Laugh Line Award?

Clearly I misread. It can't be that the James Laughlin award has been given to the execrable Michael Dickman? The award named for the founder and lifelong director of New Directions, the press that brought real experimental and interesting poetry (and other stuff) to American audiences? Must have been the Laugh Line Award instead. You know, for poems stuffed with knowing moments when the poet looks up from the page and all the hipster kids in the crowd laugh loudly to show they got the joke. Longer post coming soon.

The Unbearable Being of Labels

I like prose poems. Lots of different kinds of them, too, from Paris Spleen to Perelman. And I write what goes by various cutely alliterative names: flash fiction, short short stories (I prefer the assonantal quick fiction). The more I read and the more I write, the more I wonder whether the modifiers in these monikers are really necessary.

If a prose poem is a poem (and I know there are those who will argue that it's not), why can't we just call it a poem? And if a short short is a story (ditto), how about just "story"?

In the case of the latter, I've often invoked a track and field analogy: some stories are sprints, some middle distance races, and some are long, cross-country treks. Length is no real help in discussions of the prose poem (though there are p.p. sprints - the typical Eshelman or Matthea Harvey breaks the tape after a couple-hundred words - and longer distances - I'm looking at you, John Ashbery). But differentiating stories by their length is not the same as taxonomizing poems by length; even when we distinguish epic from lyric, length is only the most obvious (but perhaps not the most important) salient feature. No matter how long a poem is, as long as its right-hand margin is irregular, as long, that is, as it's broken into lines, we call it a poem. A prose poem, whether it's a single sentence or book-length, always has to wear its defensive-sounding adjective, as if admitting that it's somehow not a "real" poem (but if it listens to the blue fairy and the cricket and behaves itself for a long time, it might, someday, . . .).


Poem, it is worth remembering from time to time, is at least as much an indication of how we read a given text as of that text's essence or nature. Whether in lines or in paragraphs, if we read it with a special attention to language as a material out of which something is fashioned, if we're on the lookout for its self-referring, self-consuming characteristics, we're reading it as if it's a poem, and if we're doing that, we're making it, by the way we read it, a poem. Just a poem.

Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now

As promised, thing two of the two things left on the Pill's mind a couple of posts ago. I mentioned there and I've mentioned before the shrinking poetry dollar, or the shriveling part of the discretionary spending pie chart served up for poetry by the reading public. Where one used to complain that only poets were reading poetry, the days when that was the complaint now seem to have been the good old days. Even poets, or poetasters, or would-be, ersatz, erstwhile, proleptic and otherwise possible poets aren't reading the stuff these days.

I overstate, for polemical effect. But here's the thing: a whole lot of poetry books, chapbooks, mags, e-mags, zines, pamphlets, and broadsheets are being produced and marketed by presses large and small, corporate and academic, by indie and mini and micro and happy and sneezy and sleepy and doc. How much, this book-buying, mag-subscribing, screen-reading blogger wonders, is being sold (and, ipso fatso, bought)? Not enough of it, according to the frequent plaints and laments about the shrinking audience for poetry on the page (not the same as the audience for poetry in performance, which will require another post entirely). Which prompts the larger question: why are we bothering to sell the stuff anyway?

There was a time (1720 til 1890, say), and bliss was it in that dawn to be a poet (unless you were John Keats getting beaten up on the pages of the Edinburgh Review), when composers of verses could make an honest living by the sweat of their quills. Though, really, Grub Streeters still either required a wealthy patron or grunted and sweated under a weary weight of hack-work to keep themselves in cheap meat pies and sack. There followed that Golden Age when a strong dollar and inexpensive Euro-digs let some modernists live off their writing, but even then it was the rare poet who could get by without a wealthy spouse, the kindness of friends, a day job, or all of the above. It was, of course, the postwar proliferation of English departments (to soak up G.I. Bill undergraduates) and creative writing programs that provided the sinecures in which poets could secure the means of literary production.

The point of this potted history, and especially of its parentheses, asides, digressions, and qualifications, is that the stuff has never sold well enough to keep more than a small handful of poets in garrets, tallow candles, and patched hose, and the poets who lived most securely while producing some great stuff tended to have (non-literary, non-teaching) day jobs anyway. So if most poets aren't making their living by selling their poetry and are instead making their living by writing other stuff or teaching or selling insurance, if, that is, most poets are producing poems not because it is remunerative but because it is in other (very important) ways fulfilling, and if, as I think is the case, one of the most important of those modes of fulfilling is precisely antithetical to the notions of capitalist production and the forces of the market (poetry as play, as the park rather than the factory), then again I must ask: why bother trying to sell it?

