wordstrumpet

Wednesday, October 6: New Writing Series, UC San Diego

2010-09-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

Notes on "Causal Mythology": Berkeley Poetry Conference, July 1965

2010-09-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

A page from my notes on Charles Olson's lecture, "Causal Mythology," at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in July '65. This isn't the legendary talk later in the week (although I have notes of a sort on that as well), but an earlier, more intimate moment in a classroom.

Eight lines down, the giddy, 17 year-old exclamation “GINSBERG JUST BORROWED 2 PIECES OF PAPER FROM HERE -->," with an arrow toward the spiral binding.

Understand that Ginsberg and Olson were people I had been reading before I arrived -- so to see them walk out of those pages was eye-popping.

The indented parts were my attempt to represent what Olson was writing on a blackboard or tablet at the front of the room (can't recall which).

More to come in some form later. . . .

Click to enlarge image

Thursday, September 30: Living Writers Reading Series, UC Santa Cruz

2010-09-13T04:49:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Harding Davis: Lost and Found in Family Pictures

2010-08-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

The picture on the right is Rebecca Harding Davis. Is the picture on the left the same woman?
(Click to enlarge image)

Recently the pictures above came to light in the collection of an older family member (who scanned them), and we're trying to identify the woman on the left.

We know that the picture on the right is American writer Rebecca Harding Davis (my great grandmother's sister) -- or certainly identified as such, since it appears on the covers of at least two books and elsewhere.

One friend says, "I do see a resemblance, a strong one, in the curls, shape of head, and the facial configuration right below the lower lip."

That would be my impression as well. What do you think, dear reader? Is there a science to this kind of informed guessing? Are there people who specialize in it?

If scholars have seen this picture before, I would be very interested to hear.

The originals are in Connecticut and I'll be there in late October (after my reading with Jerome Sala at the Poetry Project in New York on the 27th). I will of course be eager to examine them, looking for clues of any kind. There are, apparently, others of interest, including a group photo taken (according to writing on the back, or so I'm told) by L. Clarke Davis, Rebecca's husband.

But these, and some intriguing others, are unidentified. Lesson: label your pictures immediately (she said to herself).

One thing that's beyond eerie for me is the arresting resemblance between the well-known picture and my own mother. That could be Cynthia, as easily as Rebecca, looking out at us from some strange remove.

The Fudd-Lieberman Ticket: Elmer Meets Joe in a Paroxysm of Delight

2009-12-14T15:28:00.000-08:00

Self-love conquers all, even that wascally congwess and that unpwesent pwesident.

The Giant (from Kate Greenstreet)

2009-08-21T17:46:00.000-07:00

I was knocked out by this extraordinary little movie. It's a piece of one of the short films from the DVD that'll come with Kate Greenstreet's new book, The Last 4 Things, when it's published in September by Ahsahta Press.

If there's a better poetry clip anywhere, please send me a pointer. (Seriously. I'm interested in this stuff.)

But it seems to me we could all go to school on this one. Even more astonishing to the technically-challenged among us, she made it herself.

At the moment, I can't even remember how to blog.

I Am Not a Crook's Head

2009-07-20T03:34:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Daniel Bouchard: micro cartoon-clips of Tricky on the march!

The Poet, Burning His Own Work

2009-06-10T01:57:00.000-07:00

Carl Spitzweg, "The Poor Poet" (1839)

"The poet writes while huddling under his bedcovers and wearing a tattered coat and nightcap. The writer has been burning some of his own work - most likely volumes I and II since volumes III and IV remain in bundles on the floor. The fire in the room has obviously gone out since the poet rests his hat on the cold stovepipe and no live coals are visible in the stove. Indeed this cold stove is the darkest part of the picture and symbolizes the writer's sorry state of affairs."

Paavo Haavikko, "A Flower Song"

2008-10-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

Paavo Haavikko, 1966

A Flower Song

The fir-trees at play;
comes raining down
ceaselessly;
O you, the wood-cutter's
daughter,
steep as the mountains,
as gruff and as gorgeous,
listen,
if you never loved, if I
never loved (your
bitterest words
when we parted), O listen —
the cones, raining down upon you
abundantly, ceaselessly,
without mercy.

— tr. by Anselm Hollo

Paavo Haavikko (1931-2008)

2008-10-07T02:49:00.000-07:00

Life being short, poverty and wealth
are final verdicts, in that
poverty and life are of equal duration
and wealth and cold indifference
are perennial and hereditary, like diseases.

(from May, Eternal, 1988, tr. by Anselm Hollo)

And, briefly:
The old part (1754-1762) is known as
The Winter Palace.
Accordingly everything,
Floor, ceiling, walls
Is covered with these exalted beings:
Venus, Jupiter, many ladies
Of a full-bodied vintage.
You can still see how many a man
Lost head and hat
By the Berezhina River,
You can see that Borodino
Was a victory;

Of such
I'm talking, here,
Under the roof
Thatched by my hair.

(from The Winter Palace, 1959, tr. by Anselm Hollo)

Where Metaphor Comes From

2008-03-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

That place where you throw sand in the air and get to call it rain.

Hello, Blackheath NSW and Cleveland OH --

didn't mean to worry anybody. . .

Goodbye to All That

2008-01-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

Weldon Kees

Wonder whether I'm the only person whose first thought on being wheeled into an ambulance was "I have to stop blogging." My guess is no.

Anyway it may have been my second thought because, as you can imagine, things at this point were running together a bit. My first thought was maybe more like "This is incredibly weird."

But there I was with Joe, a sturdy, bear-like human being, and he was cheerfully slapping electrodes under my clothes and we were making a sort of psychedelic small talk.

In any case I'm okay — I just fainted for the first time in my life and had a small seizure (apparently fairly normal when the brain's deprived of oxygen) and scared my husband half to death.

This all happened in a restaurant and he had to shout "Help!" at a certain point and this is not something that Finns (a very reserved people) are wont to do, unless forced to the greatest extremity.

So the whole thing has taken a lot out of both of us and I just thought I'd keep you (faithful reader) in the loop.

Will I stop blogging? Probably not entirely, at least for now — but I do have to change the way I do it and the way I do a lot of other things, or these tangled ganglia are going to assassinate me.

So (speaking of tangled ganglia) here's one of the finest poems of the last century, for my money — one that, as usual, seems strangely apropos.

ROUND

"Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."
But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead,
A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."

Flaps like a worn-out blind. Cezanne
Would break out in the quiet streets of Aix
And shout, "Le monde, c'est terrible!" Royal
Cortissoz is dead. And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. The soil
In which the ferns are dying needs more Vigoro.
There is no twilight on the moon, no mist or rain,
No hail or snow, no life. Here in this house

Dried ferns keep falling to the floor, a mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Cezanne
Would break out in the quiet streets and scream. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly." And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead.
There is no twilight on the moon, no hail or snow.
One notes fresh desecration of the portico.
"Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House.

— Weldon Kees

Radical Stupidity

2008-01-22T03:26:00.000-08:00

The phrase "radical stupidity" popped into my head the other day and I'm not sure whether it appeared in order to describe this Ukrainian army recruiting video (which I had not yet seen) or as a promising name for a new school of poetry.

I prefer the latter but we can confidently build the church of radical stupidity upon this rock. Because the clip (which is apparently quite real) effortlessly attains sublime heights of cheesiness that Sacha Baron Cohen can only dream of.

No translation necessary (as you'll see) but here's somebody's stab at it:

girl 1: would u take us for a ride on your BMW?
BMW driver: even to the end of the world!
soldier: hey, i’d like to drown some vodka, girls!
girl 1: just a second!
girl 2: where do you live?
soldier: right here - daytime at work, and at night in the clubs!
girl 1: which work???
soldier: contract of course!
blonde girl: contract?? marriage contract or what?
girl 3: army contract, stupid!
BMW driver: hey, don’t you wanna ride in my car?
girls: forget it, take yourself for a ride!
narrator: it’s about time for new heroes! with contract based service in ukrainian armed forces!

Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Wittgenstein

2008-01-18T05:04:00.000-08:00

My copies of Court Green 5 arrived, featuring a Sylvia Plath Dossier. Just starting to read it but this jumped out at me, from Jason Schneiderman's five-part "Anachronistic Fair Use Self Portraits of 20th Century Sylvia Plath (with 'Daddy' Fixation)":

Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Wittgenstein

1. There is a Daddy
1.1. The Daddy is the case
1.2 The Daddy does not do
1.3 The Daddy does not do
1.4 The Daddy does not do anymore
1.5 The Daddy is like a shoe
2. There is a daughter
2.1 She lives in the shoe-like father
2.1.2 The daughter is foot like
2.2 The daughter is poor
2.3 The daughter is white
2.4 The daughter has foot-like lived in the father shoe-like for thirty years
2.5 She barely dares to breathe
2.6 She barely dares to achoo

The whole series is a lot of fun, especially (for my money) "Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as F.T. Marinetti" and "Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Tristan Tzara."

Reminds me that I left Longfellow and Wittgenstein hanging last year when things tightened up (not that Henry and Ludwig noticed). Intend to knit those loose ends back together in due time.

Also in the dossier and the rest of the issue, as edited by Lisa Fishman, Arielle Greenberg, Tony Trigilio, and David Trinidad:

Dossier: Sylvia Plath

Amy Gerstler • Amanda Auchter • Terrance Hayes • Anne Shaw • Jane Satterfield • Kristi Maxwell • Tim Dlugos • Jeanne Marie Beaumont • Baron Wormser • Ron Koertge • Judith Harris • Rachel Loden • Ivy Alvarez • Amy Newman • Rebecca Laroche • Sara Burge • Sarah Murphy • Amy Lemmon • Angela Veronica Wong • Susen James • Leanne Averbach • Kathleen Ossip • Patricia Spears Jones • Robyn Ewing • Peter Davis • Michael Broder • James Brock • Robert Siek • Jim Klein • Nicholas Grider • Meg Barboza • Jean Valentine • Maxine Scates • Diane di Prima • Muriel Rukeyser • Lee Ann Brown • Sylvia Plath • Laura Mullen • Wayne Koestenbaum • Jan Beatty • Jason Schneiderman • Debora Kuan • Mary Jo Bang • Susie Timmons • Jenny Mueller • Judith Kroll • Catherine Bowman • Lee Anne Sittler • Scott Keeney

Poems

Jan Beatty • Susan Briante • Sarah Blackman • Daniel Khalastchi • Noelle Kocot • Michael Montlack • Chip Livingston • Kristin Abraham • Kevin Carollo • Susan Cataldo • Chelsey Minnis • Ross Middleton • Brian Young • Daneen Wardrop • Margaret Brady • Ron Koertge • J. G. Brister • Neil de la Flor • Maureen Seaton • Amanda Nadelberg • Jeffrey Bahr • Karen Garthe • Mark Yakich • Jenny Mueller • Sharon Dolin • Dorine Preston • Kristi Maxwell • Zach Savich • Kathleen McGookey • Aaron Anstett • Jason Labbe • Grace Ocasio • Noah Eli Gordon • Joseph Campana • Julie Carr • Mary Ann Samyn • Jack Anderson • Jordan Davis • Denise Duhamel • Steven D. Schroeder • Kathleen Rooney • Brent Goodman • Nathan Hoks • Roberto Harrison • Suzanne Rhodenbaugh • Andrea Rexilius • Stephanie Strickland • Nancy Kuhl • Todd Fredson • John Azrak • Kerry James Evans • Sara Michas-Martin • Terita Heath-WIaz • Allison Campbell • Michelle Taransky • Anne Heide • Ron Drummond • Sarah Vap • Jason Schneiderman • Pat Nolan • Jim Klein • Emmy Hunter • Tom Christopher • Ian Harris • Adam Clay • William C. Olsen • Caroline Morrell • Chad Paries • Alice Notley

Ordering information here.

Nixon Vets the Candidates

2008-01-12T12:24:00.001-08:00

Dick thinks Susan could have been a little more tactful about his White House years in the comment box over the weekend. But he's grudgingly consented to give us the benefit of his counsel on some of his old enemies and new bêtes noire:

Romney:

Another rich boy who thinks he has it coming to him, like Kennedy. He'll probably fold, like his candy-ass father after he talked a big game.

Thompson:

Dumb as hell but friendly, as I said when he was my mole on the Watergate committee. Sam Dash ran rings around him, and he's even dimmer today.

Giuliani:

Used to think I saw a bit of myself in him in his better moments. But of course they're not like us. They smell different. Plus the bastard compared me to Bernie Kerik.

McCain:

Growing on me, especially after he appointed Fred Malek (who counted Jews for me in '71) as his national finance co-chair. Even calls Malek "an inspiring public servant who has served our nation well." Credit where credit is due.

Huckabee:

Best instincts of this bunch of clowns by far, even if he does look like Gomer Pyle. What's in the water in Dogpatch, Ark.?

Clinton:

Whatever it was, she didn't drink it. Now Bill loved the lucidity of my mind, like Gergen said: he got me.

But I always say that if the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent, it makes the husband look like a wimp. I mean Pat is spinning in her grave, for Christ's sake. And she never had to lock up the interns.

Obama:

We don't owe the blacks a damn thing. Especially one who thinks he's better than we are.

What's Segretti up to these days? We need someone working full-time on that middle name.

Gravel:

Did his best to screw us with the Pentagon Papers, back in the day. Now everybody laughs at him, which is perfect.

Edwards:

Elmer Gantry in a $5,000 suit. All that poor-mouthing about his father the millworker: what a load of crap. I know what it means to have nothing, but we're Republicans. We don't talk about it.

Kucinich:

Are you shitting me?

The guy I don't understand is the other Dick. Why isn't he fighting for it? Did he set his own office on fire?

I'm pinning my hopes on a brokered convention — which could happen if the voters never settle on any of these pygmies.

So if they deadlock in the Twin Cities, I'll be there before you can yell Milhous. I'm just saying.

A Poem for Primaries

2008-01-07T03:52:00.001-08:00

The above tricksy dicksiness, of course, from the great Pat Oliphant (born in Adelaide, Australia — who knew), a greeting card in my collection since MCMLXXXII. "Of tendentious or tangential topicality, tickling the turbid, turgid, turbulent twitwits of our tempestuous times," it says on the back.

My own recent disappearance owed as much to a medical mystery tour as to my mother's death, fresh as that peck of dirt may be. We were at a cardiologist's office at the height of the recent violent gale and it drove me back to Julius Caesar's tempests dropping fire, my first WS ever on the page and to passages like this:

Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man
Most like this dreadful night,
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars
As doth the lion in the Capitol,
A man no mightier than thyself or me
In personal action, yet prodigious grown
And fearful as these strange eruptions are.

