1 day ago
Monday, January 08, 2007
Pamuk's Acceptance
It must be because I like so much being a father that Orhan Pamuk's Nobel acceptance speech left me a little damp in the ocular regions.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Uptown/Downtown
Weird set-piece battle over at Poetry on the Grand Question: “Does Poetry Have A Social Function?” The four participants are all sharp & sling words good enough, but the forum itself, like so much Poetry touches, seems vague in purpose and ill-conceived to me. The positions staked out are all ones you’ve heard before: it’s basically “School of Quietude vs. Post-Avant” 101, with the more independent-minded moderates representing each wing. (Ron’s distinction is so annoying because so often it works.)
It’s hard to see what Poetry wants to accomplish with a feature like this. Either they’re trying to look ecumenical (& grooming the ‘Lilly millions’ voices who’ll get to speak for each side) or they’re hoping to make poetry look relevant by giving it a little Bill O’Reilly-style sizzle. Either way, the exercise feels artificial and teacherly to me. No diss meant to the participants, whose positions are considered and deeply felt; it’s just that in watching the discourse of contemporary US poetry move through the quartet with greater or lesser intensity, it struck me how little reason these poets have to talk to one another at all. Nothing personal, it’s structural: the interlocking networks of publishing houses, grants, teaching opportunities, awards, websites, blogs, and review outlets a poet needs to get work out into the world in 2006 (oops, 2007) are so thick & multifarious now that poets at its extremes never need to meet.
Sure, there’s a lot of voluntary interchange, even poaching, in the warm middle, and you could argue that as interest in poetry—& reading in general—shrinks, the field is making like the mainline Protestant denominations and going ecumenical: the Academy of American Poets recruits from the Grand Piano. But I think the more striking development in recent years is how little reason poets of different stripes have to confront or even acknowledge one another to have a fulfilling life (career?) in the art. Being a Yale Younger Poet doesn’t automatically cut any more ice in some not insignificant circles—in fact, considerably less—than having a first collection from Edge or O Books. What the Language poets helped to do, with all the obduracy and rancor they’re sometimes remembered for, is create an alternate poetry world that’s been grafted onto the ‘real’ one. (Parallel examples could be drawn from a lot of other poetries and scenes.) ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’, as more and more poets seem to realize, are two dense, self-sufficient neighborhoods on the same shrinking island, where the commuting’s become purely voluntary.
I’ve been reading Yeats’s The Trembling of the Veil, where he remembers the effort it took to weld the young pre-Raphaelite Turks like himself to the Fenian greybeards of the 1840s generation in order to create The Irish Literary Society. It was rough work, of the ugly committee-and-minutes kind, but tied as it was to the larger cause of Irish independence, Yeats & his colleagues felt it was worth the fight. I can’t see the larger political (let alone poetic) reason that would require the ‘School of Quietude’ and the ‘post-avant’ to come together like that right now, in any of their permutations. The Irish needed to show they had a world-class literature to strengthen the case for self-rule: how’s that for Social Function? On what pressing political grounds today, in the US, do we need poets from across the spectrum to work together—or even convene on a website—at all?
It’s hard to see what Poetry wants to accomplish with a feature like this. Either they’re trying to look ecumenical (& grooming the ‘Lilly millions’ voices who’ll get to speak for each side) or they’re hoping to make poetry look relevant by giving it a little Bill O’Reilly-style sizzle. Either way, the exercise feels artificial and teacherly to me. No diss meant to the participants, whose positions are considered and deeply felt; it’s just that in watching the discourse of contemporary US poetry move through the quartet with greater or lesser intensity, it struck me how little reason these poets have to talk to one another at all. Nothing personal, it’s structural: the interlocking networks of publishing houses, grants, teaching opportunities, awards, websites, blogs, and review outlets a poet needs to get work out into the world in 2006 (oops, 2007) are so thick & multifarious now that poets at its extremes never need to meet.
Sure, there’s a lot of voluntary interchange, even poaching, in the warm middle, and you could argue that as interest in poetry—& reading in general—shrinks, the field is making like the mainline Protestant denominations and going ecumenical: the Academy of American Poets recruits from the Grand Piano. But I think the more striking development in recent years is how little reason poets of different stripes have to confront or even acknowledge one another to have a fulfilling life (career?) in the art. Being a Yale Younger Poet doesn’t automatically cut any more ice in some not insignificant circles—in fact, considerably less—than having a first collection from Edge or O Books. What the Language poets helped to do, with all the obduracy and rancor they’re sometimes remembered for, is create an alternate poetry world that’s been grafted onto the ‘real’ one. (Parallel examples could be drawn from a lot of other poetries and scenes.) ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’, as more and more poets seem to realize, are two dense, self-sufficient neighborhoods on the same shrinking island, where the commuting’s become purely voluntary.
