Our man...

I just learned today that a poem of mine has been accepted into the Leonard Cohen: You're Our Man anthology, a local production to come out on Sept. 21, in celebration of the bard's 75th birthday. In the call for submissions, poets were invited to respond to one of LC's poems with a poem of their own. I did a palimpsest of Two Went to Sleep. Apparently, 75 poets from around the world are to be published in this anthology -- including Margaret Atwood.

Philosophy Bites

Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds of philosophybites.com

Here's another iTunes podcast gem: Philosophy Bites. In this free-to-download series, one Nigel Warburton, a philosophy lecturer himself, interviews renowned (or otherwise profoundly tenured) philosophers about issues in which they've specialized. Each interview is about 10-20 minutes long -- and edited to provide at least as much insight as many an hour-long philosophy lecture of similar calibre. This is like completing an undergraduate major in Philosophy, without the homework or exhaustive reading. (I did a Philosophy minor alongside my English Lit at U of T way back when, so it seems aimed at people like me.) And I love the British accents.

Podcasts extraordinaire

One reason I have been blogging sporadically of late is that I bought an iPod Nano, and have been attuning myself to the universe of Itunes. My computer, for some mysterious reason, stopped recognizing my three-year-old but sadly outmoded Sandisk. I was glad to do the upgrade, however – my Nano, pictured above, is a nifty little thing.

One discovery I’ve made: the monthly podcasts of Poetry Magazine. They’re free to download, and hugely enjoyable. In fact, I’ve downloaded them all. The two editors of the magazine, Christian Wiman and Don Share, air authors’ readings of chosen selections from the coming issue, then discuss why they liked them. The discussions are insightful, neither stuffy nor self-important at all. These relatively youthful editors (30’s? Early 40’s?) unabashedly love what they do and the selections, I’d say, are often damned good. I feel, believe it or not, that every time I listen in I’m encountering kindred spirits. Makes me consider submitting to them again.

Despite the self-professed open-door policy, I continue to get the impression that particularly if you’re from outside the US, your chances are pretty close to nil of getting into their pages unless you’ve acquired considerable renown. But these fellows enthuse enough about newcomers and the previously unpublished (all American, so far in my listening) to raise hopes. Another discovery: it’s not necessary to subscribe to the magazine to read the poems they discuss. The entire contents of each issue are archived on line. (For a while, I thought this was a promo sampler, to get you to subscribe. Nice to have such a budgetary carte blanche...)

Twenty-five book blogs and how to pitch a blogger. On the side bar, an author can find all sorts of interesting advice on using the new media for one's book promotions. Thanks to Colin Kelley's twitter site.

Update on the Kindle/Owell kerfuffle

People are also worried that the very architecture of network-connected devices like the Kindle, TiVo or iPod give tech companies unprecedented control over digital media and by extension, the free exchange of ideas.

Once upon a time, retailers sold customers a product and then walked away after the transaction. Today’s specialized devices often keep an umbilical cord to their vendor, loading updates and offering convenient ways to make purchases. These devices also limit the extent to which people can load independent software and customize their experiences.

Some of you may have noticed the new gadget on my sidebar: Yes indeed, hate to say, in the last day or so I've become a twit -- or, less self-deprecatingly, a

... or rather, tweeter. I'm a relatively late adopter of this -- scare quotes, anyone? -- "communications" "tool" -- but a number of people have asked me to become a "friend", so I decided to try it out to see what the "fuss" is all about. This business of "friends" is of course, quite ridiculous -- a true "friend" of mine once told me that after he opened such an account (well, it was actually a Facebook account, but same diff.), he soon had more "friends" than ever before, and never felt so lonely in his life. And frankly, up to now I just haven't had the stomach to learn yet another computer app.

The limitation -- 140 words -- is obvious. And the question too, the stuff of idiocy: What are you doing? Frankly, what I'm thinking is practically always a lot more interesting that what I'm doing. That's why I'm sitting at a computer. Of course, most of us so-called tweeters soon ignore that opening gambit and jot opinions, links, etc. (I did it from the very start.)

Call it Blogging Extra-lite. Nanoblogging. Net telegraph. (Actually, the official term is micro-blogging.) The appeal: well, it's not so wordy as all this goddamned blogging. At140 words, including hyperlinks, style -- or use of lengthy words, or even extraneous parentheses -- are quickly defenestrated. Yr as good as anyone els: 4 concision's sake, U soon start using sh frms. 2 spk., which is v. good for egalitsm.

