NEW READING STRATEGY

I've decided on a new reading strategy: for every living poet I read, I will read at least one dead poet. By keeping my poetry reading more or less half-dead, I will ensure my own poetry writing is ALIVE. Methinks.

Any unusual reading strategies that have served you well?

DEATH TO THE DEATH OF POETRY

I may be reporting old news on old men again, but looking over my post on Joseph Epstein below, I realized I had forgotten to mention he was the author of a much-talked and written-about article, "Who Killed Poetry?" -- which I remember both impressed and very much depressed me when I read it in Commentary back in the late 80's. In it, as I recall, 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. Viz. Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?, a thesis written along the same lines only two years later. Looking up the Epstein piece, I came across this 1989 article by Donald Hall, Death to the Death of Poetry, which is intended to refute it. I daresay I loved it. It convincingly nays the naysayers of contemporary poetry (excuse my neighing!), and gives a bang-on diagnosis of the so-called "problem" of poetry appreciation in our culture. Wish I had read it back in '89 when it first appeared.
______________

Well... "Bang-on" may have been facile. Actually, looking over Can Poetry Matter? again, I see Gioia takes many of Don Hall's arguments into account, and that his article is meant to gainsay boosters like Hall. A kind of synthesis of the two antitheses, in other words. A number of Gioia's observations I feel are quite astute, particularly vis-a-vis the self-imposed limitations of a great many poetry readings (poetry only readings, authors reading their only own work -- those limitations still largely hold today). However, I'd say Don Hall's feisty essay injects a positive note that makes it necessary reading for anyone with vital interest in the issue.

I wonder, 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?

JOSEPH EPSTEIN

"The modern essay," writes Karl Shapiro, "has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein."

Well, he is a marvellous essayist, that I can attest -- an elegant prose stylist who writes with surpassing insight, clarity, and aphoristic flair. I just finished reading his 1980 book Ambition: The Secret Passion -- one of more than a dozen books of commentary authored by him (he has also written two highly acclaimed books of short stories). In this book he argues that ambition, no matter how ambivolent we may feel about its excesses (and rightly so), can be defined as "the fuel of achievement", an answer to a deep seated need to realize our potential as well as (ok, I'm quoting from the book jacket now) an honourable way to influence and advance civilization. An absorbing as well as, I must admit as far as I'm concerned, a sobering read. For an update on his views, I highly recommend this 2004 piece in The Weekly Standard, entitled The Perpetual Adolescent: The Triumph of Youth Culture. I guarantee, especially you"perpetual youths" out there (oh yes, we are many), that you're in for a provocative as well as highly stimulating read.

Robert Duncan: Warp & Woof

Last weekend, besides seeing Marie Chouinard Dance Company go through its paces at La Place des Arts in Montreal (see post below), I also attended a lecture by Robert Duncan at Naropa College in Boulder, Colerado. It was pleasant being part of the audience, people around me caughing and shuffling their feet, rising to ask barely audible questions, or laughing at his jokes (sometimes I chuckled too). A fair number of these people are probably dead, as is, of course, the lecturer. Occasionally cars purred by that have long since been to the junkyard, and I think I heard a plane, possibly heading to Denver -- the windows were open, so it must have been some time in early Fall or late Spring. Attending a lecture of 25 or 30 years ago is one of those things, of course, you can easily do nowadays via a medium that Duncan, eminent spiritualist though he was, could never have possibly imagined. Like the University student I haven't been for decades, I kept assiduous notes -- this time, not on a notepad but on a computer screen.

Duncan was a fascinating and entertaining lecturer, whose nervous stuttering staccato could barely keep up with rapid-fire associations in his head. Frequently, almost willy-nilly, he went on tangents, but the theme and direction were nearly always clear. Today I touched up my notes, added paraphrases here and there to make them at least somewhat intelligible. Since the lecture, entitled Warp & Woof, Part 1 (I was unable to find Part 2) is more than an hour and a half long, I thought you dear readers might benefit by scanning this synopsis of most of his main ideas, as well as a number of thought-provoking curiosities that came out along the way:

Imagine a warp and woof, as of a fabric -- imagine it going throughout the universe
The warp & woof of the "true" and fabricated universe
The word poetry: Greek word for making something up
"Song" -- canto -- entirely other origin, aspect
Semitic community (Judeo-Christian & Moslem world) was in for quite a shock when it came in contact with this decadent Greek idea of a made-up world
Greece had doctrine of inspiration
Semitic world, on the contrary, was opposed to graven images, making things up. In that tradition, one should not "make a poem", but speak with a poem that comes from your voice, heart. Prophetic, vatic voice.
Duncan himself: a product of the Celtic and Jewish trads. + Greek idea of making up.
Sappho
Christian world: felt there was something profoundly wrong about making up things & persons. Only in Rennaissance was "making up" returned to prominence
Shakespeare (Tempest): Universe a stage. A master maker.
The germanic word for poet is maker too.
Story tellers thought of themselves as makers; talk about weaving a tale. (Goes along with weaving cloth): story you tell as you weave cloth. Minotaur; maze.

