Pronouns/Amateur Nouns and SHARING

Today had a marvellous day. Got together with some fellow poets from last Fall's workshop, caught up on each other's news and read/critiqued each other's poetry, over wine, dip, crackers. A lot of the work read and shared was very good, definitely "publishable" or nearly so. Would it have been as good to me had I run across it in a literary magazine, and didn't know the living, breathing poet who wrote it? If the poet hadn't been there providing context and commentary, his or her reading voice and body and personality and living self providing itself a kind of context and commentary? Who knows? But I felt privileged to be part of a poetic event which may never have further record than this. And it reaffirmed an old realization, of which at times, it seems, I need to be reminded, especially when I haven't participated for a while in a get-together like this: that poetry is so intimate a medium, that it makes such demands on its readers, that it is best appreciated in an intimate context like this, and so resists the kind of commercial dissemination that goes much beyond this kind of personal, one-to-one or small group sharing.

To kick off our reading, I shared with my friends Charles's wonderful post on risk, which inspired a couple of us to share some risky poems, work which ventured into the arbitrary, solipsitic, or socially reprehensible (or at least, heavily confessional). Charles, your liberating influence spreads across the globe!

One good spinoff of the experience for me at least is that I got a critical tuneup for one of my poems, the write~~~dance thing I quoted about a couple of weeks back, and which I'll have to submit soon to the dance company. Here are the first few lines (it runs over a hundred, so this is just a taste):

here
in this circle
of light
i'm alone

teasing the air
torsion    contortion

limbs lunging out
into the blackness

flesh    glowing pink
round
fingers
that flicker

flight out of spotlight
flight   out of sight

i'm dying
but spinning
in circle of
 light

One of the poets there pointed out that several of pronouns (+ one connective) were kind of unneccessary, that the poem would be lighter on its feet without them. And I think he's likely right. Hence:

here
in this circle
     of light
  alone

teasing the air
torsion    contortion

limbs lunging out
    into the blackness

flesh    glowing pink
round
  fingers
  that flicker

     flight out of spotlight
    flight   out of sight

 dying
 spinning
  in circle of
            light

Pronouns become amateur nouns when they take up too much space. N'est pas?

READING ROETHKE

Here in Montreal, English is of course a minority language, and English books - particularly poetry books -- are not all that readily available. If you don't have a library card with one of the two English language universities - Concordia or McGill (and if you're not student or faculty, that can run you about $140 a year, at McGill at least), you're left with a piss-poor public library system, and a very limited assortment of bookstores. So of course I find myself ordering a lot more books that when I lived in Toronto. Balance that against the high rents in Toronto, though, and I'm still ahead of the game, financially at least.

Among the many books I ordered from Amazon last December, the one that I've been reading a lot lately has been Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems. In fact I'm enjoying it so much that over the next few weeks I intend to read it from cover to cover - perhaps the first Collected I've read that way in a long time, since perhaps T.S. Eliot's, which I read shortly after graduating from university (over 20 years ago now…). Like Eliot's, Roethke's Collected is not particularly long, running some two hundred and sixty pages. It reads more like a selected. Minor poems, major linked works, but not a weak poem to be found, so far at least. (At this point, I've almost finished the second of seven collections in the book, The Lost Son and Other Poems, first published in 1948.)

What is remarkable about Roethke is that he constructs a far-reaching and resonant dialogue from a limited - obsessively limited -- set of themes and images, practically all pastoral. I find that kind of singularity amazing in an age when we are bombarded by so many different influences from so many different directions. In times of hyper-abundance, such narrowness of focus could almost be taken as dishonest. Where Roethke is honest, where he takes risks, is in his fidelity to his subject matter (I'm sure I'm being tautological here, but being true to ones subject matter always entails great risk), his sensitivity, his vulnerability, his expression of his very real throes of manic-depressive illness, his adventurous thrust into a world of wholly subjective language. The pastoral provided a refuge and mooring place -- the beauty and archetypal qualities of plants, winds, soil, greenhouses, as well as the structured rhythms and rhyme schemes which no matter how committed he was to free verse he always returned to. Whatever Silliman may say (I honestly don't know what Silliman thinks of Roethke), no Poetry of Quietude this. Too much edginess and anxiety here; too much flight into the unknown.

