March 2004 Archives
I am reading A New Theory for American Poetry, by Angus Fletcher, the Renaissance scholar who has dedicated himself to a more universal inquiry than just the 1600s and 1700s. The book is about Whitman. And John Clare. And John Ashbery. It is founded upon environmentalism and poetics. Its chief idea is the "environment-poem." And what Fletcher means by "theory" in the title is precisely this--poetics and the environment that a poem makes and that makes a poem.
He writes a fascinating chapter on "The Whitman Phrase," claiming that it is modeled on the wave in its ceaselessly repetitive nature, its movement-without-destination. He writes equally engaging chapters titled "Clare's Horizon" and "Diurnal Knowledge." He makes a wonderful argument in a sub-section titled "Describing the Nondescript." The environment of which Fletcher writes, that is, is something much grander and far less purposeful or directed than the environments of modern-day "nature poets" or the Romanticism of two centuries ago. It is directing in the sense that environment has created the American poet (or political idea or science or economy); and Whitman was the first to recognize this.
It's sometimes a slog of too-academic discourse: "If then, among central attributes of the descriptive, there is a power to place inventories in motion (if only as the result of adding up a sequence of discoveries), the descriptive implies an ever receding horizon."
Still, the book is extremely well constructed for having been written out of a series of investigations, papers, and readings over a broad expanse of years in the late nineties. Not to mention prepared for via an earlier career in Renaissance literature! There is much to learn here about yourself as a poet and as an American.
End note: I recall a classmate in graduate school at Indiana University, in the middle seventies, attempting to write a term paper on the fugue quality of Whitman's style. (Fletcher makes numerous comparisons to music in the poetry of Whitman as well.) My classmate surely was sensing this wave association in the contrapuntal aspect of the fugue? Alas, he didn't take his argument beyond mere analogy (that is, into theory), and, as I remember it, our professor didn't buy the analogy.
The newest issue of 2River is out and I'm pleased with it. Richard Long is a busy man! One poem of note, "Heinz Rosenberg on the Platform," by Evelyn Posamentier, tells me that in the right hands, fine poems of the Holocaust can still be written and still have power. There is no better time than now to write them and read them.
I've just returned from a conference in San Antonio for writing teachers. The River Walk is a good tourist spot. Lots of places to eat. Fairly good Mexican food. Great margaritas at the Original Mexican Restuarant. The shrine of Texas independence, The Alamo, was a sad sight, however. Hotels engulf it, and the grounds were covered with garish tents for 1600 guests who were there to celebrate the movie release of The Alamo. I simply don't think there's much to bring a visitor back.
The conference also had it's ups and downs. I went to a couple of sessions where the presenters had been depending upon technology but for one reason or another there were technological breakdowns. Rather than falling back on Plan B they expected the audience to understand shit at times happens even with technology. Sure it does; that's why you have a Plan B. Another let down was that I arrived late for the Friday night poetry reading. I got there and the room was empty.
Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts?
Friday night I went to a special interest group meeting, Academic Blogging, where I met someone who actually knew of 2River. That was exciting.
What's going on in the poet's mind when he's daydreaming? I work for a living. I fly a lot. I go into the office and plug in my laptop and hook up to the network my employer provides and to the Internet. I make a few telephone calls. I look at my weekly calendar (handwritten, no Palm Pilots here!). I make a few calls, a few plans, a few decisions. I work my way down a list of things to do, either mentally or on paper, tallying the day, ticking off my chores. I pack up, ride the elevator to the garage or outside the building to a cab. I move on.
I wouldn't say I'm experiencing much, or even thinking, for that matter. I am fulfilling a routine, maybe. I am sleeping without dreaming.
Occasionally, I wake up and look around me. Today it happened on the Delta Shuttle, Washington to New York. It was full of people just like me. I willed myself to start dreaming, that is, taking in everything in my metallic environment I could take in, including images from my own depths. Headlines, overhead bins, headrests, heads . . . I wonder if other people do this? I wonder if I am ever the object of somebody else's day dream?
Soon enough, it started to come, that familiar flood of words and images and sensations that I need as a poet, that makes for the poet in me. I pull an orange (!) journal out of my briefcase, a retractable pencil, and start capturing bits and pieces . . .
"A binder clip was traveling to Poukeepsie."
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"The fresh things became stuck in committee."
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"The French action is precise and airless."
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"Everyone's bending over in his hair cream."
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"A blast of cold air will remake them."
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"Protesting, the models wear last year's fashions to bed."
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"Until such time as we have run out of until."
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"Another question you mean it like that."
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"I am sorry, sir, but you're flying the Delta Shuttle and your choice is cheese and crackers."
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"We have been vectored and no one even took a vote."
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"A basic slip of the lung was all."
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"Dog eared and stained and then landed safely."
My wife reminds me that I once had the capacity to sit around and do nothing for hours. She says this like a eulogy. She is only partly wrong. I used not to fear the consequences of it.