I’ve been reading Yeats’s The Trembling of the Veil, where he remembers the effort it took to weld the young pre-Raphaelite Turks like himself to the Fenian greybeards of the 1840s generation in order to create The Irish Literary Society. It was rough work, of the ugly committee-and-minutes kind, but tied as it was to the larger cause of Irish independence, Yeats & his colleagues felt it was worth the fight. I can’t see the larger political (let alone poetic) reason that would require the ‘School of Quietude’ and the ‘post-avant’ to come together like that right now, in any of their permutations. The Irish needed to show they had a world-class literature to strengthen the case for self-rule: how’s that for Social Function? On what pressing political grounds today, in the US, do we need poets from across the spectrum to work together—or even convene on a website—at all?
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Local Yokel
I'm amazed at the amount of coverage local bands get in the weeklies here. The last Willamette Week gave out Best of 2006 prizes for Best Local Albums, Songs, Shows, Venues, ‘Surprises,’ even Labels. That's on top of their 5-to-6 weekly sidebars on local musicians, along with detailed mini-reviews in the Listings section. (The Portland Mercury follows suit.) If homegrown music was getting this level of attention in San Francisco, I missed it. Playing in Fog, valiant as it is, just doesn’t hold a candle to WW’s Local Cut.
Granted, once BAM magazine disappeared (remember the Bammies?), Downtown Studios closed, and key ‘mid-band’ venues like the Paradise Lounge, the Tip-Top, the Boomerang, and the Covered Wagon either shut the doors or switched formats, I pretty much checked out. It's not just a matter of spaces to play and ears to hear—what was missing was any effective way to make a scene of any real size visible to itself. It’s the kind of function I think Stephanie Young (among others) performs so well for poetry on her blog, & pursued with special intensity during what I’m starting to think of without too much embarrassment as the ‘early aughts’. Of course there’s MySpace, a giant boon for bands. But are FriendSpace links a substitute for the mysterious ecology of a scene?
Granted, once BAM magazine disappeared (remember the Bammies?), Downtown Studios closed, and key ‘mid-band’ venues like the Paradise Lounge, the Tip-Top, the Boomerang, and the Covered Wagon either shut the doors or switched formats, I pretty much checked out. It's not just a matter of spaces to play and ears to hear—what was missing was any effective way to make a scene of any real size visible to itself. It’s the kind of function I think Stephanie Young (among others) performs so well for poetry on her blog, & pursued with special intensity during what I’m starting to think of without too much embarrassment as the ‘early aughts’. Of course there’s MySpace, a giant boon for bands. But are FriendSpace links a substitute for the mysterious ecology of a scene?
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Meme a Little Meme
FIVE LITTLE-KNOWN THINGS ABOUT ME (tagged by Kasey)
1) Names of my parents and siblings all start with the letter 'R'.
2) Was a teenage DEVO fanatic.
3) For a short time in 2001 could understand Romanian if spoken slowly.
4) Was an altar boy and page turner for the organist in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.
5) Once played water polo against USC's 'B-team'.
On to: Alli Warren, Jack Kimball, Mel Nichols, Maria Damon, David Harrison Horton.
1) Names of my parents and siblings all start with the letter 'R'.
2) Was a teenage DEVO fanatic.
3) For a short time in 2001 could understand Romanian if spoken slowly.
4) Was an altar boy and page turner for the organist in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.
5) Once played water polo against USC's 'B-team'.
On to: Alli Warren, Jack Kimball, Mel Nichols, Maria Damon, David Harrison Horton.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Dept. of Morpheus
First dream of 2007: Gary Sullivan telling me he'd finished drawing all of Elsewhere #3 on Christmas Day.
Monday, January 01, 2007
Top Ten in '06
1) Lesley
2) Auden
3) Flarf Fest
4) Portland
5) Poetry Project
6) Movie Kiss
7) Fred Rodgers
8) Bay Poetics
9) Mills College
10)Tommy Saxondale
Peace and every happiness in 2007. This will be our year.
2) Auden
3) Flarf Fest
4) Portland
5) Poetry Project
6) Movie Kiss
7) Fred Rodgers
8) Bay Poetics
9) Mills College
10)Tommy Saxondale
Peace and every happiness in 2007. This will be our year.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Notley on O'Hara = Degentesh?