The other thing, though, is that it's POPULAR. In two minutes, after announcing my recent review, a certain social connector who posts about ten times a day sent a big waoooh! and the word on to about 125 people. This blog, on the other hand, has become rather a quiet place. Does the sudden rise of twitter have anything to do with it?

Other indicators suggest that twittering is a passing fad that may soon be abandoned by all but a few stalwarts. (Like blogging, actually.) According a study referenced by this site, already more than half of all twitter accounts are inactive -- that is, haven't posted an update for at least week, and only 5% of tweeters account for 75% of tweets.

Maybe, though, with skillful use of tweets I can drag some twits -- err tweeters -- into this bog, rather blog. We'll see.

Tracking down Sauls...

Trolling the net, I found this poem by Roger Sauls, published in Ploughshares back in '83. I quite enjoyed it in all its well-honed concision -- its images stayed with me all day. Otherwise, no other poetry by him is to be found online, as far as I can determine.

It is interesting that he merits mention in The Neglectorino Project, a well-meaning blog that attempted to find, track down and celebrate worthy but obscure & forgotten poets referred to as "neglectorinos" (a term coined by Ron Silliman, in fact). That project ran for only a few months, back in 2006. Sadly, it seems to have fizzled, out of... neglect.

There, one Don Riggs writes:

Roger Sauls and Richard Williams, two slightly older (than I was at the time) poets in Chapel Hill who were guiding lights; Roger was very minimalist, lapidary (Light Poems by Roger Sauls, The Loom Press 1974 was out of print but I found a copy that had fallen behind a bookshelf in a store in 75, I forget the more recent book's title, pub. by The Bench Press) , while Richard was whoa way crazy in some ways (Savarin by Williams, Ardis 1977 is the last published work I know of his -- hilarious and very very scary in places), what has happened to them?

Minimalist, lapidary... these values are exemplified by that Ploughshares poem. Makes Saul's appreciation of my book all the more remarkable.

RIP Frank McCourt

When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.

-- Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

Passenger Flight gets its first review

The premiere review of Passenger Flight is up at The Rover. It pleases me to say it's a most eloquent, perceptive, and generally speaking, positive review by Roger Sauls, a poet who writes out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He begins the review with as profound a reflection on the tensions within the prose poem form as I've come across.

The long and short of the prose poem is that it’s a product of deep inner contradictions. Its prose wants the freedom to wander, while its poetry wants the brevity of a few luminous words. It rejects the primacy of either of its parents in favor of a synthesis of both. It delights in frustrating the expectations of the readers of poetry and the readers of prose. In the end, its perfect realization is a construct of awkward grace that conceals as much as it reveals, that darkens the blank page with justified lines that are jagged with revelations.

I must admit, on first reading, I was rather taken aback by the generality, about three-quarters of the way down,

There is no difference, to him, between the sacred and the profane. Everything is slightly absurd, everything has its own lurid charm.

Everything? Hmmm. And the "no difference" bit makes me sound positively amoral -- although an emphatic moral stance is expressed in a number of the poems, including, for example, Fix. But, on further examination, it becomes clear that Sauls is talking strictly aesthetic strategies -- tone, word choice, juxtapositions -- and not morality per se. It would seem this reviewer's aesthetic conservatism causes him be somewhat uneasy in his appreciation of the deliberate contrasts in my work, and may even limit him in understanding the content of certain poems (at least, that seems to be true of "Gallimaufry", a playful satire on the ultimately self-referential writing-about-writing of the so-called Language school, and a poem which pretty much explains its own modus operandi if one reads on: "Dandelions, crabgrass, creepers: I've left them in, planted them deliberately".) Be that as it might, one can hardly be expected to address all nuances within the five-hundred-or-so word limit of a Rover review. Having written such reviews myself, I well appreciate the challenge, which Sauls rises to in superb fashion. Indeed, I'd be interested in seeing his poetry.

I find it clairvoyant, by the way, that Sauls refers to Munch in relation to "Brainpan". This very image flashed in my mind as I wrote that poem:

My prose poem Fix is finally up at the Evergreen Review -- and it's the lead-off poem in the current issue. Looks like the review has a new look, too -- much an improvement, I'd say, over previous online issues. The poem is one of the more political poems in Passenger Flight.

