Vic Chesnutt RIP

This extraordinarily gifted songwriter took himself from this world Christmas day at the age of 45; if you want to inform yourself on the man's remarkable life and tragic passing, here's quite a thorough obit from the LA Times. 

I myself had never heard about Vic Chesnutt until the news came out of his death, but after being riveted by a couple of videos I downloaded one of his albums (and will probably download more).  His was a spare, melancholy aesthetic spiced with dashes of eccentric humour -- a minimalist Americana that brings to mind (my mind, at least) the film Paris, Texas, among other things.  Some of his work is as profound as it gets -- like the above, which brought chills to my spine and tears to my eyes.  His work was rare -- particularly for the US -- in that it confronted the darkest realities head on.   He will be missed -- but left behind a considerable body of music to explore and savour.

It's a wonderful life...

... and so it is.  May you have a more peaceful time today than this guy did.

MY OWN

A recent prose poem of mine appears in Apparatus Magazine, a Chicago-based online review of a surrealist bent.

GENDUN CHOPEL: PRECEPTS ON PASSION

Below, extracts from other later poems of Chopel -- this time the "Precepts of Passion" section in In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems by Gendun Chopel, edited and translated by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. This is supplementary material for my review of that book in The Rover. I also added some notes that didn't make it into the review.

There has been considerable interest in Chopel in recent years -- other translations of his work have come out, and recently a film about him called The Angry Monk. The photo to the left is not one of Chopel, but, I take it, a frame from the film. (I took it from a German review.)

(See Early Poems, Later Poems)


#91

If coupling was abandoned in the realm of humans,
It would surely become empty in an instant.
And if there were no human beings
How could there be monks and the Buddha’s teachings?

#94

First kiss the arms and under the arms
Then slowly kiss the belly.
Becoming more intoxicated, kiss the thighs and vulva;
Draw the streams of the channels under the sea.

98: “I bow down to the sphere of self-arisen bliss”

from 98:

Sometimes, seeing a goddess is revolting.
Sometimes, seeing an old woman is arousing.
Thinking, “This is it,” something else comes along.
How can the deceptions of the mind be counted?

from 99:

With little shame in myself and great faith in women
I am the kind who chooses the bad and discards the good.

…
The monk Mi pham wrote from reading.
The wanton Chopel wrote from experience.
The difference in the power of their blessings
A passionate man and woman will know through practice.

May all humble people who live on the broad earth
Be delivered from the pit of merciless laws
And be able to indulge, with freedom,
In common enjoyments, so useful and right.

(See Early Poems, Later Poems)

GENDUN CHOPEL: LATER POEMS

Below, more extracts from In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems by Gendun Chopel, edited and translated by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Although the anthology is arranged thematically, there is a chronological element in the arranging too. These I take to be later poems. This is supplementary material for my review of that book in The Rover. I also added some notes that didn't make it into the review.

(See Early Poems, Precepts on Passion)

from #32

The talents of a humble scholar, seeking only knowledge
Are crushed by the tyranny of a fool, bent by the weight of his wealth.
The proper order is upside down.
How sad, the lion made servant to the dog.

#33

The wealth of the world is a mist on the mountain pass.

...Empty talk that leaves fools amazed.

#38

Although the dress of a monk has long disappeared
And the practice of monastic discipline has left no trace,
This meeting with the assembly of elder monks
Must be the fruit of a deed of a former life.

(Note: Final two lines echo Nichiren Diashonin, and since he had probably never read or even heard of him, very likely other Buddhist sages)

#52
In my youth, I did not take a delightful bride;
In old age, I did not amass the needed wealth.
That the life of this beggar ends with his pen,
This is what makes me so sad.

from #62

For those who seek intelligence and clarity of mind,
Who wish to understand the setting for wondrous speech,
How could the elements of subtle and eloquent expression,
Not be a festival of delight

Note: Sensual enjoyment in the “flavors of meaning/from the learnied treatises of ancient times.”

from #64: a real process of suffering.

Through this roaming to the ends of the earth for nine years
In the illusion of seeing many realms and lands
And the dream of feeling physical pleasure and pain
I feel as if I’ve been reborn.

#70

The old sayings that contain the seeds of truth
The footprint of the rabbit that jumped to the wondrous mountain,
When one enters the forest of faded wisdom,
Who can distinguish right from wrong.

