Until 2005...

Have a happy ho ho... Season's Greetings, reindeer, ding-a-ling & all that... a true Gemini, I will leave you a couple of contradictory/complementary quotes to mull upon:

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order... the continuous thread of revelation.
-- Eudora Welty

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.
-- MC Richards

Peaceful & productive 2005.

"ORGANIC" vs. "NONORGANIC": the discussion continues (endlessly...)

Josh Corey has a thought-provoking series of posts from December 3-6, where he discusses "organic" vs. "nonorganic" poetry. For me, it is a real privilege to tap into his intellectual process, as he is tremendously widely read, very much in touch with elements of the contemporary scene that I am not, & has a working familiarity with critical materials like Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde and Pierre Bordelieu's Genesis and Structure of Literary Field, neither of which I will probably ever read in this lifetime. In his consideration of those two works he allows me at least a peek at some of their key insights. The dichotomy he describes, however, is not unfamiliar to me. Adze (see bio, & poem) and I had lengthy discussions back in the late eighties around very much the same duality, as Adze, with his endless "city of words" text, TV (text-visual) series, and Big Pages (which covered entire rooms) tends strongly towards the "nonorganic" (what we called process-oriented art) and I - with my tinyman series, Biblical monologues, love poems series - etc. towards the "organic" (what we called product-oriented art). Over the years of our discussion, I became more open to admitting random elements in my work… but it seems I have a pretty well genetic predisposition towards the kind of singular, "accessible" expression to be found in, "organic" poetry, whereas he is equally predisposed to celebrate the surprises and superabundant possibility to be found in the "nonorganic". To which I say, vive la difference.

To summarize Josh's arguments, there are two rubrics poetry falls under (as described by Bürger, et al...NB, in this summary, I'm interpolating obs. of my own, which I'll indicate as much as I can considering the haste I'm in… as I'm doing this summary as much for me as for readers out there…if I distort or oversimplify Josh's views in the process, my apologies…)

Under "organic":

· Poems with definite unifying (and limiting) subject matter: this poem is about war, about love, etc. These are poems most people identify as "poetry": Poetry from the canon (Lovelace Keats Wilber Plath & beyond, inc. "popular" poets like Tate, Collins, etc. ) I would say (my interpolation) that the contemporary poetry in this vein is largely Romantic, with recognizable tropes: love, death, natural motifs, etc.
· Characteristics: quoting from Corey: "the work's elements refer primarily to itself and only secondarily to exterior contexts (whether those be the facts of its production or the work's subject matter)
· Ironically, although it is called organic, this has taken, "through force of tradition", Josh says, very artificial, "inorganic" forms: the sonnet, villanelle, etc. Josh writes: "the attitude of the author has a lot to do with it, I think: the ethos of making the poem look easy, effortless, never letting them see you sweat-the labor of concealing labor - associated with labour."

Under "nonorganic":

· Poems/poets of the 20th C. (21st C.?) "avant guarde": Language Poets (Bruce Andrews, Bernstein, Silliman, etc.), & others associated with that sort of "experimental" work. Predecessors like Olson, Pound could be grouped here, although they definitely had "organic" elements, as did TS Eliot, regarded as avant garde when he took the literary world by storm with "The Wasteland", although really a kind of "romantic/organic" poet in the spirit of his compositions…
· Characteristics: quoting from Corey, "in the nonorganic works elements retain some of their independence-which does not mean, I think, that these elements could necessarily stand on their own as artworks, only that they primarily refer to some external reality (again, the facts of production or subject matter) and only secondarily do they make a contribution to the integrity of the artwork they belong to. Hence expression through pastiche, fragmentation. My note: A critical (in both senses of the term) influence: deconstructionism (Derrida, etc.)
· While "concealing the labour" is a characteristic of organic poets, the nonorganic writer must "show their work." Quoting from Corey: "in nonorganic artwork the parts do not form a unity: it is an assemblage of pieces between which cracks are visible, and the pieces have some degree of independence from the unity of the total work. The more minimal (or the less intrusive) the structure of the whole is, the more independence the parts have, and the "harder" the poem is likely to be."
To quote further from Bürger: "It is true that at the surface level, automatic texts are characterized by a destruction of coherence. But an interpretation that does not confine itself to grasping logical connections but examines the procedures by which the text was composed can certainly discover a relatively consistent meaning in them" (79).
· I would tend to add (this is me, not Josh), that the procedures by which the text is composed is indicated encompassing "conceptual umbrella" titles that "nonorganic" poets tend give to their creative projects: Pound's the Cantos, Silliman's The Alphabet, my friend Adze's "City of Words" are cases in point. (Those who are familiar with Bernstein and Andrews can corroborate or deny… I am not yet very familiar with them)

