Brian Spears

I've moved

2010-04-05T20:15:00.000-04:00

In an attempt to put my various web presences under one roof, I've discontinued this blog and exported it to a wordpress site. My new site (for now) is http://brianspears.wordpress.com and I've been blogging there fairly regularly this month at least. No promises as to whether that will continue.

I'll take this site down eventually, so you may want to update your bookmark.

Poetic Lives Online

2010-03-13T20:00:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Rae Armantrout for winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection Versed.

This post by Al Filreis made me send him a Facebook friend request, just so I can find out how the conversation ended. (If you friend request me, I'll probably say yes--I'm a bit of a whore.)

Jessica Smith has more on her series about women in poetry and poetry-blogging.

The Washington Post covers split This Rock.

Google has reached a deal with Italy to scan books. Older books, mind you, out of copyright, but still, it's a start.

I really enjoyed this poetry lecture featuring five Muslim American poets: Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa. It's 45 minutes long and that's only part one, but it's worth the time.

This week's Twitter recommendation is Katrina Vandenberg. She's one of the poets we'll be featuring during our National Poetry Month poem-a-day project. More on that soon.

The New Math Doesn't Really Add Up

2010-02-27T12:08:00.002-05:00

What does one do with an essay like the one David Alpaugh pennedfor the Chronicle of Higher Education on the current state of poetry publication? As an editor who publishes about 50 poems a year here on The Rumpus (all directly solicited), I feel like I have to respond, since I'm contributing to the noise that seems to bother Alpaugh so.

Others have already responded. John Gallaher says of Alpaugh's claim that he doesn't know who the best poets writing today are, "In the face of all of this raging against the blur of numbers, he gets his big chance to assist, to cull some of the chaff, and what he says is “I have no idea”? Nope. That just won’t cut it."

Mark Scroggins replies to Alpaugh's claim that the potential loss of a contemporary Blake or Dickinson would be the "most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable" this way:

That, not to put it politely, is bullshit. (My own answer to the pro-life folks who ask, "What if Beethoven's mother had aborted him?": We wouldn't have missed him, would we?) Yes, the loss would be incalculable, precisely because it wouldn't be a loss. We only consider Blake & Dickinson essential elements of our culture because we have Blake & Dickinson; if we didn't have them, we'd be living in a different culture. It's an effing time-machine game, Mr. Alpaugh – stop playing Star Trek and start reading, writing, & promoting as best you can the poetry you value. That's the way critical approval, fame, canonization & the rest have always worked.

My problem, though, is with Alpaugh's math. Let me start by conceding that the arenas for publication have exploded in number in the last ten years with the rise and mainstream acceptance of online publication. But I'm not sure Alpaugh is comparing apples to apples in his construction. First of all, he gets his numbers from different sources.

Len Fulton, editor of Dustbooks, which publishes the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, estimates the total number of literary journals publishing poetry 50 years ago as 300 to 400. Today the online writers' resource Duotrope's Digest lists more than 2,000 "current markets that accept poetry," with the number growing at a rate of more than one new journal per day in the past six months.

Hold on a second--"literary journals" doesn't necessarily equal "markets that accept poetry." For example, Thrasher Magazine fits into the latter, but not the former category today, and I have my doubts as to whether Fulton included independent 'zines (the equivalent, in a way, of online journals today) and magazines that published poetry as an afterthought in his count of literary journals.

Alpaugh also fails to take population growth into account. In 1959, there were about 177.8 million people living in the US. Today, that number is closer to 309 million, and the last decade showed a larger raw number increase than any of the last five. More people=more writers=a larger potential audience, it seems to me.

And finally, growth rates are rarely, if ever static. Alpaugh doesn't take into account either the number of journals, online or otherwise, which cease publication (yes, it even happens online) or the possibility that the growth in publications will slow over time, perhaps due to their replacement by a new venue for poetry.

There are other problems with this essay, but I'll leave those to other writers (and I'll probably link to them as I see them). That the math doesn't work is enough for me to dismiss it.

Crossposted at The Rumpus

Reading update

2010-02-25T23:46:00.000-05:00

Even though I've been busy as hell with the semester, I've managed to get some reading done in the last few weeks. Almost two months ago, I took a page from Mark Scroggins and other to think about just how much I read. Since then, I've finished George Witte's Deniability, W. S. DiPiero's City Dog, Stacy Lynn Brown's Cradle Song (which I plan to review for The Rumpus soon), and I've reread Gabrielle Calvocoressi's Apocalyptic Swing, largely because I'm teaching it in my Poetic Forms class this term.

I've also made it my goal to read things I probably should have read in graduate school but somehow missed, so I've just read Spring and All and I'm working my way through Robert Creeley's Pieces at the suggestion of a close friend. Both of those will require multiple readings, certainly. And I've reread some fun stuff from my youth, thanks to my Stanza app--The Three Musketeers and The King Arthur stories. I'm also working my way through a version of Inferno done by twenty different translators lent to me by my friend Becka McKay.

So I guess that brings my completed total of new (to me) books this year to 7, and total to 9, with many more on my list. Next up (for now): Ann Carson's Oresteia, Heather Hartley's Knock Knock (in part because I named my own manuscript that for a contest or two) and Nick Lantz's We Don't Know We Don't Know.

Do What Now?

2010-02-20T18:36:00.001-05:00

So I'm hunting around for links for my weekly Poetic Lives Online post over at The Rumpus, when I come across this gem of a post from the London Review blog. I couldn't give it the full attention I thought it deserved in that column, so I'm putting it here instead. The blog post begins this way:

A properly sceptical article by Anthony Gardner on the creative writing industry, in the latest Royal Society of Literature mag, quotes one teacher explaining that ‘creative writing schools in the US teach that a poem needs to have what they call “redemption”: something at the end which lifts the reader up.’

What do you do with such an obviously ludicrous statement? What's worse is that the blogger, Jenny Diski, rolls with it as though it's so obviously true that it's not worth challenging. Seriously, that's the kind of claim I'd smack down one of my first-year students for putting it into the introduction of an argumentative essay.

Let me use my own experience as an example here. Got a minor in Creative Writing as an undergrad at Southeastern Louisiana University, and my poetry teacher there, Jack Bedell, never once suggested that a poem needed to have a redemptive close. Got my MFA at Arkansas, which is a pretty traditional school, and none of my teachers there--Miller Williams, Michael Heffernan, Enid Shomer and Davis McCombs--suggested that a poem needed to have redemption in it. I can't remember if Miller had redemption or something similar in his long list of closing moves that he gave us in Form and Theory class, but if he did, it was one on a very long list. And Michael might have punched me in the throat if I'd tried that. (Not really--he was a great guy.)

Move forward to Stanford--Ken Fields, Eavan Boland and W. S. DiPiero. Never a peep about a redemption requirement in poems. And none, I might add, from any of the people I was ever in a workshop with, many of whom are teaching in universities across the countries. And while I'm not on the MFA faculty here at FAU, and I've never sat in on any of the graduate workshops, I'd bet money that Mark Scroggins doesn't tell his students to put a moment of redemption or uplift into their poems, and I'd be surprised if Susan Mitchell does either.

Neither do I, and I teach undergraduate poetry workshop nearly every semester. In fact, I find myself very often telling my undergrads to be a bit more daring in their closings, because they tend toward that moment of uplift on their own, when they're not going for out-and-out explanation of what they were trying to say all along.

Look, it's obvious that Gardner and Diski have their doubts about the university creative writing industry that's springing up in Britain, and the one we have here certainly has its flaws (though I don't think they're as dire as most detractors seem to suggest), but be a little skeptical for crying out loud. All you have to do is access a poetry journal, even one as mainstream as Poetry, and you'll find poems written by poets who've gone through that system which disprove that thesis. Just don't look in The New Yorker.

Poem Flow

2010-02-17T12:50:00.001-05:00

Poets.org, the online home of the Academy of American Poets, has just released an iPhone app called Poem Flow. (No idea on just how well that link will work, for the record--you can access the description through the Poets.org home page as well.) I downloaded it because, well, I'm a sucker for apps, and it's free. I've been fiddling with it a little, and here's what I find interesting about it.

It changes the way you perceive the poem a bit. Here's what I mean. The first poem that loaded up for me was Yeats's "The Second Coming." Here's a screen grab of what it looks like in standard view.

Scroll down the screen and you get the whole poem--the lines are broken to fit the screen, but the indentions make clear where Yeats broke his lines. Here's the traditional way of viewing the poem for comparison's sake.

But when you go landscape, well, that's a whole different story, because now you get the flow effect--there's a play button at the bottom of the screen, and the words appear and disappear as you work your way through the poem. Notice I didn't say lines--that's because lines aren't the units now. Here's a screen grab from the landscape view:

This view seems to have done away with much, if not all of Yeats's capital letters, but the big change, for me, is that they've completely changed the way one approaches the poem now. You can't get the sense of movement from the screen grabs, but the rate at which the words appear and disappear limits the speed at which you can read the poem (in a good way, I think) and it emphasizes moments of tension in the poem. It creates dozens more line breaks than Yeats included or arguably intended. In a way, you're no longer reading Yeats's poem--you're reading the programmer/designer's edition of Yeats's poem.

This also means that the programmer/designer can have some fun with the poem. I was grabbed by this moment the first time I saw it.

Combined with the previous line "a waste of desert sand;" these lines make me think of the Sphinx, and by extension, the Valley of the Kings, and while it may be coincidence that these three lines form a pyramid of sorts, it certainly reinforced the image for me.

The poems all appear to be older, public-domain poems--you get twenty for downloading the app, and then you have the option of buying another hundred for a dollar, or a year's worth for $2.99, using the new inApp option iTunes has set up. I spent the three bucks and I'll see how I like it. I hope that the AAP is using the public domain stuff as a teaser and that we'll see newer poems in the subscription model. It would also be nice if the AAP would allow poets to collaborate with designers in the translation of their works into this new format.

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-30T20:58:00.001-05:00

Philip Pullman writes about Blake's poetry, and argues that it can be appreciated separate from the illuminations.

Thermos interviews Katy Lederer, who we reviewed nearly a year ago.

Anindita Sengupta on Indian English Poetry.

Inferno, the video game. It's Dante in the same way "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is Homer. Except it's a video game. And Beatrice is in hell.

More on gender, race and poetry in this post at Harriet. And some good advice as well--advice I plan on taking as Poetry Editor here.