#72

Unalterable and unchanging,
The mistaken crowd is diamond-hard.
Who can possibly argue
With iron-faced fools?

from #88

This most enchanting face of truth
Is covered with a veil of unclear words.

#89

The sequence of the opening and closing words of a fool (translated)
Are expressed amidst the assembly of the eloquent.
Please bestow a small smile inspired by compassion:
I dare not invite a guest who would be pleased.

Notes:

Images: mountains, drizzles, flowers, temples, trees, plain, sands, sky, moon, sun. The bee, the dog, the snake. Diamonds, jewels, robes, the veil.

Sanscrit described as “most useful”; English as “useless language of the foreigners” (p. 117)

(See Early Poems, Precepts on Passion)

GENDUN CHOPEL: EARLY POEMS

Below, some extracts from In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems by Gendun Chopel, edited and translated by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Although the anthology is arranged thematically, there is a chronological element in the arranging too. These I take to be early poems. This is supplementary material for my review of that book in The Rover. I also added some notes that didn't make it into the review.

(See Later Poems, Precepts on Passion)

from #3

Compassionate power of the three jewels,
Reliable refuge that never deceives,
Calming all illusions of meaningless samsara
Bless our minds to turn to the dharma.

from #7

To the friend of gods and humans, with lotus eyes of nonattachment,
A body made of thousands of virtuous deeds, worthy of the world’s worship,
Endowed with the color of the purest gold,
To the one who abides in Sravasti, I bow down.

#10

The mirage of a lake of clear water with patterns of waves
Is recognized to be a plain of dry sand.
Unwanted things that come to be true
Are but portions of the suffering gathered in samsara.

#21
Like a bee circling again and again
Around a gently swaying lotus,
In the vast and splendid temple,
I am moved by devotion again and again.

#26
What intelligent person would honor you as a friend for protection from the great enemy, fearful samsara?

#28:

Objects of knowledge posited by the mind as existent and nonexistent;
Valid forms of knowledge dependent on objects true and false.

I am uncomfortable about positing the validity of convention.


Worldly affairs, no matter what they are, never end.
At the end of doing deeds, there grows despair.
When all the pleasures and wealth proudly gained are gathered,
They make up but one-tenth this pile of pain.

Notes:

Buddhist typology:
“threefold world”, “three realms”, the “Ling-pa who number thirteen”
“sixteen joys”, “the realms of the six beings”, “nine vehicles” “treasure of one hundred and seven indestructible precepts”, “threefold reasoning”.
and assumptions: “wrong views”, “path of purity”.
Buddhist world-weariness: #32, p. 67. Platitudes, but deeply felt. “sad song”
Reposes in generality: “Curdles of suffering, misconceptions beneath our hopes and fears,
32: awkward translation: “the froth of clouds of smoke on a great endless plain.”
philosophy, p. 55.

(See Later Poems, Precepts on Passion)

Black Book

In the same issue of the MRB, a review by yours truly of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy by Yves Engler. This book ended up being shortlisted for the QWF non-fiction award. For those interested in the Canada's international behind-the-scenes machinations -- and they are non too pleasant look at -- this one is an eye-opener.

A review -- this time a not too kindly one -- of Passenger Flight in the Montreal Review of Books.

If I should take issue with it -- perhaps best not to bother -- it's hard to believe this reviewer gave the book more than a cursory read. Reducing my inspiration to Charles Baudelaire (with some employment of a “Gertrude Stein solution”) is, well, reductive, and his choice of “Edmonton” as coming closest to B’s “splenetic urban tone” is even getting B. wrong. The review format --it was one of five books reviewed in a column, and the MRB has strict word limits -- lends itself, however, to short shrift.

Click on the label below for more favourable reviews.

Inside The Lives Of Amazon.com Warehouse Employees: Long Hours, Long Walks, And Heavy Lifting (PHOTOS)

It'll make my feet ache when I think of ordering books through these folks...

Inside The Lives Of Amazon.com Warehouse Employees: Long Hours, Long Walks, And Heavy Lifting (PHOTOS)

Fine Words

While Obama's Nobel Prize speech was beautifully turned, informed commentaries like this one and this one reveal inconvenient details that give his carefully nuanced blend of tough practicality and idealism a definitely hollow ring. Arianna Huffington, meanwhile, points out the obvious question that Obama left begging: how will escalating the war in Afghanistan make Americans more safe?

