ROBERT CREELEY R.I.P.

It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.

-- From "The Door"

TOP BLOGS

When I look over my blog roll, the four names that leap out as current reigning favs are, and in this order:

C. Dale Young
Ron Silliman
Simon de Deo (Rhubarb is Susan)
CR Jenson

Other substantial worthies that I visit every so often include AD Thomas, Josh Corey, Mike Snider, Whimsy Speaks, Henry Gould, Cosmopoetica, and Jonathan Mayhew, roughly in that order. Recent interests include Greg Perry (Grapez), Nick Piombino, and Great American Pinup, but I haven't visited them enough to "place them" yet. Poetry Hut is a good source of poetry news that I occasionally visit.

I'll give updates as I notice my visiting habits change.

THE APRIL POETRY TWO-ER

... just to say I have two featured readings coming up, booked close enough to each other that I feel like I'm on tour. (Poetry gigs are rare in these parts...) Since there are just two of them, it's hard to resist promoting this as...

THE BRIAN CAMPBELL '05 APRIL POETRY TWO-ER!!

First stop:

Sunday, April 3, 2pm

PASTRY AND POETRY SERIES

L'Oreille de Van Gogh Cafe

4800 rue Wellington, Verdun (Mtl.)

(De L'Eglise Metro, Autobus 58 West)

Second stop:

POETRY PLUS

welcomes you to an evening of poetry, prose, music and
the best open mike in town (so they claim).

Wednesday, April 6, 2005 at 8.00pm
Arts Café
201 Fairmount W (corner Esplanade) (Mtl.)
Come early and enjoy the house specialities

April 6 lineup:

Sharon Lax, Cheryl Neill (pt. 1) Raphael Bendahan, Alison Newall, (Susan Durbrofsky) BREAK

John Fretz Jason Gondziola, Cheryl Neill (pt. 2)
Brian Campbell.

I'll be on about 10 pm.

YET ANOTHER HISTORICAL PRECEDENT FOR SPOKEN WORD SLAMS

The Arabs of pre-Islamic times possessed a primitive script, but they tended to distrust writing as a medium which imprisoned the free spirit of their poetry. The spoken word was all-powerful; in comparison with this living splendour, the written word seemed to them dessicated, like a pressed flower.

-- Charles de Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man, pp. 204-5

WRITERS IN INDUSTRIAL QUANTITIES

Well, it felt good to get that off my chest! Downright cathartic. Thanks to those who left/emailed comments. (This has been rather a "head" blog so far... and I suppose I will soon enough climb back into the head. The head can be a safe place, though it does get stuffy after a while.)

I was just reading Writers on Writing, Vol. 2 , and says Anne Beatty in an essay therein (entitled, plainly enough, "Essentials Get Lost in the Shuffle of Publicity"):

There's an industry out there, sprung up around writers... To many, writing is not so interesting as being a writer, and when writers go on tour, it reinforces people's belief that it's all in a package: you create something… you get out there and network and promote it all the way to success, because success is the American Way.

In my opinion, writers have been overexposed, caricatured, asked specious questions to elicit amusing answers, their faces printed on coffee mugs. There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost. We are all inundated with endless appearances from writers who become Mary Poppins every time they publish again: they drop out of the sky to be booked anywhere and everywhere, say sensible things (the opposite is also nice, and will suffice), then disappear.

Writers are afraid not to be out there, for fear that they'll be completely lost in the shuffle, but paradoxically, by getting out there we add to the problem…

Whoo. Writers on coffee mugs?

I think I saw a Walt Whitman coffee mug once.

Maybe I should print up some Brian Campbell mugs. Guatemala & Other Poems mugs. For poetry reading satellite sales.

Ms. Beatty, though, seems to be suffering from a malaise of our literary age-- competition-weariness -- and, however astute her observations, I strongly suspect that they come out of a deepset case of Special Person Syndrome (in my last post, I called it a complex; now it's a Syndrome). However "successful" she herself may be.