And on that note, would you like to write about poetry for The Rumpus? What was the last book or poem you loved? Send me a write-up, no length requirements, and I'll publish the best of them. poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net.

Brian Spears

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-23T19:28:00.001-05:00

It's Saturday night and it's poetry time. Who else is excited?

I always figured the Irish got excited about poetry. Roddy Doyle says otherwise.

I'm late to the game in discovering the Poetry Foundation's podcasts, but I'm having some fun listening to them. I liked Ron Silliman's discussion of writing a poem with an eraser, as well as Carmine Starnino's "Are Poets Lazy Bastards?"

41 popular moves in contemporary poetry.

I'm double-dipping a little here, as Elisa Gabbert helped on the above link, but I really liked this piece from her website on publishing the poem, not the poet.

John Gallaher asks what it means to be a careerist in poetry.

Twitter recommendation for this week is January Magazine. They do more than just poetry--sometimes they just tweet news story links--but they're very active and informative.

Brian Spears

An Arundel Tomb

2010-01-18T21:26:00.000-05:00

Twice now, in the last couple of months, I've come across media pieces on Philip Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb" (which is on my Interpretation of Poetry syllabus for this week), first on BBC4 radio, which is sadly not available online at present, and then today on the Poetry Foundation website--they tweeted it and I followed the link because I really, really like this poem. The funny thing is, neither piece talked about the reason I like the poem, namely, the statement I think Larkin makes about nostalgia.

Let me start by saying it's perfectly possible that the reason none of these other people mention nostalgia is because it's so obvious and they're interested in other matters. I haven't read any Larkin criticism; for all I know, there's a book on the way Larkin dealt with nostalgia. But I'm going to blather on about it anyway.

The poem begins with a description of the tomb of the Earl of Arundel and his wife Eleanor in Chichester Cathedral. The Earl and the Countess are side by side atop the tomb, holding hands, he dressed in armor and she in what looks like a nun's habit, and there are dogs beneath their feet. Larkin describes the effect of seeing the hand-holding as a "sharp tender shock," an unexpected display of affection given that noble marriages from the medieval period weren't typically romantic affairs. (Larkin later mourned that he'd gotten this detail wrong, that these two by all accounts did have an affectionate relationship--doesn't matter, though, since the surprise is the important thing.)

He plays on this a bit in the following stanza:

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

Larkin is punning on the word "lie" here; the whole idea of an elaborate tomb is to make one's name last far into the future, so he can't be talking about their physical bodies. No, it seems to me that, because he distrusts the image of the two as a loving couple, he assumes that their hand-holding would be "just a detail friends would see," and they would write it off to "a sculptor's sweet commissioned grace" and nothing more. The important information, from the Earl and Countess's point of view, would be the "Latin names around the base," not any memory of the romance (or lack thereof) between the inhabitants of the tomb.

Larkin moves this "lie" forward in time and shows how it becomes a truth of sorts, as "succeeding eyes begin / To look, not read." Future observers who were unable to read the Latin names or were unable to contextualize them would only see the lie of the loving couple. Tourists would visit the cathedral, "Washing at their identity" until all that was left was the image itself, a man of war and his wife, his ungauntleted hand holding hers in this unusual moment of tenderness.

So when Larkin opens his final stanza with the words "Time has transfigured them into / Untruth," he's talking about how we look back into the past and see only the rosy parts. We wash away anything disturbing (whenever we can) and so this medieval couple, who one would assume married to unite powerful families or consolidate land gains are now a symbol for love that lasts through time. That's what Larkin is getting at in his final line, "What will survive of us is love." The Latin names didn't make it (in the sense that they don't signify anything to most people who see the tomb), nor did any stories of what their relationship truly was like. All that was left was the statue. What survives of them is love, whether it really existed or not.

But that's the thing about memory and nostalgia. It's completely unreliable. It washes away the ugliness, the grit and crap, and makes things seem prettier, simpler than they ever could have been. The love that survived, that will survive us, will be a lie, not because it isn't love, but because it will be devoid of context and strife, of any of the dirt that has to be part of any relationship. The notion that we should not speak ill of the dead is one manifestation of this phenomenon. We remember only the good parts, only the beauty, only the love.

Wow

2010-01-13T22:20:00.000-05:00

So I've been blogging at The Rumpus and Incertus about the Haiti earthquake response, instead of prepping for classes tomorrow like I ought to have been--it's too early in the semester to get behind, after all--but about midway through my marathon session, I was forwarded this incredibly wonderful post from Don Share at Harriet. If saying it didn't automatically negate it, I would say I am humbled by his words.

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-10T10:44:00.002-05:00

Happy Saturday everyone.

So Missouri Governor Jay Nixon wants a Poet Laureate for the state who doesn't have anything in his or her background that might embarrass him. I take it he doesn't know many poets.

Connecticut is looking for a Poet Laureate too. No word on embarrassment restrictions.

Did you miss the off-site MLA poetry reading? You can get an .mp3 of it here.

Catherine Halley reports from the Key West Literary Seminar, which is experiencing, I'm sad to say, the least Key-Westian weather in recent memory.

And my Twitter follow recommendation this week is the poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing. I've been interviewing Gabrielle for The Rumpus and Twitter is a big part of it.

Brian Spears

Crossposted to The Rumpus

First Impressions: George Witte's Deniability

2010-01-02T23:43:00.000-05:00

I should have loved this book, I think. I agree with Witte's politics, and my own writing tends toward the metrically formal, which Witte does quite ably throughout Deniability.

And yet...maybe I would have loved this book three years ago, which is when I suspect most of the poems were written, or at least inspired. The cover image is Fernando Botero's "Abu Ghraib 66" and the second section is made of poems about rendition, torture, and the various justifications the nation's leaders made for the actions our military took during that time frame. The third section deals with surveillance and an allegorical figure named "Suspicion."

I'm sure the issue is one of fatigue for me--I've spent more time on political blogs for the last five years than is good for one's mental stability--and I don't want to ascribe this to Witte's poems, but when I read "Failure to Comply," about a set-to at an airport security checkpoint, I find myself not caring, not about the subject nor the poem itself. And that's not fair to Witte or his art.

There are moments where Witte's poems transcend the immediate subject matter--the first section is full of them, and I really enjoyed "Likenesses," which contained this moment:

"So much of who we are," he said, "depends
on markers humans recognize as us."
I recalled our daughter Helen
shying from my stroke-strange mother's kisses,
two years enough to discern alien
in familiar guise.

Even though the poem begins with a specialist who helps repair the faces of people harmed in war, Witte makes the poem more familiar here, and his decision to move away from the strict iambic pentameter he'd been using really brings this moment into focus--the two year old who saw something not-quite-human in her grandmother's face and shied away.

I won't be reviewing this for The Rumpus--I'm passing it on to another reviewer, and I hope she can give it a better chance than I did.

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-02T22:50:00.001-05:00

First thing: Chinese poet Lu Xiaobo has been sentenced to eleven years in prison. There isn't much people can do, but you can register your opinion on this via the PEN American Center website.

Mark Scroggins has inspired me to keep better track of how much poetry I read. Not sure if that's what he was going for, but that's what happened.

Gary Barwin comments on what he calls the cage match of Canadian poetry and wonders "why we can’t have both approaches as part of a vital and active poetry world." Other than "both" buttressing a dichotomic view of poetic options, I agree with him. I think of myself as a poetic populist--room for everyone in the pool.

Alex Beam suggests libraries could help kill the e-book by lending them out. He couldn't be more wrong.

My Twitter follow recommendation for this week is @rattlepoetry, the feed of Rattle. It's a journal which is using the web as an addition to their print journal, and they use it well.

Crossposted to The Rumpus

Tracking my Reading

2010-01-01T16:35:00.000-05:00

For a long time I thought I read a lot--and I did, compared to the people I was an undergrad with, and among my friends while I was a Witness. Then I got to grad school, and even though I was reading more then than I ever had before, I came to realize that I was a piker, at least when it came to the subject I was studying.

I was reading Mark's post on bulk-reading and beating myself up over my lax habits when it occurred to me that I don't really know how much I read in a given year. I'm not in Mark's league, not by a long shot, but I probably do a better job than I give myself credit for, especially since I started getting books as part of my editor's gig at The Rumpus.

So since I've been looking for ways to use this blog more, I'm going to shamelessly jack an idea from Michael Kelleher and modify it--I'll post what I'm reading and keep count of it. This will be my New Year's Resolution, to keep track of how much and how varied my reading is. And I'll be glad to take suggestions from anyone who passes by and leaves them in the comments.

So right now, I'm in the middle of a couple of books, not counting the two I have to reread in order to review soon. The first is City Dogs by W.S. DiPiero, his latest collection of essays, and I've been at this one for a couple of months, reading a snatch here and there and then ruminating on it for days. I love DiPiero's writing, and have ever since I worked with him at Stanford, and I did some scanning and conversion to text work for him when he was putting this together, so I have a closer connection with some of the content than I would normally have.

The second is Seamus Heaney's new translation of The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, which I've been reading occasionally before I go to bed. I could just blow through this one, but again, I've been taking it a fable at a time. Heaney's translation is fine, but not inspired, or maybe it's the subject matter--morality tales get a little heavy-handed at their best, and when I read them one after another, I start to feel like I do when I read Very Intense Bloggers Writing About Very Important Things, and I tune out. The rhythms of the lines don't vary enough to counteract the occasional creeping numbness, which is why I don't read much of it in a sitting.

So that's two, and I'll update when I finish one and get into another.

Book count: 2

Stealing Books

2009-12-28T10:24:00.002-05:00

Via The Rumpus, Margo Rabb has a funny piece in the NY Times about book theft. As anyone with a wry sense of humor might expect, the Bible is the most-stolen book around, even in Christian book stores (where it might be the only thing worth reading).

These paragraphs near the end got me thinking a little, though, in large part because my own book is being published (fingers crossed) in 2010, and though I doubt there's going to be much of an issue with digital piracy--I can only hope that I'm in demand enough that people would want to steal it--I am interested in using the web as a marketing tool for my work.

Many publishers and authors fear that piracy, and the general transition from print to digital media, will cause irreparable harm to the book industry, as it has in the music world. The writer Sherman Alexie, who has refused to make his fiction available in digital form, agrees. “The open source culture is coming for us,” he told me, “and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

John Palfrey, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the author of “Born Digital,” is more optimistic. “The way young people enjoy music is very different from the way they enjoy books, and I don’t think that we’ll see the same pattern of piracy emerge that we’ve seen in the music industry — at least not in the near future,” he said.