Corey, while he considers Bürger's "provocative conclusion that… organic and nonorganic artworks are equally (in)valid for the present", & favours himself lyric and sensual elements in poetry, says

"I'm interested in at least trying to experience any text that in some way foregrounds its artifice and involves or implicates me in meaning-production. And I'm much quicker to reject bad or even good organic work than I am nonorganic writing because I feel like its form is a lie that won't admit it's lying. (I'm speaking of modern and contemporary writing, of course; I can love Keats without making any claims for his inorganicity.)

It's interesting how Corey, while conceding the personal nature of his preferences, cleverly draws us towards "non-organic" poetry by consistently describing "organic" poetry in unfavourable terms, and "nonorganic" poetry in favourable terms: Organic is easy, effortless, no sweat (at least for the reader), and nonorganic "difficult", showing evidence of the work involved, therefore, presumably, a greater challenge to read (and a problem that can be solved, as Cris puts it). Organic is a kind of duplicity, a lie "that won't admit it's lying", nonorganic is not clearly described as a lie, or if it is a kind of lie because it is "(in)valid", at least admits to its limitation; therefore it is implied that it is more expressly, honest & "true". Organic work is "driven by force of tradition," whereas nonorganic work is "experimental." Organic work, because it refers to "reality", is described as independent, whereas organic work refers primarily to itself (therefore insular), is dependent. Reading Josh's description, I begin to feel inclined myself to prefer "nonorganic" poetry any day. But do I in my poetry practice? It seems to me all his arguments can be turned on their heads. More on this later…

Apropos de apropos

For essays/commentaries by people like Denise Levertov, James Wright, Richard Hugo etc. on subjects like line lengths and sentimentality in verse, bookmark this site called Essays, Issues, Poetics. Fascinating reading.

By the way, I must confess to a certain stuffiness a few days back, where I expressed annoyance at poet bloggers thrusting their drafts on the world at large. Reading Mike Snider and Tony Tost's blogs (blogrolled to the right), I quite enjoyed their draft/poem postings this week. I suppose if I am interested in the poet's process, if I'm in the mood, if the poem is apropos of some vital need of mine, I can be quite open to a blogpost poem. Clearly, this goes for all poetry: for a reader to be open to it, the poem has to be apropos of a vital need...

FORM & SUBSTANCE; PRINT & VOICE

Mike Snider has written an insightful series of blogs over the last week or so on enjambment in accentual-syllabic poetry. Highly recommend it, for those who are interested in poetic form.

Mike Snider's blog directed me to a fabulous poetry resource, the Factory School Digital Archive.
Recordings of readings by the all sorts of well-known poets are freely available here -- from Ammons to Plath to Yeats to William Carlos Williams. Snider was pointing out how when WCW reads, he ignores his exquisite line breaks and pauses only when punctuation demands it. The oral presentation of the poem doesn't necessarily have to conform to the visual version. They are different media, page & voice. Listening to Ginsberg reading Supermarket in California, I was surprised by how weary & woebegone his voice & reading seemed. I expected a more exuberant interpretation, especially with all those exclamation marks in the poem(... I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! etc.) But it was effective nevertheless... there is a plaintive undersong there, which his reading brings to the fore, with "What thoughts I have of you, Walt Whitman", "In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images", the "solitary streets", and "Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry..." Print is of course black and white: in an aural/oral poem, it is a series of instructions for interpretation, like a musical score. (On the page Ginsburg can't indicate how strong those exclamation points are!...!...!) Voice is many shades of grey, or rather sound colour... nuances of pause, volume, raspiness, clarity, rapidity of delivery, feeling of the moment... varied taste of words & silences, transmuted into speech...