I'm sadly reminded of G.I. Gurgieff's description of modern civilization as "based on violence and slavery and fine words." Also what Tariq Ali said about Obama at the Blue Met last April: “Unfortunately, if you wear Caesar’s robes and put on Caesar’s crown, you have to act like Caesar. The previous one was like Caligula. This one is more like Claudius.”

Seeing red

Such a large (is it that large?) & vocal contingent that sees red when they hear the words "government" or "regulation" . To drown out their own ever-more ear-splitting cognitive dissonance in the face of economic disaster & obvious signs of climate change, they shout it out all the louder these days thru the blowhorns of Fox News, CNN, AM talk shows etc. etc. So loud they gain a kind of phony credibility -- so that the Washington Post features an op ed by who guessed it? Sarah Palin...

In case you missed it, here's Jon Stewart fleecing the onion skins off her + CNN et al. (For those of you outside Canada, it's Nov. 18, 2009 Clip 1 on the Daily Show site accessible to you.) I think he truly nails it here. Classic Daily Show.

The best lay in town may be a poem.

Carmine Starnino and Christian Bök: The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry

The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry from Kit Dobson on Vimeo.

Christian Bök and Carmine Starmino, says the caption, "duke it out in their discussion of Canadian poetry." I watched this parley, which took place a few days ago, with great interest. If there's any clash here, it's between two writers possessing contrasting psychological/creative styles that need not be as dismissive of each other's creative practices as they have been. The tension between them is palpable -- I don't think they looked at each other through the whole hundred minutes -- but it's intriguing to see how their views are undergoing some process of moderation, and how much common ground they actually share.

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak | Environment | guardian.co.uk

An article from the Manchester Guardian no less. I think this will be looked upon as the age of text leaks, embarrassing videos, and quick clarifications/apologies. ("Clarifications" yet to come on this one...)

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

The big green bogeyman

An interesting article about how the media regularly sabatoges proposed climate solutions:
The big green bogeyman

56 Papers In 45 Countries Publish Joint Editorial On Climate Change: A 'Profound Emergency'

Glad of this, after all the "climategate" crap.

56 Papers In 45 Countries Publish Joint Editorial On Climate Change: A 'Profound Emergency'

BBC - Earth News - Vine seeds become 'giant gliders'

Beautiful...

BBC - Earth News - Vine seeds become 'giant gliders'

What to do with Woodwork?

Have been thinking about making this a "Tuesday only" blog -- as lately, I've been posting only about once a week or even ten days.

My own experimentation with Facebook and Twitter has lead to a lack of focus on my part -- plus lately, I'm just not willing to spend as much time looking at a computer screen. Due those competing platforms readers have been drifting away from blogosphere. Frankly, it's crossed my mind to drop this blog altogether. But I do enjoy this form of instant publication -- far more than the others, I may add.

I've recently discovered that in a jiffy one can crosspost interesting articles in "Huffington Post" and other online papers that I regularly read. On Blogger, though, unlike Facebook, there's no quick and obvious way to post thumbnail images, an obvious attraction for the eye. I hope that changes. I like a varied blog, so for now, while still posting my own things when the mood strikes, I'll pepper things up that way. Forays into politics, therefore, may become more than occasional. These are politically charged times.

A Tale of Two Obamas

Quite a perceptive commentary on Obama's ambivalent presidency.

Plug for Woodwork

I've just learned Online University Reviews lists Woodwork as one of the top 100 poetry blogs. But they've overlooked a number of other worthies, including (hyperlinked on my blogroll, to the right) Robert Archambeau's Samisdat Blog, Sina Queyras' Lemon Hound, Rob McLennon's blog, Seth Abramson's Suburban Ecstasies, Pris Campbell's Songs to a Midnight Sky, Todd Swift's Eyewear, and Mary Biddinger's Wordcage, to name a few. Meanwhile, they've listed CD Young's Avoiding the Muse twice. Other things on their list, like the Slate Poetry Podcast, aren't properly blogs at all. Maybe if they paid more attention to their own editing, they would also pay a little more attention to what's out there. But, it's nice to be listed.