There's little doubt in my mind that the transition will force the publishing industry to evolve, and that the companies which currently dominate the landscape will mostly fail to do so. The companies will survive in some form or another, but they'll be the IBM's of a generation ago--once-powerful, now an afterthought.

Palfrey is correct--for now--that the way young people (and middle-agers too, for the record) access music is different from the way they enjoy books, but that's going to change, and I think the switchover will come when e-book readers become textbooks for schoolchildren. Adult readers stick to books now because that's what we're comfortable with. Read the arguments against e-books and one place they always hit is the tactile sensation of turning pages, of the smell of the paper and ink, the must of age in the cover. You lose all that with an e-book, absolutely. But if you've never really had it? If your first book was a child-proof Kindle or Nook or Tablet? Then a paper book will be a curiosity, but it won't evoke the same emotional attachment it does for us.

And once that's the expected way of accessing books, then piracy will grow quickly. We have a generation of people who are adults now who may have never accessed music other than via a computer, and we're getting that way with movies. The DVD has a top end life span, I'd wager, of ten years, even with the introduction of HD versions. Streaming delivery is the model of the future. So why not with books?

That's why I'm interested in making my book available in digital format, even if I never sell a copy that way. I'd like it to be open-source, though my publisher will no doubt have objections to that--but whatever agreement we come to, I want it to be available on as many readers as possible (so no Amazon-proprietary format no matter what happens). For the current generation of young people, and the ones that follow them, if it's not online, it doesn't exist. Writers have to acknowledge that--Sherman Alexie is right when he says open-source is coming for all of us, and that we can't stop it. The question is how we engage with it.

One thing publishers need to do in order to survive this evolutionary moment is do a better job of selling the costs of publishing. The music industry failed badly in this respect because it allowed the frame of "a blank CD costs pennies; why does a music CD cost 17 bucks?" to become the focus of the debate. The fact that the record companies exploit new artists horribly and that they were raking in billions of dollars while churning out some of the least interesting music ever didn't help much, but where they really failed was in making the case that producing songs is expensive, even if you don't see it in the end product.

Publishers need to make the same case. Right now, the argument goes that a digital download costs next to nothing compared to a printed book--therefore, a digital download ought to cost next to nothing. And for some books, namely, those in the public domain, I agree completely. But making books--and I'm not taking about the physical making here; I'm talking about the writing and editing and formatting and selling of books--is expensive. But most readers don't get that, because the costs are hidden, and because they haven't actually tried to do it themselves, they have no idea how hard a job it is. I've never done a job as tedious as copy-editing, and I worked in a grocery warehouse pulling cases for 3 years.

Publishers have to pay people to do these jobs, and those of us in the industry would like to earn a living wage doing it. And in order to do that, publishers have to set a price point for electronic books that's higher than the average person might expect. Amazon hasn't helped matters with its Wal-Mart-esque bullying of publishers, but in the end, it's publishers who control the content, and right now, the market is malleable enough that they can still exert some control if they're willing to fight for it. And one of the ways they can do that is by making the case that there's value in the book itself, regardless of the format. Don't ask me how--I'm not a marketer. I don't even expect to make more than beer money off this book. But I know this is where we're heading, and if publishers want to thrive, they'll have to find a way to convince people to buy their books.

Poetic Lives Online

2009-12-26T17:00:00.002-05:00

Hi everyone. I sort of took today off along with everyone else here at The Rumpus, but there was a lot of good stuff in the po-world this week and I wanted to pass it along.

For starters, Memorious launched their blog today, and their first official post is "what books we're looking forward to in 2010," which is a wonderful change from all the retrospective lists that pop up this time of year. Forward looking--I like that.

Speaking of forward looking, Identity Theory wonders about the purpose of literary journals in the internet era, especially those who are usign the web in a merely perfunctory way.

The Poetry Foundation is doing a retrospective of sorts, though it's more about how poetry has changed over the last ten years. I personally found the responses by Annie Finch, Rigoberto Gonzáles and Camille Dungy to be the most on point and interesting, but they're all worth reading.

Finally, this week's Twitter follow recommendation. Two of the biggest daily poetry websites out there are Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, but I tend to only remember to look at the former on a regular basis. Why? Because Poetry Daily has a Twitter feed, and they update regularly, without being obnoxious about it. What do you say, Verse Daily? Will you get on the Twitter Train? (If they already are, someone send me a link, because I'd love to follow them.)

Brian Spears

Crossposted at The Rumpus

Major changes are afoot

2009-12-18T00:31:00.002-05:00

I haven't updated this blog since August, and it's been two weeks since I updated Incertus--obviously, something has to give. Right now, I'm doing a major redesign on the personal website, and I've managed to successfully import this blog into it--for now. I plan to redesign the blog as well, and include a twitter feed and cross-post some Rumpus stuff as well. I'd been limiting this blog to only poetry and writing related posts, but that's likely to change once I get the technical side of things ironed out--expect some goofy videos at the very least.

I'll be updating the blog roll as well, though how extensively will depend on just how fancy I can get with the blog. If I have to stay with a classic template, I'll have very limited options.

Incertus will likely be shuttered for now, and I'll be asking people to update their blog rolls accordingly. I'll try to work out a redirect if I can. When I started that blog nearly six years ago, I did it under a pseudonym because I was worried about harming my job prospects. It didn't take me long to discover that my pseudonym wasn't all that effective. I'm not saying it cost me a chance at a job--I don't think it did, and I've never been asked not to blog by my current employers, though I've been more than a little over the top at times--I'm just saying that it's pretty clear that any bloggers who think they have anonymity online are fooling themselves. All it takes is one determined jerk who doesn't respect your desire to stay anonymous and you're outed. The reality is that the second you engage the online world, you sacrifice some privacy. If you're not willing to do that, better stay off the web, not to mention any social networks, no matter how exclusive.

I built up an audience using that pseudonym, which is why I continued to use it even when my identity was clear--it was a way to separate myself from all the other Brians out there, and I may continue to use it on some of the websites where I comment. But to the extent I blog, I'll be doing it under my own name now

Neglectful

2009-08-06T23:48:00.003-04:00

I update this site far too rarely. I am a bad personal blogger, I suppose. But anyway, two sites to bring attention to. The first is a new blog by a dear friend of mine from Stanford, Shara Lessley. She's apparently going to be moving to Jordan in a year, and her blog is going to talk a bit about her preparations for the trip, as well as the issues with a completely unfamiliar language.

Secondly, a new online journal I found not long ago (and immediately submitted to). It's called Redheaded Stepchild and their requirement for submission is that your poems have to have been rejected by someone else, and they want to know who passed on them. You might ask, why would anyone want another journal's castoffs? A few years ago, The Missouri Review did an issue on all the great stuff Knopf had rejected--including classics like Lolita. There are so many reasons why a journal might reject a poem, from being overfull to the poetry reader just having a bad day and refusing everything that came in, that there's a good chance that someone else's castoffs will make a fine journal. Here's hoping they like my offerings.

A Quiz: Vogon Poetry or Flarf

2009-06-29T22:07:00.004-04:00

My last post talked about the Vogon Poetry app for the iPhone. Vogon poetry, if you're familiar with The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is considered the third-worst poetry in the universe. Flarf has come to be known--by one definition anyway--as intentionally bad poetry.

Flarf got the main(stream) stage this month with its inclusion in Poetry alongside conceptual writing and Poetry's regular fare, and when reading it, I saw what I thought were some similarities between Flarf and Vogon poetry. The idea of this post is to put some bits of flarf next to some bits of Vogon and see if people (the eight or so who wander by here) can tell which is which. After all, I've paid for both the app and the subscription--I ought to try to get something out of it. Answers will be at the end of the post.

1. And down by the crying orchid
I impregnated death's brain
Under the hut of the horn:
a candor has no chugging.

2. An apple on my ninja.
Alas! Yet I destructed. I vowed.
If a towel is harmless, can a gravy be extinct?
It was only reading from soy to soup.

3. Glitter is the Swiss Army knife
of the most bedazzlingly ridiculous
emotions: the part just before
the paranoid cheese-maker says,

"Whatever you do in Palm Springs,
don't yodel"

4. Thanks, puncture, for tumbling the reason,
I get to win for another look.
Who was more not particularly good
on that moist mistake?
You who is slurping, or me who ponders you?

5. April 22 is a nice day. I really like it.
I mean it's not as fantastic as that Hitler
unicorn ass but it's pretty special to me.
CREAMING bald eagle there is a tiny Abe
Lincoln boxing a tiny Hitler. MAGIC UNICORNS

6. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it's speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything.

7. O limp steam,
my creative Mainframes to me, and to all sofas--
Are as an informational
INCOMPETENCE
Upon positive hermits; turned, moistly.

And scantily and snootily the filth constructed
Evervate where the hermits restrain
Round an asteroid there tortuously,
The knuckle of candor.

The Vogon poems are constructed by the app, which claims that no two poems are alike. I don't know what algorithms are being used to ensure that, though in some of the examples I didn't include, the program uses nonsense words similar to the kind Douglas Adams used in The Hitchiker's Guide. A linguist could probably give you details about the way those words are built--all I can tell you is that they sound similar. My point is that those words are undoubtedly part of the process to ensure difference in the poems. But overall, the poems tend to read like a Mad Lib combined with a random word generator.

So there's certainly some difference in the construction of the Vogon poems as opposed to Flarf, but what about the finished product? Both are intentionally bad. Does that make Vogon poetry a machine-built Flarf? Does the generator get recognition as the poet or does the programmer? I'm not a Flarfist so I'm not going to speak for them, but it does seem like it's a question worth discussing.

By the way, the answers, for those of you who haven't seen the very limited selection of Flarf that Poetry published, are 1,2,4, and 7 are Vogon and 3,5 and 6 are Flarf.

Vogon Poetry

2009-06-20T12:06:00.003-04:00

I dare say I'm not the only iPhone owner who's also a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--the book, not the film. Smartphones in general seem to be turning into the technology Douglas Adams envisioned all those years ago, and while they may not (yet) provide you with an introduction to Eccentrica Gallumbits of Eroticon Six, they can provide something infinitely more bothersome. Vogon Poetry.

I dropped the three bucks for this app last night, mainly because I saw it and figured, "eh, three bucks." That's a coffee in a lot of places. And it gave me this in return.

Eternity, spark, and morass — the code of the oracle:
To ruefully plummet, or at least salivate enormously with SUGARS,
Don’t suppress my lagoon!
Don’t get my leviathan dreamed of!