In happy Jung land: you aren’t making things up once again. Psychoanalysis: archetypes: not made up. Lady Macbeth’s archetypal standing less interesting than the made-up aspect.

Duncan suggests (jokingly) an alternative to the Oedipus complex: the Jocasta complex: mother aint’ going to leave the son alone.

An ecclesiastical work is not "a making up"; it is a vision of what is there.

Homer: Penelope: every day weaving a design of a plot; all a work

In our own Judeo-C world, word “craft” is even yet filled with apprehension: as in crafty
Craft is a cunning little animal: one you tame so it won’t bite you

Ezra Pound: all human spirit is identical, consubstantial. All times contemporaneous. We evoke a presentation.
Cocteau: Pound is the last rower on the sacred river of Arabus.
Lowest rung of heaven is hell.
Limbo is the conventional world, a world world where love is good, war is bad; the world of the mother’s day poem (platitudes)

We don’t have such a thing as imagining, without being recharged by understanding.
(Psychoanalysis: fantasy is called making things up)

We’re in a fabric of time and space. People 40 yrs. from now will not be buzzed by the same buzzes of now.

Celtic traditon of the bard – keeping alive the identity of the tribe. Now bardically, the poet must keep alive our identity in the universe.
We leave an imprint. We devise a design in a poem, but it is like a footprint out of which you extrapolate an entire dinosaur.

Conventional dictum “Write with your true voice.” Don’t come on like an immitation Robert Browning. But if you do immitate well, you are yourself anyway. Imprint.

“What do you think of this” = will you think about this for me.

No matter what I think I say, the words say other things: storehouse of impressions.
You cannot take a thing you feel and put it into language.

Say Cow – that’s my cow, but not really your cow.

One of our communities is language.

Everybody has this notion of emptiness. Language has a term: nothing. Language tells us we’re individuals. That’s not our idea. We discover ourselves in commonality.

Idea that archetype is in you, nothing like the idea that it’s in language.

You’re in the hands of the peril of the universe when you are in health. Being sick: getting with the program, as it were.

Eripides not in the web; Shakespeare is. E. limited by notion of catharsis. S. creates a world; gives eloquence to all virtues and vices in the web.

Creely poems frequently have no images. Shakespeare: no images in “To be or not to be”
What was an image? Nexus of when a person... (forgot to finish my note here)

We are not warp nor woof – we are holes (between warp & woof).

We think of Whitman as "big superdaddy poet", not as leaves of grass, one of millions, which was his view, ultimately.

A love song with language rather than notes.

Writing a sonnet – doesn’t require faith. Playing tennis with the net up (Frost). But being is a different game – hard to know when you are playing being.

Loyalty is not faith.

There’s a flow – because there’s a language and going on in our heads all the time -- continuously of poems – an artesian well of sorts – but the art of poetry is actually a structure to prevent us from being plunged into the absolutely everlasting generative field that language is. It is of high magic field, it is a form of evocation. You get inside a pentagon – because you don’t want to be swamped by the whole spiritual world. A sonnet (or any other poem) like making a little garden inside the language. In the sonnet, love and the erotic brought close together in a relation. This is the grand attraction of magic: bringing things together in a circumscribed area. In the grand web (warp & woof) of the universe : love and sex not even related much of the time. We’re back to leaves of grass. We don’t mourn the loss of one leaf. Rationality, too, is a grand magic, which makes sure all its own demons remain present while the rest are consigned to the realm of the “irrational.”

Marie Chouinard: The Aesthetics of Prosthetics

On Friday night, my partner and I saw the Marie Chouinard Dance Company's "bODY_rEMIX/
gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS", at the Place Des Arts here in Montreal.

Since she came onto the Montreal dance scene in the late '70s, Marie Chouinard has grown from enfante (adolescente?) terrible to an force of international renown in the dance world. My partner remembers seeing her early solo show Cru (Eng.: Crude), where she shocked audiences by dancing in the nude, slathering her body with mud and urinating into a chamber pot on stage. Nudity and shocking sexuality have frequently been a feature of her creations. But they have also featured the most cutting-edge technical innovation as well as profound emotional exploration. So when we saw the striking image above on the cover of one of the local entertainment papers and read the interview inside, we decided it would be damned interesting to see what she's having her dancers do now. (Chouinard now choreographs and runs the company, having retired from dancing a few years ago.)

