but which has been thoroughly altered or updated in some way. To my understading, a literary palimpsest is akin to a parody, but more of a tribute. I don't find this term in either of my literary dictionaries -- but the metaphor, and the critical term, have been around for some time, as Carmen Musat on this site attests. To some extent, he argues, all literary creations are palimpsests.

Since there was no room in the anthology to publish the original (nor, I imagine, time or means to deal with copyright issues), I took liberty to post both versions here. Contrary to popular rumour, Leonard and I did not share the same bed -- but I invite you take palimpsestuous delight.

LEONARD COHEN
_______________________________

TWO WENT TO SLEEP

Two went to sleep
almost every night
one dreamed of mud
one dreamed of Asia
visiting a zeppelin
visiting Nijinsky
Two went to sleep
one reamed of ribs
one dreamed of senators
Two went to sleep
two travellers
The long marriage
in the dark
The sleep was old
the travellers were old
one dreamed of oranges
one dreamed of Carthage
Two friends asleep
years locked in travel
Good night my darling
as the dreams waved goodbye
one travelled lightly
one walked through water
visiting a chess game
visiting a booth
always returning
to wait out the day
One carried matches
one climbed a beehive
one sold an earphone
one shot a German
Two went to sleep
every sleep went together
wandering away
from an operating table
one dreamed of grass
one dreamed of spokes
one bargained nicely
one was a snowman
one counted medicine
one tasted pencils
one was a child
one was a traitor
visiting heavy industry
visiting the family
Two went to sleep
none could foretell
one went with baskets
one took a ledger
one night happy
one night in terror
Love could not bind them
Fear could not either
they went unconnected
they never knew where
always returning
to wait out the day
parting with kissing
parting with yawns
visiting Death till
they wore out their welcome
visiting Death till
the right disguise worked.





TWO WENT TO SLEEP
(after Leonard Cohen)

Two went to sleep
almost every night
one dreamed of earth
one dreamed of Europa
visiting a shuttle craft
visiting Scriabin
Two went to sleep
one dreamed of anuses
one dreamed of assemblies
Two went to sleep
two voyagers
The long tarry
in the ark
The sleep was bold
so the travellers were told
one dreamed of almonds
one dreamed of Alexandria
Two friends asleep
ages locked in travel
Good night my sweet
as the dreams waved farewell
one travelled sprightly
one walked through tombstones
visiting a web site
visiting a bar
always returning
to wait out the day
One carried a corkscrew
one climbed a salt shaker
one sold an iPod
one shot a Republican
Two went to sleep
every sleep together
wandering away
from a vivisection table
one dreamed of sable
one dreamed of Sahara
one dealt out cards
one became a statue
one counted trade agreements
one tasted scriptures
one was an embryo
one was a patrician
visiting a factory
visiting the cradle
Two went to sleep
none could foretell
one went with a calculator
one with a book
one night serene
one night in horror
Love could not hide them
Fear could not either
they went undetected
they scarcely knew where
always returning
to wait out the day
parting with embraces
parting with yeah right
visiting Death till
Death put out their eyes
visiting Death till
Death was their disguise

Our Man

Here's the cover of the Cohen anthology. The launch date is this Thursday the 17th at Westmount High School auditorium, 4350 Ste-Catherine W. (just a little west of Atwater metro, I'm told), at 7:30 pm. Admission $5. Haven't seen the tome yet myself. Margaret Atwood will be in it, I'm told; I just learned on Jack Locke's facebook site that poets participating in the launch include: Ann Weinstein, Jason Camlot, Ann Lloyd, David Solway, Donna Yates-Adelman, Michael Mirolla, Jeffrey Mackie, Angela Leuck, John Fretz, Grace Moore, Rona Feldman Shefler(a classmate of Cohen's,) erika n. white, Sandra Sjollema, Ryan Ruddick(Westmount High teacher,) Brian Campbell, and Eleni Zisimatos. A number of good poets here. No news as to whether the man himself will be in attendance. On Sept. 21 there's a gala which I can't attend, because I'm teaching that night. Details on Jack Locke's site.

Update, Sept. 17: Home from the launch of "Leonard Cohen, You're Our Man". A well-produced book, a classy occasion. A number of the poems were good-- and the DVD of praise for LC from the international space station was a surprise.