Takes a case to know one.

(But I think I've found some means and perspectives to make my Syndrome all but disappear, so that what's left will work to advantage -- touch wood, or rather, woodwork...)

Anyway, count your Easter eggs (we all have them, figuratively at least). May they hatch into poems -- or poetic acts -- that resound throughout eternity.

Cheep. Cheep. CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPPPPP!!!!!!!!

UNLOVED POETS

About C. Dale's post on So Much Bitterness in the poetry world: very apropos. Today's apology I also take to be sincere. Bad shit goin' down in one's personal life comes out in one's generalizations. However true they are. And however much you have going for you (C. Dale, obviously, has a lot going for him.)

I'm going to sound like Oprah for a second:

The main reason so many poets are bitter is simple: they are unloved.

I know this because I have been there.

I was unloved -- for many years. For my poetry, by my poetry, because of poetry, whatever reason(s).

I used to say things like: telling a woman you write poetry is like telling her you have a dose of clap. It seemed the rejoinder I always got was, "But how much money do you make?"

It came to be every word I wrote seemed to be pushing love away. Of course, this was an illusion. But a very compelling illusion while it lasted.

It made rejection after rejection just more salt on a gaping wound.

Eventually I stopped writing. I gave up on poetry, and for a decade found more nurturing expression in another art at which I have had some degree of success, artistically speaking, but which in the end I really don't believe is my strongest suit.

Now, irony of irony, miracle of miracles, I am loved by someone who loves my writing. Who is a writer herself, and who has critical integrity. What a difference this makes.

Most of us poets have a "Special Person" complex. We see our work as Special, and ourselves therefore as Special People, and we wish to be regarded that way in a world of six billion people and teeming thousands of writers.

It's quite a demand to make on the World. It can also be a setup for total frustration.

If you are not a star in someone's world, if you do not have a support system of a few other writers whom you respect who give you critical feedback and support, God help you.

To be a poet in those circumstances, you have to be a tough bastard.

I am not a tough bastard.

Right now, I am exactly where I should be. But I'm coming out of the woodwork. Just watch me.

THE STICK

Nobody sent me the stick. Waaaaah!
Confirms my outsider status here. Ah well, I don't come from a cool place like New York or Passadina, but this coooooold place up here, where the snow is still quite deep on the ground.
So I cut and pasted it from Eduardo's cheery, summery pastel-wallpaper blog.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Marquis de Sade's Justine. This book has proven very fire-worthy.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Justine in Lawrence Durrell's Justine.

The last book you bought is:
Justine. No, actually: Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology, Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence and Other Poems, and John Donne's Poetical Works. Saw the latter on the New York Times best seller list, and just had to go out and get it.

The last book you read:
Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.

What are you currently reading?
Islam and the Destiny of Man, by Charles de Gai Eaton.
Theodore Roethke's Collected (still).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portugese. (A cute little edition, published in '61, that fits in my shirt pocket. Great subway reading, especially for short rides)
Have bookmarks in, & definitely intend to finish:
The Making of a Poem (Norton Anthology of Forms) by Mark Strand & Eavan Boland
Mark Strand's Selected
Life, an Enigma, a Precious Jewel by Daisaku Ikeda
Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
BAP 2004
Wylah Falls, George Elliot Clarke (that bookmark has been there since last summer...)
Volta, by Susan Gillis
Introspections: American Poets on One of the Own Poems by Robert Pack/Jay Parini

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
The Collected Writings of Nichiren Daishonin (especially if the island is harsh & desolate)
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (especially if the island is tropical and lush)
Introspections: American Poets on their Own Poems (It looks good, I wanna get into it!)
Shakespeare's Collected (assuming I'm there for a long time)
The Essential Rumi translated by Colin Barks
The Lotus Sutra, translated by Burton Watson
(oops! That's six. Can I smuggle about fifty more?)