What we saw included some spectacular moments -- her 11 dancers are of the highest calibre, and she puts them through some gruelling paces and seriously complex configurations. The dance revolved around the use of prosthetics, canes, walkers, as well as ropes and points. Dancers hobbled about, soon found their form, and at one point (a beautiful ending to the first half), celebrated, jumping, laughing, flying through the air. There were comic moments as well as some haunting ones. But it seemed to us Chouinard explored the aesthetics of prothetics without getting into the real emotional stuff -- the pain and social exclusion that is the lot of those who rely on such aids every day, as well as the suffering we all experience, being handicapped of sorts. From the start it was clear that these were splendid dancers in fantastic shape who didn't need these aids at all. The walkers and canes were simply "extensions of energy", as Chouinard put it in the interview.

An abstract dance interpretation of remixed samples from Bach's Goldberg variations played by Glenn Gould, along with highly distorted (that is, frequently unintelligible) excerpts of an interview where Gould pontificates things like, "Music played with an inflexible -- absolutely inflexible -- rhythm is possible, but is really not music at all" -- this piece was a rather cerebral statement of art about art as much as anything else. As sleekly sexual as her dancers are (and most of the time they were about as close to nude as possible), the dance was at only rare and fragmentary points erotic... this is not meant as a criticism, but a thing I found interesting in itself. It seemed that, as in a number of contemporary dance pieces we've seen of late, there were lenthy, highly complex sections that were quite redundant, that could have been lifted right out of the piece without harming it as a whole. Were they there to fill out a two-hour show?

This morning I was thinking that if there had been a drama in the piece, a relationship, a part where a dancer seems truly in pain as she hobbles around, shunned by another or by a healthy crowd, followed by some sort of resolution, that could have enhanced the experience -- created an opportunity to explore such themes as determination, compassion, etc. Such a concept probably never crossed Chouinard's mind. As one professional dancer told me, compassion is not exactly Chouinard's strong suit.

The crowd I have to say enjoyed the show. It gave her an ovation that expressed more veneration than genuine excitement. We, like this reviewer here, didn't feel inclined to join in. It seems to me Chouinard came up some great ideas, but missed an opportunity to explore a central theme in depth.

For a more positive review which evokes with great eloquence some of the movements of the dance, this is a good one.

SWINGIN' IT BOTH WAYS

By sheer accident (typing Google's blog into my browser bar rather than Google), I just came across Google's self-justification for submitting to censorship in order to do business in China. Makes for an interesting series of arguments -- circumlocutions? -- in favour of compromising so-called core principles in favour so-called long-term benefits that would serve those so-called core principles supposedly better, and of course bring in lotsa moolah moolah moolah for Google. Better Google than someone with no so-called core principles at all. Right? Aren't we still nice guys? (Better look in the mirror to make sure...)

Local Scene: Cafe L'Enchanteur

That's me on the left at last Sunday's show at Cafe L'Enchanteur -- playing a new, unheralded, unknown "hit" of mine called Cry Baby Cry, that for some mysterious reason, had them all clapping along (actually, not so mysterious: it was you who started it, Benoit!). The clapping was so distracting I almost forgot the lyrics I had been practicing all week... The crowd (photo below, taken at some other point in the show) was packed into the place shoehorn-wise: I think the cafe manager had told us the capacity of the place, and not the actual number of seats, and on our side we had forgotten to include ourselves (7 musicians, soundman, plenty of stage space) in the count. Fortunately because of the cold evening not everyone showed up who had tickets -- or the doors would have been blown off the joint. A good evening, tho, was had for all involved. Back to the writing life!
(For more on my music, album etc. check my website.)

THE REAL FOOD

SAINT ANTHONY'S CHURCH

Instead of a large oak door, a loom. Instead
of mosaic windows, wedges of fruit.

Instead of a poor box, a loaf of bread. Instead of holy water, gin.
Instead of pews, beds. Instead

of hymns, gossip. Instead of the Stations-of-the-Cross,
instructions on how to build a kite out of canvas, sticks. Instead

of an altar, a butcher's table. Instead of the nailed palms of Christ,
the warm hand of my father on my shoulder.

Eduardo Corral
in Three Candles Review

Now here is one brilliant poem -- by none other than fellow poet-blogger Eduardo Corral. Hey, hey, we have a true poet in our midst! I'm going to watch out for anything else this man has to offer...