And those eruptions and passages — given the just-concluded Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary tomorrow— put me in mind of my own WS (but this time Wallace Stevens) spoof, written right after the capture of Saddam Hussein:

MILHOUS AS KING OF THE GHOSTS

A cold cellar-hole at the end of the day,
When faithless pretenders cover the sun
And nothing is left but my candidacy—

There was dead Checkers with her list of slights,
Slow tongue, green bile, black list, white mind
And April, cruel as rumors of my demise.

To be, on the lawns, where no helicopter lands,
Without that preening statuette of dog,
That dog surrendered to the moon;

And to feel that the light is a Key Biscayne light
In which everything is lofted up to the elect
And no returns need be tallied;

Then there is no use in counting. It comes of itself;
All the blue votes turning a brilliant red,
Even in Chicago. The wind moves on the lawns

And moves in myself. The last Iowa sweetcorn
Is for me, the snows of New Hampshire drift up
Into an empire of self that knows no boundaries,

I become an empire that fills the oleaginous pipelines
Of the earth. The bitch is still yapping
By gravestone-light and I am whipped high, whipped

Up, sculpted higher and higher, cool as a sphinx—
I sit with my head like a Rushmore in space
And the scrofulous hound smelling blood on my wings.

From The Richard Nixon Snow Globe, Wild Honey Press

Is Christmas over? A good thing, perhaps, to judge from my sleepy progeny:

But they're still playing the holly-jolly muzak in the doctors' offices, for which (at the very least) someone should be ritually disemboweled.

Too many wake-up calls of late, as if we needed them, but I'll be here as time and vicissitudes permit, with love (real and true) and poesy for all.

The Moist Lotus Open Along Acheron

2007-12-19T05:03:00.001-08:00

photo by Timo Ketonen

A whelming if not overwhelming time. You'd think I would like a drug called Versed, but I didn't. When they pump you full of Versed and Fentanyl and then (later) tell you to go home and not make any major decisions, you have to wonder what they're imagining.

As somebody else must have said (please come forward mysterious personage), I'll cross that bridge when I jump off of it.

But things are fine: one is just rather tired of death and tubes and Versed. Flames shooting out the windows of the Old Executive Office Building, as though even the vice-president's walls were longing for release.

Goodbye, goodbye — no more water, the fire next time. Or Mayakovsky: "In the church of my heart the choir is on fire!"

Indeed. Only a couple of weeks ago the title of an Alan Williamson poem had sent me spinning into the dictionaries: I had heard of psychopomps before, but somehow I had never been besotted with them.

Now I was, since the OED said they were "conductor[s] of souls to the place of the dead. Also, the spiritual guide[s] of a (living) person's soul; a person who acts as a guide of the soul."

And there was this, too, in the OED, from a letter of Rupert Brooke: "I, Hermes-like, am coming to fetch you psychopompically to Hell." Even if "the handsomest young man in England" (as Yeats called him) has not been kissed by time, this is a missive I'd dearly love to finish.

Because wasn't this what I was trying to be for Richard Nixon: his Charon, so that he might see (in Sappho's words, tr. Mary Barnard) "the moist lotus open / along Acheron"?

Surely I could not be as cruel as she was:

Rich as you are

Death will finish
you: afterwards no
one will remember

or want you: you
had no share in
the Pierian roses

You will flitter
invisible among
the indistinct dead

in Hell's palace
darting fitfully

I should be more cheerful by New Year's! Bah humbug, fellow curmudgeons.

The Important Looking Men (with a Note from Mairéad Byrne)

2007-12-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

Late one October night I read all of Mairéad Byrne's Talk Poetry in one addictive sitting, greedily, as if it were a plate of hot onion and cauliflower pakoras, which it was.

I asked her to say a few words about her poem "The Important Looking Men," her crisp and spirited book or anything else that struck her fancy, and her comments follow the poem.

The Important Looking Men

The important looking men are not always the important looking men. Sometimes the important looking men are women. Sometimes the important looking men are the woman with the brown helmet of hair, head tilted attentively. Sometimes the important looking men are not the important looking men but visitors from out-of-town where they are not important either. The tortured artist is not always the tortured artist. The tortured artist is not always the guy in the thin cardigan smoking a cigarette outside the studio. That might be the electrician. The tortured artist is sometimes the small priest who stands in the corner of the salon balancing his cup of tea. Or the woman nobody sees. The lover is not always the lover. The lover can be a liar, refracting images of himself back into infinity. The lover might be this beagle, this couch, this slipper, this child who shouts out to me this morning late for school — tumbling from his father's car & again from the side-walk — Clio's Mom! Or this other child, this evening, alone, walking home, who tosses his glorious hello across Camp Street to land at my feet.

--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==

Mairéad Byrne writes:

This poem was originally called "Appearances." You can see that's what it's about. Usually, poems begin with titles for me; this one oscillated between two titles. Ultimately, "The Important Looking Men" was irresistible.

Flat statement is very much part of Talk Poetry, even flat contradictory statement, as this early poem on my blog indicates:

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

WRITING PRACTICE

I write every day.
But not really.
But really.
This is a new way of speaking.
Talk poetry.

Except for "the important looking men," who are generic, the images in the poem are all very specific for me. "The woman with the brown helmet of hair, head tilted attentively," or "solicitously," as it once was, is a colleague. "The tortured artist" is glimpsed on my way to work. The small priest is Gerard Manley Hopkins, isolated at a soirée hosted by John Butler Yeats, when William was about 17, the star of the show. I guess the woman nobody sees is Emily Dickinson, although she was seen by many she loved. And that's how the poem goes. I didn't always find love where I looked for it but it sprung up around me nonetheless. The child tumbling from his father's car is a boy I know. When I taught poetry in my daughter Clio's third grade class, the children wrote list poems beginning "I wish." He wrote "I wish Clio was my friend." He wrote more than any of the other children. He had a lot of heart and was not afraid to show it. His father was sick at the time I wrote the poem. He was a single parent, his three boys lived with him. He died this year. The second child who shouts out to me in the poem is also a boy. A valiant, friendly boy.

The public schools in Providence — and in all American cities probably — are very poor. It really grieves me. The children are made grey. But I have faith that they are untarnishable.

Speechless

2007-12-09T03:50:00.000-08:00

Woody Allen on the WGA strike, via the union web site.

Have been a bit speechless myself, for different reasons. It's amazing how sick you can get when you put your mind to it.

Actually overdosing on the vitamins and so on but would much rather be out on the picket line.

"What say you / soldiers of the lyre, we wait / for some o’clock and then stop / singing? Oh I would stop, oh yes / and let the feckless meadow fill / with xylophones and snow, the striped / tail of the muse slap in her burrow."

(from "Poetry and Sorrow in a 'Right-to-Sing' State")

Rose, Oh Pure Contradiction

2007-12-03T05:20:00.001-08:00

photo by Timo Ketonen

Season of faxed cremation papers, which one shouldn't read, one really shouldn't.

But here's arguably the best blurb ever:

Since Knox favors premise over conclusion, her poems simply speak — they do not explain. In this way they are not entirely unlike scripture. The part that is unlike scripture is the one that’s like “Wait, I was reading these poems and laughing but my hearing aid fell out and then my face just kind of blew off in a beautiful rainbow spray of bullshit-dissolving napalm.”

This from Sarah Manguso, writing about Jennifer L. Knox's Drunk by Noon. I'm looking forward to the book, and perhaps (with a virulent head cold) living up to its title.

But what else might one expect from someone capable of writing these lines, as Manguso did in her book Siste Viator (wait for the last rim shot):

My great-grandmother's lamp is mine now. It is made of rose quartz — that is, it is made of poetry.

More poetry: A coin you dropped when you took your pants off is still on the floor. Please come back and pick it up.

More: The scar on my hand I got cleaning the house for you has outlasted you. In this way you are indelible, but only as long as I have my hand.

The More Things Change Dept.

2007-11-28T05:03:00.001-08:00

"Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don’t have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content."

"The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts. It feels that if a thing is funny it can be presumed to be something less than great, because if it were truly great it would be wholly serious. Writers know this, and those who take their literary selves with great seriousness are at considerable pains never to associate their name with anything funny or flippant or nonsensical or 'light.' They suspect it would hurt their reputation, and they are right. Many a poet writing today signs his real name to his serious verse and a pseudonym to his comical verse, being unwilling to have the public discover him in any but a pensive and heavy moment. It is a wise precaution. (It is often a bad poet, too.)"

"I think the stature of humor must vary some with the times. The court fool in Shakespeare's day had no social standing and was no better than a lackey, but he did have some artistic standing and was listened to with considerable attention, there being a well-founded belief that he had the truth hidden somewhere about his person. Artistically he stood probably higher than the humorist of today, who has gained social position but not the ear of the mighty. (Think of the trouble the world would save itself if it would pay some attention to nonsense!) A narrative poet at court, singing of great deeds, enjoyed a higher standing than the fool and was allowed to wear fine clothes; yet I suspect that the ballad singer was more often than not a second-rate stooge, flattering his monarch lyrically, while the fool must often have been a first-rate character, giving his monarch good advice in bad puns."

All excerpts from "Some Remarks on Humor," adapted by E.B. White from his preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor, Coward-McCann, 1941.

But of a piece with pretty much everything the Humpolonians had to say in 2007, and most likely of a piece with the compleynts and sorrows of the fools of 1257 or 1384.

Susan Sontag, An Argument about Beauty

2007-11-26T03:19:00.000-08:00

(photo: Timo Ketonen)

Taken in the Finnish autumn afternoon, about a week ago.

Found Susan Sontag's At The Same Time: Essays And Speeches on the new book shelf at the local library and remembered what a tonic "Notes on Camp" had been for my teenaged soul.

I mean, a girl intellectual, and a particularly shameless, even arrogant one. Imagine. I'd been feeling like a freak, sinking down in my seat when the grade curve was outlined on the blackboard, trying to disappear.

Not that that feeling evaporated after reading "Notes" in the Westport, Connecticut, public library — far from it, I spent years and years thinking that it was somehow weird to want to be both Orpheus and Eurydice. Could one possibly be both singer and beloved?

These were serious questions decades ago, believe it or not, and perhaps they're still serious questions for girls now. It's certainly depressing getting random toy and tot catalogues in the mail: there's the pink, flouncy, gauzy section, and then there are army fatigues for four year-olds.

It's tempting to feel like Rip Van Winkle: did the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties even happen? It's 1957 and Eisenhower's on the golf course.

But Sontag (at least in that first blush) was one thrilling, transgressive blow against the idiocracy and I'm still grateful for it, and for her.

From my favorite piece in the new book:

When that notorious beauty-lover Oscar Wilde announced in The Decay of Lying, "Nobody of any real culture . . . ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned," sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up to date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

Concord in the Sixties

2007-11-19T02:06:00.000-08:00

The Wayside, Hawthorne's home 1852-1864

The 1860s, that is.

Since I'm in no condition to blog I thought I'd turn things over again to someone who shares my mitochondrial (a.k.a. matrilineal) DNA, my great-grandmother's sister Rebecca Harding Davis. My first excerpt from her memoir, Bits of Gossip, which Houghton Mifflin published in 1904 , is here. That chunk, which I called "A Walk with Nathaniel Hawthorne," is preceded by a bit of background which I won't repeat.

This shorter clip includes a hilarious dining moment-of-truth with Bronson Alcott, as seen in part through the eyes of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Also RHD's musings on the Concord circle as a whole — its moral and philosophical airs and impracticalities, especially as contrasted with the actual Civil War, which she had observed firsthand — and a first encounter with Alcott's daughter Louisa, later of course of Little Women fame.

Note: a "second girl" was "a household domestic in a subordinate position," according to The Rebecca Harding Davis Reader (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995).

I wish I could summon these memorable ghosts before you as I saw them then and afterward. To the eyes of an observer, belonging to the commonplace world, they did not appear precisely as they do in the portraits drawn of them for posterity by their companions, the other Areopagites, who walked and talked with them apart — always apart from humanity.

That was the first peculiarity which struck an outsider in Emerson, Hawthorne, and the other members of the "Atlantic" coterie; that while they thought they were guiding the real world, they stood quite outside of it, and never would see it as it was.

For instance, during the Civil War, they had much to say of it, and all used the same strained high note of exaltation. It was to them "only the shining track," as Lowell calls it, where

. . . "heroes mustered in a gleaming row,

Beautiful evermore, and with the rays

Of morn on their white shields of expectation."

These heroes were their bravest and their best, gone to die for the slave or for their country. They were "the army" to them.

I remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's father as he chanted paeans to the war, the "armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before."

We were in the little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr. Alcott stood in front of the fireplace, his long gray hair streaming over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with rotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing, sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.

I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.

Mr. Hawthorne at last gathered himself up lazily to his feet, and said quietly: "We cannot see that thing at so long a range. Let us go to dinner," and Mr. Alcott suddenly checked the droning flow of his prophecy and quickly led the way to the dining-room.

Early that morning when his lank, gray figure had first appeared at the gate, Mr. Hawthorne said: "Here comes the Sage of Concord. He is anxious to know what kind of human beings come up from the back hills in Virginia. Now I will tell you," his eyes gleaming with fun, "what he will talk to you about. Pears. Yes. You may begin at Plato or the day's news, and he will come around to pears. He is now convinced that a vegetable diet affects both the body and soul, and that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit. Wait. You'll hear presently."

When we went in to dinner, therefore, I was surprised to see the sage eat heartily of the fine sirloin of beef set before us. But with the dessert he began to advocate a vegetable diet and at last announced the spiritual influence of pears, to the great delight of his host, who laughed like a boy and was humored like one by the gentle old man.

Whether Alcott, Emerson, and their disciples discussed pears or the war, their views gave you the same sense of unreality, of having been taken, as Hawthorne said, at too long a range. You heard much sound philosophy and many sublime guesses at the eternal verities; in fact, never were the eternal verities so dissected and pawed over and turned inside out as they were about that time, in Boston, by Margaret Fuller and her successors. But the discussion left you with a vague, uneasy sense that something was lacking, some back-bone of fact. Their theories were like beautiful bubbles blown from a child's pipe, floating overhead, with queer reflections on them of sky and earth and human beings, all in a glow of fairy color and all a little distorted.

Mr. Alcott once showed me an arbor which he had built with great pains and skill for Mr. Emerson to "do his thinking in." It was made of unbarked saplings and boughs, a tiny round temple, two storied, with chambers in which were seats, a desk, etc., all very artistic and complete, except that he had forgotten to make any door. You could look at it and admire it, but nobody could go in or use it. It seemed to me a fitting symbol for this guild of prophets and their scheme of life.

Mr. Alcott at that time was their oracle, appointed and held in authority by Emerson alone. His faith in the old man was so sincere and simple that it was almost painful to see it.

He once told me, "I asked Alcott the other day what he would do when he came to the gate, and St. Peter demanded his ticket. 'What have you to show to justify your right to live?' I said. 'Where is your book, your picture? You have done nothing in the world.' 'No,' he said, 'but somewhere on a hill up there will be Plato and Paul and Socrates talking, and they will say: 'Send Alcott over here, we want him with us.'" "And," said Emerson, gravely shaking his head, "he was right! Alcott was right."