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
No. Nobody passed it to me, so I'm not gonna pway with anybody else! So there!

POETRY & THE TRIBES OF THE HEJAZ

... The subordination of man to man and of one people to another has been the common and formative human experience throughout the ages, but the tribes of the Hejaz had never experienced either conquest or oppression; they had never been obliged to say "Sir" to any man. In this they must have been almost unique; the only possible comparisons might be with the Mongols of the Siberian steppes and the Indians of North America before the coming of the white man.

Poverty was their protection, but it is doubtful whether they felt poor. To feel poor one must envy the rich, and they envied no one. Their wealth was their freedom, in their honour, in their noble ancestry and in their incomparable language, the pliant instrument of the only art they knew, the art of poetry. All that we would now call "culture" was concentrated in this one medium, which required no heavy baggage such as would have encumbered them on their journeying. Language was something they could shape and model to glorify courage and freedom, to praise the friend and mock the enemy, to extol the bravery of the men of the tribe and the beauty of its women, in poems chanted at the fireside or in the vastness of the desert under the vast bowl of the sky, bearing witness to the grandeur of this little human creature forever travelling across the barren spaces of the earth.

For the Bedouin the word was as powerful as the sword. When hostile tribes met for trial in battle it was usual for each side to put up its finest poet to praise the courage and nobility of his own people and heap contempt upon the ignoble foe. It is said that there were occasions when a poet's tongue was so eloquent and his words so compelling that the opposing tribe would slink away, defeated before a blow had been struck.

-- Gai Eaton, writing about the 7th Century tribes of the Hejaz (now Saudi Arabia), in Islam and the Destiny of Man, pp. 97-8

Now, there's different role for you poets! Imagine, using your gifts as a high-level, inter-tribal WAR WEAPON!!! Risking your neck -- and those of your fellows -- with your verse! For those who advocate poetic risk-taking, how about this? (On some levels, though, it is clear that Theodore Roethke took greater risks...)

WORDS ON THE MOVE: Translation of Carole David's Bouche à Bouche

This year, for the second time, members of the public were invited by the Literary Translator's Association of Canada to translate poems by two of Quebec's best-known poets in an event called Words on the Move. The poets this year were Carole David (Bouche à Bouche) and Robyn Sarah (Once, Desire). Some twenty translators participated in rendering the David poem into English, including yours truly (two others translated it to Italiano). Other notables in the Montreal English literary scene who participated include Maxianne Berger, Elise Moser, and Hugh Hazelton.

The original poem can be seen here.

My translation can be seen here.

All the translations can be accessed here.

The call for translations took place back in January. A reading of the translations took place, appropriately enough, at the best-known hangout for Montreal francophone writers, the cafe-bistro Les Gâteries, on Feb. 9. I unfortunately couldn't be present because of teaching commitments. The translations just got posted on the web last week.

Obviously, it was an enjoyable experience for everyone involved. I look forward to the chance to do it again in coming years.

The David poem seemed pretty easy to intelligably render using obvious, viz. literal word choices . There were relatively few awkwardnesses. Hence what is most striking, perhaps, is the similarity between the translations.

I'm sure, however, that all the translators found they were in immediate contact with quite a different sensibility than one ordinarily finds in English, a sensibility that is all but impossible to satisfactorily render. French is an exceptionally subtle and gentle kind of whisper-language (yet forceful within its gentleness, an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove quality) that sustains passionate expressions of abstraction with far more authority than English. "Nous sommes depuis sortis de la réalité", for instance, has far more elegance -- and punch -- than "We have since left reality" or anything like that we can muster.