In his first book, Open House (1941) Roethke establishes himself on very solid if conservative ground. Aside from a few starchy, highly compressed constructions where he tries to sum up Reality in a few words (I'm thinking of "The Adament", in particular, and a couple of others), these short poems - and those that begin his second collection -- are among his most successful and highly anthologized. I'm thinking of the title poem, "Cuttings 1 & 2", "My Papa's Waltz", & others. (For a link containing a Roethke bio and many of these, click here.)

With the longer poems that end his second collection, he departs in a forcefully subjective direction - prime referents practically being the words themselves, the language becomes suffused with subjectivity. Roethke shatters Ruskin's strictures against pathetic fallacy with abounding personifications that are never pathetic in any pitiful sense of the word, but constitute ecstatic (if arguably disturbed) mystical communions with nature.

The salt laughed and the stones;
The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,
And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
The lovely diminutives.
I could watch! I could watch!
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a
windbreak of cedars,
And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
The worms were delighted as wrens.
And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.

-- "A Field of Light"

Any poet worth his salt will write the odd schizophrenic poem or three - poems where the images and referents are so personal, the rhythms and devices so idiosyncratic that they defy interpretation by any but the author himself (and may even be somewhat indecipherable to him... or her).
At times Roethke risks skating on his own private pond.



My meat eats me. Who waits at the gate?
Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper…

The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape glistens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
The eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from the flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.

-- "The Shape of Fire"


While on certain levels I feel that poems like "The Shape of the Fire" may not be as
"successful" as his earlier, more accessible work, the language is tremendously evocative, the rhythms lovely, and at least impressionistically it's pretty clear what Roethke's up to. Reading and rereading these poems even for this blog, I find clarity is gained… the prevailing mystery
remains an essential part of the pleasure.

One of the great pleasures of reading a collected is coming across fine "minor" poems that don't make it into the anthologies, and seeing how they relate in the development of the poets internal dialectic and contribute to his oeuvre as a whole. Here, though, are a couple of superb ones
from the earlier period, obviously linked in theme - not minor at all to my view -- but that
I haven't yet come across in any anthology.

THE BIG WIND

Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into the lashing
Wind driving water
So far down the river
All the faucets stopped? -
So we drained the manure-machine
For the steam plant,
Pumping the stale mixture
Into the rusty boilers,
Watching the pressure gauge
Waver over to red,
As the seams hissed
And the live steam
Drove to the far
End of the rose-house,
Where the worst wind was,
Creaking the cypress window-frames,
Cracking so much thin glass
We stayed all night,
Stuffing the holes with burlap;
But she rode it out,
That old rose-house,
She hove into the teeth of it,
The core and pith of that ugly storm,
Plowing with her stiff prow,
Bucking into the wind-waves
That broke over the hole of her,
Flailing her sides with spray,
Flinging long strings of wet across the rooftop,
Finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely
Whistling thinly under the wind-vents;
She sailed until the calm morning,
Carrying her full cargo of roses.

The greenhouse becomes an ark, a womb, a wild horse to be broken in, transport of
romance & mystical symbol… all at once! Fantastic!

CHILD ON TOP OF A GREENHOUSE

The wind billowing out of the seat of my britches,
My feet cracking splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

Regardless of what goes on, it's still gotta be a wonderful world that contains such poems…

SOME NOTES

GC Waldrep makes a balanced and illuminating contribution to ongoing aesthetic discussions -- some call them the Poetics Wars ("Organic/Non-organic", although he doesn't use those terms; "experimental/traditional" etc.), over at Writer's Block. I have to agree with his views on Houlihan, which I must admit are both more informed and nuanced than those I expressed earlier. He also introduced me to a term I had never heard before: Gongorism. It's well worth reading the whole string there. (Thanks to Whimsy Speaks for pointing out the Waldrep posts...)

