Poets Per Capita

Are there more poets per capita in Northern Ireland than in most other places? I'm not sure. But the density of quality poetry produced here is impressive, to say the least. Sure, there are the Ulster Renaissance types everybody knows: Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian. But also an older generation or two who ought to have a wider readership. John Hewitt, for instance, whose house I passed on the way from Dublin to Belfast today. Or Louis MacNeice, for whose "Snow" alone he ought to be more famous (and whose Autumn Journal is one of my favorite poems of the late 1930s). But MacNeice said awful things about Ireland, and I'm having a good time here, so instead I'll give you a sample of Ciaran Carson (whose middle name I would tell you if I knew it, but, alas, I do not), and since I'm about to go enjoy a pint at the Crown, here's a pub poem:

Last Orders

Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but
It's someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens.
Like electronic
Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who's who, or what
You're walking into. I, for instance, could be anybody. Though I'm told
Taig's written on my face. See me, and would I trust appearances?

Inside, a sudden lull. The barman lolls his head at us. We order Harp --
Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks
daggers at us
From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how simple it would
be for someone
Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and
ourselves, to Kingdom Come.

Worst. Book. Ever.

The Pill is, as a rule, averse to superlatives. I have, when pressed, been heard to aver that Ardbeg is the best single malt Scotch whisky and that British Air is the worst airline on which to fly to or from London, but that’s about it. So it is with some hesitation that I tell you that Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life is the worst volume of poetry I have ever read, but tell you that I will. And Gentle Reader, I have read this.

It’s an ugly book, and I don’t just mean the awful and illegible cover, the bizarre trim size or the off-putting Quemadura typeface (though those are all bad enough). I mean the poems themselves.

I’ll get to the ugliness. But first I’ve got to admit to some simple confusion. Are these poems dramatic monologues, with speakers distinct from the poet? I kept hoping so, especially when I came upon a solecism like this (from “Fat”):

I have wandered for six days with no bread, drank lemon water
Went running.

This, my fellow lovers of the language, is incorrect tense usage; the sentence begins with the past participle form of the verb (“have wandered”) but slips, after the comma, to the simple past (keep the "have" in your head when you get to "drank" and you'll hear the problem). A deft and economical way of characterizing a speaker, suggesting sloppiness of thought through intentional sloppiness of language? A moment in which we are subtly invited to join the poet in her ironic distance from this linguistically slovenly speaker? Would that it were so. The same poem includes banal lines about writing poems:

I have written poems about the flesh of scientists
But nothing in their science speaks to me about my art.

Oh dear. But wait. It's worse. Examples abound. Here’s another, from “Ars Poetica”:

Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again
And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess
He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness
No other human being had before to my ears
And told me that I was no good.

Perhaps he meant her grammar, for the “interspersed” in the second line suggests that what we’ll find between the tears and, ahem, "clinginess" is a noun, not the verb phrase “He screamed.” Something, rather than some action, is interspersed between (or, better, among) other things.

Pedantry? OK. I’ll accept that. But Ezra Pound, who was woefully wrong about many things, was right, I think, when he wrote that poetry should be as well written as well-written prose, and these here Black Life poems are emphatically not.


What they are is chopped-up bad prose about how hard it is to be the poet (and these poems never, ever let the reader forget that they were written by a real, live poet):

I am a great woman, I have the wiles
That make the poet
But I am also gentle
And when I kiss a man I really mean it
Have you felt this too, upon my kisses
That I gave you in the nightsky
As your eyelashes hung over the moon?
Or were you too young to see it too,
My little feverish butterfly

Oh, the cheap cummingsy runtogetherness! Oh the sappy Chagallery! Oh the missing terminal punctuation! Oh, the humanity!

One is embarrassed for Lasky at a moment like this. Or like this here other one, from “Jakob”:

Readers, you read flat words
Inside here are many moments
In which I have screamed in pain
As the flames ate me.

One's critical response is reduced by such lines as these to the head-shaking repetition of "Oh dear." But, OK, these are just run-of-the-mill bad, the sort of awful self-obsessed, craftless crap that smears a thousand workshop tables in creative writing classrooms and MFA programs around the country (and soils, one admits, far more notebooks whose sophomore owners have the decency to keep them out of sight and, perhaps, when the writers come to cast mature eyes on their late-night, wine-fueled drivel, consign them to the cleansing flames). I got halfway through the book just irritated by the fact that this stuff got slapped between those ugly covers instead of being sanitarily flushed.

And then I read “Ever Read a Book Called Awe?”

[Gentle Reader, this humble blogger pauses now to ask you to recognize that, though the following might at first blush feel intemperate, great restraint in fact was brought to bear in the composition and revision of these sentences.]

It's bad enough that we're treated to the navel-gazing bout of self-absorption in which the poet asks if we've read her previous book, in which she goes on to describe, in a sickening faux-naif tone, the publication process, and that this wince-inducing anecdote is made somehow to stand for love as it's juxtaposed to "Some people I love / Don't love me." (Yeah, I threw up in my mouth a little there, too.) What transforms icky to full-on revolting is the next juxtaposition. Sometimes, you see, people love the speaker (I'm going to retain this persona/poet distinction, though there's precious little evidence to support it), and, as the poem has it, "That's good," and then the Big and Important Generalizations appear:

When you sit in a landscape of snow
And you're a bird, that's Awe
When you look over a big green field
And the dead soldiers like all around you, that's Love

And when you shift from your navel and your precious little undeserved career to the Capital-H History figured by those dead soldiers, whose vintage, by way of that "Awe," seems to be in the 2003-present category, that's stealing some unearned gravitas from the fatigue pockets of casualties like a camp follower grabbing wallets. And it's disgusting.

Bad poems, Gentle Reader, are bad enough. This book is worse. It's ugly.

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.