The tyrant’s asteroids are hard,
And mucus is like the yellow liquor;
The mainsheets are become ascended, the vow is impersonated by a pickings:
May’st it yet theorize the cold eye-patch.

RABBITS are brawny, hooks are red.
On either delight the pillar breaks cleverly;
monastic pilots of field and of spatter
That endures the cutter and maroons the scallywag;
And through the narwhal the sailor goes by
To ruefully-gaff rigginged document;

Ostensibly and wickedly went the treasure,
risible galaxies and depressed ropes for to pull,
fomenting me with me a most pink captain, well!
Hard, sane mirage!!! That’s what a liquid’s life is about! Phooey!

And haltingly and surreptitiously the driftwood ambled.
Pull where the destructors keelhaul
Round a donation there externally,
The mongrel of faith.

Or that the limes, the supernovae of old
Could but follow their cuttlefishes;
And peculiar in the drunk-CONSTRUCTED cuttlefish
They remain as they were, breathtaking and sadistic.

The app gives you eight different modes to choose from, and promises no two poems will ever be the same. They could be lying, I guess--after all, who could read enough Vogon poetry to challenge the claim?

Crossposted to The Rumpus

On Poetry Reviews

2009-06-06T15:49:00.002-04:00

I like Don Share's take on the issue of poetry reviews mostly because he doesn't try to stake out a "my way is the only way to look at this" position. That appeals to me populist side.

I’m not advocating weeding out the bad from the good in poetry or in anything else; my good is your bad, and vice versa. But one has to know the physiology nonetheless. That’s my point, and in fact I’ve argued elsewhere for the great and enduring value of very bad poetry (which I read in enormous quantities). But I think there’s much to assent to in Joel’s remarks, particularly with regard to “civil society,” which does seem to be vanishing (like sherry-drinking and dressing gowns)… assuming it ever existed, that is.

As I've written here before, I try to stay away from "good" and "bad" when it comes to poetry. I talk more about what I like and what I dislike, what moves me and what doesn't, what I'm able to communicate with and what I feel sealed off from, but I don't like making value judgments about poetry in general because tastes vary, and what I find cold and hermetic may seem vibrant and inclusive to another reader.

When it comes to reviews, I approach the matter from two very different perspectives. When I'm writing a review, I stick with stuff I appreciate. I'm one of those people who will pass on doing a review before writing a negative one. I understand the criticism of taking such a stand, and I'll take the hit, I guess, but I'm not willing to hit another poet for doing something with language that doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather spend my time and effort pointing out poets who are doing stuff I find interesting, who appeal to my aesthetic, who I can communicate with in new and interesting ways. I'm just not a basher when it comes to artistic matters--the number of people who read poetry is already small enough without turning more people off by being dicks to each other.

As Poetry Editor of The Rumpus, though, I have a different approach. For starters, I'm willing to talk to anyone who wants to write a review for me. I won't promise publication, but I'll definitely take a look at your style and see if it fits our mode. If you look at the poetry reviews we've published over the last few months, you'll find that they're largely positive, and even the ones that are less so point out something positive in the writing. I haven't published a completely negative review (though I haven't really been faced with the possibility yet), but I'm not completely opposed to doing it, as long as I feel the review approaches the work honestly and as long as I don't think the reviewer is looking to settle an old score or make it a hate letter. That's a fine line, and I'm sure that at some point I'll publish a review that does just that, and then I'll feel the need to apologize for it. That's the editor's life, though, unless you're only going to publish love letters.

The big challenge for me so far has been making sure that my reviews reflect the diversity of voices in the poetry world, and while I've been trying, I won't say that I've succeeded. I'd like to have more women reviewing for me, as well as people of color, and I'd love to have more books by women and people of color reviewed here. That challenge has made me reach out to communities I'd neglected to in recent years, much to my own loss, and I've really enjoyed both the poets I've discovered and the communication I've had with them as a result.

I'm also trying to get reviews of and by people whose aesthetic I don't share, because the last thing I want The Rumpus to be known for is a single, limited set of voices. I'd love to publish advocates for poetry I don't get, because I'd like to get what they're doing, and I work from the assumption that the problem is mine, and not the poet's.

Padel v. Walcott

2009-05-26T22:35:00.004-04:00

By now it's old news that Ruth Padel has resigned her position as Oxford Professor of Poetry a week after she took the job. She came under fire because she supposedly lied about her involvement in the campaign against Derek Walcott. I refuse to call it a smear campaign as some others have because calling it so would make it seem as if the charges against Walcott were unfounded; the opposite is true. Walcott has been busted at least twice, once at BU and once at Harvard, so reminding the voters at Oxford (which is what I believe Padel was referring to when she said she wasn't involved in the campaign against Walcott) is hardly "dirty pool".

Is a history of sexual harassment enough to disqualify a person from holding such a prominent post? Some of these people say no.

Prof [Hermione] Lee said Byron and Keats would not have been ruled out of such a post: “We are acting as purveyors of poetry not of chastity.”

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature at Oxford, said the anonymous packages were “creepy and unsettling”.

“If we started excluding people on the basis of their peccadilloes there would be no one for us to teach,” she said.

James Fenton, a former professor of poetry at Oxford University, said: “Who but the most bigoted would think that professional issues settled a quarter of a century ago should debar a poet from standing up at a lectern three times a year to give a public lecture on poetry? Who thinks Oxford’s reputation has been enhanced by this unscruplousness?”

To Professor Lee I say only that Keats was a man of his times, and if he were living today, we would have different expectations of him. To Professor Boehmer, I reply that sexual harassment is far more than just a peccadilloe--if Walcott wanted to dress up in a diaper, I wouldn't have an issue with his candidacy. And to Professor Fenton, I suggest he may want to look at the record again. The first public charge came over a quarter century ago, but there have been others since then. That's a pattern of conduct.

It may sound at this point like I'm ready to dump Derek Walcott into the dustbin of poetic history--I'm not. But I am suggesting that his supporters have been far too dismissive of the case against him, and that Walcott could have defused some of this furor by facing up to the charges and apologizing publicly. Had he done so, he'd probably have won the post in a walk, his critics would have been silenced, and his supporters wouldn't be reduced to making such ludicrous argument in his defense.

In the end, no one wins here. Walcott is still Walcott, Padel is still the first woman to hold the post, but for perhaps the shortest tenure ever, and whoever winds up with the post will be remembered, if at all, as the third choice who was brought in to clean up the mess. And neat, tidy types don't leave a memorable mark, generally speaking.

Oh great

2009-05-23T18:58:00.001-04:00

Another page I'll have to keep with reading regularly.

Lots of truth in this

2009-05-08T14:23:00.001-04:00

Wislawa Symborska, via Poetry Dispatch:

To Mr. Br. K. of Laski: “Your poems in prose are permeated by the figure of the Great Poet who creates his remarkable works in a state of alcoholic euphoria. We might take a wild guess at whom you have in mind, but it’s not last names that concern us in the final analysis. Rather, it’s the misguided conviction that alcohol facilitates the act of writing, emboldens the imagination, sharpens wits, and performs many other useful functions in abetting the bardic spirit. My dear Mr. K., neither this poet, nor any of the others personally known to us, nor indeed any other poet has ever written anything great under the unadulterated influence of hard liquor. All good work arose in painstaking, painful sobriety, without any pleasant buzzing in the head. ‘I’ve always got ideas, but after vodka my head aches,’ Wyspianski said. If a poet drinks, it’s between one poem and the next. This is the stark reality. If alcohol promoted great poetry, then every third citizen of our nation would be a Horace at least. Thus we are forced to explode yet another legend. We hope that you will emerge unscathed from beneath the ruins.”

Indeed. Go read the whole collection, especially if you teach creative writing. It might become your textbook.

Sweet Jeebus

2009-05-01T00:35:00.008-04:00

National Poetry Month is over. Whew. I actually squeezed out the 30 poems in 30 days, no cheating or using previously written material. I'll admit, there have been years where I haven't produced thirty drafts of poems, good or bad, and that can't continue. It's the most condensed period of writing I've ever done, and it was tough given the end of the term and the new responsibilities I took on over at The Rumpus. It's been brutal at times, and I will admit that not all of what I wrote will likely survive to be revised or sent out. But it was a good exercise all the same, and one I plan to repeat more than once in the coming year.

So now starts the task of revision, submission, and putting together another manuscript. It never ends, and I'm glad for it.

P.S. Ive tried posting this for five days now. Here's hoping it works tonight.

Challenge: Haiku

2009-04-21T14:43:00.002-04:00

Today's prompt at Poetic Asides was haiku, a form I've never been fond of. I never quite knew why I wasn't fond of it--it was more a visceral thing for me--but Jim Murdoch has outlined some pretty good reasons for disliking it, at least as it's generally understood. I'm going to take a longer look at what he's talking about, though, because there's some promise in futching with the form, I think.

But for this exercise, I stuck with the tradition, even if it's a messed up one, and the subject matter is the thing that's overwhelming me at the moment--the last week and a half of the Spring semester here at Our Fair University.

Haikus for the last week of classes

The end of Spring term:
my ambient noise setting
is Buddhist morning.

I'd rather sweep, mop,
pull weeds, sift the litter box,
than grade these essays.

It's raining today,
though not the rainy season.
No escape for me.

Coffee wakes me up
but the dose necessary
makes my comments poor.

Squirrel in the palm
looks in my window, chitters,
mocks. Hawk swooping by.

Alone in the class,
I count the minutes, seconds,
'til the bus is due.

My first flarf?

2009-04-17T18:36:00.003-04:00

This is written as part of the Poetic Asides National Poetry Month writing challenge. I wasn't all that into the prompt, and this came out, perhaps a bit snarkier than I intended, but there it is.

All I want is

peace love and understanding
and this lamp,
the breeze off the ocean,
noise putty,
a loaf of bread, a jug of wine,
more hair (except on my back),
sharks with fricking laserbeams attached to their heads,
a pair of really comfortable shoes,
Boo-Berry,
an iPhone rolling on twenty-twos,
the question for which 42 is the answer,
less foot pain,
the movie rights,
forgiven student loans,
more visitors to my blog,
a cup of coffee that tastes as good as it smells,
Velveeta.

If flarf is intentionally bad poetry, then I think this qualifies, though it certainly wouldn't be my first flarf piece. That would probably be my "Sonnet to Sausage," mercifully unpublished all these years.