A while back I blogged about Katie Degentesh’s The Anger Scale and how the unique voice at work in the poems extends and amplifies O’Hara’s late style. There’s a lot more going on in the collection than that, but it’s one way of getting at what it is that doesn’t sound 'prodecural' to me (if procedure has a sound) in Katie’s deft fusion of the MMPI with Google. Out with the labcoat and the I Ching; in with wit, absurdity, looby satire, and a surprisingly intimate voice given the various sources used to call it into being. (Shanna Compton and Jasper Bernes have been commenting on this aspect of the poems as well.)
Recently I’ve been reading Alice Notley’s Coming After: Essays on Poetry. In it she talks about O’Hara’s late style in a way that reminds me a lot of The Anger Scale, though the things Notley objects to in O’Hara’s last poems are the same qualities that I think make Katie’s collection so engaging. Of those last poems, which O’Hara planned to collect under the title The End of the Far West or the New York Amsterdam Set, Notley writes:
"A new kind of voice is speaking, that of the poet becoming, and at the same time commenting on and changing, the story or issue on the screen. The voice is both satirical and mysterious; it’s anonymous and communal (in the bad sense) in its exploitation of verbal mediocrity, and works somewhat more through deadpan presentation and juxtaposition than through intricate linguistic closework.
What if that one, that entity [the ‘I’ of the poems], does think in the clichés of television, has a pile of these units, these lines clattering around inside waiting for further use and rearrangement in rather empty contemporary situations? It’s the space between sentences that’s now remarkable and impeccable, but these poems aren’t very pleasant, though maybe they shouldn’t be. A warning shouldn’t be pleasant, a pointing towards a future both inarticulate and full of words produced, recycled, and recombined by all sorts of machines.”
--Alice Notley, Coming After, pp. 12-13.
Among the many other things it is, The Anger Scale may be one of the first books to make good use of the neglected O’Hara. More pointedly political though: the backbeat of the MMPI suggests how subjectivity—or the exams, institutions, and (ulp) lyric poems we rely on to produce it—can be absurdly limiting, sinister, and laugh-your-ass-off funny all in the same breath.
It seems like a lot of contemporary poets are also pursuing a voice like this, one to which Notley's thoughts about O'Hara might apply, but charged positive. What is it about the culture right now that makes this tonal shift feel so right?
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Dept. of Being Present (Spare Room)
Tony Christy and Jules Boykoff read last Sunday at the Portland Art Center, an airy downtown gallery on loan for the night to the Spare Room collective, which runs the most ambitious experimental reading series in Portland.
Tony Christy didn’t read so much as put into motion a set of antic verbal actions—many involving other readers, one involving a knife—centered on voices of authority (judge, bureaucrat, cookbook author, priest, rapist, God) to suggest the shared cadence of power in its various guises, its ways of making us “shut the fuck up” and feel small. But in his use of multiple voices, attention to the aural, 'pre-sensical' qualities of words, and vaudevillian stage presence, Christy also managed to point at some possible lines of resistance: Orthodox chant folded into polyvocal dada static.
Jules Boykoff opened with “Essay #5” from his terrific new Once Upon a Neo-Liberal Rocket Badge. One phrase in particular hit me as an apt description of Boykoff’s poetic practice: “helicopter as metronome.” It evokes all the current events, military and humanitarian, that require the intervention of helicopters in this our transnational age, while pointing to a beat—a structure—that underpins them, one that’s available, dub-style, for resistance as well as oppression. Just functioning like a metronome— making the repetitions visible—is itself a rebellious act in the Murdoch era: Boykoff goes one further by finding a music that gets information to sing:
Jules also read all of Gringostroika, his new Dusie wee chap (yes, I said wee chap) and parts of his new The Metal Sunset of Tomorrow’s Ascending Dissension, also from Dusie. (apparently they work very hard in Switzerland.) The latter is an engaging writing-through of several friends, influences, and poetic fellow-travelers: 28 poems of ten lines each, with the first and last lines borrowed from another poet (“Poem that begins & ends with a line from David Buuck,” "Poem that begins & ends with a line from Judith Goldman,” etc.) It’s a clever, generous way of ‘doing’ community instead of just celebrating it, maybe also tipping a hand just a little to the competition that shadows any poetic scene (“man, I wish I’d written that!”) but turning its energies to the positive work of acknowledgement and production.