Mr. Alcott was a tall, awkward, kindly old man, absolutely ignorant of the world, but with an obstinate faith in himself which would have befitted a pagan god. Hearing that I was from Virginia, he told me that he owed his education wholly to Virginia planters. He had traveled in his youth as a peddler through the State, and finding how eager he was to learn they would keep him for days in their houses, turning him loose in their libraries.

His own library was full of folios of his manuscripts. He had covered miles of paper with his inspirations, but when I first knew him no publisher had ever put a line of them into print. His house was bleak and bitter cold with poverty, his wife had always worked hard to feed him and his children. In any other town he would have been more respected if he had tried to put his poor carpentering skill to use to support them. But the homelier virtues were not, apparently, in vogue in Concord.

During my first visit to Boston in 1862, I saw at an evening reception a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her. Presently she came up to me.

"These people may say pleasant things to you," she said abruptly; "but not one of them would have gone to Concord and back to see you, as I did to-day. I went for this gown. It's the only decent one I have. I'm very poor;" and in the next breath she contrived to tell me that she had once taken a place as "second girl." "My name," she added, "is Louisa Alcott."

Now, although we had never met, Louisa Alcott had shown me great kindness in the winter just past, sacrificing a whole day to a tedious work which was to give me pleasure at a time when every hour counted largely to her in her desperate struggle to keep her family from want. The little act was so considerate and fine, that I am still grateful for it, now when I am an old woman, and Louisa Alcott has long been dead. It was as natural for her to do such things as for a pomegranate-tree to bear fruit.

Paul Robeson in Prague

2007-11-16T05:42:00.000-08:00

My brother just called me up and sang this song to me, which (given any expectation I ever had of him) was pretty extraordinary.

Our mother liked to sing it to us on Deakin Street in Berkeley, thousands of years ago, and she learned it from this guy.

On an Age-old Anvil Wince and Sing

2007-11-08T19:14:00.001-08:00

Cynthia Ulrich Edelson

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind. . . .

G.M. Hopkins of course. I seem for the nonce to be almost out of words.

Many thanks to all who sent notes, etheric or otherwise (Susan, Ange, Linh, sweet backchannelers and thought-streamers).

That sort of kindness gets recorded pretty deeply, at a time like this —

more soon, as things start to make sense.

If they ever entirely do again. . . .

Hiatus

2007-11-05T14:33:00.000-08:00

My mother fell this morning and then had a heart attack, so I'm going to have to put this blog on ice for a few days.

Be well, all of you.

See you later....

The Theory of Heartbreak

2007-11-02T06:51:00.001-07:00

If, as David Bromige says, poetry is the theory of heartbreak, when do we begin to theorize?

The person I'm thinking about has never had a problem with separations, barely glancing at his parents as they go out the door. But when he wakes up after a night away from them, a night (one can assume) full of dreams and confusions, surf's up in the feelings department.

This time, however, for the first time, he had a word to say, the germ of a theory about this unsatisfactory situation. He let my husband pick him up out of his crib but then (from this high perch) took a long, disappointed look at us and turned away. "Mama," he said, heartbrokenly, and let his body shake with sobs.

It started me musing. I came to poetry in my teens after losing both my parents, my father to divorce (when I was close to this guy's age) and then my mother to madness.

And poetry kept me alive. At ten, living for a year in Los Angeles, I'd decided I wanted to be a singer but that was actively opposed (while my mother was still relatively well). I wanted lessons but kept singing anyway, especially when everybody was out of the house. Still, as a dream, as a vocation, it seemed absurd and out of reach.

Poetry, though, when I stumbled on it, was just the solution. Who could take it away from me? One didn't need materials other than those one already had for school. It made no noise. It wasn't part of that feared and hated entity, show business (my father's first career path, before blacklist and economic reality set in). I could even take it along when, later that same year, my mother entered a mental institution and I was sent to live with a foster family.

I could be a poet and nobody would be the wiser. And so I was, really, for decades. Maybe that's why I've always remembered what John Logan said of Bill Knott's poems (on the cover of his Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans): that they "give asylum to the orphan in each of us." I'm sure that's also why I was so taken with the work of John Wieners, poet-waif of poet-waifs:

Rain today and rain in the self. Reign. Return
to the place of imprisonment. Reign of life, how many
years left to bury the old heart and give birth to the new?
Reign of years, with each day a marking place of what
happens in the universe, what comes into ken,
of the stars and their turning. What one does not know.
Will never know. The desire to pierce space and
be up on the moon. Doomed as fellow men to
walk this place with sweat on our forehead.
         That we are not given enough, must find
the means to fulfill our existence. That we are
given enough, too much as a distraction to pene-
trate the essential core of our being. And what is
that but a hollow place? No radiant outpouring
as stars of light. We have eaten away our basic
substance, fed it to the drugs, of days
when there was nothing to do. Too many on the calendar.
         And yet this is substance, this despair.
         To walk with it as a beloved companion, or
friend. See that as the broken leg we try to mend.
Cripples with no crutch, looking for the broken tree
to fashion into a stump.
         And yet this is not the true condition. There
are comedies and comedians. Flowers in blossom.
The same old dirge. Age-old. The curse of
"Adam" that each man is heir to, and equipped
for — interrupted by the doctor coming down the
hall — that each man is heir, and for which each
is equipped.

(from "A Series," Ace of Pentacles)

A Fresh Face, Somebody Who Understands

2007-10-31T07:27:00.001-07:00

Nixon and Rumsfeld, circa 1971

"Rumsfeld flees France fearing arrest," reads the story, still unconfirmed. "Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of 'ordering and authorizing' torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military’s detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest."

What we know for certain, according to the New York Times, is that "several human rights organizations based in the United States and Europe have filed a complaint in a Paris court accusing former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of responsibility for torture."

Monsieur le Procureur, begins the text of the document, after twenty-four pages summing up:

Il résulte des éléments ci-dessus et des documents annexés à la présente plainte que la responsabilité pénale personnelle de Monsieur DONALD RUMSFELD dans les faits de torture et de mauvais traitements, constitutifs également de crimes de guerre, est absolument indiscutable.

(It follows from the above elements and documents annexed to this complaint that the personal criminal responsibility of Mr. DONALD RUMSFELD in the facts of torture and ill-treatment, also constitute war crimes, absolutely indisputable.)

If this isn't exactly justice — at least not yet — it is still a physical relief to read.

And it reminded me of this 1971 conversation between Nixon and Rumsfeld: the then-president, in almost avuncular mentoring mode, and his shiny young underling looking for work commensurate with his talents:

PRESIDENT NIXON: I have an idea. I have an idea. There might be, even at this time-- you're not, you're not too sensitive about, I trust you're not about where you sit at the table. You really ought to be, you really ought to be in foreign affairs. I wish I had any position. The question ...(inaudible) assistant secretary or something like that. ...(inaudible) That's where the action is. That's where it is.

RUMSFELD: And five years from now, that would give me a--

PRESIDENT NIXON: Oh, enormous.

RUMSFELD: --a credential, a background in terms of running for the Senate in Illinois, or in terms of being involved in the world. It's just a much--it seemed to--it struck me that it may be something say, your ...(inaudible) at this point.

PRESIDENT NIXON: Well, let's look at the transcript.

RUMSFELD: Of course, those service secretaries are--

PRESIDENT NIXON: Well, they're just ...(inaudible). I like them all as individuals. But the poor guys, they do, they must do important things. ...(inaudible), if Henry weren't such a difficult person, god knows he needs somebody else ...(inaudible). He needs a fresh face, somebody that understands.

My Wicked Caddywumpus Ways

2007-10-29T09:31:00.001-07:00

Welcome to my world, this week anyway. This surely can't be a "good" picture, technically speaking, though my half-mad subject makes me want to figure out how to take one. But I'm happy in any case with its small capture of wild unraveling frenzy.

The personage involved is (seemingly overnight) exploding with language — cracker, money, airplane, baby — it's intoxicating to listen while it all suddenly manifests in this realm.

Grateful to find Nada Gordon's anti-rules of poetry blogging, each of which I have been breaking (and will no doubt continue to break) constantly. Still, they're liberating.

I keep thinking that these posts ought to be notes on something (rather than attempting to be something) or like Wile E. Coyote I am going to end up one day dangling in mid-air.

Followed by a very uncartoonish fall from grace. Till then I will continue in my merry (or should it be my wicked or at least my daffy) caddywumpus way.

This morning that means splurging on cups of green Lung Ching Dragon Well tea and thinking about a blurb for somebody. Reading Marianne Moore's dust jacket copy, which Wayne Koestenbaum recommends here as "fanatical exercise[s] of a personality sculpted in the privacy of the bedroom/atelier." That sounds about right.

Noticing a word strewn through them, over and over, and not of course accidentally: verity. Verity! So quaint.

A foot-wrong that would be expunged from any self-respecting bit of puffery today.

A Page from the Dangerfield Playbook

2007-10-26T05:04:00.000-07:00

This makes perfect sense. The strumpet proposes a new model for literary prizes and Stephen Colbert immediately takes advantage of it. Evidence: his book I Am America (And So Can You!) has just taken the first coveted Stephen T. Colbert Award for Literary Excellence. Somebody's slapped a silver seal announcing this honor right on the book jacket, so it looks like the Newbery Medal or something:

I wouldn't want to claim that Colbert reads this blog, although that would have an air of truthiness. But what is clear is that ideas of this order cannot be contained in the poetic blogosphere and so loft like pixie dust over circus tents and television studios alike, finally taking purchase in the brains of well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiots* like Colbert.

What's even lovelier is that apparently the book contains a raft of silver stickers like the one on the cover, so that each of us may win the Colbert Award in turn.

Who said prizes are for children? Stickers may be for children but surely these beauties should be kept out of their hands at least till they are older and have developed the requisite level of narcissism.

When we launched the conversation that became The Dangerfield Conundrum: A Roundtable on Humor and Poetry on the same day as The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, it seemed like a happy oddity — but obviously it was a signal that larger forces were at work, and only poets who are content with their station can afford to ignore them.

* Colbert's own description of his character.

Poetry, Grimness, and Gallows Humor

2007-10-23T11:28:00.001-07:00

Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko, whose posts are such an impertinent pleasure over at Harriet, gets off a good volley against grimness in the comment box this morning, and I don't want it to go unnoticed. "Is black humor the only serious humor, then?... 'Dahn the Plug'ole' makes me want to cry, not laugh. Which is fine, but frankly I'm tired of the sense I get from some in the avant-garde that negativity is the ultimate value. Nietzsche's Silenus, who stops laughing long enough to advise one that it would have been better never to have been born, might be its mascot."

I understand her weariness with gallows humor, although I don't always share it when the hangman (or is it the hanging man or woman) leaves us with uncertainties about the larger order that set the death-platform stubbornly in place. Here's a poem that accomplishes that feat of gallows legerdemain (apologies for wrapped lines, which defeat me in html with all the different browsers and text sizes out there):

War Has Been Given a Bad Name

I am told that the best people have begun saying
How, from a moral point of view, the Second World War
Fell below the standard of the First. The Wehrmacht
Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected
The extermination of certain peoples. The Ruhr industrialists
Are said to regret the bloody manhunts
Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers. The intellectuals
So I heard, condemn industry's demand for slave workers
Likewise their unfair treatment. Even the bishops
Dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short the feeling
Prevails in every quarter that the Nazis did the Fatherland
A lamentably bad turn, and that war
While in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the
Unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman
Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been
Discredited for some time to come.

— Bertolt Brecht (tr. John Willett)

Ben Lerner’s “Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan,” from his 2006 book Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon), immediately comes to mind as well as a poem bracing (not enervating) in its darkness. Here’s a brief excerpt:

I am wearing a Mikhail Gorbachev Halloween mask.
Blood is a vegetable when it forms part of a school lunch.
Tell the boys to go out there and win one for me.
The former president entered my room at night.
We celebrated by breaking off pieces of the wall.
I want the tone to have a very broad surface in relation to its depth.
I want a gun for protection.
I want the form to enact the numbing it describes.
I would shoot myself only in self-defense.

Like Ange I do sometimes find it hard going when a poetic performance seems to teeter on the edge of nihilism, when the poet speaks from a seemingly airless cultural room in which the objects of his or her loathing loom triumphant, with no possibility of resistance in sight. This is clearly not the case with books of incendiary satire like K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation and Drew Gardner’s Petroleum Hat, but (in less skilled hands) it does seem a particular challenge for a poetry collaged from found materials chosen for their ridiculousness or even for their ignorance and bigotry, in which the poet’s own stance must emerge solely from what he or she selects.

I’d be very interested in hearing more from Ange or others about dark-humored books or oeuvres that seem rooted in unreconstructed hopelessness, or tack against it. I’m sure Ange would not include excitable boys and girls Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, Kenward Elmslie, Maxine Chernoff, and Kenneth Koch among the grimly hilarious, for instance, but who else might we put forward among our contemporaries or recent contemporaries?

Who, in other words, is writing funny poems that set nihilism on its ear? And where do we run into a thick, unmoving, windless sea of despair, that Nietzschean Silenus wanting to sleep and never wake again?

Adventures in Heresiology

2007-10-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

Priests and Levites shewing the sentence of judgment

Stan Apps makes some provocative (if in my view somewhat puritanical) observations on "Rear-Gardism and Aesthetic Norms" here. Why such earnestness and territoriality in someone who displays a puckish and transgressive sense of humor in his art?

Apps says he wants to "imitate science, in its fantastical escape from prior knowns." But science is a process of gradual corrective action, based on testability and the constant revision of theories.

He thinks that the relationship between Newtonian mechanics and quantum physics is one of supersession. But actually Newtonian (a.k.a. classical) mechanics hasn't been superseded. It's used all the time to predict the motion of spacecraft, comets, planets etc.

And Einstein's corrections to the system are so small that they make no difference in calculating mundane things like the orbits of satellites.

Quantum physics is a "new" theory but the mathematics behind it was spawned by classical mechanics, and that mathematics is in constant use.

So no fantastical escape from prior knowns is possible in science or in art, and attempts to parachute out are less fantastical, in their impulses, than they are hygienic.

Here we go again (as I began to say here): solemnly patrolling the perimeter of the avant-garde, casting out the heretics, keeping the pure of heart within the fold.

Perhaps it's my origins in the order of the red diaper, but I am ever so tired of claims that in their humorlessness remind me less of art, or science, than religion.

Academy of Fine Arts

2007-10-19T01:14:00.001-07:00

Jonathan Hill, an illustrator/cartoonist living in Portland, Oregon, has made a cartoon out of one of my favorite poems from Linh Dinh's oeuvre, "Academy of Fine Arts," and somehow he's actually made it funnier.

Is it the last (and first) panel with the empty word-balloon that adds a sort of delicious extra beat to the poem? I don't know, but that pause at the end just kills me.