Mr. Cogito On Upright Attitudes

2009-04-14T22:41:00.003-04:00

1

In Utica
the citizens
don’t want to defend themselves

in town an epidemic broke out
of the instinct of self-preservation

the temple of freedom
has been changed into a flea market

the senate is deliberating
how not to be a senate

the citizens
don’t want to defend themselves
they are attending accelerated courses
on falling to the knees

passively they wait for the enemy
they write obsequious speeches
bury their gold

they sew new flags
innocently white
teach their children to lie

they have opened the gates
through which enters now
a column of sand

aside from that as usual
commerce and copulation

2

Mr Cogito
would like to stand up
to the situation

which means
to look fate
straight in the eyes

like Cato the Younger
see in the Lives

however he doesn’t have
a sword
nor the opportunity
to send his family overseas

therefore he waits like the others
walks back and forth in a sleepless room

despite the advice of the Stoics
he would like to have a body of diamond
and wings

he looks through the window
as the sun of the Republic
is about to set

little remained for him
in fact only
the choice of position
in which he wants to die

the choice of a gesture
choice of a last word

this is why he doesn’t go
to bed
in order to avoid
suffocation in sleep

to the end he would like
to stand up to the situation

fate looks him in the eyes
in the place where there was
his head

Zbigniew Herbert
Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter

Miller in the Times

2009-04-13T21:46:00.002-04:00

Miller Williams was the reason I went to Arkansas, and he sat on my thesis committee as well, so I'm glad to see him get a little love from the NY Times for his latest book.

His latest collection, “Time and the Tilting Earth,” offers many pleasures. Chief among these are Williams’s way of entwining the pure earthiness of language as it’s spoken with rigorous metrical precision, and, analogously, his affection for the quotidian, with an insistence on confronting unanswerable but unavoidable existential problems. In poem after poem, he mingles the low and the high in both form and content, bringing a sense of cleareyed practicality to life’s big questions and a keenly honed poetic technique to the cadences of Arkansas porch talk.

Glad to see that he's still plugging away after all these years.

Regret by John Casteen

2009-04-09T20:30:00.001-04:00

REGRET

This life, it is like conducting
the symphony of a warring country;
the cellist has been shot through the wrist it’s all in,
the horn player has buried his child
and sworn off music.

The conductor will never hear his piece as he hears it.
Sometimes I wake between three and four, these winter nights,
clenching tightly the what-is-not-there,
and I can’t negotiate with that kind of failure.
Outside the wind is roaring at the house.

I had to throw away someone I loved.
The thing that I said at first, about the conductor?
Such a man has no cause to expect redemption.
Fine. So I’ll never understand anything.
So this life, it’s never going to explain anything.

Testing, testing

2009-04-05T15:01:00.001-04:00

We're migrating our sites to a new host and this is one way of checking it out. Fingers crossed.

I find myself in a poetry feud

2009-04-03T16:01:00.004-04:00

I'm glad to see that Micah Mattix has responded to my criticism of his article from a couple of days ago. His response misses the point, but I'm glad there's a conversation going on.

So here's what Mattix didn't like. On his first point, about there being too much money in poetry, he replies:

The fact is, if you add up all of the lectureships and professorships at creative writing programs at universities, and add this figure to fellowships and prizes, there are more institutional funds (both private and public) devoted to poetry than ever before.

None of which negates my point, which is that poetry isn't overfunded. Let me introduce you to a simple concept--funding can be at its highest point ever and still be too low. Like I said, no one's getting rich on poetry, and in fact, most of the young poets I know are struggling to make ends meet, even the ones outside academia, and trust me, there are a lot of poets outside academia because there sure as hell aren't enough jobs in academia to support the current poet population, even if you shift most of them into adjunct and composition jobs. As far as jobs in creative writing are concerned, well, the market makes crap look good--in the last job cycle, about half the already meager pickings were canceled or put on hold due to budget constraints. About the only genre seeing growth is creative non-fiction, and even there the pickings are slim.

Dana Gioia no doubt celebrates this fact, as he argues that MFA programs are basically a bane on poetry's existence, even though he had no problem sucking that teat before he became director of the NEA in 2001. My one personal experience with Gioia involved picking him up at the Highfill airport in Cave Springs, Arkansas, so he could spend a week with the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, making a few extra bucks running a workshop and giving a reading. Pardon me if I find Gioia's argument less than convincing.

To Mattix and Bethell, I simply reply that retracing a flawed argument does nothing to fix the flaws in it. If anything, it only makes those flaws more apparent. The fact is that there are more independent, outward looking voices, presses and journals now than there ever have been, in large part because the cost of entry has become much lower thanks to the internet and print-on-demand services.

As to the rest, I'll be damned if I can see where I engaged in an ad hominem attack, unless suggesting that he used a less than comprehensive set of examples to make his point constitutes one. Here's some of the rest of his response.

Contrary to what Spears implies, I think there are indeed some very good poets writing today (as I thought I made clear in my original piece). I have written reviews on some of them myself (even in so-called post-avant publications such as Octopus Magazine), and think that poets such as David Shapiro, Adam Kirsch, Scott Cairns, Franz Wright, Mark Jarman, Theodore Worozbyt, Timothy Steele and Peter Porter, to name a few pell-mell, are writing some of the best poems out there. These poets, it seems to me, do not reject narrative progression or formal devices for simplistic ideological reasons, but use (as well as bend) them because such things are part of what makes lyric poetry poetry — and not, say, a painting.

The problem with contemporary American poetry, however, is that there are also a lot of mediocre poets. One of the reasons for this, I think, is the influence of philosophical materialism. Silliman was an example of the effects of materialism on the arts, but its effects can be seen in non-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets as well.

First of all, I neither said nor suggested that Mattix had said there were no good poets writing today. What I said was that he ought to broaden his reading list if he thinks philosophical materialism dominates the contemporary landscape, and I stand by that. I didn't deny that what Mattix complained about exists--I simply noted that it's neither the only thing going on nor even the biggest thing going on.

The thing that defines contemporary poetry right now is that there isn't really a dominant school of thought, Silliman's complaints about the School of Quietude notwithstanding. The world of poetry is incredibly fractured right now, but I consider that to be its strength, because it allows for a far greater range of voices to be heard and for much more crossing over between groups. It makes for a livelier art.

Mattix complains that there are a lot of mediocre poets, to which I can only reply, no kidding. There have always been a lot of mediocre poets. They published in their times as well, and were promptly forgotten by the next generation of readers of poetry, if not their own generation. I'm reminded of a poem by Miller Williams titled "A Note to the English Poets of the Seventeenth Century" which reads, in part:

Someone in every century has to stand there
saying, No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry
I'm sorry.
You've gone as far as you can go.
...
and some
reading the three or four that make it through
will shake their heads and say
as even now we do
(having I think already turned back a few)
"They didn't have many poets, but they were great."

I'm not going to insult Mattix by suggesting that he would argue the sentiment in that final line, but his statement does have a hint of nostalgia to it, to the notion that in previous times, back when there wasn't all this money in poetry or all this philosophical materialism, that there were fewer mediocre poets, when there's absolutely nothing to back that contention up.

Next point. Mattix writes:

Second, he is indeed a rather important figure in contemporary American poetry, despite Spears’s breezy dismissal. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is probably the most widely known experimental poetry movement in America since the 1960s, and as of January 2009, Silliman’s blog on contemporary poetics had received two million visits. That’s right, two million. Not too bad for a poet no one ever reads.

Okay, this is just dishonest. First off, I never dismissed Silliman--I said that he, along with Charles Bernstein, represents a segment of the poetic world today, as opposed to being the dominant voice. Hell, I was ecstatic when I discovered that Silliman had linked to me, because he drives traffic. But it's also important to understand that pointing to blog hits isn't the best way to make a point.

Ron Silliman is huge online, and no one questions that he's a major voice in poetry today, but he's big online for more than just his poetics. He's an aggregator, and I love that--he's one of my sources of stories for my weekly column at The Rumpus, and that works like a feedback loop. Also, Silliman has no problems linking to people he disagrees with, which widens his appeal. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Silliman is abrasive toward what he calls the School of Quietude, and that controversy drives traffic. Lots of people come to Silliman's blog to argue with him, not to agree with him or hang on his every word. That's about as close to a universal truth as you can find on the internet, no matter what subject you write about.

Finally, I want to comment on one last point Mattix makes.

There are of course, a number of other influences on poets, but I do think it is pretty clear that philosophical materialism has been one of the more important ones in the last fifty years or so. In the context of this, the contemporary poet is often left with the choice of following the example of the hard-nosed L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, or seeming like a fluffy, nostalgic Longfellow. The latter is often the charge leveled against so-called “popular” poets, who evoke things like the self and love uncritically. Sometimes this charge is warranted, sometimes not. While there are certainly some very good poets out there who have managed to avoid this false dichotomy, the effects of philosophical materialism on poetry have not been positive.

I like how Mattix sets up a dichotomy, then tries to get away from it by saying "some have managed to avoid it." Indeed. In fact, I'd say most manage to avoid it, which is why I suggested Mattix ought to expand his reading list, as opposed to sticking with those poets who confirm his biases (maybe that was the ad hominem attack?). If your favorites are Franz Wright, Mark Jarman and Tim Steele, and the people you don't like are June Jordan, Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, then you're missing out on, well, most of poetry right now, and I suspect that the world of philosophical materialism isn't as pervasive as you think it is.

Spring Cleaning

2009-04-02T23:47:00.001-04:00

By Melvin Dixon

First goes floordust, then newspapers
stacked near the bed. Peanut shells
swept out of hiding between mattress
and rug. Toenails clipped.
Sprouts of a beard shaved off.
With hourly glasses of Deer Park Water
and the barest of food, the body
sheds winter fat and filler.

The hair goes next, close
to the gleaming, gleaming skull.
You are ready for the sun
and the salt-tongued air.

You are someone new. I will be
someone new, like you, and promise
not to hear the rattle our bones make
moving from empty closets
and all through the room.

Do what now?

2009-04-01T14:46:00.003-04:00

Micah Mattix says he's got the problem with contemporary poetry all figured out--well, he and Tom Bethell of The American Spectator, anyway, and while I can't be certain that TAS's reputation for accuracy in politics extends to poetry, I might make some guesses based on this argument. Are you ready?

The problem with contemporary poetry, particularly with the avant-garde, is...wait for it...

There's too much money involved in it.