About thirty years ago, the poet Roy Fisher said in an interview that if poets wanted people to read their stuff they should just give it away. And poetry as part of a gift economy makes much more sense than the efforts to make it compete in the marketplace. Giving it away has a long and glorious history (think of all those poets in Tottel's Miscellany and the Egerton Manuscript). OK, those were courtiers (but think of the day jobs Wyatt and Surrey and company held while they wrote all those sonnets and epistles, while they blamed not their lutes and reached out to "Mine Own John Poins"! Would we have to re-think tenure requirements for poets with academic appointments? Sure: poets could list the pamphlets and loose sheets they handed out, the lyrics and eclogues and epics they posted to the blogosphere and their colleagues would have to do what they've let the market do for them all these years and evaluate the stuff themselves.

Give Chance a Chance

Two things from the last post that I want to follow up on in the next week or so: chance and the shrinking poetry-buying dollar. In the spirit of what follows, I flipped a coin to determine the order. So, here are some thoughts on not making shit up.

Maybe it’s all the Flarf and Conceptual stuff I’m reading (and reading about) these days, maybe it’s that I’ve been playing some composition-by-chance games with my students and on my own, but I find myself nostalgic for the good old aleatory poem. Whether a Cagean writing-through, an Oulipian cut-up, a MacLowesque diastic, or even a cool, refreshing Surrealist automatic writing exercise, it’s fun to take a chance on chance both as reader and as writer (if that last noun’s really the right one; I tend to say that poems I’ve produced through these games are ones I’ve made rather than written).

As reader: I’ve been enjoying re-reading Jackson MacLow lately. I picked up (by chance?) a couple of his books a year or two ago at a great used bookstore in my part of the world and they sat on my bookcase until, needing to choose some Susan Howe and Haryette Mullen poems to teach this fall, I saw them and flipped through. Wot larks! Gentle Reader, hie theee hence and read a little MacLow (there are a few poems here, for instance). To tempt you thither, “Call Me Ishmael”:

Circulation. And long long
Mind every
Interest Some how mind and every long

Coffin about little little
Money especially
I shore, having money about especially little

Cato a little little
Me extreme
I sail have me an extreme little

Cherish and left, left,
Myself extremest
It see hypos myself and extremest left,

City a land. Land.
Mouth; east,
Is spleen, hand mouth; an east, land.

But don’t stop there. Even with no French, you can find examples from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes, a do-it-yourself assembly kit from which may be assembled 10-to-the-14th different sonnets. Bev Rowe has a good translation project going on these. Here’s one:

At five o’clock he rests in his marquise
and sleeves are wrapped round horns of buffalo
the chosen fruit is hued a bright cerise
who knows if sharks will feast on bummalo

The Papuan sucks his friend’s apophyses
your mind turns more and more to gloom and woe
going up to visit town is quite a wheeze
most people like to read the words they know

Milord has lisped from Malibar to Swat
you mix with that you’ll find you’ve had your lot
shame gives a colonel’s brow a greasy sheen

Those Latin states spin like a weathercock
one carts off debris marble from the block
but best is grilled black pudding with sardine

As a writer: I suggested some aleatory methods to my first-year poetry students as a way to help them get out of the prison-house of self-expression and to play the language game of poetry as a poetry of gaming with language. The results were mixed (they always are, I think, with these methods, though in that regard the poems produced are not all different from those produced by other means; there are a lot of bad poems in which every word was consciously and intentionally chosen, too). And, though I don’t write poems much, having long ago realized that I’m better at reading the stuff than at writing it, I gave some of the games a try myself.

That’s when things got weird.

The Pill, Gentle Reader, does not believe in magic, but at a certain point it began to feel as though the interplay of rule and found text was generating stuff that spoke to where I was and what I was thinking and feeling. To wit: I tried some varieties of writing through – using the letters of a name or phrase to select from an existing text a bunch of fragments that became lines. Sometimes I looked for words beginning with the letters of the phrase, sometimes words in which those letters simply appeared. I used the letters’ numeric values to choose page numbers on which to search, lines on the page at which to begin searching, and, sometimes, the number of words to include that fell on either side of the one in which the letter appeared. A couple of results from this kind of game played with Thoreau’s Cape Cod can be found in an essay of mine. But the real magic came when, over a Thanksgiving weekend during which I felt particularly low, I worked through Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy with the letters of a significant proper noun. I won’t hazard a comment on the quality of the product, but I will say that, for the first time, I felt what some writers who use such methods have talked about – something was guiding me to bits of language whose relevance to my situation was palpable. I’d read Burton with great pleasure before, but this time it was like the book was talking to me about me.