Waldrep in turn points us to Rubarb is Susan, a blog written by "a fellow from New Jersey" that consists of subtle and candid reviews of poems found online and elsewhere. This will soon be on my blogroll, as will be the Penn Central achives, an impressive source of readings of single poems.

Speaking of poetics discussions, though, CR Jenson writes a brilliant post on risk-taking in poetry. Risk is an energizer. So is his post!

Write Dance~~~~Dance Write

Last week I participated in a collaborative project involving Theatre La Chapelle here in Montreal, more than a dozen writers, including fellow members of the Quebec Writer's Federation, and the Dance troupe Platform 33. La Chapelle sent out the call for writers to watch Platform 33 practice and put on a dress rehearsal of a dance performance, and use the experience as a point of departure for literary creation. Writes Richard Simas, director of La Chapelle, "the heart of the project is using the dance to inspire creative, parallel texts that venture far from an immediate, journalistic description of what is going on. The project is not about writing a critical evaluation of the pieces or the dancers." As he said to us in a reception before the first practice, the world has a surfeit of description (video, print journalism, etc.); he is more interested in the imaginative, lyrical, archetypal if you will…

Platform 33 consists of three women, Julia Aplin (at the present time replaced by Linnea Swan), Shannon Cooney and Susan Elliott, top-ranked contemporary dancers who joined together and commissioned the choreographers Damian Muñoz (Barcelona, Spain), Louise Bédard (Montreal, Canada) and Kim Itoh (Tokyo, Japan) to compose three linked works, or rather works with common musical/verbal elements (Hence the name Platform 33 -- three dancers, three works).

The performance of these works will take place in Toronto's Harbourfront (next March), in Montreal's La Chapelle (this fall), and elsewhere (as yet to be determined). Our own creations will be performed in readings after the performances, and perhaps travel with them in some form (pamphlets, wall displays) as well as appearing on Theatre La Chapelle's website (will keep you posted).

For me the collaboration was a marvellous experience. Peculiar though it was sitting in the half empty theatre with other members of the audience scribbling sporadically in the dark, I couldn't have found myself among more compatible company, indeed made friends with a couple of fellow writers... perhaps these friendships will be lasting. As for the dance pieces, I enjoyed them all, and the performances were superb. The three dancers complemented each other well personally as well as physically: one elegant and aloof, another sultry and athletic, and the third, wildly comic and vivacious - and the three pieces, although conceived independently, had the complete feeling of a three-movement concerto.

Much contemporary ballet/dance that I have seen (like contemporary poetry, like the other contemporary "fine arts") expresses considerable loneliness, tenuousness (in terms of relationships and contact) and desperation, and from the first practice, these pieces proved no exception. Dancers dancing separately in their own spotlights, joining briefly, then torn apart by their own centrifugal momentum… I conceived a poem very early about being trapped in a circle of light, limbs pushing out everywhere with tremendous energy, but essentially alone. Hence it seemed uncanny when, in the dress rehearsal two days later, the dancers appeared on stage and intoned at the beginning of Munoz's piece (which hadn't been performed in the previous practice), "I've lost time and space, friends, photographs, books, memories, courage, time, friends…" and ended their performance of the Itoh's (the final) piece with a stream of free association, which I transcribed in the dark: "yes, perhaps, collapse, detain, unwind, simple, special, spectator, allowance, advertise, reveal, after, acknowledge, again, architecture, alone." (Then the final dancer being helped out of the spotlight by another dancer's extended hand…) My own poem, which runs some 140 lines, begins as follows (I hope the lineation comes through as I intend ... Thanks to C. Dale Thomas, I've just learned how to format it) :

here
in this circle
     of light
i'm alone

teasing the air
torsion    contortion

limbs lunging out
    into the blackness

flesh    glowing pink
round
  fingers
  that flicker

     flight out of spotlight
    flight   out of sight

i'm dying
but spinning
  in circle of
            light

Poem by Louis Lax-Roseman (Age 9)

I will tell you a warning.