Why are there, Bethell wonders, so many mediocre poets today? Following Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia, his answer is prizes, subsidies, grants, lectureships and professorships. There is too much money in poetry. It offers poor or mediocre poets too many opportunities to write and publish, and it encourages many otherwise good poets to pose as avant-garde artists–to write against their audience rather than for it–because it increases their chances of getting such fellowships and prizes.

Indeed, one of the ironies of art today is that there is little financial risk involved in being avant-garde. Unlike the first avant-garde artists who supposedly created works to challenge the commercialization of art, such a move today is very much the first step in making it commercially, in terms of fellowships and grants. Cut back on the cash, Bethell claims, and purge the country of a legion of Miles Coverdales.

To be fair to Mattix, he says there's a bigger problem than too much money, though he certainly doesn't disagree with Bethell's premise. And just so we're clear on something, there isn't too much money in poetry--no one is getting rich off this genre, and few are even supplementing their incomes with it. And most poetry is published on a break-even basis, if not a loss. Now it seems pretty clear that Bethell is not a populist when it comes to poetry, so perhaps his point is that if you get the money out of poetry, you leave only people wealthy enough to pursue it as a hobby, and that will suit his aims just fine, thank you very much. But I doubt it would improve the world of poetry any.

Mattix's larger problem with contemporary poetry is a more disturbing one, in my view. Bethell can be dismissed with a laugh, because anyone who looks at the actual money involved in poetry these days, especially on the avant-garde side of things, can easily tell that Bethell is full of it. Mattix however...

Bethell writes that “Creativity unaccountably waxes and wanes at different times and places.” This is not entirely true. There is a reason it is waning now and, it seems to me, it has to do with the sterile ground of philosophical materialism for the arts.

Philosophical materialism is the belief that the material world, as the word “material” is currently defined, is the only thing that exists in the proper sense of the term. It reduces the spiritual to the material and universal morals to mere politics (often leftist politics). Love, for example, becomes nothing more than a word we use to refer to certain chemical reactions in the brain. It does not exist in the materialist sense of the term. The materialist poet, therefore, does not write about love qua love. Instead, he flirts with language, writing poem after poem of mere surface language play that produce superficial frissons without engaging us at a deeper, more meaningful level. The political poet, on the other hand, rails against the oppression of a particular group. The stronger the outrage, the more effective the poem at accomplishing its political purpose, and, therefore, by the implied theory of poetry at work here, the better the poem.

All I can really say is that Mattix needs to read more contemporary poetry, rather than sticking to only those poets who confirm his biases. He mentions Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein and June Jordan by name, and they are, to say the least, a narrow sliver of contemporary poetry. Don't get me wrong--L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (and its descendants) is still a powerful force in the poetic world (though not one I feel a part of), and there are still lots of poets who rail against oppression the way Jordan did, though perhaps not with her ferocity, but pick up nearly any mainstream journal and you'll find pages upon pages of poems which engage on deep, meaningful levels--and sometimes they even do it in traditional forms. Shocking, I know.

And Mattix's criticism of both L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and political poetry is off the mark as well. The former is capable of engaging at a deep, meaningful level--it just makes you work a little harder to get it, and to look for clues in ways you might not expect at first--and Mattix is simply caricaturing political poetry, so it's difficult to know if he's being honest or if he's playing to the kind of audience who would read The American Spectator. The use of the term "leftist politics" makes me suspect the latter.

The darkly funny thing about Mattix's piece, though, is the way he ends it. His solution?

I think critics need to do more to discover those poets and artists who are, indeed, doing good work. While it is the job of the critic to tear down, it is also his job to build up–even if he has to search far and wide for a poet that is worthy of praise.

Critic, heal thyself.

National Poetry Month

2009-04-01T01:52:00.002-04:00

So it's April again, time for a host of news articles which once again reference the opening lines of "The Waste Land." I've been in a dry spell as far as writing goes lately--too many other things crowding out my writing time, though the responsibility is mine. So I'm using this month to generate a lot of new stuff, as are a lot of other people, by taking part in NaPoWriMo, or Poem-a-day activities. Poetic Asides, which is the poetry blog of the company which publishes Writer's Digest, is offering a prompt a day, along with a contest. I plan to take part in that one, and perhaps post some of the work I do here as well, though I make no promises.

I'm a Poetry Populist

2009-03-29T02:05:00.002-04:00

Before I started doing my weekly column for The Rumpus, my contact with the poetic blogosphere was very limited. I linked to Mark Scroggins's Culture Industry and read his posts more because he's a colleague of mine than anything else. And even though I'm now the Poetry Editor for The Rumpus, I still don't really consider myself part of the online poetic conversation. I don't have time for it, for one, and frankly, I don't have the stomach for it either.

The big thing I've learned from having to discover this world of poetry online is just how testy it can be. There's nastiness in poetry that rivals the ugliness in the political blogosphere, and over what seems to me to be considerably less important stuff.

I'm convinced that at least part of the reason for this is due to some pretty hardcore genre policing. Lots of people seem determined to carve out a claim as the "new direction of poetry" or "the only serious poetics," as though there isn't room enough in the genre for multiple serious directions for poetry.

Obviously, I think there's a problem with this attitude, mostly because what other people seem to see as uncrossable divides I see as differences in taste. And differences in taste, it seems to me, aren't worth fighting over. There's room in the genre for all sorts--even for stuff I don't get, and more importantly, stuff I don't like. I'd like to think that I'm not arrogant enough to determine what is and isn't a poem. Some people don't have that problem.

I'm taking a chance here, going after something Marjorie Perloff says--after all, she's a respected scholar and theorist, and could probably destroy me in a debate on pretty much any subject, with the hip-hop lyrics of the 80s perhaps being the exception. But I am going to take issue here with what she says about Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural poem, even though I was no great fan of it either. Perloff asks "What does it mean that we have a society that would consider that a poem?" Well, I'd say it means we have a society that doesn't get an awful lot of exposure to what you consider poetry. Professor Perloff argues that "Praise Song for the Day" wasn't a poem--indeed, she says "there's nothing about it that meets anybody's criteria for poetry." Okay, so I'm nobody.

Look, I think one can reasonably argue that Alexander's poem wasn't very challenging, and can certainly argue that her performance of it left a lot to be desired, but I think it's a little ridiculous to claim that it wasn't a poem. It certainly had formal structure and meter--those elements might not have been as pronounced as Professor Perloff would have liked, but they were there nonetheless, and when the interviewer, at about three and a half minutes in told her of Alexander's appearance on the Colbert Report, where she explained the form of the poem and the intent of it (and he did so in an equally sneery, insider way), Perloff dismisses Alexander's statement as pretentious. How's that work?

But I'm a populist on these matters. I think there's room for Elizabeth Alexander's poetry--which speaks to a particular audience--and there's room for what Professor Perloff considers poetry and lots more besides. I want to widen the scope of what can be considered poetry, not narrow it. Perloff argues that poetry has been harmed by this, that it has been denigrated, removed from its place atop the world of the written arts. I think that poetry is already speaking to such a small audience that to further narrow its appeal is to make it even less relevant. But more importantly (at least to me), I don't think anyone or any group ought to assume the power to determine what is or isn't poetry.

Say you don't like something--sure. Say it lacks vigor or intellectual depth--fine. Say you just don't like it--awesome. There's way more poetry out there that I don't like than I do. Just because I accept that something is a poem doesn't mean I've put my personal stamp of approval on it. But what Perloff and people who agree with her are saying is that there is some objective standard by which poetry can and must be measured, and that they are the arbiters of that standard, and I can't accept that.

Fortunately, I don't have to. Poems are still being written, books are still being read, poets are still taking part in the vibrant world of poetic expression, whether or not everyone approves of the kind of work they're doing. And I hope they (and I) keep it up.

The Rumpus Interview with Mary Rosenberg

2009-03-15T10:04:00.002-04:00

Amy and I have written about the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizes here in the past--they're very generous prizes that started up five years ago and are having a tremendous impact on the world of poetry simply because of the amounts of money involved. The Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund has given out upwards of $650K in the last five years, and for poets, that's a big deal, since most of us are fairly broke most of the time.

Earlier this year during some other correspondence with Mary Rosenberg, who manages the contest, I asked her for an interview for The Rumpus, and the result is here. I found her to be generous and thoughtful--just the kind of person I want running a contest I'm entered in. She's the kind of person who looks for reasons to like a poem as opposed to dismiss it, and maybe that has something to do with the fact that she's not really interested in creating a legacy for herself in the poetry business. At the end of our interview, she wrote (because we did this via email) "Encouragement is what it’s all about on my side: faith and persistence on theirs [contest entrants]." Even if I hadn't done the interview, I'd recommend the interview.

Crossposted from Incertus

since feeling is first

2009-03-06T03:41:00.004-05:00

I first came across E. E. Cummings in high school, like many people have, and he had an immediate effect on me. He was so different from the rest of the stuff I'd been reading in my classes that he shook me to the core, and made me want to write poetry just like his. I grew out of that, thankfully, but he's never stopped being a favorite of mine. The first book of poetry I ever bought was a selected verse--I have it to this day, dogeared and having survived more moves than I can count.

This poem in particular was one that stuck with me from the beginning--I copied it onto my English folder, and I memorized it as well. I'm no good at that sort of thing, mind you. I've memorized probably three poems of any length in my entire life, and two have come mostly because I've taught them so often. (I don't count "The Red Wheelbarrow" because it's what, 16 words?) I can mostly get "Channel Firing" and Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130" and that's about it--except for this one.

What I love about the poem is the way Cummings sets up the two worlds of love or emotion and reason at odds with each other, and the way he used words outside their expected syntax to get this across, like the way he uses "first" in the opening line as prominence, as if he's saying "since emotion is the most important thing." This declaration sets up the rest of the poem--it assumes the position the poet is taking is the correct one and proceeds to argue for it. It's the logical fallacy of "begging the question," to be sure, but since reason is going to be set aside anyway, it makes a peculiar sort of sense for this poem.

So let's look closer at the opening lines:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you

He's saying here that since emotion, love, feeling is primary, the person who pays attention to the logical structure of things--the syntax--will never wholly kiss you, or, will never be willing to abandon him or herself completely to emotion. Put your trust in logic and you'll lose the chance to really be overwhelmed by love.