It’s not so wet but very cold right now in Portland. Jules wore a thick-collared coat through the reading and I swear I saw steam coming out into the mike—sign of life and breath and heat.
Tony Christy didn’t read so much as put into motion a set of antic verbal actions—many involving other readers, one involving a knife—centered on voices of authority (judge, bureaucrat, cookbook author, priest, rapist, God) to suggest the shared cadence of power in its various guises, its ways of making us “shut the fuck up” and feel small. But in his use of multiple voices, attention to the aural, 'pre-sensical' qualities of words, and vaudevillian stage presence, Christy also managed to point at some possible lines of resistance: Orthodox chant folded into polyvocal dada static.
Jules Boykoff opened with “Essay #5” from his terrific new Once Upon a Neo-Liberal Rocket Badge. One phrase in particular hit me as an apt description of Boykoff’s poetic practice: “helicopter as metronome.” It evokes all the current events, military and humanitarian, that require the intervention of helicopters in this our transnational age, while pointing to a beat—a structure—that underpins them, one that’s available, dub-style, for resistance as well as oppression. Just functioning like a metronome— making the repetitions visible—is itself a rebellious act in the Murdoch era: Boykoff goes one further by finding a music that gets information to sing:
“suckered again by the Lulu Guinness tulip detachable clutch
material frame now beyond the gumption of interest rates
[replica volcanoes spewing
replica sphinxes all plastic and shammy
like the massive between thank you & de nada]”
...
landlord as feudal hangover
mosque-hopping cassette-tape contraband
Thermidorian bevel torque
Sonuva horse baron!”
Jules also read all of Gringostroika, his new Dusie wee chap (yes, I said wee chap) and parts of his new The Metal Sunset of Tomorrow’s Ascending Dissension, also from Dusie. (apparently they work very hard in Switzerland.) The latter is an engaging writing-through of several friends, influences, and poetic fellow-travelers: 28 poems of ten lines each, with the first and last lines borrowed from another poet (“Poem that begins & ends with a line from David Buuck,” "Poem that begins & ends with a line from Judith Goldman,” etc.) It’s a clever, generous way of ‘doing’ community instead of just celebrating it, maybe also tipping a hand just a little to the competition that shadows any poetic scene (“man, I wish I’d written that!”) but turning its energies to the positive work of acknowledgement and production.
It’s not so wet but very cold right now in Portland. Jules wore a thick-collared coat through the reading and I swear I saw steam coming out into the mike—sign of life and breath and heat.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Brimful of Asha
Funny how in writing a tribute to the era of the 45, Cornershop managed to make one. 45 as bell jar of the one-hit wonder.
A thoughtful take on Cornershop’s 'hybridity problem' here. A closer look at the song’s lyrics here.
(pictured: Asha Bhosle at left with her sister, Lata Mangeshkar, also namechecked in the song.)
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
"Somewhere Else"
There’s a remarkable song in Gazal that goes like this:
I love the way this skews the ideas usually cued by the Taj—Mughal power, imperial serenity, conjugal love, Indian national glory—and spins them leftward. It leaves the conventional associations in tact (nowhere does the song suggest the Taj isn’t beautiful or grand or serene), but adds a new layer of meaning that reveals the contradictions implicit in the monument, and in the nation for which it stands as metonym.
Love—which in Bollywood, like in so much of pop culture, operates as the great leveler, its pleasures and headaches available to rich and poor, famous and obscure alike—gets tagged with a class position. Rich people who love aren’t like poor people who love at all, because the rich have the luxury of expressing their emotions, through buildings like the Taj and, by implication, through words, literacy: the preserve of the educated.
By using the Taj as an example of what divides society rather than an emblem of its unity, the song manages to insinuate other divisions as well: Hindu vs. Muslim, colonizer vs. colonized, Third World vs. First. At the same time, it collapses other possible fractures—most notably, caste and gender—into the “us and them” binary of rich/poor. Love is still the constant, but instead of using it to trump social conflicts, the song makes passion a media access issue: who gets the money to express themselves through art? In the end, it hasn’t razed the Taj as a symbol so much as moved it “somewhere else.”
The words are by Sahir Ludianvi, whose life isn’t so unlike that of the character in the film who sings them: a Muslim-born atheist who joined the leftist Progressive Writers Association in the ‘40s, Ludhianvi shuttled between nations—Pakistan and India—after Partition, until his politics forced him to flee to Bombay. There, he found himself an Urdu poet writing hits for the Hindi film world (a position few Hindi poets were willing to stoop to at the time). Ludhianvi also penned the stunning “Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Who Kahaan Hai“ from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957), which uses prostitution as an image for India’s moral failing in the wake of Independence. The lyrics are adapted from his poem “Chakle” (Brothels), which you can read here.