I am reminded of an a North American aborigine (otherwise misnomed Indian) who said to a missionary who was trying to convert him, "If your God is so great, why do you keep him locked up in a little house? We pray to our God under the sky, in the forest, by the rivers and lakes!"

So with this poem. The contrasts surprise not only through their precision and beauty but by the conclusion the author leads us toward. There are a number of St. Anthony's, but the one in this title is obviously Saint Anthony of Padua, the saint for whom St. Anthony's Feast is named and who is traditionally invoked for the recovery of things things lost. In this poem, themes and images are one -- and the images so beautiful, that while the poem (despite that pious title) is actually an attack on the institutional self-aggrandizement of the Catholic Church, it's also a celebration of the beauty of Catholicism, of a Latino heritage, of the closeness of father and son ( father can be taken two ways -- but as I take it, the small "f" father is the real Father, the big "F" Father, a kind of imposter). Actually (backtracking a bit here), "attack" is a rather simplistic description -- the poem is also an appeal for a deeper, more authentic spirituality, recognized by the Catholic Church and exemplified by Saint Anthony himself.

Anyway, enough exegesis (or attempt at exegesis). That same friend of mine tells me he actually cried when he read this poem (I sent it back to him as a response to the one below, saying "this one's of a whole other order...). I'm more dry-eyed than he is, but this is one poem I would have loved to have written. But of course, one would have to have been brought up a Catholic to write it.

Interesting that both this poem and the one in the post below advance by a series of contrasts to an arresting but wholly natural resolution. Unlike the poem below, however, this one would never have been taken by The New Yorker. It provides the real food.

A Certain Kind of New Yorker Poem

SELF PORTRAIT

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

-- Edward Hirsch
New Yorker Magazine

A friend of mine who gets regular hold of the the New Yorker transcribed and emailed this poem to me the other day. I enjoyed it. It made me think -- why didn't I think of that? It's one of those poems I would have liked to have written. And yet... and yet.

On one level the poem is so apt, and yet the rhetoric of contraries so conventional, and so complacent in its conventionality, that the whole thing becomes an exercise in figures and the reality of having a right arm and left arm, or even of being a bundle of contradictions, is somehow nearly lost, eclipsed in the play of illusion.

By the time we get to

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

and

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

the whole picture becomes so grotesquely ridiculous I start to feel like putting the poem down. But then poem splendidly resolves itself into this grave, almost midaeval image of the body lying in state, hands crossed, made "whole again". Somehow I even imagine the man with a crown or mitre on his head, or cross or sword over his body, and that the coffin is very narrow -- even though that's not there in the poem. The whole feeling though is so powerfully midaeval perhaps because of the ancient dualities that run through the body of the poem, leavened of course by jocular modernity.

Ingenious! Brilliant! one could say.

And yet... in its ingenuity, the whole exercise is deeply disingenuous, wouldn't you say? All very tongue in cheek. Worldly. Ironic. Not unlike The New Yorker itself. Self "portrait", indeed!

Like many a Billy Collins poem (and this is a Billy Collins-type poem), this is a one-shot deal. Read it a second or third time, and the balloon collapses, the wit goes stale. One sees the poem for the series of cheap tricks that it is. And yet, it wins me over enough to say ... yes, I would have liked to have written that. It's fun. Gravely, even profoundly fun. Delightful at points. In my playfulness, I've written things in a similar vein...and what's wrong with play, after all? And yet...

As a rather serious friend once put it, charm does not feed a hungry soul. Somehow, with this poem, we're all left hungry for more. For the uncharming, real food. (Such as will practically never appear in the New Yorker, by the way.)

The Elements of Spam

Charles directed me to this hilarious link which draws upon the legacy of Strunk and White. Weird but true, the examples of use/misuse here make a far more vivid impact than those of S&W themselves. (Who remembers the innocuous examples of S&W?)

SOLD OUT!

All 90 seats in this cafe have been sold out for Saturday's show. (For those who don't know French, this is an esp. clever play on words: Le Coeur Chaud (The Hot Heart) is pronounced the same way!) Since we divvied up the tickets and sold them to friends, family, etc. (aside from our own websites, we didn't even bother with outside promo on this event), we're guaranteed a very friendly crowd. Of all the musicians above, only Mark Pinkus has significant web presence -- besides of course myself. A special plug for Benoit, Paul, Michael, Adrienne, and Mark too -- they're all amazing talents. Yours truly will be playing 3 songs in the first set, and a poem set to music in the second. Cafe L'Enchanteur has excellent food & drinks and a woodsy bistro atmosphere. Should be a very pleasant evening all round.