Here’s number 3, of 12:

They beget one another and tread in a ring.
If it takes root once, it ends in despair,
perturbation, misery. Torment
hinders concoction,
causes men to be red.
Conceive what it lists,
broken with reproach,
forsaking country and dear friends.

Mischances misaffect the body:
almost natural,
being barren,
some quarrel or grudge, some contention.


I know, I know. There’s an explanatory circularity here: feeling melancholy, one applies the source of the feeling to a text about the feeling and, voila, poems addressing the feeling emerge. But it felt like something more, and for that reason alone I’d recommend giving such games a shot.

Some (P)Arts of the Sonnet

Every generation seems to need a new rehearsal of the sonnet’s history, a new compendium of exemplars, a new set of two-page commentaries. Our age, it seems, demanded its version and so we have, courtesy of Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet.

Sigh.

I suppose it hurts no one to be reminded, again, of the sonnet’s origins in 13th-century Italy, of its importation into English verse by 16th-century diplomats and noblemen, of its enormous popularity among Elizabethan courtiers, its resurgence among the Romantics, and its position as a favorite occasion for experiment (or rabid resistance to experimentalism) among modern and contemporary poets. And yet another volume that takes us from “Whoso list to hount” through Sidney, Spenser, a couple of the best-known Shakespeares, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Millay, Frost, and Heaney is as good a way as any for the small and shrinking poetry-buying public to spend their few discretionary dollars (though I'd much rather they bought new volumes by living poets, like this one or this here other one). The mini-essays on the sonnets here are fine. Burt is a prolific and deft book-reviewer and his skill is evident (disclosure: we were colleagues a few years ago). But I’ve never been quite sure of the purpose served by commentaries in volumes like this. If the book is for students, the commentaries perform some of the work students ought to do themselves as they play with the poems. If it’s for scholars, the commentaries add little to ongoing critical conversations (we'll read Roland Greene on post-Petrarchanism, thanks). And if the book is, as I suspect it will be, picked up mostly by the sort of well-off professional who would like to add a little literary knowledge as a mark of Bourdieuian distinction (the audience for recorded lectures on, say, music appreciation or classics in translation), the commentaries will too often stand in for, rather than lead into, the poems themselves (it is, after all, much easier to derive cocktail party tidbits from prose about a poem than from the poem itself).

The contents attempt historical comprehensiveness (not just the big three Renaissance sonneteers, but also Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne, not just the major Romantics but also the eccentric American, Jones Very, etc). Likewise, the later periods (the book tilts toward the recent) show at least an awareness of the desirability of aesthetic diversity (a Ted Berrigan sonnet here, a Tony Lopez sonnet there). But it’s precisely here that I find the book most irritating. Take the 30 sonnets included here published after 1960 (please). Among them appear sonnets by May Swenson, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, John Hollander, Rosanna Warren, Rita Dove, and Alison Brackenbury. Sure, these poets offer certain kinds of diversity. Harrison fills the form with political dissatisfaction, Dove with racial consciousness. Lowell is caught amidst his long experiment with the blank verse sonnet as a journalistic form and Bishop halves the lengths of the lines from their usual pentameter. But these, and most of the others here, exemplify one or another version of the familiar form doing familiar things with fairly familiar themes. (By the way, while two of the great recent experimenters with the sonnet – Geoffrey Hill and Paul Muldoon – are present and accounted for, I find myself wishing, in one of those inescapable critical cavils, that they were represented by some of their more searching experiments; “Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings,” say, or “Quoof”).

Here’s the thing. There are more fun and interesting adventures in the sonnet since 1950 than are dreamt of in this book’s philosophy. The form was a favorite among writers on the political Left during the Fifties (not surprising, given the prominence of politics among the oft-treated themes in the form’s history). One might imagine, to give Harrison some company, an example from Walter Lowenfels’s Sonnets of Love and Liberty, or one of the tart, taut 14-line pokes at pop culture published by Eve Merriam. I’ve acknowledged the welcome presence of Berrigan and Lopez, but here, too, they might have been given a bit more sympathetic company in the form of a section from Lopez’s fellow Cambridge-schooler Drew Milne’s "Garden of Tears," say, or from Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets or Alice Notley’s 165 Meeting House Lane. Indeed, the really interesting riches among experimental sonneteers is something this volume would never lead you to suspect. Here’s half a dozen examples off the top of my head, in no particular order: Ken Edwards’s Eight + Six, Adrian Clarke’s 25 Sonnets, Sean Bonney’s Astrophil and Stella, Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets, Edwin Denby’s In Public, In Private, and Geraldine Monk’s “Ghosts.” (You can find some of these, or parts thereof, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets.) And this is to say nothing of the great Oulipian games with the form; they’d have to be included in translation, but this didn’t stop Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo wandering leglessly in.