The Taj [Mahal] may be
a monument of love for you
you may love this
beautiful monument
O my beloved, meet
me somewhere else
O my beloved, meet
me somewhere else
O my beloved
several people like us
have loved in this world
several people like us
have loved in this world
Who says their emotions
were not true
but they have no way they
can express their emotions
because even those people,
like us, were poor
because even those people,
like us, were poor.
O my beloved
This garden, the flowing river, this monument
this garden, the flowing river, this monument
these beautifully painted
walls, this décor—
a king, with the help of his wealth
has made fun of
the love of us poor people
O my beloved
O my beloved, meet
me somewhere else
O my beloved
meet me somewhere else.
I love the way this skews the ideas usually cued by the Taj—Mughal power, imperial serenity, conjugal love, Indian national glory—and spins them leftward. It leaves the conventional associations in tact (nowhere does the song suggest the Taj isn’t beautiful or grand or serene), but adds a new layer of meaning that reveals the contradictions implicit in the monument, and in the nation for which it stands as metonym.
Love—which in Bollywood, like in so much of pop culture, operates as the great leveler, its pleasures and headaches available to rich and poor, famous and obscure alike—gets tagged with a class position. Rich people who love aren’t like poor people who love at all, because the rich have the luxury of expressing their emotions, through buildings like the Taj and, by implication, through words, literacy: the preserve of the educated.
By using the Taj as an example of what divides society rather than an emblem of its unity, the song manages to insinuate other divisions as well: Hindu vs. Muslim, colonizer vs. colonized, Third World vs. First. At the same time, it collapses other possible fractures—most notably, caste and gender—into the “us and them” binary of rich/poor. Love is still the constant, but instead of using it to trump social conflicts, the song makes passion a media access issue: who gets the money to express themselves through art? In the end, it hasn’t razed the Taj as a symbol so much as moved it “somewhere else.”
The words are by Sahir Ludianvi, whose life isn’t so unlike that of the character in the film who sings them: a Muslim-born atheist who joined the leftist Progressive Writers Association in the ‘40s, Ludhianvi shuttled between nations—Pakistan and India—after Partition, until his politics forced him to flee to Bombay. There, he found himself an Urdu poet writing hits for the Hindi film world (a position few Hindi poets were willing to stoop to at the time). Ludhianvi also penned the stunning “Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Who Kahaan Hai“ from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957), which uses prostitution as an image for India’s moral failing in the wake of Independence. The lyrics are adapted from his poem “Chakle” (Brothels), which you can read here.
Monday, December 18, 2006
On the Clamways (dance edit)
Michael Magee just put a portion of my reading for his Downcity Poetry Series up on YouTube. He works some miracle with music and hilarious editing that makes poems about bivalves look almost cool. Almost. Check it out here.
This one goes out to all the Scientologists in Wetumpka.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Dept. of Film (Bollywood)
GAZAL (1964)
Sunil Dutt stars as an experimental poet who spends his days editing an avant-garde literary journal with his atheist Marxist cohorts. When he overhears Meena Kumari—a skilled School of Quietude versifier struggling to get published—reciting in a garden, Dutt instantly falls in love. A formidable succession of veils, burkhas, partitions, and garden walls keeps Dutt from discovering the poet’s identity, so he decides to plagiarize her work at a mainstream poetry conference in order to smoke her out.
The ploy works; invited as the enfant terrible, Dutt wows the crowd with his lush, formally correct ghazals (provided by real-life poet and famed Bollywood lyricist Sahir ‘Magician’ Ludhianvi) and an irate Kumari reveals herself. Soon after, Dutt gets fired by his editorial board for printing one of Kumari’s rearguard poems. No matter: he’s a confirmed traditionalist now, happy to wander the streets of Agra going moony at views of the Taj Mahal, that all-purpose symbol of Indian grandeur that also happens to be the greatest forget-me-not a prince ever gave his gal.
Yes, they end up together. Yes, I would love to see this remade with modern American poets.
Sunil Dutt stars as an experimental poet who spends his days editing an avant-garde literary journal with his atheist Marxist cohorts. When he overhears Meena Kumari—a skilled School of Quietude versifier struggling to get published—reciting in a garden, Dutt instantly falls in love. A formidable succession of veils, burkhas, partitions, and garden walls keeps Dutt from discovering the poet’s identity, so he decides to plagiarize her work at a mainstream poetry conference in order to smoke her out.