Dancing In Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky

David turned me on to this poet back in October. I finally received the book through Amazon in early January, and read it straight through during a busy crazy week when I had no time to post anything of significance. I was saving ideas for a lengthy review, but since have passed on to other things. David's mini-review is in any case so well crafted and has such interesting links that that it seems almost redundant to say more -- except read this amazing poet! For starters, I'll post this poem here, which begins his collection. Astonishing that someone born in 1977, who spoke no English until about 10 years ago when he immigrated to the US from Russia with his family, and who besides all that has been deaf since the age of 4, could compose word-music in his adopted language of such wondrous skill and depth:

AUTHOR’S PRAYER by Ilya Kaminsky

If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.

If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through the rooms
without touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking, “What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest days
must I praise.

RIGHT ON

Surfing around, looking for new poetry blogs and sites that might interest me, I found this one which captured my attention the other day. Unfortunately (for me at least) after two years, its author, Dale Smith, has recently decided to put it to rest. In his parting reflections, Smith expresses with extraordinary eloquence pretty much my own "blogging philosophy", as well as mixed feelings about blogging itself:

The blog medium itself disturbs me. To do it right requires a considerable amount of self-investment. The blogs I admire--Rue Hazard, Wood's Lot, Texfiles, Orpheus in Boxers, Equanimity, Third Factory--manage to make connections that are thoughtful, understated, and arranged in ways that reveal the state of the art with transpersonal values. I mean, poetics is central, not the person behind the blog. And I have a fairly extended notion of "poetics." I don't mean a person isn't present behind these sites, but "person" is an instrument toward some greater agency beyond their own limited field range. These are trustworthy observers of the state of the art because the blog medium is arranged formally--according to each distinct perception--to reveal something we didn't know before.

Too many blogs wallow in in the pigsty of personhood. Instead of making an instrument of themselves, they are vacuums of attention. While picking on Silliman's blog is hardly new or useful, one thing about his that has not been mentioned elsewhere is the commitment to Enlightenment rationality. His blog prose at times is equivalent to Sir James Mackintosh, the 19th c. lecturer who Coleridge excoriated in letters and private notation. Silliman's ongoing history of the "post-avant" po scene is terrific, in its way, but you have to endure the discursive prose and categorical feather-fluffings.

Blogs that reveal a situation and that work according to the diverse motivations behind the scene are useful tools or gauges through which we can evaluate the larger field. A commitment to that should be commended, but it is a time-consuming and challenging task to use the blog with such force and attention.

Yep, you bet. If I have any difference with the above, it's the perhaps excessive value Dale gives to "understatedness". I'm still youthful (immature?) enough to be turned on by an "over the top" blog as long as it's fired by raw, brimming insight. (Usually the insight is short-lived, though...)

Right now the benefits -- all that I'm learning about contemporary poetry and poets, the opportunity to hone what were once rusty writing skills, the delight of posting articles and reaching an audience immediately -- outweigh the drawbacks, particularly the amount of time it takes, time that could be better spent writing and revising more poetry, reading books, even sending out to reviews. (C. Dale Young is apt in calling his blog "Avoiding the Muse".)

But who knows how long that will last? It seems recently that a number of poetry blogs have petered out after about two years' dedicated output -- and two years does seem a reasonable amount of time to be doing this sort of thing. (Hey, I'm approaching that... Woodwork started on Blog City in May, 2004.) Quite a few writers -- off the top of my head I can thinkof A.D.T. , Eduardo Corral, Emily Lloyd, Simon Dedeo, Henry Gould -- have dramatically pulled the plug only to come back a few weeks or months later. Of the blogs Smith mentions above, only Wood's Lot, Equanimity and Tex Files are still operating, and the latter, at least at first glance, seems to have devolved into exactly the kind of personal pigsty he detests. (This I find is an all-too-common tendency...)

Whatever a poetry blog is, to deserve my time it's gotta be educational -- a product of intellectual discipline, a process of evolving insight, a sharing of literary discovery. All the blogs among my current fav's, to varying degrees, fit that description. A great many of the others do too ... although for one reason or another they have either failed or ceased to snare my attention the way those "top blogs" do. (The "faves" list changes pretty much on a monthly basis, by the way.) If ever I start posting frequently about my cats or the contents of my room or what my girlfriend and I did today, I'd appreciate it if at least one of you out there gently suggest I unplug all life-support systems and put this basket case out of its misery.