ADZE: A POEM

I'm preparing a critique of Josh Corey's views on organic vs. nonorganic poetry, which I find very thought provoking, although I don't exactly share his take on the dichotomy… it may be a while, as I'm busy… it's kind of like preparing a debate with Clarence Darrow… so stay tuned…

In the meantime, here's a fine poem by Adze (aka Allen Sutterfield), and as he gave me a green light on publishing his stuff here, well, HERE GOES. This is one of five thousand-odd texts in his City of Words project…

THE POET

1.

"As above, so below."
…………..Hermes Trismegistus

I've got to breathe the alpine air
To stay afloat up here
But that's an air I know,
Glass-hooved goat of high peaks:
Words carry me across the crevasse
When air alone is underfoot:
World is there, where I land,
Page is my rock-shelf,
A page like this, showing words and world
Since both, not either, is where I trek and stand.

2.

"Bic in hand/is a magic wand!"
……………Tram's APOTHEGMS

Afternoon magic show under the trees
As the magician mixes elements in the breeze:
Water, Earth, and Air blend in Fire:
Light show extraordinaire!
Lawn party for the elite
Or carnival booth on the street
Magic is the frame
Of the picture that he forms.
No one can exactly say
Whether it is work or it is play
Yet all who see are made aware
Of the unusual happening there:
Equal measure in the scales,
Rite of passage to other worlds.



-- Allen Sutterfield (Adze)

A CANADIAN READS KHAYYÁM AND DREAMS HOCKEYWARD

Omar, he's got the rubái, he's coming down the ice, it's a two-on-one break, over to Fitzgerald, back to Omar, he shoots -

Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits - and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire.

he SCORES!!!! What an INCREDIBLE shot by Omar! To score his 9th quatrain in this Rubáiyát!

Crowd: Omar, Omar, Omar, Omar!

And that was one HECK of an assist by Fitzgerald, EH, Don?! We gotta see that on the replay. He's got the most UNBELIEVABLE back-pass in Naishapur ...

...some of my POETRY for a change...

Had a most enjoyable weekend by the standards of anyone living on this planet. Read lots of marvellous poetry (still mostly out of How Does a Poem Mean), made some significant revisions to my own work, wined/dined at a Japanese restaurant, made love, participated in an excellent Kosen Rufu Gongyo (does anyone out there know what that is?) saw some very engaging contemporary dance (Pierre Lecours & co. at L'Agora de la Dance). I also spent a number of the wee hours setting up a couple of "sub-blogs" for my poetry, one called "Sky of Ink", a sampling of short, previously published poems, and another, "Jonah", a longish poem from my first book.

When I started this blog, I thought I'd have everything here - journals, musings, rough drafts, what I called the raw sourced and the unsourced (whatever that means). But whenever I visited other poet blogs, I found nothing could make my eyes glaze over more quickly than being faced with unpublished poems and drafts. I actually don't appreciate having that kind of demand made on me au hazard. But if my curiosity is piqued… if the expectation is there… well, gladly.

Sky of Ink includes a few poems/prose poems in the third person from what I called my "Tiny Man" series. Jonah meanwhile is a monster of a poem from a monster series of dramatic monologues of early Old Testament characters. I've long since lost my desire - and probably ability -- to write in that mode, but… those OT poems are still as much a part of me as my right arm. They reflect a long difficult period that I consider the dark background of my present happiness. And, they impress me still.