CAN POETRY MATTER? 15 YEARS AFTER (Part 4)

(See Parts I, 2, 3)

Jake Berry in "Responding to Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" (Muse Apprentice Guild, Oct. 2002), is one of a number of writers who complain that the whole debate is tedious as hell, bores them to tears, let’s just go on writing the best we can, come what may. His essay begins thus:

My initial response to the question, before I read the essay –– to think, "Can Poetry Matter?" was "I hope not!" Why would I respond in this way? I am a poet and should have much at risk, I should want to see poetry matter as much as possible. The problem lies in what matters culturally and who decides what matters. Despite the fact that more books are sold now than ever before, that more books are purchased and presumably read, we seem somehow less erudite, less intellectual than we were even thirty years ago. And the cultural artifacts, the phenomena that matter, even to the intelligentsia, often seem so insignificant when compared to art, past or present,that in order to matter one would have to sacrifice the very art one hoped to foster in the first place. So is it better to be irrelevant than relevant in a vapid culture? Am I cynical? Of course I am. What was once known as pop culture seems now almost universally accepted as the only culture.

etc. Actually, Jake Berry's attitude to pop culture turns out to be far more open and nuanced than this opening paragraph would suggest; and although he claims a profound indifference to the matter of “mattering”, his concern about poetry's social role reveals itself to be at least as abiding and intense as Gioia's. His though is the perspective of a profoundly alienated outsider, from the capitalist economy (in this respect he does not resemble Gioia) and more particularly, from academia (in this, he very much does). Employing terms borrowed from Frank Lazer's two-volume Opposing Poetries, Berry sees academe, dominated by "plainverse" writing school poetry, absorbing the opposing "language poetry movement", much in the way that free market capitalism devoured the burgeoning '60's "revolution" in the name of style and fashion and sold the trappings -- clothes, haircuts, symbology -- in slightly refined form to the culture at large. The result he describes as a "great homogenization." I am not at all convinced of this -- in 2006, this seems a blinkered perspective -- but doesn't the following scenario have an all-too-familiar ring?

One can practice the accepted forms or resign oneself to obscurity, and many, most, of the poets outside the academy have done exactly that. They pass poems to one another and publish in the handful of publications that accept outsiders. Primarily they work and either self-publish or publish one another in small inexpensive editions that the general public would not even recognize as a book. Most of the poetry I read that might "matter" has almost no exposure at all to an audience beyond a few interconnected renegade cabals in what remains of the literary underground.

Close to the end of the essay, Berry asks a series of questions that I'm sure all practicing poets have asked at one time or another:

Should we as poets be prepared to accept, even embrace, obscurity in order to practice an art that is important to the deeper, more complex, conditions of our species? For what reason? Does reason have anything to do with it? Do we not
practice this art out of some obsession that forever seems to remain just beyond our ability to describe and name? Or do we practice it to keep the poetic faculties alive regardless of who or how many may subscribe to that experience? It is certain that our culture contains a great many people that are broadly intelligent enough to appreciate and generate poetry that is populist in its scope, and to recognize and call it an art. Do they constitute an "educated public"? Probably not, for the most part, in the sense that Gioia means it. Does that kind of public still exist? Yes, but most likely in a diminished percentage.

We do as we must, simple as that. Reconsidering these various points of view, I've come to conclude that from the point of view of creation, publication, even audience for live readings, poetry is doing really quite fine, considering how non-commercial and non-marketable an art form it inherently is. (As Simon DeDeo, one of my blog interlocutors, put it so well, does theoretical science matter to anyone? Not really, except for the practitioners, the aficionados, and the students. Similarly for poetry. As theoretical science is not in a bad way, neither is poetry.) With the internet, a vast spectrum of diversity is literally at our fingertips. Through blogs, poetry boards and other internet publications, spontaneous communities of poets, information sharing and literary discussion are constantly evolving. Poet-bloggers such as myself have acquired a greater sense of interconnectedness and possibility than ever before; our site meters, however inflated they may be by irrelevant visits, tell us we reach a world-wide audience of hundreds, if not thousands. Through other blogs and internet reviews I have encountered fabulous poetry by such up-and-coming writers as Ilya Kaminsky, GC Waldrep, Victoria Chang, and Eduardo Corral, all of it fresh, none of it clubby or derivative.