What would Wittgenstein think? It's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" all over again.

Thanks to Jonathan (whose website is here) and to Linh for giving me permission to run the comic.

Click on it to make the image larger and much more readable.

Poem in Spanish (with a Note from Paul Hoover)

2007-10-17T04:45:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I fell hard — first for a single poem called "Poem in Spanish," by Paul Hoover, and then for the collection it names.

I wanted to know how Hoover came to write this book, which I envied for the extravagance of its gestures and its deft feints and parries with the post-avant rules.

So I asked him to say a little something about it here. His comments follow the poem:

Poem in Spanish

I have two coffins but only one wife,
who loves me like a neighbor.
I have one wing and a long flight scheduled.

I have two sons and the time of day,
its late hour dark in a brilliant landscape.

I have a small religion based on silence
and a furious heart beating. I have a map
of the region where the kiss is deepest,
a duplex cathedral for my hells and heavens,
and one oily feather. No matter how I settle,
the world keeps moving at its famous pace.

I have two minds and an eye for seeing
the world's singular problems as my self-portrait.
I have fuzzy lightning and a pair of old glasses.

I have two radios but only one message,
subtle in transmission, arriving like wine.
I have yo tengo and two tambiens.
The world between them creaks
like distance and difference.

I have two fires and a very sleepy fireman,
immortal longings and one life only,
unliving and undying.

--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==

Paul Hoover writes:

The poems "Poem in Spanish" and "Corazon" were the last two poems in Winter (Mirror), published by Flood Editions in 2002. I wrote the rest of the sequence in 2003, while going through an excrucriating separation from the Chicago college where I'd taught for 28 years. I had always loved Latin American poetry for its warmth, daring, and sense of humor. The project developed out of this attraction. Why not be Latin American for a few poems? After a while, I realized that I could express certain things through the mask of style that my writing could not directly address: the death of parents, feelings of love, and so on. In discussing Poems in Spanish this summer at a literary conference in Rosario, Argentina, I stated that, as postmodern artifice, the concept of writing in Spanish gave me "permission" to speak forthrightly. As soon as the session ended, Hector Berenguer, the conference organizer, leaped to the stage to ask, "Why do you need permission?" He had invited me to the conference because of the directness and openness of the poems, not for the charm of their postmodern artifice. At the same time, Marjorie Perloff sent an email stating that the sequence is a "breakthrough" work. To some degree, apparently, the poems are like tea leaves; you can see in them whatever you desire to see. But I suspect a stronger force is present. The poems stand on essential ground and address essential matters. When I read them in Argentina, as well as at Omnidawn book events, I could literally hear the attention in the room. I could also feel attention in myself as a speaker. There was no doubt in me or in the audience about what the poem was after; even the poem knew.

We live at a time of crisis in expression, when subjectivity is broadly challenged, constructivism is increasingly triumphant, and the concept of unity of being is considered laughable. Our postmodern psychology is more or less: no artifice, no authenticity. The word "imagination" is no longer used. Poems are "constructed" rather than divined. By this standard, my poems break all the rules established against Romanticism, except for one thing — they appear to have been written in another voice than my own. This minor irony sets the work gently back into the postmodern camp. The reader is allowed to think: "Oh, they're constructed, after all, and stand at a safe distance from sincerity. What a relief!"

M. A. Numminen Sings Wittgenstein

2007-10-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

Specifically, sings the seventh and last proposition of the Tractatus:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent").

A must-see, if you're as goofy as we are.

All others warned.

The Longfellow of Philosophy (Part Two)

2007-10-12T08:16:00.001-07:00

Wittgenstein with Georg Henrik von Wright

To pick up where I had to leave off on Wednesday —

It seems that Kreisel was on to something in his anecdote about Wittgenstein’s legacy-anxieties, especially whether his fate might resemble Longfellow’s.

When recounting a story from Kreisel it is perhaps always best to have a second source. He loved the cultivation of scandal, and no one is quite sure whether he (for instance) actually spent the night with Brigitte Bardot, as alleged. The fact that it seems entirely plausible, however, is a testament to his wide circle of glamorous friends and acquaintances.

Since I first heard Kreisel’s recollections years ago, I’ve been wishing there were more meat on those bones. In that pursuit, back in the nineties, I asked my husband Jussi to speak to his father, the Finnish philosopher and logician Oiva Ketonen, to see whether he or his close associate, Georg Henrik von Wright (co-executor of Wittgenstein’s literary estate), had any memories that could either confirm or cast doubt on what Kreisel had to say.

Von Wright (the “Wright” pronounced as in Richter scale) had succeeded Wittgenstein at Cambridge and often housed and cared for him during the waning days. My father-in-law (now deceased, like von Wright), spent some time in the von Wright home during this period.

Alas, neither of them could confirm the story, von Wright flatly telling Ketonen that it wasn’t true.

As it turns out, however, he was quite wrong, at least according to Wittgenstein’s close friend, British philosopher Elizabeth (G. E. M.) Anscombe, co-administrator with von Wright and Rush Rhees of Wittgenstein’s literary estate.

In her essay “On the Form of Wittgenstein's Writing,” she writes:

Wittgenstein once said to me in the course of a conversation that he had asked himself the question whether he was a second-rate artist. He added by way of illustration that Longfellow’s discovery of the Hiawatha metre must have seemed a great thing to him; and he said, or implied, that under the influence of such an impression it would have been difficult or impossible for Longfellow to perceive — what we could easily see — that he was a second-rate artist.

Anscombe’s brief anecdote, when combined with Kreisel’s, seems enough to confirm Wittgenstein’s anxieties. She goes on to say that “what corresponded to the Hiawatha metre [in Wittgenstein’s writing] was the use of separate ‘Bemerkungen.’ A Bemerkung might be a single short sentence, or it might be over a page long....”

These separate Bemerkungen are of course Wittgenstein’s famous “remarks.”

Elizabeth Anscombe

It’s fascinating — and poignant — to think of Wittgenstein torturing himself with the notion that his style, so beloved by the poets and critics of our era, might have blinded him to (what he imagined might be) his irrelevance.

But it also makes one wonder, somewhat tantalizingly: which stylistic tics (or other self-important bits of business) might be blinding poets to their irrelevance or just-plain awfulness today? And which of their contemporaries — poets, editors, critics — might be embracing them for exactly that shtick, and those gimmicks?

It’s enough to give a poet pause. The sort of pause Wittgenstein seems to have taken when he says, in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations:

I make [my remarks] public with doubtful feelings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another — but of course it is not likely.
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.
I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.
Cambridge,
January 1945.

Von Wright, in his “Biographical Sketch” of Wittgenstein, writes that “His life was a constant journey, and doubt was the moving force within him. He seldom looked back on his earlier positions, and when he did so it was usually to repudiate them.”

Such mutability (and I do think it is an ability rather than a form of intellectual weakness) should perhaps be considered in light of the puzzling fact that Wittgenstein selected a quote from Longfellow, his “second-rate artist,” as a possible motto for the Philosophical Investigations.

Marjorie Perloff, in her essay “But isn’t the same at least the same?”: Translatability in Wittgenstein, Duchamp, and Jacques Roubaud,” writes of “the almost comic vehemence of [his] extreme aesthetic judgments,” especially ironic in someone whose “impatience with aesthetic theory is legendary.”

She explains this as an expression of “le côté Viennoise of Wittgenstein — the social code of his time whereby those who are gebildet (cultured, well educated) took it to be incumbent upon them to pronounce on the given art work or performance or concert,” and goes on to expand enormously on our understanding of his proposition (collected in Culture and Value) that “One ought really to do philosophy only as a form of poetry.”

What Anscombe's memories make clear, I think, is that Wittgenstein did think of himself as an artist, as much as a philosopher, and found the model of an artist’s life peculiarly useful in thinking (or worrying) about his legacy.

More on this, I hope, sometime next week — Wittgenstein actually slightly misquotes Longfellow in his proposed motto for the Philosophical Investigations, and the stanza in question turns out to have hilarious echoes in the poetry of today.

The Longfellow of Philosophy

2007-10-10T03:51:00.001-07:00

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I’ve been dipping into what must be one of the loopiest and most sensational festschrifts ever set to paper, Kreiseliana: about and around Georg Kreisel, edited by Piergiorgio Odifreddi (A.K. Peters, 1996), concerning the ferociously brilliant and witty mathematical logician who was one of Wittgenstein’s favorite students and whom Wittgenstein called the most able philosopher he had ever met who was also a mathematician.

Among other things of interest (at least to people who knew him or knew his penchant for infamy) the book contains the extraordinary and strangely affecting reminiscences of mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, who left her husband, the renowned physicist and writer, Freeman Dyson, for Kreisel. Following those are Freeman Dyson’s own brief and somewhat sniffy comments, including the observation that he “never felt [himself] to be in competition with [Kreisel].”

Kreisel was also the likely model for the wicked Julius King in Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat (although she denied it in a way that seems rather to confirm it) and, according to Iris Murdoch: A Life by Peter J. Conradi, “one model for Marcus Vallar in [Murdoch’s] The Message to the Planet, who is brilliant and solitary to the point of near-autism, and given to bouts of random cruelty that devastate its victims.” (She also dedicated An Accidental Man to him.)

More on the looking-glass world of Kreiseliana later, perhaps, but the book reminded me of a story recounted by my husband, Jussi Ketonen, who knew Kreisel when they were colleagues at Stanford. Kreisel had a habit of inviting Jussi over to his then-home on Forest Avenue in Palo Alto for conversations which Jussi describes as among the funniest and most intellectually arresting of his life.

In one of these conversations, Kreisel described Wittgenstein as worrying, in the years before his death, that he would be remembered as “the Longfellow of philosophy.”

For obvious reasons, this amused and intrigued me, and I’ve always wondered whether there were mentions of Wittgenstein’s Longfellow-anxieties elsewhere. I’d never been able to find one until a couple of weeks ago — although I’m certainly not a Wittgenstein scholar, and would be very happy to be enlightened by such.

When time permits, probably by Friday, I’ll pass on my small discovery.

The Hat Makes the Man

2007-10-08T07:19:00.001-07:00

Max Ernst, The Hat Makes the Man (1920)

"Given a choice / Between the good / And the beautiful, / Please don't give me that choice" (Gary Lenhart)

Much that looks delectable in The Hat 7: Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Robyn Art, John Beer, Aaron Belz, Joseph P. Bienvenu, Jack Boettcher, Anne Boyer, Adam Clay, Bruce Covey, Crystal Curry, Alison Stine Davis, Orman Day, Christopher DeWeese, Mary Donnelly, Andrew Epstein, S. Jason Fraley, Jane Gregory, Jenny Gropp, Jeffrey Harrison, Lois Marie Harrod, Anthony Hawley, Anne Heide, Dale Herd, Claire Hero, Elizabeth Hughey, D.J. Huppatz, Vincent Katz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jason Koo, Jacqueline Kolosov, Jason Labbe, Erik La Prade, Josh Lefkowitz, Gary Lenhart, Reb Livingston, Rachel Loden, Jonathan Mayhew, Richard Meier, Catherine Meng, Andrew Mister, Michael Morse, Gina Myers, Cynthia Nelson, Charles North, Kathleen Ossip, Jean-Paul Pecqueur, Frederick Pollack, Michael Robins, Ken Rumble, Zachary Schomburg, Peter Jay Shippy, Gary Sullivan, Maureen Thorson, Jen Tynes, Chris Vitiello, G.C. Waldrep, Della Watson, Dara Wier, Betsy Wheeler, Shelley Wong and John Yohe

In the Vale of Poem-Making

2007-10-01T16:55:00.001-07:00

photo by babblingdweeb

Really. Is there anything more poignant in a ridiculous sort of way than finding your own book in a used bookstore? Unless perhaps it is finding two of your books, two different books, in a used bookstore. Unless perhaps it is finding two of your books, two different books, in a used bookstore and not even in the main store -- no, they are in some sort of annex, an annex where you had gone to look at other people's poignant and unsorted books.

You had gone there to wonder whether you could love those books more than the people who had abandoned them without a second thought, but instead you were staring at your own tattered orphans.

Reader, this happened to the strumpet not ten days ago at Green Apple Books in San Francisco and as she is ever desirous of affording you an accurate representation of her humiliations in the vale of poem-making, she passes on her little tableau. Enjoy it in good health.

Well, not an accurate representation, no: for to give you an accurate representation of her humiliations would get her booted out of poesy in a great hurry, possibly in a coffin. But be assured that she will strive to tell you whatever she can. Until she can't anymore, that is, and then all bets are off.

And actually the day at Green Apple was far from lost because she found (crisp and thrilling, in the real store, not in the shabby but endearing annex) this shiny thing:

and brought it home, where somebody loves it, and it is a wonder-cabinet. Which of many wonders to show you?

To a Muse

Give me a first line, you who are far away.
The second line will almost write itself.
In times of pain, I open the dictionary.

Like a girl in the last row who will not say
The theoretical part of the dream was herself,
Give me a first lie, you who are far away.

A student laughs: I died once. Red is gray.
Cheat me like a quote, deceiving Elf.
In times of pain, I open the dictionary.

You who tried to carve this family in clay
Skeptical and frivolous as a filthy shelf
Give me another line, you who are far away.

It's a small freedom on a revisionary day
As a jay imitates the human on an elm --
In times of pain, I open the dictionary.

And in ordinary happiness, I open the dictionary.
The words remain, but the guards are gone for help.
Give me a last line, you who are far away.
In times of pain, I open the dictionary.

First Monday in October

2007-10-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

Steve Kroft's attempt to soften and recraft the image of Clarence Thomas on 60 Minutes yesterday left me both shaken and depressed. Shaken because Thomas is filled with unexamined fury and it clearly fuels what (in his case) passes for thinking. Depressed because he's only 58 and will likely be imposing his unconscious on us for decades and decades.

The 2006-2007 Supreme Court term was downright scary, with reaction (for the first time in my memory) entirely ruling the roost.

Not voting (so fashionable once again) is a luxury for people without uteruses.

'Guillaume Apollinaire is Dead'

2007-09-28T00:52:00.001-07:00

Jasper Johns, "Land's End" (1978)

As I mentioned in the comment box yesterday, there is a connection between Jasper Johns and The Sonnets, beyond the fact that Joe Brainard (in his cover for the first edition and in some of his early paintings and assemblages) "showed the influence of Jasper Johns," to quote from his bio at the website devoted to his work.

According to Roberta Bernstein, in Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan (Coffee House, 1991), "Near the upper left corner of 'Screen Piece 3,' Johns silkscreened the title page and adjoining blank page of a book of poems by Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets (1964) [in the Grove Press edition]. There are many aspects of The Sonnets which would have appealed to Johns at this time, but I think the most important was the way the poems were conceived as a series. They are all written in the sonnet form and certain lines reappear in different poems, sometimes fragmented or slightly altered. Two of the poems, 'Penn Station' and 'Sonnet XXI,' are made up of identical lines rearranged. Johns' Screen Pieces are likewise the same format, and contain motifs which are repeated in each version. Johns was reading The Sonnets in November 1967, when he was beginning work on his Screen Pieces, and I think these poems reaffirmed or possibly inspired the idea of a closely related series of paintings."