The ploy works; invited as the enfant terrible, Dutt wows the crowd with his lush, formally correct ghazals (provided by real-life poet and famed Bollywood lyricist Sahir ‘Magician’ Ludhianvi) and an irate Kumari reveals herself. Soon after, Dutt gets fired by his editorial board for printing one of Kumari’s rearguard poems. No matter: he’s a confirmed traditionalist now, happy to wander the streets of Agra going moony at views of the Taj Mahal, that all-purpose symbol of Indian grandeur that also happens to be the greatest forget-me-not a prince ever gave his gal.
Yes, they end up together. Yes, I would love to see this remade with modern American poets.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Found In Translation
Being told to read more 'world' poetry is like being told to eat more vegetables—you know it’s good for you, but translations just aren’t as sweet.
Still, recently found this handy digest of what’s up outside the Anglophone:
International Exchange for Poetic Invention
Added to links at right.
Still, recently found this handy digest of what’s up outside the Anglophone:
International Exchange for Poetic Invention
Added to links at right.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Dept. of Amusement (Magic Helicopter Prayer)
Caught The Perpetual Motion Roadshow last night here in Portland, which I heard about through Mike Young. Mike was one of the poets I met in Ashland earlier this year at the Emergent Forms series at Southern Oregon University, along with Jessica Rowan (featured in the new issue of Foursquare) and an impressively tight group of writers that felt just a few hairs away from becoming a sort of "Ashland School."
Mike read from his chapbook "That's Not the Face I Was Giving You," which he delivered like youth's ambassador to the Sanhedrin. One from the set:
Stops to come in Berkeley, San Francisco, San Jose.
Mike read from his chapbook "That's Not the Face I Was Giving You," which he delivered like youth's ambassador to the Sanhedrin. One from the set:
NOTHING IS INTERMINABLE RIGHT NOW
Oh snap! According
to tonight's work
zee past
just sits there
I feel like a Clydesdale
watching NASCAR
in a nice bathtub.
Stops to come in Berkeley, San Francisco, San Jose.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Monday, December 11, 2006
Friday, December 08, 2006
Thug Life
A life in poetry: what might that mean? How do poets occupy office jobs or fly in airplanes or deal with bureaucrats differently from non-poets?
I can recognize poets whose writing is on the same continuum as their everyday life (for some reason it’s not “professional” poets I think of this way so much as activist poets like kari edwards, or writers like John Wieners or Hannah Wiener, whose phone calls and poems and notebooks and symptoms seem of one piece). But in so many situations that happen off the page, I’m not sure what the ‘poetic’ response is. Some soufflé of openness, freedom, orneriness, goofiness, and encouragement where possible of those values in others, plus not being a Republican.
That doesn’t seem grand enough to constitute “a life lived in poetry,” the way an Alice Notley or Nada Gordon or Ezra Pound or Juliana Spahr conceives it, or the way I imagine they conceive it judging from the energies that animate their poetry.
If there’s still any romance left in being a poet, it hovers around this question for me. It’s the life you want in the end more than the poems—otherwise you’re just left with some version of that creepy Eliot/Stevens/Gioia model of the businessman-poet, spreadsheets by day and poems slipped out of a drawer by night.
I guess what I’m wondering is what poetry looks like without the poems.
I can recognize poets whose writing is on the same continuum as their everyday life (for some reason it’s not “professional” poets I think of this way so much as activist poets like kari edwards, or writers like John Wieners or Hannah Wiener, whose phone calls and poems and notebooks and symptoms seem of one piece). But in so many situations that happen off the page, I’m not sure what the ‘poetic’ response is. Some soufflé of openness, freedom, orneriness, goofiness, and encouragement where possible of those values in others, plus not being a Republican.
That doesn’t seem grand enough to constitute “a life lived in poetry,” the way an Alice Notley or Nada Gordon or Ezra Pound or Juliana Spahr conceives it, or the way I imagine they conceive it judging from the energies that animate their poetry.
If there’s still any romance left in being a poet, it hovers around this question for me. It’s the life you want in the end more than the poems—otherwise you’re just left with some version of that creepy Eliot/Stevens/Gioia model of the businessman-poet, spreadsheets by day and poems slipped out of a drawer by night.
I guess what I’m wondering is what poetry looks like without the poems.
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