What interests me in particular is the emergence of publishing venues that are not under the auspices of academe, that are also not caught up in their own tiresome version of "being cool" (Shampoo and Exquisite Corpse come quickly to mind), but that in an independent, understated way highlight, on a consistent basis, excellent work. These include the net magazines Octopus, Dusie, Nth Position, Three Candles Review, No Tell Motel, and can we get our ball back?, to name a few. Among high-circulation print reviews that reach a broad public and yet are open to poetry on their pages, fresh arrivals include the Canadian Adbusters and Maisonneuve (also irksome in their efforts at "cool", but I like their sizeable and sophisticated audience). Weird top-down initiatives that are certain to bring seismic shifts in the poetry landscape include the Griffin Prize here in Canada (of prizes, as has been noted, there's a plethora, but this one is the biggest yet for a single book of poetry) and the recent Ruth Lilly donation of $175 million to Poetry Magazine. To read more about upcoming initiatives related to the latter, see here.

All that is really lacking in this present Poetry Age, as both Hall and Gioia go to lengths to point out, are prominent critics in prominent places to perform that crucial function of finding the diamonds among the mounds of broken glass, and of pointing out with passion and critical intelligence, the differences. As far back as 1978 Robert Bly published an essay called, "Where Have All the Critics Gone?" (later published in his book of essays, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity). There he pretty well outlined the malaise: widespread critical nepotism, vapid praise, etc. Unless I'm blind as I describe the elephant, the situation hasn't substantially changed.* I won't make the space here to go into the nuances of Bly's essay, but its final gruff lines are

In our situation we need poets and writers who are willing to do the hard work around literature, that is, to separate the weak from the strong, photography from art. In brief, we need people with joy in their own intellect and judgment.

Echoed 13 years later by Gioia with, "By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art."

Think though: with a few shifts in the cultural climate, we could have what Latin Americans have enjoyed for decades in the Mexican Excelsior or the Nicaraguan La Prensa Literaria, a whole section of a widely circulating newspaper dedicated not just to reviews but excerpts of fiction and poetry by established as well as emerging writers. Wouldn't that be something! (Now I hear a loud chorus of, “Dream on!”)

To borrow a page from pop culture, before the media spotlight turned on to the likes of Kenneth Flatley's River Dance, Nathalie McMaster and Ashley MacIsaac, Celtic dancers and violinists played in kitchens and the occasional festival -- and they probably will go back to that again (if they haven't already). Poetry is in such a kitchen state. (Actually, perhaps more appropriate would be Hart Crane's line: "…in this town, poetry’s a bedroom occupation.") In the present circumstances, my suggestion, for what it’s worth, to fellow poets is: plug away, hone your craft, flood the mails, keep publishing. And if you can, find a lover who enjoys your work. Who knows what'll become of it; in the present poetry climate, it may yet go no farther than that.
_________________________________________________________________

* voices like Joan Houlihan, Ron Silliman and Canada's Carmine Starnino -- do they have the wide sweep and depth of a Wilson, Bloom or Sontag? Are they and others like them enough to make that substantial difference? Rather doubt it, as yet...
_________________________________________________________________

Other links of interest:

Marc Pietrzykowski writes a critique of privatization and manages to relate that to the sociology of poetry and the Gioia essay. Densely written (this poet writes like an economist, if not economically), this is nevertheless a cogent read and includes a few wildfire suggestions on how to loosen the stifling grip of the communication monopolies that be. Among them: send your poetry to mainstream magazines, newspapers, etc. Of course your work will be rejected out of hand, but maybe, just maybe, you'll jog those iron-clad assumptions a touch!

Simon De Deo and I discuss the merits of Gioia’s poetry here on my blog.

Joan Houlihan weighs in with a survey of graduates of MFA programs, and confirms my own hunch that my money has been far better spent on wine and books (not to mention song, etc.)

Finally, a 1995 interview with Dana Gioia, where he counters some of the criticism levied against "Can Poetry Matter?" This too is a very engaging read.

* This article was adapted from a four-part post called "The 'Can Poetry Matter?' Debate" that first appeared in Out of the Woodwork, Feb. 25 - Mar. 6, 2006.

(See Parts I, 2, 3)