Outside In

Some thoughtful pre-AWP handwringing from Paul Hoover on the insiding of the "outside" of U.S. poetry. Old story, but salutary reminder of how quickly it's happened, how alienated an experimentalist—even on the barnside-broad definition of approval for the Beats, Black Mountain, and New York School—could feel as recently as AWP 2001.

I've seen vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and mp3s all in one short lifetime: now I'm facing the prospect of explaining to my son what "albums" were, as a form. It's not the changes themselves, but the speed of them—the pace at which they accumulate nostalgia—that starts to seem significant. We're deposited into the future before it can really be imagined as future, which sort of bends the avant-garde back on its past: 1910, 1968, AWPs of the Eighties. Memory takes on the remoteness of history, history becomes archaeology, and the future, as a category, becomes a subsidiary of the now. What's the new way of writing (and reading) that responds to that?

Addendum to the Below

Re: poets and popularity, Sunday's blog run unearthed poet Trevor Calvert (or "Colbert") recommending books—including G.C. Waldrep's—on San Francisco's NBC affiliate. How did I miss this one?

The segment's called "The Quills," true clarion for the Now. (It opens with a cheeky minuet. Rraaar!) Weird to see Trevor in that setting, against peacock logos and swooshing flatscreens, a banner for whatever book he mentions glowing below. It reminds you how artificial the markers of "the news" are, and how quickly the literary wilts under its glare (though Trevor's valiant).

I don't think, pace Kirsch, that poets deliberately eschew popularity. But there's an instinctive feeling that something as bizarre and interpersonal as poetry, especially in its visible form of a writer with text at a mike, needs its own habitat to not look utterly ridiculous. If the mass media's our measure of popular, I can't think of a poetry that could survive it without amputating what it is I go to poems for ... er, that for which I go to poems. Can you?

People's Poetry

A languourous dive through the blogroll this weekend hauled up in ideogrammic conjunction Reginald Shepherd's conference room kerfuffle with Adam Kirsch over poetry's popularity, and Stephen Vincent's account of reading Kyger aloud to his 91-year-old mother. (Vincent's clear-eyed posts about his mother's response to poetry as her mind slips are among my favorite in blogland.)

Stephen's post reminds me how often the giant machinery of poetry—all those schools, CVs, conferences, retreats, blogs, publishers, and reviews that eat up so much of the foreground for those of us hustling in the art—ratchets down to a one-on-one encounter with a reader that no grant can really measure. True of all the arts, but especially so with poetry, where there's no reliable yardstick of "the popular." For all the welcome talk about community, poetry's paradoxically most political and subversive, for me at least, where it's most anti-social; where it turns the late-capitalist pyramid on its head, putting its trees and factories and foundries and editors and ink at the service, for an instant, of the 91-year-old person who listens.

Do poets want to be popular? Or is the taller order wanting to be heard?

Dept. of Poetics

One day pass outside the temple of disjunction, please. In civvies, Ummin and Thummin of irony and assonance stashed behind the altar. Back by curfew.

It's Alive!

It's that time of year—my second—where I get all misty-eyed for Small Press Traffic's Poets Theater, wonder who's playing whom and who'll be in drag, who in next to nothing, who'll sing off-key at the end of Kevin's play.

Only this year there is no Kevin's play, but an intriguing bill of '80s Poets Theater "revivified." Move that Grand Piano, Stan: tonight I'd give a bicuspid to pixelate in.

UPDATE: Pics up at Stephanie's Flickr.

Modern American

Original "Modern American" Katrina Rodabaugh's joined fellow M(F)As Jennifer Manzano and Melissa Eleftherion Carr in the blogosphere.

(ModAms of yore--am I missing any of you? We're some of us friends on GoodReads, but drop a comment if you've got a blog.)

Natural Theology

"What's wrong
with God my screen name wouldn't solve?"

Helen in Portland, 1/12/08

David Abel held a marathon reading of Helen in Egypt for Spare Room two weeks back, and Sam Lohmann lived to blog about it. I survived too, though made just the 2.5-hour down slope. You wouldn’t think H.D.’s complex tissue of allusions, etymological arabesques, and didactic speechifying to set up each of the poem’s sections would lend itself to the rush and roll of oral performance, but here I am hungry to do it again. Sam nicely captures some of the qualities of H.D.’s verse that came to the fore live:

HD was clearly a poet who thought with sound: I imagine the difficulty for her was not in thinking up rhymes, assonances, consonances, mesmerizing strings of modulated syllables, but rather in toning them down, avoiding jangle, and emphasizing only the meaningful echoes.