Listen close.

In purple pine forest,

spaces in middle
an inn

you feel yourself
happy, but
cursed are your lips

I have been there myself, and found a way out.

But I have been abused
by my dreams,
in the cupboard of doom.

But my dreams have me trapped
in the cover of doom.


This was written by Louis Lax-Roseman, son of Sharon Lax, friend and fellow Montreal-based poet and teacher. Louis is 9 years old... pretty remarkable, eh?

The last two stanzas represent 2 possible endings. Louis isn't sure which one to take. I have my opinions, but for now I'll keep them to myself. What he wants to know from you readers out there is, which one do you prefer??

"My Magic Shoes" by Annie Lax-Roseman (Also age 9)

My magic shoes are wonderful
They take me very high
They take me very high up to the sky
And after they take me to another world
Where there are lots of games to play
And there we play all day
When it is time to go I say, "Good bye''

And then my magic shoes fly me up high in the sky
Over the mountains and over the streams
Over the trees with shiny green leaves
And over the puffy white clouds of foam

My magic shoes fly both of us home

Annie is Louis' (fraternal) twin sister.
Needless to say, bright kids, both...

THE ORGANIC/NON-ORGANIC DISCUSSION CONTINUES (AGAIN INDEFINITELY... PART 2 OF 3 OR 4 OR 5

It's taken me a while to get back to the discussion of Organic vs. Non-organic poetics, which has been passed like a ball from one blog to another over the last couple of months. There is a Chinese proverb that says in effect, "Want a thing long enough, and you don't." Since I last talked about it, Xmas, some very heavy family issues, work, excellent reading that came my way, as well as revision and creation have made me disinclined to put in the hours to read over the arguments and refine some of my drafted points. In the meantime, as I was saying, other bloggers have put in their seven cents worth, stealing at least some of my thunder (boom, boom). I was beginning to think that if I waited long enough, somebody would be bound to say more or less what I intended to say, reason enough to stay silent on the issue for good… but I still find, despite myself, I have things to express on the ol' dichotomy, if only to further explore and articulate where I stand in relation to it. In this post, I'll be focussing on the contributions of others to the discussion over the last month and a half, with insertions of a few parenthetical snipes and assorted pop-gun fire, just because... well, I find the temptation irresistable. Put it down as a quirky idiocyncracy. I am still trying to define myself, "find my voice" (although why emerging poets are always described as having a pronounced case of laryngitis is beyond me...)

In a later post (I keep promising this, I know... but I will get around to it, eventually), I'll weigh in more heavily with my own take, particularly on some of Josh's peculiar attitudes to "organic" poetry… even if Josh is no longer Josh, but somebody else.

Josh, in a post on January 11, points out that there is clearly a spectrum between the extremes of so-called "organic" and "inorganic" approaches. Where one stands on the spectrum is a reflection of attitude, pure and simple.

To recap, the argument here stems from my reading of Peter Bürger's book Theory of the Avant-Garde, from which I derived the notions of the organic artwork or poem as that in which all of its parts are subordinated to the whole-to the poem's poemness-while in the nonorganic poem the parts are not so subordinated-the whole, goal, or telos of the poem is exterior to it, located in "reality." From there I suggested that all poems can be located on a scale, Kinsey-style, with 1 being entirely organic and 6 being entirely nonorganic. Not surprisingly, nowadays most poems produced by younger poets fall somewhere in the middle, and you could make a game out of assigning a "Kinsey" number to various magazines and publishing houses (Fence 3, New England Review 2, Aufgabe 4, The New Yorker 1, Syllogism 5, and so on). Pure 6's are very rare, more the domain of individual poets, while 1's are still quite common. Nonorganicism in poetry generally takes the form of a greater or lesser degree of parataxis or montage (often formalized into constructs like the ideogram, the New Sentence, etc.). Its original goal was to put ordinary means of language, and the ideological structures they support, into question; nowadays most people who introduce a nonorganic dimension into their work are after a particular aesthetic effect, but the possibilties for political critique still attract many writers. That slippage from radical attack on poetry-as-given to a style is why Bürger suggests that the nonorganic mode is no longer to be preferred to the organic, which means both can coexist as styles precisely because both are equally inadequate for re-imagining a world that, to paraphrase Richard Hugo, is inadequate as given and will not do.