Here's that bit from the upper left corner of "Screen Piece 3" (I'm snipping it from a photo of the entire work by Eric Pollitzer, and then rotating it ninety degrees):

Bernstein goes on to talk about the pleasure Johns took in discovering the patterning of The Sonnets. He read her poems from the book and selected favorite lines, some of which she quotes as particularly relevant to his art (and some of which Berrigan borrowed, of course): "Everything turns into writing / I strain to gather my absurdities into a symbol"; "(to cleave to a cast-off emotion--Clarity! Clarity!)"; "I'll break / My staff bury it certain fathoms in the earth / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book."

She also mentions the wealth of personal and poetic references in The Sonnets and how Berrigan's allusions "to particular poets and poems, even through a name or title only, enabled Johns to bring personal associations and feelings into his own work indirectly through the intermediary of poetry."

Lovely affinities all. But since the initial charge of this blog was to throw light on lives both saved and ruined by poetry, one can't help noticing that these affinities pale a little (or are overshadowed by an element of sadness) when one remembers the economic circumstances in which Berrigan left his family and how they compare to the prices fetched by works like "Screen Print 3" today.

On November 2, 1994, under the headline "At the Auctions," the Washington Post reported the top five prices of recent days, including a work by Jasper Johns which they called "Screenpiece #3 (The Sonnets)."

Kvelled the Post, "One of the handful of works offered by publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse, this esoteric canvas is inspired by the New York poetry of Ted Berrigan."

Selling price? A cauterizingly ironic $662,500.

The Library of Missing Books

2007-09-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to pine away after a lost book? Apparently.

But it seems particularly ridiculous to carry a torch for a missing book if indeed one still owns it in three different editions. The level of absurdity reaches absolutely giddy heights if (as is the case) each of those editions is supposed to be improved, i.e. more complete than the last, and if all three are vastly more readable, as physical objects, than the lost original.

Because yes, I have the October 3, 2000 edition of The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, listed somewhat hilariously at amazon.com as "Penguin (Non-Classics)" (well okay, if you say so); I've long had the 1982 United Artists Books edition; and a few years ago, in a fit of grief, I bought the 1964 Grove Press edition from a guy in the Netherlands.

What I don't have anymore is the crudely mimeoed and stapled stack of pages published by "C" Press in 1964, in an edition of three or four hundred copies. Ron Padgett, who typed the stencils, says four hundred in an essay in Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, which Coffee House published in 1991; sellers of rare books seem to say three hundred, and they want considerably more than a thousand dollars for it.

I had it when we moved to Hawai`i in 1975, shipping all our worldly goods in a container that left from the Port of Oakland. I had it during the two years that my husband taught mathematics at UH Manoa. But somehow, in the chaos of moving back to California, it seems to have been misplaced. I say seems to have because to this day I am still thinking of places it might have been stashed by accident, and I'll probably always maintain the image of it turning up, as cheerfully shabby as ever, to assume its rightful place among its brethren.

It would have been easy for someone else to misplace it, and I did have friends helping in those last insane days, with a seven-year-old running around. It was about the size of the average glossy magazine and might have been shuffled in with a bunch of those and (this is difficult to think about) tossed into limbo. (The thought that it was recycled or that it's mouldering somewhere in a landfill fills me with despair and makes me want to wear a hair shirt and beat myself with birch branches, to atone for my carelessness.)

What seems completely wrong, in each of the other editions, is the cover. That's because the covers are wrong: they're not the thing you see above. As far as I'm aware, the original cover, by Joe Brainard, was nowhere on the web before today. I scanned a picture of it from Nice to See You, and have to say that it's a kind of tonic for what ails me to see it again, a thing in itself, and not closed up in the pages of a different book.

The other covers are definitely slicker, and some might say lovelier, but I will never be reconciled to them.

My sorrow isn't about the money, which I would have left on the table in any case unless I had a starving baby. No chance that thing would have walked out of here (with my consent) while I am still living, so it must be about something else. Is it possible to miss a book physically? Because that's what it's about: I want to touch it again. I want to feel its strange heft, turn its pages (carefully), note again the way the staples fail to really hold it together.

Perhaps you, too, have a book that got away? I'd like to imagine all those lost and cherished books in a secret library somewhere, our never-burned, secret Alexandria.

~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /~ . /

Going through the eye of the needle, alas, and no doubt it's going to happen more than once, although I hope to be here at least a few times a week.

So check in when you can and find us stuttering (or strumpeting) back to life....

Poetic License and the Powers That Be *

2007-09-21T07:35:00.000-07:00

Some interesting reactions to my last post on mailing lists and by the backchannel. The hip stance is revulsion, almost horror; this is not something we care about, not something we could possibly care about. And indeed as I said myself in the comment box, in the main "prizes don't matter a fig. Most times, they're not actually about literature."

What I was trying to do was to inject an element of playfulness and merriment into the general gloom, to suggest that (if these things occasionally rankle us, and they do seem to rankle even the hipnoscenti, for all their supposed aloofness) we're not entirely powerless to tweak those conditions, or even turn them slightly on their ear, if we take them into our own hands. What is always fascinating, and poignant, is to see how many people do think we're powerless as arbiters of taste, that there's no way to accumulate enough literary capital and credibility to make us anything but fodder for establishment guns.

Ron Silliman has written as well and as frankly as anyone about prizes over the years, remarking at one point that "It’s this need for external validation that strikes me as sad, finally, though I’m sure I crave it just as badly as the next human being, maybe more. What makes it sad is what it says about how our culture doesn’t let us value the act of writing itself, for its own sake, as its own reward."

And yet he often links contemptuously to notices of particularly idiotic prize selections (so they must eat away at him on some level), notes the better choices ("And when prizes do work: / More on the Pulitzer / for Ornette Coleman"), or says, on some sunny morning, "It strikes me as bizarre that John Ashbery, of all people, never has received a National Medal for the Arts."

Bizarre indeed: according to something called the Ashbery Resource Center ("project of the Flow Chart Foundation for Bard College"), Ashbery has won everything from the Discovery Prize in 1952 to the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Robert Frost Medal (both given by the Poetry Society of America) and on and on, not to mention fellowships from the Guggenheim, MacArthur, and Rockefeller foundations, to name a few.

Nor should we forget for a moment the much more culturally salient fact that he is now, as we all know, poet laureate of MTV.

Of course he deserves every bit of it plus the National Medal for the Arts to boot. Given all the fashionable loathing for awards, I do think it's interesting that nobody has ever suggested that (in order to remain intellectually respectable) he should have turned them all down.

Often (mis)quoted in these discussions is something Charles Ives is reputed to have said, that "Prizes are for children." I went looking for accounts of the Ives remark and found two good ones, the first marvelously romantic:

Equally significant was Lou Harrison's performance of the Third Symphony in 1947. It won Ives a Pulitzer Prize, forty years after the work had been composed. Ives was gratified; he disliked the hubbub, however, and remarked: "Prizes are for boys. I'm grown up." He had a point. The years that followed saw the recording of virtually all his important works, and Ives took his place in the textbooks as, all things considered, probably the most important American composer.

Europeans discovered him as well. When Arnold Schonberg died in 1951, his widow mailed Ives a sheet of paper that she had found. On it he had written:

There is a great Man living in this country—a composer.
He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn.
He responds to negligence by contempt.
He is not forced to accept praise or blame.
His name is Ives.

(Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization: Robert M. Crunden, University of Illinois Press, 1985)

But the second account, from Timothy A. Johnson's Baseball and the Music of Charles Ives: A Proving Ground (Scarecrow Press, 2004), may, in the end, be more telling:

1947 also was the year that Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for his Third Symphony. According to legendary accounts, Ives replied to the committee, "Prizes are for boys. I'm grown up." Moreover, he claimed that "prizes are the badges of mediocrity." But this public reaction perhaps has been overplayed. As Jan Swafford noted, "In private he hung the certificate proudly on the wall."

* Title cribbed from this.

The Dangerfield Prize

2007-09-19T04:01:00.000-07:00

I'm naming this post after something completely chimerical, as real at present as Nessiteras rhombopteryx (the Loch Ness monster) or other triumphs of cryptozoology. But the Dangerfield Prize, and prizes like it, may have more going for them than cryptids like Nessie.

Last month I mentioned the scholarship recently established for a student graduating from first Canadian poet laureate George Bowering's old high school in Oliver, British Columbia, who "must have a demonstrated interest in writing and be a bit of a pain in the ass."

This scholarship, as I said at the time, opens up all sorts of new imaginative vistas for awards. I'm forced to think about awards in the fall, when I have to decide whether to nominate ten people (plus any number of single works in journals or other small press publications) for the Pushcart Prize. If I decide to participate, as I've done since 2002, my ten nominees will get a letter from Pushcart asking them to send their own selection from their 2007 small press-published work for consideration for the next year's anthology. If I also nominate single pieces from magazines and anthologies, the editors of those publications will get slightly different (but similar) letters.

If any of my nominees actually wins, they'll become contributing editors as well and get to send in their own lists of nominations in future years.

So why do I have to think about whether to go through this drill? Why isn't it more fun? Because since I've been doing it, only one of my nominees has actually won a Pushcart. The sheer number of nominations pouring in to Pushcart's P.O. box in Wainscott, NY, is enormous and (do the math: each year's winners become nominators) growing like kudzu every year. So any individual nominee stands a vanishingly small chance of winning.

On top of this, there's more than a small aesthetic difference between my taste and that of the annually-chosen poetry editors. Bill Henderson, who founded Pushcart because of his own frustrations with the literary establishment, is, I suspect, a sterling guy who's pursued his mission with nothing short of heroism. Unfortunately, though, we don't happen to be on the same page (for the most part) about what constitutes an outstanding work of poetry in a given year.

That, I think, is to be expected: these are his awards, his bailiwick, and his taste (and that of his chosen editors) rules the day. But as a result I have to wonder: shall I really trouble, say, Rae Armantrout with another nomination, when she's never won? Why should she bother to go through the fairly onerous drill, only to lose yet again?

Even worse, if I do nominate her again, and she puts herself through those paces, doesn't she begin to associate me with the absurdity of it all? Have I really done her a good turn, or have I wasted her time? Questions like these have made me puzzle over my nominations year after year, never seriously considering some extremely worthy candidates because I know they stand zero chance, and apologizing in advance to those I do nominate for what may be a particularly thankless errand.

All this, plus the fact that there is almost universal frustration with awards of all kinds, has made me wonder: what's stopping any of us from taking a page from Bowering's book, or Henderson's, and launching our own awards?

After all, there is actually no prize with a Pushcart Prize, other than publication. The scholarship given in Bowering's name (though probably not endowed from his personal kitty, though I don't have the inside poop) is obviously something most of us can't dream of setting up. But even if the prize loot were extremely modest indeed, or nonexistent -- other than some sort of fuss made by announcement and (for example) publication of the winning work(s) somewhere -- wouldn't it, at the very least, make some deserving writer's day, and be an absolute hoot?

And, if the standards exercised were rigorous enough -- or witty and cryptozoologically wild enough -- couldn't it become more than that? Would it be ridiculous to hope that (in some small way) it could actually help to shape the aesthetic environment of the times?

That's why I'm musing on a still very-much-imaginary Dangerfield Prize, and why I hope others will indulge in similar musings of their own.

The Ministry of Silly Walks

2007-09-17T03:32:00.000-07:00

There was a fissure on the humor in poetry list between those of us who thought that the screws of comedy were equally well tightened on the scullery maid as on the queen and those who believed that insult humor was funnier when it redressed a power imbalance. My own views on this were happily complicated by the discussion, some of which is available here, and are certainly not set in stone or even in aspic.

Over the weekend we happened to tune into a 1986 interview with John Cleese (of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame) and some of his answers confused things further, so I scribbled down what he had to say to interviewer Melvyn Bragg and am reproducing it here:

Melvyn Bragg: Why do you think you're so drawn to authority figures? You seem very much at home playing people in authority.

Cleese: Firstly, because I could play them easily, you see. I'd had the training that the authority figures have. If you've been to Clifton and Cambridge it would be easy to become a barrister, you know, or a very upper echelon businessman or a conservative politician. It's very easy to do that.

So all I had to do was put a suit on. I had the right accent. I could play them. So that's one of the reasons.

Second thing is, I realized very early on that if somebody, a character that you're going to write, is going to do that [twitches convulsively] then it's funny if he's head of the Secret Service and not funny if he's a milkman.

So the more authority you give these characters, the more they have hanging on them, the more people's lives depend on how they're going to act, then the funnier it is when they do a bit of that [twitches spasmodically again].

Cleese was also interesting on the exercise of authority in the family and how it affects our ability (later on in life) to evaluate power in the larger world. Unfortunately he also seemed locked in to antiquated views about "mother domination," as though authority only came naturally to fathers, but some of what he had to say was so spot-on and so reminiscent of annoying people I've known that I thought I had to include it as well:

[When people see that] authority can be exercised intelligently they have a choice about what they're rebellious about. A lot of people who grow up in families where the father is absolutely awful -- and I could name some MPs on the left here [in Britain] -- have a feeling deep down that all authority is wrong all of the time. And they're the sort of compulsive rebels who have no choice about what they're going to complain about.

They'll just whinge about authority the whole time and if anybody says anything about anyone in authority they'll raise their eyes to heaven, knowing all authority is wrong. And I think I used to be in that camp.

It was also delightful to learn that that Cleese's father was born Reginald Cheese, his grandfather John Edwin Cheese, and that the name was only changed after the first world war. It's tempting to wonder whether some of the patented Cleese anger (so usefully deployed in comedy) springs from centuries of teasing, but that will have to remain one of life's unsolved mysteries.

Poetry, Heresy, and Delirium

2007-09-14T04:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I fell hard for a word.

I remember watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at a drive-in somewhere in Connecticut with Danny Boyarin, Michael Cohn, and Mary Harrison. But really I don't remember much about the movie. This was sometime in the mid-sixties and you know what they say about those memories: that if you have them, you weren't there. Actually all I'm sure of is that Danny (a Goddard student before Goddard had anything to do with writing programs) utterly charmed me with a madcap grace and a pixyish hilarity that fit the wild scrapes up on the screen, which we were mostly ignoring. It wasn't a romantic occasion, just a delirious one, and the next day I went back to high school and never saw Danny again.

So it was lovely to stumble across mention of him on the web in the last few years. Danny is now Daniel Boyarin, the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley. Some search or other led me here, quite by accident, to this bit of jacket copy for Professor Boyarin's book Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004):

There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border -- and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.

