December 2003 Archives

I like 3rd Bed, www.3rdbed.com for a lot of reasons. For one, its name is ingenious, derived from The Republic, where Plato famously describes a bed in three aspects: the first and therefore most real bed is the idea of "bed"; the second is that object made by the carpenter; and the third bed, the one imitated by the painter. You know immediately where this little zine is headed. The poems (I can comment only on these) are indeed the artifices that Plato had in mind. When you read them, you are reading "made language," verbal icons and artifacts. (You are not, or not necessarily, reading little narrative histories, morality lyrics, philosophical treatises, confessions, self-improvement devices).

An example:

Barn Song
--by Corey Mead

Liquid trees? and Edgar doesn?t know
even a part of Anna

To rise and go to the field and cut off his head.

Like, the more they talk
never having
in fields this constant: nature is lost.
Edgar almost...the mind.

And, risen, never
returned to the barn.

(from the current issue)

Certainly, language takes precedence over narrative here! From the opening question, posed in media raes, to its fabulous (in two senses) ending, this little song is deliciously unfamiliar. As for the references, would that be Degas, Poe, another? Given the surreality, I lean toward Poe. But I appropriate the poem just fine, thank you, without the correct historical or literary allusion.

Here's an interesting literary review. I read a very well done review in it at lunch today, by Scott Hightower, of Richard Howard's new book of poems, Talking Cures. Well, it's actually a reverie of Hightower's relationship to Howard (he was a student at one time) and the poetic voice Howard represents. In fact, the poem quoted in the review comes from an older book!

He closes with a very reassuring observation:

"Our poets make our poetry . . . One by one the poets give voice to our realm, our humanity, and fill our slandscape with our collective exploration: the observing, generating self engaged in speaking ourselves through time. Talking cures."

I very much like this sense of history, the historical conversation or polylogue that poets and poetry represent for any society, nation, culture. Hightower's strikes me as the appropriately Romantic tone for our bloody new century: individual and inclusive (undeniably so), measured and ambitious.

Now, if he can only let himself release literature from its chains, as in:

" . . . Howard consistently delivers the proportion and perspective an educated reader can expect from 'literature.'"

No shame, I think, in using that word again, since all educated readers will agree that it means so much more (other?) than the white male canon from which all educated readers have been liberated.

It's clear now that I'm stuck on sex tonight. Was just thumbing through some previous blogs from Richard, back to the beginning of this web log, in March 2003. Found there Richard's idea that someone should record his poems, drafts and all, for all to see, on this thing called "Wiki." (He provides the link.) Now, there's an interesting idea--not only to unzip but to toy with it MTV style. Actually, I agree, it would be a beautiful thing to see a poem become.

Anyway, here's the sex part. I tried the link and was taken to this Wiki site (I am new to this stuff), where I clicked on "What's Wiki." And here is the definition I get:

"Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly."

What? Laugh at me if you will. But the underlying theme here is "Hey, it's easy as pie to use this thing!" Delivered in the most sexless techno-jargon I can imagine.

Struggling the past couple of weeks deciding whether to write in blog or in the more traditional journal, with pen and ink. I've kept a journal for almost twenty-five years. Now, with access to this blog, I feel some pull both ways . . . but what does that mean, both ways? Tonight, I want to think about the private journal.

Supposing one keeps a journal that nobody ever reads? This ought to make it, then, not so much a journal as a diary. Dear diary. The diary, as a cultural phenomenon, contains all sorts of pablum and splash: emotional outburst, self-pity, whining, narcissism, shallow self-analyses, shallow analyses of others, the day's weather. It's a record of the worst of one's character & discipline. A site of delerious masturbation!

Now suppose that you save everything you write, every spiral-bound, thin-ruled volume. This says maybe your work isn't so private after all. The voyeur, perhaps some niece or grand-nephew one day, or a graduate student in anthropology, is invited. When the mark is made, the word inscribed, the voyeur is sent his invitation. But not for tonight. Maybe when you are dead, maybe long dead. (But you toy lasciviously with the notion that you will one day be exposed!) There is so much of the posthumous about writing: the breath preserved.

Now, here's one immediate difference between the saved private journal and the blog: delay. Delay has its effects, structurally, upon thought. It makes sex furtive and delectable and unreal. (Something to note for later consideration: my response to the Web--emails, chat rooms, discussion groups, instant messaging, now blogging--even when I participate only as voyeur, is squeamishness.) If you write something about yourself in your private journal in, say 1987, that you return to read in 1999, who is that later person? The most intimate of voyeurs. Writing anything, there, knowing that one day "you" may return for a peek at your old self (two selves so very private that there are no mediating readers, no "public"), you are Narcissus.