He goes on to say that while he can't help but feel that there is "still something valid, even heroic, about the modernist project of presenting the usual hierarchical means of meaning-production with a sufficiently complex NO." At the same time, he also admits to being "a bit of a classicist at heart, addicted to my own aesthetic responses, and that's why I think my own poetry rarely rises above a 4 on the organic-nonorganic scale."

An attitude (like pretty well any such personal stance) to which he is perfectly well entitled. (As for me, depending on the day, I'm a 2.3 repeater, a 1, or when my tiresome perfectionism keeps me from writing at all, a 0… )

to be continued...

Organic/Inorganic Part 3

Brennan Wysong contributes to the discussion with an appreciation of the dichotomy in terms of reader participation in the process:

Perhaps to further the dichotomy, might the difference between the organic/inorganic also be in terms of reader participation--say, in terms of analysis vs. (an attempt at) synthesis? In the organic, we find ourselves assuming all parts contribute to the whole and so we simply try to understand how they contribute to this unity. ("The tone of this poem is solemn because it's an elegy.") With the inorganic, and esp. with some Language poetry, there is an attempt on the reader's part to synthesize into a whole what cannot be reconciled as such. This leads to what Hank Lazer refers to as "a dialectical tension between possible continuities and radical discontinuities."

(That dialectical tension that sounds like a perfect definition of reader frustration, apathy, etc.. Ah, but there is titillation: excitement, promise of revelation. The transcendental pleasures of random juxtaposition…)

Mike Snider, who makes some pretty strong headbuts against against random "word salads" and other tendencies associated with Language and related poetries, takes issue with the very use of the term "organic" by Josh, Berger, and others. Living organisms, he points out in an astute and beautifully written post, not only depend on having internally consistent relations among their component parts, but these parts for their very existence depend on valid relationship to the external world. The implications for "organic" poetry are obvious:

It's an odd, and, I think, misleading use of the words, since by "organic" Bürger seems to mean self-referential, self-enclosed. The use of "organic" by Burger and by Josh … at first, intriguing because usually "organic" is the term used to indicate value and relevance to a well-lived life. But it's misleading because it fundamentally distorts what it means to be organic, whether in the natural world or in the world of art. Organic things - living things - certainly have an internal structure in which various parts are dependent on each other for their continued existence, but those internal relations have evolved in relation to an external world.

First, that set of dependencies in a living thing only exists because its ancestors were able to interact successfully with their organic and inorganic environments, with other creatures and the utterly indifferent rock and water and sun and air. It is utter nonsense to speak of a living thing as self-contained.

Second, those relations are fragile. We see this most dramatically in cancer, when some set of cells, by ignoring their relationship to the whole creature, dooms that creature's relationship to the world, except perhaps as food for other creatures. But blind cave fish illustrate another point: all things in that set of relations, even eyes, have a price, and when that price is not repaid by value to the rest of the organism through relations to the outside world, not even eyes, which have evolved independently many times and in many lineages, can maintain themselves however beautifully and intricately they are connected to other parts of the creature.

(My next project: to create the poetic equivalent of a cave fish: remove the eyes from a poem, and yet ensure that it thrive in a sea of sighted readership… Hmm… joking aside, I tend to agree with Mike about the misleading nature of the "organic/non-organic" terminology, and for that reason, employ, when I remember to, quotation marks around the terms…)

K. Silem Mohammad, more sympathetic to the "non-organic" trends, articulates so beautifully an overview of the antagonism between the two camps that I can't help quoting it as a fine contribution to the discussion:

Josh writes:

"my utopia of poetry is a world where EVERYONE is a poet, in which all voluntarily assume the pains and pleasures that come with the highest possible sensitivity to language."