This was provocative in lots of ways, especially for someone with roots in both Christianity and Judaism, but what took me into immediate ecstasies was the notion of heresiology. This was a word I seem to have been searching for all my life, with obvious applications to the devotional Marxism that surrounded me as a child and to the life of poetry, as we live it now.

Surely all schools of poetry have their core beliefs and catechisms and by the same token, their heresies and heresiologists -- those who grimly patrol the borders of orthodox belief, shunning the sinners and keeping the faithful in line.

But who are the heresiologists of the post-avant? Anybody spring instantly to mind?

I happen to be particularly immune to all forms of heresiology because of my childhood immersion in cryptoreligious foolishness -- well-intentioned foolishness, but foolishness nonetheless.

What strikes me now is how a word can come along -- a single word -- and not only tickle the brain but make sudden sense of the nonsensical, as unexpected things fall into place.

So today I am a little drunk on this new elixir. Thanks, Danny.

Heresiology! The heart sings.

Another Kind of Heaven

2007-09-12T03:51:00.000-07:00

The peripatetic Jack Kimball is reviewing chapbooks this week, including Ange Mlinko's, and points out that they "look more important than ever as basic frames for a writer's work and process." Indeed. They're the secret history of this thing we do, eluding in their many fly-by-night forms all the bar codification of this sell-or-die culture. I revere them and count a number of them, like my copy of The Hotel Wentley Poems (which I've been carting around since the sixties) among the few possessions I'd seize if this place were on fire.

What I can't figure out is why they're not more celebrated, more treasured and more purchased by libraries, which one might assume would really get what these slim volumes represent. Some do, of course, and in my nomenclature "rare book room" sounds like another kind of heaven. (We'll overlook for now the fact that I don't have entrée to any of these lovely places, certainly not to the special collections or any other collections at Stanford, only two miles away, as WorldCat is fond of reminding me when I look up something I will likely never be able to see. When they call that little window at the front of the library "Privileges," they are not kidding.)

But let's look up some chapbooks at WorldCat and see how the libraries do. I wouldn't expect them to have Mlinko's Children's Museum yet, of course, but (just for example) how about her Immediate Orgy & Audit, which came out in 1996? Five libraries have it: Stanford, Utah State, SUNY Buffalo, New York Public Library and Brown (and you'll find some of those names coming up again and again in chapbook listings). Or let's try Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse (Effing Press, 2006). Not a single entry, astonishingly enough, and I tried calling it just Good Apocalypse as well. 153 libraries have my Hotel Imperium, a full-length book, but only six bought The Last Campaign, even though it was lavishly produced (with a silver-embossed jacket no less) by the very billable, brick-and-mortar Hudson Valley Writers' Center.

Why is this? Of course chapbooks (for the most part) don't have spines, so they're harder to display, and aren't in high demand in any case at Poughkeepsie Public. But why don't university libraries and larger city libraries aggressively buy them? I have no idea but it seems like an incredible impoverishment of the public (and the scholarly) sphere. Obviously there are things I don't understand, so if there are librarians reading this please straighten me out. In the meantime try entering a few of your favorite chaps at the WorldCat link above and you'll probably agree that the situation at least seems absurd, and perhaps a little bit shameful.

Ange Mlinko, The Children's Museum

2007-09-10T03:21:00.001-07:00

My scanner doesn't begin to do justice to this beauty, one of Ryan Murphy's "proudly haphazard" one-offs from Prefontaine Press. It arrived in all its hand-sewn glory in July just as we polished off the last of the collected Stevens, which seemed particularly fitting and particularly satisfying since both were so pleasurable to read (or reread) aloud.

Mlinko has described the Hartford pyrotechnician and voluptuary as "consistently wring[ing] the comic potential from mere syllables," with a humor that "comes right out of the click and crash of consonants and vowels, as if phonemes were feathers applied to a particularly ticklish part of the brain," and it would be hard to come up with a better description of her own protean, acrobatic project, recently seen to full advantage in her National Poetry Series-winning volume Starred Wire (Coffee House, 2005).

I've been reading film editor and soundscape designer Walter Murch's musings on how the blinking of our eyes punctuates consciousness and how those blinks resemble (and can be used to suggest) cuts in film, and have inevitably gone on to wonder exactly how we blink, cut, punctuate the thought-stream in poems. What better way to begin that study than to screen the first half of the title poem of this lovely small collection, and let Mlinko show us how it's done:

It's hard to know whether today or yesterday was the full moon;
excitement isn't rigorous. It's just river-silvering

blent with the odor of silt where the roofs spike
along a repurposed waterfront.

A beach ball floats above the pressurized stream;
it is disequilibrium that keeps it there. Soap's expressed

as blisters when even gravity works backwards
at the limit of the ball held upside down inside the loop.

Rewards in a game they play against themselves
-- "Fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air" --

the shade breaks up beneath the oaks
tithing their gifts against the curriculum

of an armed galaxy. It slides into focus for the instant
I'm brrr, blurred.

The Code of the Woosters

2007-09-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

I do some strange kinds of reading. Possibly there are other shower-readers in the world but if so, we have yet to be properly introduced. My m.o. is to print out an intriguing poem (or one I'm working on), tape it up on the tile and try to inhabit it as deeply as I can while (say) washing my hair. One of the poems in my new ms. was written by slapping pieces of the old English lament "Deor" on the wall and rewriting sections of it, one by one, until it seemed like something of my own.

This took a lot of showers, which meant a lot of reprintings and fine-tunings on the computer, and in the process it was impossible to know whether I'd end up with anything that held together at all. But I had no other writing time, for complicated reasons, and this kept the brain engaged and was a lot more compelling than a shower radio to boot.

In the last few years I've also been reading by listening, and not to books on tape. When an old injury flared up my husband took pity on me and started to read while I contorted myself into various shapes, on orders from a physical therapist. We stormed through all 864 pages of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit and can recommend them very highly to you. We read all of Eliot -- the poems that is -- all of Stevens, most of Whitman, although he alternately delighted and irritated us, till we finally moved on (it was the bardic airs and the occasional bombast). We read the Dhammapada (The Path of the Dharma) and Paavo Haavikko's Selected, in Anselm Hollo's wonderful translation.

Now, somewhat randomly, we're on to The Code of the Woosters. I'd never read Wodehouse before (although I've bought my husband shelves of it) and my helpless pleasure in this account of the adventures of people like Gussie Fink-Nottle, Pongo Twistleton and Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright (not to mention Bertie Wooster himself) seems sure to get me summarily ejected from the Order of the Red Diaper, except that all of them, other than their servants, are such perfect twits.

The writing, though, is superb -- crisp and bright and hilarious. I've gotten so besotted with the thing that I've taken to absconding with it between times, savoring especially Wodehouse's delicious portrayals of Sir Roderick Spode, the sinister "founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts," who is apparently based on Sir Oswald Mosley, the would-be British führer who married Diana Mitford, sister of Jessica and Nancy.

Alexander Cockburn, of all people, writes an intro to our edition, and makes some pretty extraordinary claims, ones I don't sneer at a bit after my brief immersion:

Wodehouse's status? It's been vouched for by every major English writer of the twentieth century with a spark of insight or talent. He stands as father of the style of Evelyn Waugh, too acute ever to get lost in the prejudices that marred the latter's delicacy of touch towards the end of his career. Wodehouse took a language forged out of second-rate fiction and narrative techniques from stage farce and created a world as timeless and as true as that of Homer or of Shakespeare. And despite his own self-deprecation, Wodehouse had his ambitions. Joy in the Morning, to be read immediately after The Code of the Woosters, deliberately invites comparison with Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Wodehouse popped in enough allusions and quotations to bend the reader toward such parallel. And he survives it. The Wooster-Jeeves cycle is the central achievement of English fiction in the twentieth century; an achievement impossible to imitate, because -- as E.M. Forster remarked of the poet Cavafy -- the cycle stands at a slight angle to the universe, unreachable by almost anything but laughter itself.

The Young and the Restless

2007-09-04T03:07:00.000-07:00

We just spent three days with someone who wants everything and knows nothing.

Of course he is not yet sixteen months old, but does this give him the right to be exactly like the rest of us?

He is obsessed with buttons, switches, knobs, handles, and all the myriad variations on this theme but suffers the constant indignity of being kneecap-high to those who are (quite unfairly) able to reach them. Thus his imperious demand to be carried about the house for hours on end, pointing at his intended targets and then knobulating (as my husband puts it) to his heart's content.

I have no idea what this means. My daughter (his mother) had zero interest in such fetish objects, preferring nipples and eyes -- sucking the one, looking into the other -- but various former boys of our acquaintance, including his father, are said to have shared the compulsion. I would like to hear about any girl babies who also share it but (rather frighteningly) am so far striking out on this score.

The first recognizable thing he ever said to anyone was "uh-oh," and it is now repeated often with a tone of genuine regret. This seems fitting if a bit darkly foreshadowing: apparently it's what scientists frequently remark in their labs, rather than the much-too-sunny "Eureka!"

On the road to the junior museum, hoping to give him a broader range of things to take apart and knobulate, one is treated to a steady line of patter from the backseat (where the carseat must be buckled), the tone changing second to second from one of happy sing-song to one of dismissive reproach, with a few little "uh-ohs" tossed in to punctuate the rest.

A Walk with Nathaniel Hawthorne

2007-08-30T03:11:00.000-07:00

I never met my great-grandmother’s sister, the American writer Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), who is remembered today (if at all) as the author of Life in the Iron Mills, a novella that first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, and as the mother of Richard Harding Davis, journalist and adventurer (listen for his name in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent).

But without her, I might not have had the audacity to think that I could write poetry without any sort of license, educational or otherwise.

In her afterword for the republication of Life in the Iron Mills in 1972, Tillie Olsen wrote that “Without precedent or predecessor, it recorded what no one else had recorded; alone in its epoch and for decades to come, saw the significance, the presage, in scorned or unseen native materials — and wrought them into art.

“Written in secret and in isolation by a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who lived far from literary circles of any kind, it won instant fame — to sleep in ever deepening neglect to our time.”

After the publication of the novella Davis wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne to express her delight in reencountering in his Twice-Told Tales several stories that had appeared, unsigned and probably without Hawthorne’s permission, in a collection from her childhood, stories she had “read over so often that [she] almost [knew] every line of them by heart.”

According to the account in her autobiography, Bits of Gossip (Houghton Mifflin, 1904), Hawthorne wrote back “that he was then at Washington, and was coming on to Harper’s Ferry, where John Brown had died,” and would then travel farther to see her in Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia).

“I wish he had come to the old town,” she writes. “It would have seemed a different place forever after to many people. But we were in the midst of the Civil War, and the western end of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was seized just then by the Confederates, and he turned back.”

A year later, according to scholar Janice Milner Lasseter, “She accepted an invitation offered by the Fields [James T. Fields was her editor at the Atlantic] and Hawthornes . . . On that trip she met her literary ancestor Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalist philosopher and educator Bronson Alcott, kindergarten founder Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, physician and writer Oliver Wendell Homes, as well as James T. and Annie Fields.”

This excerpt from Bits of Gossip, detailing her encounters with Hawthorne, is, I think, a special one:

It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great. I have found that most of these royalties seem to sink into ordinary citizens at close approach.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do. You are disappointed in every word and look from them. You expect to see the divine light shining through their talk to the office-boy or the train-man, and you never catch a glimmer of it; you are aggrieved because their coats and trousers have not something of the cut of kingly robes.

Hawthorne only, of them all, always stood aloof. Even in his own house he was like Banquo’s ghost among the thanes at the banquet.

There is an old Cornish legend that a certain tribe of mountain spirits were once destroyed by the trolls, all except one, who still wanders through the earth looking for his own people and never finding them. I never looked at Hawthorne without remembering the old story.

Personally he was a rather short, powerfully built man, gentle and low voiced, with a sly, elusive humor gleaming sometimes in his watchful gray eyes. The portrait with which we all are familiar — a curled barbershop head — gives no idea of the singular melancholy charm of his face. There was a mysterious power in it which I never have seen elsewhere in picture, statue, or human being.

Wayside, the home of the Hawthornes in Concord, was a comfortable little house on a shady, grassy road. To please his wife he had built an addition to it, a tower into which he could climb, locking out the world below, and underneath, a little parlor, in whose dainty new furnishings Mrs. Hawthorne took a womanish delight. Yet, somehow, gay Brussels rugs and gilded frames were not the background for the morbid, silent recluse.

Mrs. Hawthorne, however, made few such mistakes. She was a soft, affectionate, feminine little woman, with intuitions subtle enough to follow her husband into his darkest moods, but with, too, a cheerful, practical Yankee “capacity” which fitted her to meet baker and butcher. Nobody could have been better fitted to stand between Hawthorne and the world. She did it effectively. When I was at Wayside, they had been living there for two years — ever since their return from Europe, and I was told that in that time he had never once been seen on the village street.

This habit of seclusion was a family trait. Hawthorne’s mother had managed to live the life of a hermit in busy Salem, and her sister, meeting a disappointment in early life, had gone into her chamber, and for more than twenty years shut herself up from her kind, and dug into her own soul to find there what truth and life she could. During the years in which Nathaniel, then a young man, lived with these two women, he, too, chose to be alone, going out of the house only at night, and finding his food on a plate left at his locked door. Sometimes weeks passed during which the three inmates of the little gray wooden house never saw each other.

Hawthorne was the product of generations of solitude and silence. No wonder that he had the second sight and was naturalized into the world of ghosts and could interpret for us their speech.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

The natural feeling among healthy, commonplace people toward the solitary man was a tender sympathy such as they would give to a sick child.

“Nathaniel,” an old blacksmith in Salem once said to me, “was queer even as a boy. He certainly was queer. But you humored him. You wanted to humor him.”

One person, however, had no mind to humor him. This was Miss Elizabeth Peabody, Mrs. Hawthorne’s sister. She was the mother of the kindergarten in this country, and gave to its cause, which seemed to her first in importance, a long and patient life of noble self-sacrifice. She was a woman of wide research and a really fine intelligence, but she had the discretion of a six-year-old child. She loved to tell the details of Hawthorne’s courtship of her sister, and of how she herself had unearthed him from the tomb of the little gray house in Salem, and “brought him into Sophia’s presence.” She still regarded him as a demi-god, but a demi-god who required to be fed, tutored, and kept in order. It was her mission, she felt, to bring him out from solitudes where he walked apart, to the broad ways of common sense.

I happened to be present at her grand and last coup to this end.

One evening I was with Mrs. Hawthorne in the little parlor when the children brought in their father. The windows were open, and we sat in the warm twilight quietly talking or silent as we chose. Suddenly Miss Peabody appeared in the doorway. She was a short, stout little woman, with her white stockinged feet thrust into slippers, her hoop skirt swaying from side to side, and her gray hair flying to the winds.