In my own translation, I departed from the literal in a number of places. I translated "prends moi sur la sol" -- literally "take me on the ground" -- to "take me on the trestle" -- I liked the rhythms and sound and in the train context it seemed to work better. Translating the final question -- "faut-il que je te le rappelle aujourd'hui" -- as a statement is perhaps a more questionable departure, and looking at it today, I still have reservations. Somehow, though, in French the word "rapeller" (with its internal "appelle", call, naming) has greater strength than "remind " or "tell you about", or even "recall"; as well, the multisyllabic way of phrasing the question -- which word-by-word comes out as "Must it be that I you it recall today" -- contains an echo-chamber of subtle relations that cannot be reproduced in English. In English the question "Must I tell you this today" (or whatever... see other translations for possible alternatives) seems at once bald and weak. So I opted to preserve paralellisms and a kind of breathless "I have to tell you this today." (If the narrator internally questions why she must tell him this today, she still has to tell him, right??? Well, yes...)

As Borges put it in an interview back in the early eighties (Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981-83) "At present, literal translations are in vogue... from the very beginning we lose the rhythms -- which to me are more essential to the poetry than the abstract meaning of the words... I believe that literal translations only offer help in understanding a text, but nothing more. It is now common to publish bilingual editions, which lead the translator to a more literal version, perhaps too literal, since he knows that the reader compares the original with the translation. I disagree with this editorial format, which surely works against the translator."

Funny -- usually I prefer bilingual editions, because through them I get the chance to taste the original for myself, even if it's a language I don't know. But I have to agree with him on the limitations of literal translation they enforce.

Of course, I wasn't at the reading, but I imagine it may have gotten monotonous if they had read out more than four or five translations, since they were all so similar. Perhaps next time if the LTAC chose a more problematic poem, one that could be translated several strikingly different ways, it would reveal more about the dilemmas translators always face. (This, I recognize, is a tall order...)

I CONFESS... I'M FAST BECOMING A DAILY SHOW ADDICT...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart I've just caughten on to (to use a Nova Scotia-ism), rather belatedly, since I first noticed it one midnight a few months back on Canada's CTV network. Now that I'm teaching four evenings a week -- Mon. to Thurs., the same evenings the show is on -- I find I often turn to it as I stay up late to unwind.

Not since the wicked ditties of Tom Lehrer has political satire from the left been so incisive, or so badly needed. I guess the times are Right...and after more than thirty years, in the Right Way.

It was obvious from the start that under the jokey surface of this yet-another-fake-news show Stewart and his cohorts bear an abiding concern about the quality of public information today and the health of American democracy itself. Although this week Stewart proclaimed openly there is "no fact-checking here", and he only "reports things as [he thinks] they are" we get to see things here that we would never see on mainstream TV. Like newly appointed CIA Director Porter Goss' hilarious double take last week when Bush said that they spend every day gathering information to locate Osama Bin Ladin.

After watching a few of Jon Stewart's better shows this week and concluding the man is a fucking genius, I decided to google him and find out what I could. His bio, etc. are easily found, but this is the most delicious fruit of my search: a video clip of his Oct. 15 appearance on CNN's Crossfire. Ostensibly he was being interviewed to promote his recent book, America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. To the hosts' surprise, though, he dropped all mention of the book and started to roundly attack their show. Watch how he handles a couple of stuff-shirts who are obviously out to get him. This has to be the most priceless -- and revealing -- bit of TV I've seen in a long time. (By the way, you have to click on the icon above the transcript to get the clip.)

Blogroll & Another Plug for Rhubarb Is Susan

Added to my blogroll, a number of worthwhile poet blogs discovered over the last few weeks:

Maria (My Pareidolia) http://mypareidolia.blogspot.com/

Gary Norris http://dagzine.blogspot.com/

Michael Hoerman’s Pornfeld http://pornfeld.blogspot.com/

Peter Pereira http://thevirtualworld.blogspot.com/

Simon De Deo (Rhubarb is Susan) http://www.rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/

http://lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/

and Greg Perry http://grapez.blogspot.com/

also Penn Central Archives, a great source of recorded poetry readings.

In blogland, the poets love to chew the fat about poetry and poetics.

But it seems their eyes glaze over when they see a poem.

If a poet posts a poem, even on a blog that often gets comments, he can usually expect "no comment".