And this, I think, is what fuels my crankiness about another Wyatt-to-Walcott slog through the history of the sonnet. There are plenty of anthologies, with and without commentary, in which a student, a scholar, or a would-be sophisticate can find the familiar sonnets included here, from “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” to “Bluebeard,” and the exemplars better than those included here (Frost’s “Design,” for instance, instead of “Mowing”). Which leaves me, once more, wondering just what purpose is served by this partial (in both senses) survey.

Question Time

Tooling around on Ron Silliman’s blog a couple weeks ago, the Pill discovered a bunch of new poets to check out. Familiar with (indeed, a fan of) Graham Foust, and on nodding acquaintance with poems by a couple of the others Silliman mentioned as exemplars of the “New Precision” (or is it “New Precisionism”?), here was a half dozen or so poets utterly new to me: Joseph Massey, Michael Heller, Donna Stonecipher, and others). It’s a great thing to be introduced to new work (or work unknown to one). But in the last week or so, as part of my work on a writing project, I’ve been having to reread some poems I know pretty well, and there’s no denying the rich pleasure of rereading (hell, according to Roland Barthes, it’s the only real reading).

Most of what I’ve been rereading is distant not only from the Newly Precise, but also from the varieties of poetic experiment typically catalogued on Silliman’s blog. Today, for example, it’s been R. S. Thomas’s “Welsh Landscape,” Seamus Heaney’s “Bruagh,” and Ted Hughes’s Moortown, while yesterday was David Dabydeen’s Turner, and last week was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. More than that, even the twentieth-century poems I’ve been writing about I’ve been writing about in light of much older and still more familiar ones (the elegiac ones in light of Milton’s “Lycidas,” the others in light of Virgil, Marvell, and Jonson). But between my daily 300-500 words on the book-in-progress and the World Cup semi-final between Uruguay and the Netherlands, I stole an hour to reread something Sillimanesque, since it’d been a while since I’d reread that kind of thing.

Indeed, I reread something so Sillimanesque it was Silliman; driven by questions, it seemed a good idea to return to a poem composed entirely of interrogatives, Silliman’s “Sunset Debris.” I remember reading it something like twenty years ago, back when the New Sentence was really new, and being guided through it by a group of like-minded grad school friends but also by Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of the poem in Wittgenstein’s Ladder. A serious house on serious earth it was, at that time, a challenge to orthodoxies philosophical, poetic, and political, a darkly aggressive and demanding text the reading of which we would, as we did with various other 30-page chunks of difficulty (e.g. Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry”) wear as a badge of avant-honor.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to reread the poem (it really is thirty pages, and it really is all questions) and discover how much fun it is. Here’s the beginning:

Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet?

See what I mean?

OK. On one hand, there really is something avant and aggressive in the insistent repetition of a specific syntactic form. As Silliman said about the poem in an interview, communication inherently involves power relationships (well, what he said was “To write is to fuck. To read is to be fucked.”), and the poem puts its reader in a position sort of like that of a hapless Prime Minister caught on the horns of a back-bench challenge before the House, or like one finds oneself in during a round of that old stand-by drinking game, Questions. Provoked by a wrong-footing question like “Which one are you,” it’s tough to resist answering (which forces you to drink) rather than replying with another question. Once you’re playing the game, you’ve got to submit to its rules.

Still, what really stands out for me in this poem now is its playfulness. Many of the moves among questions are non sequiturs, but often one question seems conditioned (or, better, our range of possible interpretive response seems conditioned) by the preceding one or by earlier ones. The first three quoted here establish a pattern that seems to refer to the physical, and the next three continue in that vein but with an added affective element. Taken together, that half-dozen questions invite erotic imaginings. Things might get sinister with “Is he there,” might go off in a different direction with “Is it near,” but when we get to “Is it hard,” or “Is this where we get off,” or “Have you come yet,” I think our reading is influenced by the opening questions. We can play with this in various ways – who is speaking these questions? What relationships can be imagined among the speakers? – but we’re going to be frustrated (not without pleasure, I think) if we try to impose a straightforward drama on the poem. Instead, it’s fun to follow the shift from a discourse of feeling to one we might characterize as topographical to the cliché of kids on a car trip to the intricate connection between perception and taxonomy, and so on, when all that these sentences really have in common (as if that weren’t either significant or enough) is that they’re all questions. Isn’t that cool? Cool enough for sweaters? Was Van Persie offside?