She lighted the lamp, went out and brought in more lamps, and then sat down and waited with an air of stern resolution. Presently Mr. Emerson and his daughter appeared, then Louisa Alcott and her father, then two gray old clergymen who were formally presented to Mr. Hawthorne, who now looked about him with terrified dismay. We saw other figures approaching in the road outside.

“What does this mean, Elizabeth?” Mrs. Hawthorne asked aside.

“I did it. I went around and asked a few people in to meet our friend here. I ordered some cake and lemonade, too.”

Her blue eyes glittered with triumph as Mrs. Hawthorne turned away. “They’ve been here two years,” she whispered, “and nobody has met Mr. Hawthorne. People talk. It’s ridiculous! There’s no reason why Sophia should not go into society. So I just made an excuse of your visit to bring them in.”

Miss Elizabeth has been for many years among the sages and saints on the heavenly hills, but I have not yet quite forgiven her the misery of that moment.

The little room was quite full when there rustled in a woman who came straight to Mr. Hawthorne, as a vulture to its prey. I never heard her name, but I knew her at sight as the intellectual woman of the village, the Intelligent Questioner who cows you into idiocy by her fluent cleverness.

“So delighted to meet you at last!” she said, seating herself beside him. “I have always admired your books, Mr. Hawthorne. I was one of the very first to recognize your power. And now I want you to tell me about your methods of work. I want to hear all about it.”

But at that moment his wife came up and said that he was wanted outside, and he escaped. A few moments later I heard his steps on the floor overhead, and knew that he was safe in the tower for the night.

. . . . . . . .

He did not hold me guilty in the matter, for the next morning he joined his wife and me in a walk through the fields. We went to the Old Manse where they had lived when they were first married, and then wandered on to the wooded slopes of the Sleepy Hollow Valley in which the Concord people had begun to lay away their dead.

It was a cool morning, with soft mists rolling up the hills, and flashes between of sudden sunlight. The air was full of pungent woody smells, and the undergrowth blushed pink with blossoms. There was no look of a cemetery about the place. Here and there, in a shady nook, was a green hillock like a bed, as if some tired traveler had chosen a quiet place for himself and lain down to sleep.

Mr. Hawthorne sat down in the deep grass and then, clasping his hands about his knees, looked up laughing.

“Yes,” he said, “we New Englanders begin to enjoy ourselves — when we are dead.”

As we walked back the mists gathered and the day darkened overhead. Hawthorne, who had been joking like a boy, grew suddenly silent, and before we reached home the cloud had settled down again upon him, and his steps lagged heavily.

Even the faithful woman who kept always close to his side with her laughing words and anxious eyes did not know that day how fast the last shadows were closing in upon him.

In a few months he was lying under the deep grass, at rest, near the very spot where he sat and laughed, looking up at us.

I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said: —

“I am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always.”

The words were nothing. I suppose he forgot them and me as he turned into the house. And yet . . . I never have forgotten them. They seemed to take me, too, for one moment, into his enchanted country.

Of the many pleasant things which have come into my life, this was one of the pleasantest and best.

Like a Radio in the Dark

2007-08-27T03:07:00.000-07:00

Happy to find this bit of proof that the interview I did with George Bowering in Jacket 33 is actually getting read and appreciated a little, since I consciously set out to do the unexpected in that piece. Blogger Marcus McCann (a stranger in these parts) calls it "a fascinating interview from a content perspective" and indeed I doubt anyone else has made Bowering expound on what he likes about Americans. We also get into his Puritanism, his relationships with his schoolmaster father and the British crown, and interesting things he thought as a kid -- that he might have superpowers, for instance, or be the second coming or live forever.

If you've tangled with him on the Poetics list, as so many have, you know he's a rare bird (some might say a piece of work) and my hope was to show how he got that way, how he earned his feathers and why I believe he's worth every bit of his occasional curmudgeonliness.

So the Paris Review interview it ain't, and pointedly so. At one juncture the interviewee says "I feel as if I am 'in group,' which I managed to avoid during the Fritz Perls era." Well, it was fun to bring him there and to hint at least at what people are missing if they don't read him.

Not mentioned in the Jacket piece but amusing in itself is news of the scholarship recently established for a student graduating from Bowering's old high school in Oliver, British Columbia, who "must have a demonstrated interest in writing and be a bit of a pain in the ass."

This, I'm fairly certain, opens up all sorts of new vistas for awards. Vistas I've been thinking about, as it happens, but those are musings for another day.

Poets, Unbearable and Otherwise

2007-08-23T03:16:00.001-07:00

Poets are unbearable to one another. You have to see them with other people to know what they're like.

--Elias Canetti (from Notes from Hampstead)

Tom Beckett posted those words some years back on the Poetics list and they were immediately (and gratefully) scribbled down here and probably elsewhere. You wouldn't be able to disprove that notion with recent goings-on in the blogosphere. And of course permanent aesthetic revolution makes a certain amount of friendly fire and outright fratricide inevitable.

But the strumpet is having one of those rare and bracing weeks that make the whole absurd poetic errand seem not only doable, but really (given her odd predilections) the only thing worth doing.

We're not talking about writing here, or not only about writing; what's happening is happening between two people, two of those unbearable poets, and includes in its scope everything from the tiniest details on their pages to their riskiest sallies toward a larger canvas.

Wanted to say more -- but it's almost dawn and time's run out.

Back when we're not at the heart of it.

Something More Substantial Than Fame

2007-08-20T00:48:00.000-07:00

Stumbled on this in my files when rifling them for poems. Since the strumpet is ever striving to provide evidence on her high-concept literary ruination blog, it seemed fitting to pass these sentences on:

For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here: and they have arrived to-day by express, piling the man's wagon, seven hundred and six copies out of an edition of one thousand, which I bought of Munroe four years ago, and have ever since been paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs, to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up in my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This is authorship. These are the works of my brain....

--Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, October 28, 1853

Three Parodies of Ingmar Bergman

2007-08-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, after the death of Ingmar Bergman, I went out looking for De Düva (The Dove), with a young Madeline Kahn in the cast. Finally found it at Google Video, but YouTube had Der Bass Treeifn: The Gift of Anna, which was in some ways even funnier, plus an SCTV version, Whispers of the Wolf. Nobody else seems to have collected all of them, so here they are.

Prepare yourself for lots of (subtitled) faux Swedish.

Der Bass Treeifn: The Gift of Anna:

"I am a donkey furball.... Even death won't have me.... Spring prawns!"

De Düva (The Dove):

"My name is Viktor Sundqvist. I am still alive.... Last year I was awarded the Peace Prize in Nuclear Physics. I have a hernia...."

Whispers of the Wolf:

"So you have left Yorg again?... I cannot laugh. The dwarves make me feel old...."

Comedy, Cruelty, and Control

2007-08-15T01:47:00.000-07:00

In the last discussion days of the humor-in-poetry list (HumPo), K. Silem Mohammad made what seemed at the time like an extraordinary statement. "In my case," he said, speaking of the development of his thinking during the course of our conversation, "I have been if anything more firmly persuaded that humor is a form of cruelty." (Read more here.)

At the time, in summation mode, I disagreed, saying "Cruelty is a school of humor, for sure, and when the late-night comics indulge in it -- the gay jokes, the appearance jokes, it always seems to me like a form of laziness, the last refuge of a comedy that’s run out of ideas."

Since then, however, I've been testing instances of humor with my newly patented Cruel-O-Meter, and have discovered that (more often than would make me happy) Kasey has a point.

I started musing on this again yesterday after reading an even more extraordinary statement. "Every comedian’s heart -- the laugh muscle -- conceals a killer, " writes John Latta. "...The thing about comedy is, it brooks little argument, little half-measure, little slow-harsh subtlety of sidelong cancerous wit; it is rarely reveal’d casually, with joyous finesse, by degrees. The comedian’s unwilling to proceed by increments, who ever heard of an incremental laughter? Because comedy, like murder, is about control. And control that is slow to exhibit itself is no control at all."

If one were to accept both premises, agreeing with John that comedy is about control and with Kasey that humor is a form of cruelty, it would be tempting to hypothesize that the comedian, like some predatory spider, first paralyzes its intended victim -- "controls" it -- and then moves swiftly into the theater of cruelty to ingest it whole. MWA-HA-HA-HA-HAA-aaah!

My initial reaction to John's statement was like my initial reaction to Kasey's -- a brief bout with horror, followed by rumination. I remembered Mel Brooks saying that he'd defanged Hitler in his imagination by spoofing him (i.e. controlling him) in The Producers. Another example wasn't hard to come by -- my own comic obsession with Richard Nixon was a way to turn the tables on a figure who'd soaked up all the loose animus of my red diaper babyhood, mastering him (and occasionally making him ridiculous) rather than letting him and his ilk toy with me.

So I think there are elements of truth in John's statement and in Kasey's, although I'll be surprised if I come out exactly where they (separately) do. This is something I want to be thinking about in the coming months and (when I'm no longer going through the eye of the needle as I am through Labor Day) will hope to look at specific funny poems and how they function, or don't function, vis-à-vis control and cruelty.

Even better, reader (since the site meter says you're out there) I'd love to hear now or later, by backchannel or on this site:

Which comic poems and other humorous works appear to slip neatly into these notions and which adamantly resist them? Let me know.

Bill Knott, "the english straine"

2007-08-13T02:59:00.000-07:00

Because you don't want the fifth can in your sixpack of Coke to have Pepsi in it, do you—

And you don't want page 42 in your Michael Palmer poetry book to suddenly out of nowhere (stop him!) he's trying to write a Sharon Olds-type autobio Confessional poem with a four stress line, you don't want that do you.

You want consistency in the poets you buy, just like the softdrink of your choice; you want a book with the name Palmer on it to contain the flavor of poem you paid for....

You want what you bought. You want the brandname poet, not the generic.

You want the Real Thing, Coke after Coke, poem after poem. That's capitalism, and you don't want it any other way.

This happens to be what I'm "interested in" right now as I put together a book manuscript -- what "fits," what doesn't.

How to free my Pessoan heteronym (and anagram) Clare Holden, so she can publish her own book, with all those other weird, discomfiting, non-fitting poems.

A foolish consistency? Hobgoblin of little minds?

Survival of the fittest groceries again, perhaps, but Rachel has so little use for Clare these days, and aesthetics has its own fierce hegemony.

Lady Sovereign

2007-08-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

The strumpet was speaking through her arse poetica yesterday when she said that a blog is "a sort of castle with its lord, its gentleman-soldiers, its mounted men-at-arms and its vassals."

Actually, the lords and ladies of the blogosphere don't have that kind of retinue, but they should. It would be more fun.

Speaking for myself, I intend to establish a dungeon.

The Price of the Ticket

2007-08-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

Must admit I was pleased to see this and this, both constructs as elegant as they're generous, in their odd way. Ritualized insult at this level is, I think, almost a tip of the hat or a form of bonding, in that it acknowledges, in its backwards fashion, the power of a worthy adversary.

Or am I just dreaming of the salad days at Jordan Davis's late-lamented subsubpoetics, when K. Silem Mohammad, John Latta, Gabriel Gudding, Kent Johnson and other jousters knocked about in a state of furious revelry, and oh it was a sight to see. What made that possible (other than the superb tone Jordan set) and what makes a lot of what's happened recently seem so relatively small, sterile, stingy?

A few days ago somebody compared blog comment boxes to listservs, but this isn't accurate. On a listserv, you can think of a response three weeks later, post it to all and sundry and relaunch a discussion. Try doing that in a blog comment box--the blogger moves on, and takes the conversation with him, if he permits such chatter at all.

This leads, ineluctably, to comments being posted as quickly as possible, in a frenzied attempt to get in on the brief window of fun. Not exactly conducive to wit or thoughtfulness, although sometimes these can be managed by the most experienced and nimble.

Often, though, it's more like a dogpile, or--ironically when posts are most substantive, and least salacious--there's precious little comment at all.

Of course listservs had terrible defects as well, but when they were working there was a certain respectfulness inherent in the fact of meeting in a common space, with time to hone one's observations.

This is why I had such strong doubts about blogging from the beginning--not only the obvious limitations of the comment boxes but the way each blog as fiefdom inevitably structures the intellectual climate. A prominent blog is a sort of castle with its lord, its gentleman-soldiers, its mounted men-at-arms and its vassals.

But I'm here because the people I want to talk shop with have in the main abjured lists in favor of personal, if rented, real estate, and the only way to engage them, really (and get on the record in a non-frenetic way) is to build a fastness of my own.

How long this will be worth the price of the ticket is another matter. But in the meantime, I'm always looking for some sign that grace is breaking out, that a new age of merry vitriol is upon us.

Is that too much to hope for? Very possibly. Initially I chose to moderate comments in this obscure space after witnessing a few horror stories, especially for women. For the moment I've decided to stop doing that, and see what (if anything) transpires.

The Shock of the Necessary

2007-08-09T04:37:00.000-07:00

Linh Dinh wrote almost a week ago to say (quoted with permission) "I like the Bill Knott comparison. I have never read him, actually. Is this poem typical of Knott?" And on his blog, the same day, Knott expressed some pleasure at seeing "Survival of the Fittest Groceries" here and added "if i were only younger i'd know who this Linh Dinh is."

I wrote back to Linh saying that "Groceries" was a good example of one Knott mode but that he had other modes and tones. But really the truth is that no Knott poem is typical: they're all thorny and eccentric, like the poet, and that's what makes them memorable.

And (for Bill Knott) I can say that what always startles me awake with Linh Dinh's poems is that they seem less like precious literary confabulations and more like orders and warnings, each one bitten off in a great hurry. Here's one from his new book, Jam Alerts (Chax Press, 2007):

Investment Advices

Shimmering on the horizon, the four horsemen
Will arrive soon. Put all your liquid assets into
Baked beans, canned tuna and bandages.

After the almighty Dollar evaporates, the King's
English will shrivel. Therefore, toss your English
Dictionaries away, burn all of your English books.

The language he aggressively collects (from finance, law, history, porn) gets swept into the giant tidepool of his attention, whirled violently and disgorged in these poems, each of which seems to have wanted writing in the best, worst way. Linh Dinh's work is never random noodlings, pastel word confetti and pleasantries. Look elsewhere for that, but look here for both the necessities and the significant perils of our art, as in his poem "What Words Do" (also from Jam Alerts):

They cannibalize each other. The weakest ones
Are merely parasites. Grafting words onto words,
The wishy-washy don't trim away what's superfluous,
Resulting in ghastly weed gardens. Words, especially
Wrong and pointless ones, like to flit about, like bugs.

Prisoners of Love: Poetry and the Stockholm Syndrome

2007-08-07T05:55:00.000-07:00

If we stopped loving every poem we love because of the mysteriousness (and even confoundedness) of its creator, we'd have very little left to love indeed.

So I have been baffled by Bill Knott's apparent --and I think fairly recent -- identification with a sociological slice of poetry (and official poetic culture) that would seem to exclude someone of his temperament and sensibility almost by definition.