And with this in mind, Cummings evokes the heart by saying "my blood approves / and kisses are a better fate / than wisdom." He's turned the decision making over to the seat of emotion, the blood, and is so enraptured by love that he'd rather have that than wisdom. He reiterates this when he says "the best gesture of my brain is less than / your eyelid's flutter which says // we are for each other." I saw a guy on YouTube a few days ago complaining about this line, saying that it played into gender stereotypes about males being logical and women being emotional, but I think he missed the point of the poem. First of all, there's nothing definitively male about the speaker--it's only in a heteronormative setting that we make that assumption--but more than that, Cummings has already spent a lot of time in this poem making clear that he's comparing logic and reason to emotion, so why should we depart from that reading to make this about men and women now? He's saying that emotion--the "eyelid's flutter which says we are for each other"--is superior to logic and reason--"the best gesture of my brain."

It's probably not a great way to live every day of your life--logic and reason do have their places, and it would be as silly to abandon oneself completely to emotion as it would have been for Marlowe's nymph to run away with her passionate shepherd without at least asking a question or two about their winter quarters--but it is a nice way of looking at these two parts of the human psyche and noting that, in some cases at least, it's good to let go of the syntax at times.

So, new project

2009-02-25T20:51:00.002-05:00

As if I don't already have enough on my plate, I've started this, titled "Helen Webster's Diary." Helen Webster is, I believe, a great grandmother of mine, who was a teenager in the 1890s. Beyond that, I know nothing. My grandmother's sister (great-aunt? I can never keep these things straight) found this diary probably ten years ago and photocopied it for everyone in the family who wanted a copy. My sister passed it along to me, as a curiosity of sorts, and it's been sitting in a portable file cabinet ever since. I'd long planned to transcribe it, but frankly, the job seemed overwhelming, especially since the handwriting is small and has gone through the photocopier a few times.

But then I saw this story and was inspired. I'll just start a basic blog and post a new diary entry every day. And I find myself approaching this not as a task, but as a joy. I've had to force myself not to transcribe more than a day at a time, and in fact, I find myself deliberately delaying the transcription so as to increase the pleasure I'm getting from it so far.

I've put three entries up so far, and plan to run this until it's done. It's a way of making the diary more permanent, I guess, and if other people get a kick out of following Helen Webster's diary, that's lagniappe.

Review at Rattle

2009-02-23T17:38:00.003-05:00

Back in the old times, before I was the poetry editor at The Rumpus (what do you mean it's only been a month?), I wrote a review of Carole Simmons Oles' book Waking Stone for Rattle Magazine. Here's a taste:

Waking Stone by Carole Simmons Oles, published by the University of Arkansas Press, doesn’t have any titles quite as detailed as Whitehead’s, but the spirit is the same. Oles’ book is largely an examination of the life of the 19th century sculptor Harriet Hosmer. Most of the poems are written in Hosmer’s voice and focus on the challenges Hosmer faced as a woman in a male-dominated field. She pulls from Hosmer’s letters and other sources to produce a solid, sturdy book of poems.

Go read the rest...

Happy Belated Birthday, Mr. Stegner

2009-02-19T09:16:00.001-05:00

Timothy Egan notes in the NY Times that yesterday was Wallace Stegner's 100th birthday. I must confess that I learned more about Stegner in that column than I did in the two years I held a fellowship he helped found and which carried his name, so let me make up for it by thanking his memory here.

I owe a tremendous debt to Wallace Stegner and his fellowship. Without it, I'd probably never have lived in San Francisco, and it's doubtful I'd have the job I currently hold. I never would have met the people I met out there, which means my life would be much less rich than it is. And I'm not just talking about the writers--I'd probably never have worked at Anchor Brewing, met Fritz Maytag and Chris Solomon, and all the rest. I'd never have discovered the beauty in Old Potrero rye whiskey, or seen the sun come up over the Bay, walked the Golden Gate Bridge in both sun and fog, seen Barry Bonds hit his 700th home run, watched antique smut at the Red Vic theater in the Haight. I'd never have played in a real band, even if I was only the backup rhythm guitarist.

But then there were the writers--teachers like W. S. DiPiero and Ken Fields and Eavan Boland. I met Thom Gunn not long before he died, and saw why people like to see Billy Collins read, even if they aren't wild about his poetry. And my peers--poets with whom I'm still in contact both personally and through their work, people I respect and admire and care for on a personal level.

I'd never have been on C-SPAN's BookTV, and by extension, wouldn't now be poetry editor of The Rumpus, since Stephen Elliott is responsible for both those things, and I met him through the Stegner Fellowship.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I owe a huge chunk of my present life to Wallace Stegner, and I've been remiss in not reading his work. I'm going to rectify that, starting today. Happy Birthday, Mr. Stegner.

Shameless self promotion

2009-02-14T17:37:00.003-05:00

The official awards page is up for the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizes, and I'm on the list. It's a poem that grew out of my visit to see my daughter graduate from high school last year, so that makes it feel a little more special.

Congrats to everyone who won, particularly to my personal friends Alison Pelegrin and Robin Ekiss.

The only downside of this contest, as far as I'm concerned, is that I can't enter it anymore. I snuck in under the age restriction this past year--by one day--and so am now officially too old to be considered for this prize. Same goes for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Ah, that's when you know you've officially hit middle age--when contests won't take your entry fees anymore.

Rumpus Time

2009-02-12T07:14:00.001-05:00

My review of Dan Albergotti's The Boatloads just went up at The Rumpus. Here's a taste:

I have a special place in my heart for literature that juxtaposes the sacred and profane, that challenges perhaps the most successful meme ever to spring from the human brain: the belief that God is unwaveringly good.

That’s the matter at the heart of Dan Albergotti’s first collection of poems, The Boatloads, winner of the 2007 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. The one constant in The Boatloads is doubt—doubt about God’s benevolence, about His existence, about the speaker’s worthiness of the blessings he has received—and in a world where certainty is fleeting, doubt plays an increasingly pivotal role.

More here.

New Piece up at The Rumpus

2009-01-21T18:20:00.002-05:00

I've had my ass handed to me so many times when I write about poetry that I'm a little gun-shy, but for some unknown reason, I've written a piece about Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" over at The Rumpus. Here's a taste.

As a poet, I appreciate the gesture made toward the arts when the President-elect asks a poet to present a work at his or her inauguration. I’m as big a dork for it as there is—it’s rare that the art form I’ve chosen to work almost exclusively in gets that kind of exposure.

But I’m starting to think that it’s just not working, that maybe the limited history of the Inaugural Poem is enough to tell us to quit while we’re… well, if not ahead, at least not too far behind. Read the rest...

Crossposted at Incertus

I love Julia Alvarez

2009-01-18T01:53:00.004-05:00

I've liked her poetry for a long while, but I especially love what she's done with the AP's request for an inaugural poem. I've written before about my problems with Frost's poem for Kennedy, and it shouldn't be a surprise that I wasn't alone. Alvarez voiced many of the same reservations, though in a far better--and poetic--way than I did. Here's her poem:

The land was never ours, nor we the land's:
no, not in Selma, with the hose turned on,
nor in the valley picking the alien vines.
Nor was it ours in Watts, Montgomery--
no matter what the frosty poet said.
We heard the crack of whips, the mothers' moans
in anthems like an undertow of grief.
The land was never ours but we believed
a King's dream might some day become a deed
to what we did not own, though it owed us.
(Who had the luxury to withhold himself?)
No gift outright for us, we earned this land
with sorrow's currency: our hands, our backs,
our Rosas, Martins, Jesses, our Baracks.
Today we give our land what we withheld:
the right at last to call itself one nation.

I'm teaching occasional poetry in my Poetic Forms class in a couple of weeks, and I planned to bring in the inaugural poems anyway. I'm adding this one to the list.

W. D. Snodgrass, 1926-2009

2009-01-14T13:29:00.004-05:00

W. D. Snodgrass died yesterday at his home in upstate New York. I can't say I know a lot of his work. I've only taught a poem or two of his in the past, but I can say that I recognize a bit of myself in his poem "April Inventory". I'm a bit older than Snodgrass was when he wrote that poem--about 9 years, judging by the copyright date--but working as I do on a college campus, I can certainly relate to these lines:

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

That feeling has been driven home particularly well this year since my daughter started college. That, combined with my teaching of Freshman Composition for the first time in a couple of years, really made me feel old. I actually had a student in my class who had been a classmate of my daughter when she lived with me after Hurricane Katrina. No more fooling myself into thinking that I had something in common with my students--all the hip-hop listening in the world won't bridge that gap, I'm afraid.

The poem, in the end, is about coming to grips with the differences between one's expectations and the realities of one's life, and accepting them. The poem concludes:

There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

That's a pretty ending, if not particularly illuminating, but given that the poem has a touch of the mid-life crisis in it while the poet is barely thirty-one, I guess I can forgive it.

Poetic Lives Online: Random Poetry Links

2009-01-12T13:33:00.003-05:00

The following is a new feature I'll be doing every week for The Rumpus. I'll be cross-posting them here in the hopes that I might actually do some po-blogging of my own, instead of focusing so much on Incertus. Thanks to Stephen Elliott for giving me the shot.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama swiftly approaching (though not swiftly enough for some), the return of an inaugural poet/poem has gotten some play. Josh Corey has a "Poem for the Inaugural Poem and Marianne Amoss provides some background on just what Poets Laureate do, aside from the occasional poem. And sticking with the world of politics and literature, I'll be chewing over these remarks from Marjorie Perloff at the recent MLA on the importance of close reading for a while.

I want Meg Hamill's book, Death Notices, based on nothing more than this review. You'll have to scroll down for it.

Susan Schultz has some interesting musings on looking at a book of poetry as an artifact, especially in the classroom, and Able Muse has a wide-ranging interview with poet/translator Geoffrey Brock, which covers the intersections between translation and poetry, the difficulties of political poems, and the emergence of a new poetics--Post-Newism.

And finally, Linebreak is almost a year old, which means it's about time they reject some more of my poems. There are some good poems in their archive.

If you have any suggestions for inclusion in this column, which will appear (roughly) once a week, share them with me at briankspears-at-gmail-dot-com.

Breaking radio silence

2008-12-16T16:59:00.002-05:00

Two new publications to mention. My first ever accepted prose poem, "Pastoral," was taken by Quarterly West, and will appear next year, and I also had an acceptance from Center, a poem titled "Sedimentary." If they're available online, I'll be sure to post links to them. And now that both the semester and the election are over, I hope to post a bit more on poems here.