Jonah was, in early drafts, cast in a kind of iambic pentameter, but there were too many enjambments for my liking … I found I was counting syllables to no obvious advantage, except to look "respectable". Like Browning or Milton. Yuck! More natural it was - and more in keeping with the spirit of those ancient OT personages, it seemed to me, to take a projective approach, as suggested by Olson in his benchmark essay "Projective Verse" (to be found in The New American Poetry edited by Donald Allen, Grove Press, 1960) - not page as visual field so much as reflection of the breath of the poet. I recorded several readings with a reasonably sensitive mike, and from the best of those, made the line breaks where I made in-breaths or dramatic pauses. Too bad the blogspot protocal breaks up the longer lines in the wrong places. Eventually I will have this on my own website, when it's functional and revamped.

My girlfriend quite likes the Sky of Ink site. She told me it looks like Christmas tree. (She still thinks I spend too much time on the net…)

HOW BREAKING UP MAY BRING TOGETHER

Some well put advice by Adze (Allen Sutterfield), which I decided to type out before reconsidering (again) the poems he was responding to. In a way seeing the drafts of the poems in question is beside the point: I think the comments apply generally. I think. Generally speaking. If you weed thru the particulars...

Brian,

You can easily mix prose with lyrics, a time-honoured amalgam, that also frees up the saying by allowing for more breadth and depth. You are in fact already doing this in these pieces, & it is definitely part of their strength. I think making shorter sections - that is, making sections per se - rather than running it all together is a tactical change that would benefit the reader - a whole page of single-spaced print is too formidable and discouraging & also forces the reader to acknowlege the shifts & then remember them & keep them clear -- & nobody's going to want to or like to do that - besides, a page looks more interesting to my eye, when the text is broken up and the whole page is used - just visual arranging can do a lot & even say a lot. After all, the long poems do have "sections" already, whether acknowledged in print or not. Why not let the print be mirror rather than wall?

To go back over your poems with a more acute visual eye can also aid in your attention to the "attention field" any good poem is. You can look at the writing more objectively, and be less immersed in its content (tho this is not to belittle content at all, in fact, content will be enhanced, because it will become more nearly itself, rather than the habitual conventional expression-forms of itself). You actually don't need to do anything content-wise, the content is fine and plentiful. (You might want to add some bits in "Harangue", but that is not really new content so much as content presently missing!)

So. Let this be just a couple of opening remarks in an ongoing discussion. I'll stop trying to say everything at once, one or two things clearly said will be better.

Adze
Nov. 12, 04

XJ Kennedy, Robert Duncan, et al.

Googling around for citations of Ciardi for the post below, I found this rather fun interview with XJ Kennedy. In it he talks about how Ciardi edited by "sympathetic contract", about trends in poetry, the ease of getting published but the difficulty of "getting noticed", etc.

Tony Tost meanwhile has sent my browser to a lecture by Robert Duncan, recorded some 30 years ago. This should provide an hour and a half's entertainment.

Things that arrived in the mail from Amazon today: Janet Frame's Faces in the Water (we couldn't find any Frame in any of the bookstores here... an Xmas gift for my girlfriend, which I've already wrapped...hardly a surprise since she saw me order it), Tony Tost's Invisible Bride, and The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Forms edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland. The latter looks like not only a beautiful anthology, but a remarkably unstuffy approach to closed and open forms, by poets, for poets. On order: Blizzard of One: Poems by Mark Strand; Triggering Town by Richard Hugo; Contemporary American Poets, an old anthology my friend Adze is reading, which I got for about $3; Duncan's Selected, and Introspections: American Poets on their own poems, by Robert Pack (thanks for recommending that, Charles). An order of Strand's Selected backfired, the bargain price copy I ordered not available. I'll reorder when I see the money's been refunded.