But there is no knowing the later self until it returns, prodigally, to the site of the earlier self. And therein lies the beauty and the distaste of the self-written text. Barthes: "Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." Even one's own handwriting has changed over time, as often as one's one. (Has anyone ever studied this phenomenon among writers?)

So there you have it, the most private of texts, the personal journal never shared with anyone but one's potential self, in a way writes that self into existence. And one comes back to it as the Prodigal Son. How impossible this is with blogging!

I belong to a the St. Louis group of the Dead Runners Society. We're called the STiL Deads, as in St. Louis Dead Runners Society. Last night we had a running party where we all dressed festively and ran about five miles of local streets--quite the sight, with lights twinkling and such. We were probably as interesting to look at as the decorated houses, some of which were amazing. Today I went shopping for the last few presents remaining on my list and came home with one to go.

Damn! It occurs to me today that "Daddy" may be my dad and that I may be Sophocles. Still thinking.

I just finished a long, long week in New York City, working at my day job that of course respects no 9-5 boundaries. Then a long, long trip home to DC on the Acela train--quiet car. How eventful! The city is packed with holiday shoppers from around the world and, since my office is right in Times Square, I spend most of the week in the thick of humankind, a camera-snapping, oggling, gawking, pushing, shoving, shouldering, jostling press of people. I always find that this sort of experience does wonders for me rhythmically. It awakens me!

The weather has been electric the entire week: big snow over the weekend giving way to melting-point temperatures on M-T-W. The city, as always, is fully scaffolded, block upon block, and every scaffold traps a foot or more of snow that leaks upon us all--native, resident, visitor--as we pass underneath. A bit like being in an urban rainforest. Then on Thursday, rain. Lots of rain. Rain to take the crease out of your pants. Rain to pound old newspapers back into an oatmealy pulp, wash them down the sewer. Rain to pool two inches deep, three feet wide at every corner, exactly where the curb slopes to accept the handicapped (and the businesswoman with roller-bag in tow). There you find the blackest, vilest looking water in the world. And then Thursday evening, a friend sweeps through Manhattan: wind. That old animator. Big, gusty, strong and cold. All night outside my hotel room window it bangs a scaffold, thump thump thump. I like it. It keeps me company in that lonesome place. And this morning? Blue skies above New York. Wind had trucked the cold in from Canada. That feels good!

Today I led a business writing class for real estate consultants. We don't teach in the corporate world, we lead. It was fun spending the day talking with businesspeople about punctuation, style, audience, tone, purpose. They make eager and extremely interested classmates. The best part for me, though, must be the classroom itself: twenty-three floors up, wrapped in windows overlooking the Hudson River and the city--on this gloriously blue and bright day in the middle of December.

Penn Station a completely exotic zoo of travelers. A salesman here, an interior designer there. A retired couple dressed to the nines. A grungy, bearded, leather-faced guy in knit stocking cap looking like one of Bad Santa's elfs. A priest, a cop, a musician, an investment banker, a student. A man gnawing a giant pretzel. A woman snoring. Somebody reading a Michael Crighton novel. Somebody else reading The Wall Street Journal, already yesterday's news. Somebody staring at nothing, dog-tired and rumpled, wondering where the week went, maybe his youth too. Or maybe just thinking about home and a pot roast.

Home. The Acela to Washington. Two hours, forty-five minutes. And on the way I start work on a poem whose title will be "Bessings to Daddy from Sophocles." I like that because I never thought about Sophocles having a daddy, or about loving him. I can tell I'm going to like thinking about it.

That's what Yeats said in "The Circus of Animals" about being old. The line came to mind while reading a review of the most recent biography about Yeats: W.B. Yeats A Life, Volume 2: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939. I like Yeats even though I'm constantly struggling against the voice influence of his later poems. Against his images, too: "How can you tell the dancer from the dance?"

Many of Yeats later poems were paper poems about an eager mind trapped in a reluctant body. What does a poem about the same topic written for the white space of the screen look like? I don't think I've found it, yet. I think instead the dance we see on the screen is the same dance we see on paper. The same poem.

Ron Sillman writes this in Silliman's Blog:

One of the values of blogging for poets is that it can deepen the degree of critical thinking poets themselves do, more so I suspect than the scatter of listserv discussions. If there is a bias hidden in the blogging form, it's toward poets who think critically, but that by no means ensures that said poets will be post-avant, let alone any particular flavor thereof.