Sad commentary.

Actually, as I've admitted before, I too have been guilty of that -- eyes glazing over, leaving no comment -- the latter perhaps because I don't want to hurt people's feelings if I have a negative or indifferent reaction. But there's more to it than that. Most of us tend to be in a news-reading mode more than poetry-reading mode when we surf blogs. The inferior resolution of screens further disinclines us from the kind of focussed reading poetry demands.

The fact remains, most poems posted in blogs I've seen have a big "0" down below. My own sub-blog poetry sites -- you can see them on the side bar, to the right -- have gotten the tiniest fraction of visits that this blog gets. I'm not begging for more. This is observation based on what I see, stats and my own behaviour.

So here's a plug for Rhubarb Is Susan, a very worthwhile poetry reviewing site that is getting so little response its author posted four days ago, saying, in effect, he was considering giving it up. (It turns out he isn't ... but...)

This man gives very careful, perceptive reviews of poems in contemporary zines/magazines. Both before and after poetry theory is the reality of the poem itself. His blog -- focussing on specific poems -- suggests a direction poetry blogging may go after this heyday of poetry theorizing/shop-talking on the net is over. (Maybe it'll never be over, even should never be! Such is the delight in such talk...however...) I've decided to give him my support by commenting (at least once a week, if possible) on his reviews. Please give him a visit!

Not added to my blogroll, but fun:

A dictionary in which words are defined using limericks (courtesy of Jonathan Mayhew).

MY TEN-POEM ANTHOLOGY

Ten (English language) poems that I'd like to have written, all in one day, if possible (listed in no particular order, off the top of de head, without too much racking of brains):

1. Ozymandias (Shelley)
2. Sailing to Byzantium (Yeats)
3. The first 2 sections of Song of Myself (Whitman)
4. Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas)
5. Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (Eliot)
6. Kubla Khan (Coleridge)
7. The Instruction Manual (Ashbery)
8. Ode upon a Grecian Urn (Keats)
9. The Thought Fox (Hughes)
10. The Idea of Order at Key West (Mr. Stevens).

COPYWRITE COPY MIGHT....

My friend & fellow poet Daniel Laxer wrote me and Aimee Davidson to say,

I was just skimming your respective blogs, and I couldn't help but wonder, do you not worry that the work you put up on your blogs will get stolen? I mean, there's some good stuff there. And I'd thought about putting my poems up on the net. But I don't want to see them published elsewhere under someone else's name. Doesn't that thought worry you?

My reply:

Hi Dan,

The complete poems I post on my blog (on Sky of Ink, Jonah) have already been published elsewhere. Of course, these poems can now be easily lifted and/or altered in some way and republished under someone else's name, but the same thing could also be done to poems published in any of a number of online journals... so they are about as protected as that.

I don't put unpublished poems on my blog, but only a little due to the concern you mention. The main reason is that once they're on the blog they're eminently Googlable, and any review considering publishing one of them could simply type in a few words from the poem, and quickly find it. Most literary reviews, for all their limited readership & distribution, want to be THE FIRST IN THE UNIVERSE to publish any given poem. Since I still seek the validation of being published by said reviews, I figure it's better to be safe than sorry.

At the same time I sometimes wonder about my self-imposed gag order. Especially when tempted to put up a recent poem, talk about the writing of it, etc. How many readers, after all, does my blog get? (From what I see, the hit total is impressive, but the readership, a worthy few...) Does printing here constitute publishing? Do harried review editors even have the time to BOTHER googling to find a poem in a blog? All open questions. I see people like Aimee putting drafts of poems for feedback and the immediate pleasure of reaching out to someone out there in the cosmos, and I can't help feeling, what the hell? Why not?

Someday, who knows, I may change my tack.

Poetry in this culture remains an exercise in obscurity. It will never generate the glitz or $$$ that make copyright infringement sexy. That obscurity, I'd say, is its greatest protection.