This in the context of his larger discussion of the "organic" vs. the "inorganic" in poetry, or let's say modes of poetry based on the illusion of direct communication of transparent (i.e. familiar) meanings between a unified speaker and a (presumably also unified) listener, vs. modes of poetry that often take as their starting point the subversion or denial of such direct lines of contact between writing and reading subjects. The organic approach is distrusted by the avant-garde inorganicists because it relies on passive subscription to the dominant values that determine what gets counted as authentic, realistic, or beautiful; the inorganic approach is distrusted by the establishment organicists because (among other reasons) it resists evaluation along the lines prescribed for writing in the dominant poetic tradition (i.e. formally conservative and/or discursively "natural" composition).

Both these camps … have reason to believe that they are exercising "the highest possible sensitivity to language" when they promote their own tastes and denigrate the tastes of their opponents. In the eyes of the organicists, the worst crimes of inorganic poetry are defined precisely by insensitivity to the qualities they hold most dear: euphony, conventional structural coherence, sincere and eloquent expression of universal human emotions, etc. For the inorganicists, however, those who valorize the organic lack sensitivity on multiple contextual levels. They fail to acknowledge the significance, for example, of framing, of the ways in which the establishment scene of poetic practice and readership comes with pre-set parameters which are indestructible in themselves, but which may be interestingly tweaked and challenged by the intentional deployment of cacophony, disrupted coherence, deliberate stagings of insincerity and inarticulacy. More importantly, according to the inorganicists, the organicists lack one of the most old-fashioned of poetic values: Keatsian "negative capability," or the ability to accept that beauty and its cousin pleasure, being fundamentally irrational, may inhere in those habitations one would consider most likely to be unamenable.

In the background of all this blogger discussion is a series of highly polemical articles Joan Houlihan published over the last few years in the Boston Comment. (Must-reads for those interested in this issue, as these columns have been highly popular and influential in the poetree world.) Houlihan portrays herself as a staunch, if beleaguered, defender of what she herself describes as a "mainstream" poetry ethic, that is, "of the poetry that existed from last year all the way back to Beowulf, the kind of poetry that favors parsable syntax, drama and story, tension and resolution, epiphany and symbolism, connected imagery, strong, recognizable voice or narration, and some impact of either an intellectual or emotional nature."

(My note: hey, that sounds exactly like what I'm trying to do…couldn't put it better… DUH!)

Houlihan, described by Josh et al. as shrill, adhominemesque and pretty darned limited as a critic, writes an engaging primer on what readers like yours truly find irritating, dull and impenetrable or (or should I say, not-worth-penetrating?) in much of the poetry published over the last thirty-odd years. In it she takes on three (four, if you like) fundamental trends: the extreme prosification of poetry, the exaggerated prominence of all-too- easy poets like Collins, Tate, Levine, and Mary Oliver, the tendency of those (particularly the latter three) to continue to publish book after book long after their spark is gone, and then... incoherent extremes of Language and other established "experimental" (read Non-organic) poetries. Personally I find much of her reading highly sensitive, her analysis masterful. Consider her treatment of pieces of experimental poetry, and substitution of words to show that the writing doesn't go anywhere or penetrate that far. Confusing in the bad sense. I'm reminded of criticism of much atonal music, how it "doesn't go anywhere", and manages in the process to sound like nails scraping against a blackboard. (Or much abstract expressionist and other experimental art, which has become its own kind of establishment.) I have an appreciation for her gutsy, unafraid-to-make-enemies stance in a context where much criticism is all-too-tepidly kind. At the same time I remain wary because I prefer to at least try to keep an open mind to the new and different, even if it involves suspending belief as well as disbelief, pretending "empty mind." Chalk it up to negative capability, or a vain attempt at such. Anyway, as I always say, more later....