I was also surprised at how well the oft-cited Imagist “clarity” and economy of diction translated into real-time delivery. Because you couldn’t hold all the larger structures of meaning in mind while listening, the information tended to change shape a little with each iteration—a prior bit recalled, something new added, a conjunction revealed—in a way that mirrored the ambiguous shimmer in Helen’s identity, and in those of the fluid, aggressively syncretic gods and heroes attending the action.

Sam mentions the “comic moments” inherent in a reading like this, and the unmistakable D&D, Rocky Horror vibe, especially as we sidled up to midnight, was a huge part of the appeal. The toilet inevitably flushed at the most hieratic moments, and the sense that we were all in on some geeky secret in a bookish loft while Portland slept below lent a wizardly frisson to the event. Big thanks to David A., and a big Modern American recommendation to come to the next if you can.

Dept. of Monday

Willamette slate, immer slate.

Why Stop Now?

New lyrics for 1989 The Tracey Ullman Show appearance:

"Ronald Reagan's quite upset,
Ollie's been indicted.
Thatcher's lowered taxes
But the poor can't get excited.
Gorbachev and Glasnost
Are the very latest thing
But Afghans, Jews and Artists
Find it less encouraging."

I did the Rock (for a whole week, baby).

Political Poetree

"Carter, Begin and Sadat
Breznhev, Teng and Castro
every day negotiate us closer to disastr-o
Idi Amin and the Shah
and Al Fatah is quite bizarre
I could never get the hang of ideology

I do the Rock
I do - I do - I do - do the Rock"

Somebody Stop Me ...

"Solzhenitzin feels exposed
Built a barbed-wire prison
Nietzsche's six feet under
But his babies' still got rhythm
Einstein's celebrating ten decades
But I'm afraid philosophy is just too much responsibility for me

I Do the Rock"

More Rock

"John and Yoko farming beef
raising protein quota
Sometimes they make love and art
inside their Dakota
Rodney's feeling sexy
Mick is really frightfully bold
Me, I do the only thing that stops me growing old

I do the Rock"

Anthem for '08?

"Edith Sitwell giving readings
14 Moscow Road
Osbert's giving champagne parties
Sachie's got a cold
Gertrude's hanging pictures
Alice making tea
Me, I do the only thing that still
makes sense to me

I do the Rock"

John Sakkis & Gary Gygax

Any poet with a forthcoming chapbook called Gary Gygax deserves all the push this little blog can give.

No Tell Motel Reading in Portland To-Nite

Four excellent Northwest poets read tonight to celebrate the release of The Bedside Guide To No Tell Motel: Second Floor.

THURSDAY, JAN. 10
7:00 p.m.
The Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St.

Come celebrate the release of The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel: Second Floor with

JOSEPH BRADSHAW
SUSAN DENNING
DEAN GORMAN
REBECCA LOUDON

Addendum to the Below

"Of those few fools, who with ill stars are cursed,
Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst"

--William Congreve, The Way of the World

New Irresolution

"One hates an author that's all author."
--Byron, Beppo

Administratrix of Monday Meets Philosophy Dept.

The half-examined life sort of worth living?

The Year in Sports 2007

Thank you to the poets whose work I got a chance to hear in Portland in 2007:

ABEL, David
ALEXANDER, Charles
ALEXANDER, Chris

BELLAMY, Dodie
ten BERGE, H.C.
BETTRIDGE, Joel
BRADSHAW, Joseph
BRIANTE, Susan

CHAO, Geneva
COX, Sarah Anne
CZERSKI, Gale

DALY, Catherine
DINE, Jim
DORANTES, Dolores
DURGIN, Patrick
DYCKMANN, Susanne

ESHLEMAN, Clayton

FITTERMAN, Rob
FITZPATRICK, Corinne
FRASER, Kathleen

GALLAGHER, Kristin
GARDNER, Susana
GRAHAM, K. Lorraine
GREENSTREET, Kate

HALPERN, Rob
HAYES, Jared
HILL, Lindsay
HOFER, Jen
HOLMES, Janet

KANAE, Lisa Linn
KATZ, Vincent
KELLEHER, Michael
KILLIAN, Kevin

LANDERS, Susan
LARKIN, Maryrose
LOMAX, Dana Teen
LOUDON, Rebecca

MEADOWS, Deborah
MICHENER, Diana
MOHAMMAD, K. Silem
MORSE, Jesse

PEREZ, C.S.
PICARD, Tiare

RAPHAEL, Dan
ROBINSON, Kit
RUMBLE, Ken
RUSSO, Linda

SCHULTZ, Susan M.
SELDESS, Jesse
SHANER, Tim
STADLER, Matthew
STONECIPHER, Donna

TYC, Cat

WALLACE, Mark
WOLSAK, Lissa
WRIGHT, Bethany
WRIGHT, Vincent Craig

YOUNG, Mike

ZOLF, Rachel

(I, J, N-O, Q/R, & U/V poets--let's see a stronger showing in '08!)