This doesn't mean that I am willing to turn my back on his poems, in some equally perverse fit of aesthetic cleansing.

It resembles an instance of the Stockholm Syndrome, this strange longing (shared, at one time or another, by most poets) to sign up with that which would wrack us with its torpid indifference.

This is an odd sort of valentine, I know, but it is one nevertheless.

Your Mind Is On Vacation and Your Mouth Is Working Overtime

2007-08-05T02:42:00.000-07:00

In the century I come from, it was customary to actually read things before pronouncing them worthy or unworthy. I know this will arrive as a startling revelation in the age of infinite distractibility, when one is (apparently) proud of "not bothering." Back then -- imagine! -- this was considered embarrassing; it was not generally seen as acquitting oneself well.

But times change. So let me give up and post a Mose Allison video:

And Now For Something Completely Different

2007-08-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

... but with the same name. This seems like a poem Linh Dinh might have written yesterday--the urgency, the ferocity, the recklessness of the attack:

Survival of the Fittest Groceries

The violence in the newspapers is pure genius
A daily gift to the reader
From some poet who wants to keep in good with us
Brown-noser wastepaperbasket-emptier

I shot 436 people that day
2 were still alive when I killed them
Why do they want to be exhumed movie-stars,
I mean rats still biting them, the flesh of comets, why
do they walk around like that?

I'm going to throw all of you into the refrigerator
And leave you to claw it out with the vegetables and meats

--Bill Knott, from Auto-Necrophilia (Big Table Books, 1971)

Survival of the Fittest Groceries

2007-08-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

I steal my title from a brilliant poem in Bill Knott's book Auto-Necrophilia (1971). It comes to mind often, but especially in light of recent dismaying events. Silly to hope that one might see any rebirth of equanimity on these appalling internets. No, equanimity is for chumps, and it will always be smacked down by the endless lust for content.

So I guess I have to disagree with Seth's characterization (in the comment box here yesterday) of his BAP posts as "much-lambasted." They may have been that, but I'm fairly certain that they also got more play (more celebration, essentially), than anything else he's done, which seems a bit sad. Lots of very surprising people linked to them on all sides of the aesthetic barricades. Reason: there's nothing more delicious than a festschrift of literary indignation and schadenfreude, however accurately targeted or off the mark, and everybody loves to pile on.

The thing that interested me the most, back in 2005, was that the day after I'd been awkwardly joined to the hip with Brigit Pegeen Kelly in Seth's ceremonial BAP cuss-out, he went on the record and said (in a post called "This Just In," after he'd taken the time to read it) that "Best American Poetry 2005 is actually pretty damn good, and might just be the best edition in the whole series."

Of course, this post got no play at all, and not a single poetry-lover thought it worthy of a morning-after link.

The Baffling Mr. Abramson

2007-08-01T05:22:00.000-07:00

I don't know which is more puzzling: Seth Abramson's statement a couple of days ago that he knows "absolutely nothing about [Rachel] Loden," or his equally self-assured (and, um, "satirical") assertion in 2005 that "Other poets, like Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Rachel Loden, had simply appeared in far more issues of Best American Poetry than public opinion of their work would seem to warrant."

If Abramson knows "absolutely nothing" about Rachel Loden today, surely he knew less than diddly-squat about her two years ago. Why then did she (and the supposed market rating of her work) merit satirizing? And if he felt he needed to go on the satirical record then, how can he claim to know zilch/nada/bupkis about her now?

It's all terribly confounding, and the strumpet searches in vain for clarity.

Why Is American Poetry Culturally Deprived?

2007-07-30T05:15:00.000-07:00

Looking for something else, I stumbled on an extremely cranky essay by Kenneth Rexroth ("Why Is American Poetry Culturally Deprived?" from World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth). Among other nasty bits there's this:

From the death of Longfellow to the day Allen Ginsberg took off his clothes, the American poet was not an important factor in American life. He was not a factor at all. For this reason, the kind of young man who wished to participate in the decisions of his community went into business, engineering, or the professions. The boy who knew he could not or was afraid to participate wrote verse.

One has to wonder whether he included himself in that last, somewhat emasculating hissy fit. In a way the essay is almost Gioiaesque, although of course it predated "Can Poetry Matter?" by almost thirty years.

I actually agree with Rexroth's larger point, that American poetry is often giddily free of historical seasoning and intellectual complexity. He makes some hilarious (and wildly contestable) observations about Stevens and Williams--poets he otherwise admires:

What is valuable about the poetry of Wallace Stevens is that it really does reorganize the human sensibility afresh in each poem in terms of quite simple elements of experience. This experience is never more profound than that accessible to the kind of man Wallace Stevens in fact was--a wealthy cultivated executive of a big insurance company.

So with William Carlos Williams, who for contemporary taste is the best of the generation of Classic Modernists. As a handler of general ideas, Williams is pathetic. As either aesthetic or epistemology, his favorite phrase, "No ideas but in things," is infantile....

To products of environments as troubled as those which produced Rilke, Mayakovsky, Paul Eluard, or Dylan Thomas, even the most tormented American poet must seem singularly content, but so it is.

My Charm Offensive

2007-07-26T04:57:00.000-07:00

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

December 4, 1970

MEMORANDUM FOR: H. R. HALDEMAN

FROM THE PRESIDENT

As I have indicated in a number of my memoranda to you in the last two weeks, I have reluctantly concluded that our entire effort on the public relations front has been misdirected and ineffective. I want to be sure to separate the problems. We have gotten across the idea that the White House is efficient at the "process" in both the NSC and Domestic Council organizations--probably the best that the White House has had for many years and that, all in all, we have a very competent group of operators in the White House. The net result of this operation has been to create the impression among average voters--an impression which is gleefully underlined time and time again by our opponents in the press, that we are an efficient, crafty, cold machine, both in operating the government and all of our political activities....

There are innumerable examples of warm items--the way we have gone far beyond any previous President in this century in breaking our backs to be nicey-nice to the Cabinet, staff, the Congress, etc., around Christmastime in terms of activities that show personal concern, not only for them, but for their families. For example, the Church Service, every other person who comes through that line practically gets tears in his eyes when he thanks us for allowing them to bring their children to church. I have yet to see any columnist write this, and I of course doubt that anybody will because none of us really have the capacity to get it across, (due to the fact that we are ''slightly embarrassed to say such things").

There are such little things such as the treatment of household staff, the elevator operators, the office staff, the calls that I make to people when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody, the innumerable letters I have written to people when they have fallen on bad days, including even losing an election. I doubt if any President in history has ever written somebody who has lost an election. But I write to them in terms of their families and how hard they had worked, etc. Here we have an ironical fact. Ehrlichman is constantly bugging me that I am going to have to see the Cabinet more and the sub-Cabinet more. And Flanigan, of course, is after me to see the members of the agencies. No President could have done more than I have done in this respect and particularly in the sense that I have treated them like dignified human beings, and not like dirt under my feet....

On a small note, I called Fred Cialles the other night who was going under the knife for a cancer operation, which will probably end his life. Fred Cialles has had it in Chicago politics but he has been my friend for years. I didn't tell anybody about the call and won't, but I put his nurse on also, and urged her to give a lift to all the other patients, but that was the most important thing she could do. Rose will remember an incident where I took dolls out to a couple of children at a hospital, when I was presiding over the Senate, who were dying with leukemia. We deliberately didn't have publicity....

All of this must be handled subtly and under no circumstances am I going to sit down with anybody and start telling them all the good deeds I have done. Again, such things, to be believable, have to be discovered, and one of the great factors that should be emphasized is that the President does not brag about all the good things he does for people....

In the whole field of warmth--the thrust should be not only jokes, glad-handing, back-slapping, etc., simply these small human acts of kindness which will mean an awful lot to people. Again, here is an area of utter failure on our part....

Having spoken of the White House events, one great plus is that this is a happy White House--one where the First Family has made it everybody's house. I have hit the theme over and over again--this house belongs to the people. I have used the Latin phrase to people over and over again "Esta en su Casa," which means "whenever you are here you are in your own house". Of course, the brilliant events that we have planned, the brilliant "verse" has simply not gotten through in any adequate capacity. This, of course, is a major public relations failure....

With regard to the whole warmth business, a very important point to underline is that we do not try to broker such items. We allow them to be discovered. For example, I would be horrified at the idea of putting out the fact that I called some mothers and wives of men that had been killed in Vietnam shortly after I met with the POW wives. Incidentally, on the warmth deal, the fact that after the Ohio State Game I called the Coach at Purdue--a team that had lost 8 games this year, and where the Coach is probably on the way out, and told him how I felt he had done an awfully good job under terribly difficult circumstances. This I did not put out and did not try to broker....

To sum up, what is needed is to get across those fundamental decencies and virtues which the great majority of Americans like--hard work, warmth, kindness, consideration for others, willingness to take the heat and not to pass the buck and, above all, a man who always does what he thinks is right, regardless of the consequences (he would rather be a one-term President doing what is right, rather than a two-term President doing what is wrong), and just plain guts and courage.

Either the Audience Wins or You Do: Harold Pinter, Audience Pleasure, and Other Musings

2007-07-24T04:25:00.000-07:00

One of the most unnerving things about poetry readings for me, as a young poet, was my relative success with them. I had been reading with writers like Judy Grahn and Susan Griffin, among others, and as much as I admired Judy (for example), her spellbinding performances of her work, and the strangely (or at least astonishingly) warm reception for my own, still left me profoundly unsettled. It seemed way too easy to please people. And once one had figured out how to do this, the effects were eerily reproducible. I could imagine taking this show out on the road, and to a small extent I did, reading by invitation at a number of universities. But I wasn't happy with this process for a multiplicity of reasons, only one of which was that it felt uncomfortably like shtick.

All this must be why I'm still somewhat ill at ease when a poem is described as a "crowdpleaser," as one was during our discussion of humor and poetry in the new Jacket, edited by Pam Brown. It's not that pleasing a crowd is an embarrassing or shameful thing, one to be devoutly avoided; in fact I hope to please many of them, as the years go by, and have fun at it to boot. Perhaps I still just find the "public like a frog" aspects daunting (to quote Emily). But producing such pleasure will probably go best for me if I can interrogate it a bit, find out more about how it operates and satisfy myself that I'm not settling for anyone's smug preconceptions and self-satisfactions, especially my own.

An entire galaxy of concerns, maybe too many for one blog post. But these constellations may explain my perverse pleasure in some delicious comments a few months ago by Harold Pinter on Charlie Rose. I'm not usually a fan of the show's giddy hail-fellow-well-met attitude, but when I saw that it was Pinter for the hour I set up a tape and later went back and scribbled down this partial transcript, including my own descriptions of Pinter's body language as he spoke.

Charlie Rose: Harold Pinter began his career as an actor, using the name David Baron, and has performed often on the stage. In October 2006, despite his age and his battle with cancer, he made a triumphant return in Samuel Beckett's one-man play, Krapp's Last Tape.

[clip from Pinter's performance in the play]

Rose: I don't know how you could write what you write and not have a very realistic sense of who you are and what you have done and what talent you have. Is it just modesty?

Harold Pinter: I can't make any such judgment about my work. One thing I really do know about my work is that it makes me laugh. I really do get a lot of laughs out of it. And when I hear other actors saying the lines, I join in their own relish.

Rose: You would rather write a line that generates a laugh than some piercing insight?

Pinter: Well, I believe in two things. One is: get a laugh, if it's a natural laugh. And the other is: stop it.

Rose: By moving to the next...

Pinter: By shutting the audience up. I've always found the audience... a contest between myself and the audience, and I've enjoyed that contest. There's only one winner.

Rose: Either the audience wins or you do.

Pinter: It has to be me.

Rose: There have been times onstage in which you can feel the contest.

Pinter: Very much so. I had a most memorable, unforgettable night in New York many years ago with The Homecoming. When the lights went up on the first night, the opening night, the audience hated it. They saw the set, they saw the actors dressed in an unappealing way, and they detested it. And there was a tremendous [pumps fist for emphasis] contest that night in which the actors detested the audience as much as the audience detested them, and finally the actors won [punches the air]. And the audience, you know [mimics bow tie at his neck], their bow ties and their mink coats, slumped in their seats, defeated [wildly gleeful look in his eye].

Rose: And was that performance that night better than it had been?

Pinter: Yeah, it was a great performance.

Rose: Because they rose to the occasion.

Pinter: They certainly did.

The Temple of the Inscriptions

2007-07-20T06:11:00.001-07:00

Dear Strumpet,

The internet dreamt you last night, dreamt that you were slowly limning its texts in golds and blues and tagging its imaginary pictures. Was that you?

And then in the morning these Cloud-Bird glyphs, these fused Snake-Jaguars, these crumbling incisions in vellum and stone.

Can you survive in this place? I still don't know.

Signed,
The Dwarf

Borat and Bromige: Further Adventures

2007-07-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

David Bromige gets the last word in our roundtable on humor and poetry in the new Jacket, edited by Pam Brown. In a backchannel note to me this week, he expanded a little on his time at the private Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School near London, which also includes among its old boys Sacha Baron Cohen, of Borat fame, and historian Simon Schama. (The school was established, sublimely enough, by the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, one of the livery companies of the city of London, and has been running in one form or another since 1690.)

In our discussion at Jacket I'd mentioned that Haberdashers’ seems to be "a factory of comedy," chockablock with verbally (and comically) aggressive Jews, at least to hear Baron Cohen tell it, and indeed, according to the Sunday Times, the student body today is "a third Hindu, a third Jewish and a third Christian." When David arrived in 1945, however, he was not only a scholarship student but a WASP. "There were a lot of Jews," he says in his note (quoted with permission), "but perhaps there are more than there were in my time."

Of his comment in Jacket that Haberdashers' in his day was more "a factory of depression" than one that churned out comedians, as its young instructors were being killed off in the war, he says now that "It was really only snobbery to say that it was always dull."

He goes on: "I liked Cohen in Borat. His humor quite reminded me of Haberdashers' humor in my own time."

On the POETICS list he once wrote of those days, "The other boys might well make fun of how one spoke, a mocking that could readily be extended to one's background and antecedents. So it is by such means that a lad can lose his native woodnotes wild and be fetched into the fold of privilege."

Who else can write a sentence like that last one? His POETICS post of 24 April 1999 is signed:

David (was DIvid until Haberdashers' Aske's got their clause into my vocables.)

In the Funhouse of History

2007-07-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

Ehrensvärd Museum, Suomenlinna
(Photo: Timo Ketonen)

Feeding in the Lilies

2007-07-14T18:42:00.001-07:00

What can be said of her, finally, this fictional character? That she was nostalgic for her own stupidity? That, like another fictional character, she planned on taking more of an active role in the decisions she made?

Birth of the Blues

2006-07-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

The strumpet, surveying the wreckage of her dominion.