No telling what he means by "post-avant" but his point about using the blog to think critically points to why I'm working my way into blogging: I just want a way to push my thinking about reading, writing, and publishing poetry. It's easy to say writing assists thinking but it's hard to get into the habit of writing to think. A blog seems to be a technology that help us all get into the writing to think habit.

But where to start with "post avant." Almost sounds like savant.

Just had a problem with a poem I'd accepted for 2River. Last week the writer said sure, but I just got an email saying the poem had been submitted elsewhere several months ago and had just accepted the poem, too. The writer wanted me to say, sure, it's okay, I won't use it, forget what you said I could, it's okay to let the other place use it. That ticks me off. It's like someone accepting an invitation to a party but but then deciding not to go because a better party came along later. In any case, I chose not to decide. The writer expressed concern about wanting to grow as a poet. Said the more places published the better. Asked me to say, sure, it's okay. I told the writer to make the choice.

Richard--I keep getting this message when I post some writing:

"One or more errors occurred when sending update or TrackBack pings."

What does this mean?

Just finished re-reading The Iliad, Robert Fagles' translation, Bernard Knox' introduction. I first read it nearly thirty years ago, in a cold room in northeastern Indiana at Christmas break (I was a student at IU). That was E.V. Rieu's prose translation, which I still own in paperback (faded, brittle). At several places in the Fagles translation (which is verse), I stopped to compare texts with Rieu. I am often curious why translations don't vary more widely than they appear to, I mean, purely from the perspective of word choice. It's true, how many ways can one render "wine dark sea" into English, and why would you want to anyway? Still, launching into a line-by-line translation of twenty-four books averaging 700-800 lines each ought to offer the translator something more rewarding than a nuanced modernization of some previous rendering. Take Seamus Heaney's recent translation of Beowulf, which at certain crucial points translates a line or a phrase or a word in some subtly anti-English way, so that he identifies his own Irish history somewhat with the fate of Grendel. That seems to me worth the labor of translating a text that has been visited many times by one's predecessors! But I am sure I have not caught the nuances of change in voice and rhythm between a prose translation of The Iliad done two generations ago and one done post-Vietnam, post-fall-of-Iran, and read post-9/11.

I had not recalled how magnificently bloody is The Iliad, and blood is one thing Fagles seems to have concentrated on rendering in technicolor. Reading its carnage in end-stopped lines, "loving" detail and muscular images leaves me a little bit drained, say, the way I felt upon first seeing "The Wild Bunch" or "Scarface." It all happens in slow motion and I am not permitted to look away. It's a testament to the power of Homer's craft that a movie version would be nearly impossible to create, with any appropriate level of horror at least. (As a reference point, a cable channel a few years ago aired a filmed version of The Odyssey, starring Armand Asante. It was cartoonish. It sucked.) One needs the verbal image to register this much destruction upon individuals at war. Only the Normandy invasion scenes of "Saving Private Ryan" can approach what Fagles did in bringing carnage straight to the gut. I have experienced new dreams since finishing that poem!

I look forward to moving on to The Odyssey, another text I've not read in thirty years. Again, it was the Rieu translation then, and will be the Fagles translation soon.

This interesting article from the BBC about spam being put to literary use. Some spammers are trying to sneak their mail through filters by including text from out-of-copyright books. Some recipients of spam are snipping lines and subject headings for use in poems.

I let my mind wander into this territory every so often . . . as a poet and as an American, from what literary line am I descended? I have no doubt that the lineage can be traced to Europe, then Rome, then Greece. That is, I am a Westerner. The fact that I studied English and American lit in college and all thru grad & post grad ought to tell me that I am misinformed by the American view of the modernist movement, i.e., Pound, Eliot, and their board of erudite directors--everybody appearing in those standard university anthologies of the late sixties and all through the seventies.

Truth is more like this: my taste was poisoned by New Critics, particularly a couple of them at Indiana University, who taught me dissection, Blake style. The antidote was one Professor Richard Klawitter: long hair, smiling eyes, Oshkosh. He taught me to hear, hear the living thing. Then Aristotle taught me this: it's all just material (potential) shaped by the human self (to being) . . . and I am back where I started: the self influenced by whom, by what?

I dearly love the forms. That makes me a child of Emily Dickinson? Great slabs of talk-talk absolutely knock me out. And that makes me a Whitman baby. Neither, or at least, academically broad and therefore irrelevant. Here are, I think, some relatives, distant or close: Auden, Ashbery, Roethke, Williams, James Tate. All male, all white, most of 'em dead. Hmm. And that makes me a historical imperative.

So, if anyone's listening, whose child are u?