SNOW

Have been reading (indeed, almost finished) Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. It definitely reads like a translation from another culture, which of course it is. At times, Maureen Freely’s renderings are lyrical and flowing, particularly when snowy scenes of Kars are evoked; at other times, downright wooden. The transitions are at times awkward, the characters speak whole stiffly constructed paragraphs to each other; occasionally I’m reminded of what it’s like to read translations of Dostoyevsky. But the characters are real, passionate and substantial, and the novel driven by the intensity of its conflicts; in the process, the cultural richness and political paradox of Turkey is explicitly revealed. An adamantly secular state whose population nevertheless is 98% Moslem –- a deep contradiction in itself –within Turkey is a growing, radical Islamist movement that threatens to take it the way of Iran. The state, in defending "democracy", frequently resorts to draconian measures -- beatings, torture, executions.

Of course what is winning to me is that the main character, Ka, is a poet. We never read Ka’s poetry – but his poetic process is vividly evoked, and he’s a sensitive, tragic romantic witness; to his loneliness I can relate. For four years he was in exile in Germany, and was unable to write a thing; now, back in the most course and provincial of Turkish towns, he finds to his surprise his lifeblood is renewed, and the poems start to come. Here’s part of a dialogue with Ipek, a beautiful woman with whom he has fallen wildly in love. (That definitely does help.)

“What did you do when you were in Frankfurt?”

“I’d think a lot about the poems I wasn’t able to write… I masturbated… Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you’ve been happy too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you’ve been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic powers… Happiness and poetry can only exist for the briefest time. Afterward either happiness coursens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness. I’m terribly afraid of the unhappiness that could be awaiting me in Frankfurt…”

The Nobel Prize for Literature is often as much a political as literary award, and Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 award strikes me as example of that: with this novel and others he laid his life on the line, giving voice through his characters to Islamic fundamentalism, and having other characters respond in a way that could easily bring on a fatwa. His difficulties with the Turkish government, for contradicting the official line on the Armenian genocide, are renowned. Not to say that his novels themselves are not deserving of the highest recognition.

News/Links

• Down the memory hole: Amazon erases Orwell books from Kindle.
• Sarah Palin, the anti-poet
• Kate Burnadette of Umbrella answers 10 questions for poetry editors on Very Like a Whale
  

Back

rare sunny morning on the sun deck

Back in town -- was away for a writing week at a cottage near St-Adele, Quebec, the same one Jocelyne and I rented last year (more pictures here). It was a great retreat -- although for the most part the weather was awful. Out of seven days, we had two sunny ones (but still cool, as my sweater attests), and the rest of the time it was gloomy, raining, and cold -- too cold to use the sun deck or swim in the lake. A couple of nights it went down to the single digits (C., that is). We had to use the wood stove (which was fun -- like almost anyone, I love watching fires) and wrap ourselves in warm blankets. Still, I got some good writing done -- four poems, two among my best, methinks -- and lots of reading, including Orhan Pamuk's Snow, Sherwin Nuland's The Art of Aging (my god, how I'm thinning up there! Maybe that's the occasion) and poetry by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Jack Gilbert and a number of podcasts from Poetry magazine (more about those later). J. meanwhile did a couple of good short poems and two paintings. We punctuated our solitude with visits from friends. Among them was my friend Raphael Bendahan: we spent a day selecting and editing poems for the next Sky of Ink production, his chapbook, whose working title is By All Accounts.

The cottage is a great place to focus, and a tremendous relief from our own clutter and the city noise, but weather-wise, we have not had luck. Last year, too, it also rained almost every day, and we've had dominant bad weather in previous years. A couple of friends have bought a cottage near La Chute and invited us to stay for free. I think next year we'll be doing just that -- and waiting for a decent forecast before setting out.

I won't be have internet access for at least a week. Hopefully, I'll be creative in that time. In the meantime, here's a site to enjoy: 3-D tours of world heritage sites. I start you off with Chartres.

Robert Creeley

ECHOES

Step through the mirror,
faint with the old desire.

Want it again,
never mind who's the friend.

Say yes to the wasted
empty places. The guesses

were as good as any.
No mistakes.

-- From Selected Poems (originally from Mirrors)
Supporting material for a review forthcoming in The Rover.

Robert Creeley

SAD WALK

I’ve come to the old echoes again,
know it’s where I’ve been before,
see the same old sun.

But backwards, from all the yesterdays,
it’s still the same way,
who gets and who pays.

I was younger then,
walking along still open,
young and having fun.

But now it’s just a sad walk
to an empty park,
to sit down and wait, wait to get out.

-- from On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay (2006)
supporting material for a review forthcoming in The Rover