A note for Canadians ordering from US booksellers thru Amazon: the prices look like bargoons, even in Cdn. $$, but shipping costs approximately double them, on average. They don't tell you those costs until just before you finalize the order, in an obscure top right corner of your screen. The first time I ordered I didn't notice: I found out how much I was getting whacked with when I got my bill emailed to me. In most cases, though, it's worth it anyway. In others, there's no alternative. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I don't get hit with customs charges. (The books were priced low enough... I think ... but...)

SYMPATHETIC CONTRACT

John Ciardi in his anthology/critique/contemporary apology for poetry How Does a Poem Mean, describes a the sympathetic contract, the necessary bond of sympathy that must take place between poet and reader if a poem is to succeed:

"Every poem makes some demand upon the reader's sympathies. In addressing his subject, the poet takes an attitude toward it and adopts a tone he believes to be appropriate. His sense of what is appropriate, either in tone or in attitude, is of course a question of values. As such, it is obviously basic to the effect of the poem upon the reader. The reader may be right or wrong in disagreeing with the poet's values, but once such disagreement has occurred, that poem has failed for that reader. It is a question, as Robert Frost once put it, of "the way the poet takes himself and the way the poet takes his subject."

That demand upon the reader's sympathies may be made implicitly or explicitly, but there can be no poem without some sort of sympathetic contract between poet and reader."

After continuing in this vein with several pages of quotation and discussion, he challenges the reader to determine for him/herself how some 24 love poems, ranging from renaissance (Donne, Marvell, Lovelace, Herrick, Thomas Randolph) to restoration (John Dryden) to romantic + their contemporaries (Shelley, Byron, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt) to modern (Roethke, Nikki Giovanni, George Garrett, Diane Wakoski, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, Edna St-Vincent Millay), more or less randomly juxtaposed, "ring true" … whether their tone and attitude are exactly what they profess to be. It's a hell of an interesting reading experience… one reason why, for those who haven't had the chance to peruse this book, I strongly recommend doing so. (How lucky for me the day I picked my copy off the shelves of a second hand bookstore here in Montreal…) In this selection, Shelley (in The Indian Serenade) fares pretty badly, as perhaps he was meant to with lines like

Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!

Donne (The Good-Morrow, Song) is so focussed on the rigours of his wit that I hope for his sake he had at least one good lay --
Dryden (Ah, How Sweet It Is to Love!), hopelessly dry, all talk talk talk, I think he badly needed good a roll in the hay --
Snyder (After Work) had obviously rolled, but could have benefited from a good four-poster bed with a canopy--
Theodore Roethke (I knew a woman) - he's a marvellous fellow, I wonder though: did he really know that woman?
etc.

Richard Lovelace's poem To Amarantha, that She Would Dishevel Her Hair, conventional as it is with "Amarantha, sweet and fair/Ah braid no more that shining hair!" wins me over with a spectacular ending:

Do not then wind up that light
In ribbands, and o'ercloud in night,
Like the Sun in's early ray;
But shake your head, and scatter day!

Amarantha must have been a catch. But so, too, must have Richard.

Seems I'm focussing a lot on lays here.... My actual feelings are too complex to set down quickly , so I resort to tongue in cheek, cheek to cheek, etc.… as far as sincerity goes, however, two poems struck me as sincere to depths of their words. And these are actually, in a way, dirges:

For Jane

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.

I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

That's by Charles Bukowski. Here, by the way, is another one by him that I very much liked:

Style

Style is the answer to everything -
a fresh way to approach a dull or
a dangerous thing.
To do a dull thing with style
is preferable to doing a dangerous thing
without it.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Christ
Socrates
Caesar,
García Lorca.

Style is a difference,
a way of doing,
a way of being done.

6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water
or you, walking out of the bathroom naked
without seeing
me.

The one that affected me most deeply, however, was the last selection in the group, perhaps placed by John Ciardi as a kind of last word on the subject… as I'm getting tired (it's past 2 in the morning as I write this) I'll leave it to speak for itself…

WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED
Edna St-Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.