New Laureate

The best reading of poetry requires deep and sustained attention, it demands a retreat from the noises that surround us and a quieting of the voices within us, and it rewards our concentration with a more finely tuned awareness of truths, an awareness that is affirmative even when the news is bad. Few poetries at once demand and reward this kind of careful listening as richly as does W.S. Merwin’s finest work. For over fifty years now, since his first book (A Mask for Janus) was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Merwin has produced poetry that answers to and embodies the deepest difficulties inherent in language and life. He has also published volumes of translations (from, it seems, half the poets who have ever written in three-quarters of the world’s languages, including, most recently, Dante, the Gawain poet, and Follain), and four books of breathtaking prose. Now, this craftsman is the Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Much has been made of the stylistic shifts that have marked Merwin's career, that have, indeed, demarcated its eras. It is true that Merwin began by mastering the intricate and lapidary forms bequeathed him by the European lyric tradition and then, in the early and middle 1960s, published searing, stripped down, fragmentary poems that read like the eroded remains of lyric inscriptions. It is true that the early poems bear little resemblance to a poem like “Gift,” written twenty years later and including such lines as “I am nameless I am divided / I am invisible I am untouchable,” and that “Gift” is not much like the politically aggressive “Questions to Tourists Stopped By a Pineapple Field” published ten years later and that neither of these poems compares in philosophical density and wealth of historical detail to more recent poems like, say, “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” which is itself different from the thrilling autumnal auroras of The River Sound, which, if we really want to compare apples and oranges, cannot approach the epic sweep and episodic pathos of the brilliant book-length narrative poem on nineteenth-century Hawai’i, The Folding Cliffs.

At the same time, a rereading of this long and varied career yields surprising continuities. Merwin’s has always been a poetry crafted amidst and in the full awareness and acceptance of mortality. It is, as life is, a preparation for those last fires. Moreover, the apocalyptic scenarios of the early books continue in the later work, in, for example, the devastating representation of sandalwood logging and its associated natural and human destruction in The Folding Cliffs. Merwin’s passionate care for the natural environment and his passionate critique of human rapacity have energized his poems throughout his career. So have his convictions about injustice and what he has called “the shamelessness of men,” from 1967’s “The Asians Dying” to 2001’s “The Fence,” dedicated to Matthew Shepard.

More central and enduring even than these specific political energies, though, has been Merwin’s understanding that language is at once what enables and enacts those extinctions and injustices and what might help us to find other, better ways of being in the world. Indeed, Merwin’s famous abandonment of punctuation (about halfway through 1963’s The Moving Target – I like to date it, conveniently, to “The Crossroads of the World, Etc.”) can be read as one of his most powerful strategies for loosening the determining and debilitating hold syntax so often has upon us. His unpunctuated lines, whether the short, almost groaned lines of The Lice or the long and limber lines of Travels, involve us in repeated dramas of resolution, revision, and renewed meaning.

Don't take my word for it. Here is "December Among the Vanished," one of my favorites from The Lice:

The old snow gets up and moves taking its
Birds with it

The beasts hide in the knitted walls
From the winter that lipless man
Hinges echo but nothing opens

A silence before this one
Has left its broken huts facing the pastures
Through their stone roofs the snow
And the darkness walk down

In one of them I sit with a dead shepherd
And watch his lambs

And here is "Cold Spring Morning," from Merwin's 2008 volume, The Shadow of Sirius:

At times it has seemed that when
I first came here it was an old self
I recognized in the silent walls
and the river far below
but the self has no age
as I knew even then and had known
for longer than I could remember
as the sky has no sky
except itself this white morning in May
with fog hiding the barns
that are empty now and hiding the mossed
limbs of gnarled wlanut trees and the green
pastures unfurled along the slope
I know where they are and the birds
that are hidden in their own calls
in the cold morning
I was not born here I come and go

To parse these poems is to engage the rules for sense-making, to admit our own wrong-footedness, to rethink relationships (grammatical and otherwise), and to engage a mind that will shrink neither from conviction nor from complexity. To read Merwin is to become a better reader, and to share his cautious hope that better readers might be better people. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest wisdom we might hope for from a careful communion with the mind embodied in Merwin’s poems: an intertwined distrust of language as that which categorizes and prioritizes and, too often, dehumanizes, and as at the same time, also, always, that with which we might come more tentatively, tenderly, but fully to be human together.