The Road Less Travelled

2008-11-18T22:31:00.003-05:00

Blogger Amanda Marcotte likes to write about a phenomenon she calls the "nice guy," a man who complains about how women like bad boys and don't like "nice guys" like him, and how he deserves sex with some hot chick just for not treating her like scum. There's a particularly funny post about it here. Alan Jenkins captures the essence of "nice guy" in his poem "The Road Less Travelled," a double-sonnet-plus that reads like part break-up letter, part justification for a staid life.

Jenkins poem begins by defining what the speaker is not:

I've never scaled the heights of Macchu Picchu with a backpack,
or trekked through India, breakfasting on hunger,
or listened in the African night to the insects' claptrap,
smoked a peace pipe on Big Sure, or surfed Down Under.

The rest of the first sonnet follows in much the same fashion--I'm not Indiana Jones, he seems to say, though your friends are, and you're terribly interested in their lives. He concludes the first sonnet with the couplet, in parentheses, "(I always sent my greetings from a caffe, camera or chambre / with a view of the Rose Window, Bridge of Sighs, Alhambra...)" His speaker doesn't even go to these places, which to a Londoner aren't particularly exotic--rather, he goes to a coffee shop or rents a room nearby, and looks at them from a distance. He's unwilling to commit even to a visit.

But commitment is what he wants from his partner, and he spends the next sonnet bemoaning her fascination with her friends who are spending days in Guam or San Francisco or Das-es-Salaam. Those are the bad boys, you see, sucking up all the excitement, always traveling to distant places, leaving her behind while he's steady, you see? He's constant. He's there for her, dammit, and he refuses to be taken for granted anymore.

I can get it clear: how one day you'll move earth and heaven
to have me here, but I'll have changed tack, I'll be gone

in search of some more fascinating place or person.
I'll have made a fresh start, with not thought, now, of failure,
it won't be my emotions that you play on (or rehearse on).

Because she doesn't deserve him, you see? And when he's gone, she'll be sorry, because then she'll recognize just how great he really was. This speaker goes on and on about the little things he did for her--the tea in bed, the "Dance to Morning"--but the tone is that of a guy who is trying to justify his stolid, unadventurous life by claiming that putting on a record of "El cant des ocells" by Casals is somehow as exciting as the lives her friends are experiencing in distant locales.

Even the songs of galahs and kookaburras in his suburban garden can't make this guy worth hanging around for, though he feels like she ought to appreciate just what he's trying to give her, just like any Nice Guy would.

Something I've been working on lately.

2008-10-17T22:13:00.001-04:00

Since I haven't posted in a while.

Accord
-after Stephen Dunn

My car a chrysalis, metallic blue,
patches of peeling clear-coat,
home-tinted windows rolling
at the edges, but mine, my sacred
place. I ate and drank there, parked
under trees, windows down, key
on ACC so the tape player
would take me to places too cool
for radio to know, bucket seat
my La-Z-Boy. Even the name,
Accord, was peaceful, the machine
a link to a land I would never see
but might if I was willing to drive
far enough, freedom bound only
by the miles of roads unknown.
At night, on roads bounded by pine trees
and what lived in them, limned by moon
and stars and low-beams, wind-rush
over the side-view mirror up a sleeve
pulls shirt away from skin, wind
glorious in the hair and the crickets
and frogs loud in the dark I could
almost taste life free of church
and family and duty and job,
a heart hungry to sleep free
of tugs and unfulfilled potential.

How should we dream of this place without us?

2008-10-03T12:30:00.002-04:00

That's the line from Richard Wilbur's "Advice to a Prophet" that really jumps out at me--line ten, just over a quarter of the way through the poem--and it stays with me through the end.

I used this poem in my creative writing class this morning as an example for their next prompt (yes, I give my students prompts for poems--it keeps me from getting 15 "my life is an angsty dark hole" poems each week) which is to write a "how to" poem. I hadn't read it all that closely before yesterday, but that idea, the notion of our inability to conceive a world without us in it, has been nagging at me ever since.

Wilbur precedes that question with the line "Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race," and given the imagery from earlier in the poem along with the fact that it was written in 1961, it's pretty clear that he's writing about the constant threat of nuclear war that hung over that generation and the one that followed it.

But the same concept certainly applies today, and could be part of the reason why it has taken so long for humans to accept the reality of other problems that threaten human existence--or at least the continuation of it at this level of technology. Global warming? No way, say the skeptics. Humans could never do that level of damage. But climate change has made lots of other species go extinct over the years--why not humans? Yes, we have a greater ability to change our environment than that of any other animal, but we're also capable of screwing things up so bad that we can't survive the aftermath.

It's a failure of the imagination if we're unable to conceive of an earth without humans, and it's a failure we can't afford.

Channel Firing

2008-09-27T02:44:00.003-04:00

While "the glebe cow drooled" may be my favorite half-line of poetry ever (I exaggerate, but only a little), what I really love about Hardy's poem is the way he inserts humor into what is, at heart, a dark and dreary poem.

After all, the theme of the poem is fairly well summed up by Parson Thirdly, who says "Instead of preaching forty year... / I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer." After all, if the whole point of abstinence is to set a good example that's not going to be followed, one might as well get a little enjoyment out of the deal.

I also like the humor in the early lines, where Hardy describes the way the various animals react to the great guns firing off in the English Channel, especially since I think they're also symbolic of various groups who existed in pre-WWI Britain (or the world, for that matter).

While drearisome
arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into their mounds,

The glebe cow drooled.

I think Hardy himself was one of the wakened hounds, and this poem was a bit of his howling. He saw the portents of war--it's not as though the hostilities that erupted after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand came out of nowhere. The major European powers had been rubbing up against each other for a long while. That there hadn't been an open war between them in a while was as much a matter of luck as anything.

I look at the mouse who drops the altar-crumb as those people who saw war coming, but instead of raising an alarm, ran for cover so quickly that they even left behind food. These are the displaced that appear in every war. The worms are withdrawing as well, but into their mounds, ready to feed on the aftermath.

And then there's my favorite, the glebe cow, or the cow that grazed on the land beside the parsonage. It's drooling, completely unconcerned by what's going on around it, and a more cynical person than me might think that Hardy was taking a shot at the Church of England by making it a glebe cow in particular. Okay, I'm that cynical, or at least I'm hopeful. Hardy was at least doubtful about the traditional role of God, and while he might not have been taking a direct shot about the Church's role in promoting nationalism, it could certainly have been a subconscious one.

I think Hardy's doubt about God's presence also comes out in stanza six:

"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do, for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need)."

At the very least he's questioning the idea of the Judgment Day, a primary doctrine in the Christian faith, and that ties in well with his theme, which is that nothing really changes for man. We've been "striving strong to make / red war yet redder" since the first time a proto-human discovered that you can kill prey more effectively with a rock than you can with your bare hands. Our movement toward suitcase nukes and unmanned aerial drones with missiles is simply that of better technology. No wonder Parson Thirdly sighed.

To Lucasta, About That War

2008-09-25T22:32:00.002-04:00

Last week, as I was prepping for my current section of poems about war and politics this semester, I came across a poem by John Ciardi that I'd never seen before, the one this post is named for. It's a clear reference to Richard Lovelace's "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars," a fairly abstract piece that casts Lucasta as a symbol of chastity and purity, the perfect woman for whom Lovelace must prove himself worthy of by having an affair with a mistress named war. It's a poem I teach almost every semester, not because I have any great fondness for it, but because it serves as a nice contrast to the more reality-based poems that come out of World War I and afterward.

Ciardi's poem falls into that latter category--his Lucasta may be just as pure and chaste as Lovelace's, but Ciardi's speaker has no illusions about his lack of traditional honor. He says "I did / what booze brought me, and it wasn't you." Of course, Ciardi's speaker isn't a nobleman running off to claim a king's favor. He is, rather, "a swag-man, under the clock," on a ship headed for Europe, "over the hump where the wolf packs hid."

Ciardi's soldier isn't in it for the glory, which is just as well, because there's precious little of it to be had. He's an earthy type, dealing with each day as it comes, and drowning what memories he can in drink or sex, and his mistress certainly isn't battle.

Ciardi's poem ends with a clang, shutting the door pretty tightly, but given what he's responding to, I don't think that's a total mistake:

and the gulls blew high on their brinks,
and the ships slid, and the surf threw,
and the Army initialed, and you
were variously, vicariously, and straight and with kinks
raped, fondled, and apologized to--
which is called (as noted) war. And it stinks.

So it's not a surprising end to the poem, and it doesn't offer much room for the reader to roam around, but I don't know that it needs to offer that room. The thing about war poems, I've found in my limited experience with them, is that the ones that glorify it are always dishonest, and the ones that reject it completely are often simplistic. Poems like this one, and "Dulce et Decorum Est" for example, aren't so much anti-war poems as they are poems that seek to be honest about the ugliness of war. They don't take a stand and say "war is wrong"--the poets both volunteered for military service, after all--but they do demand that people be honest about what war is like, and not glorify it or hide it behind abstracts and euphemisms.

Good cover letter advice

2008-09-10T15:42:00.002-04:00

My old friend Chet (Alan to pretty much everyone else) is an editor at Relief, and he just posted some advice on cover letters. Some of it is specific to their journal, since it's a Christian journal, like this piece.

Do not tell us that God wants us to publish you.

Lots of people tell us we should accept a story because God told them to write it. Some imply—or even say—that if we don’t accept a story we’re going against His wishes. Now, we certainly believe that the Spirit can move in people when they write, and that God’s hand, especially when requested, is capable of guiding creativity. This fact alone, however, is not a free pass to publication. And telling an editor up front that they’re sinning if they don’t publish you is a really good way to bias your reading.

I will freely admit, however, that the reason they published me was because I threatened to infect them with my atheist cooties unless they gave in.

P.S. The rest of the advice really is top-notch as well, no matter who you're submitting to.

Publication news

2008-08-26T14:09:00.002-04:00

I think it's safe to say now--Louisiana Literature Press has agreed to do a book of my poems in 2010. The collection is currently titled A Witness In Exile, though that is certainly subject to change.

Just waiting for my copy to get here

2008-08-22T00:46:00.002-04:00

My much anticipated copy of Relief should be on the way sometime soon. As I've mentioned before, this publication means a lot to me in large part because it's the first time Amy and I will be published in the same journal at the same time. But it's also a pretty big deal to me because of the size of the poem they took. It was ten sections long, which translated into 7 pages in the galleys they sent me. (Beautiful, by the way. Molto bene!)

That's a lot of space for any journal to give to one poet, unless you're the Missouri Review, and that's just what you do. As I understand it, this is not standard procedure for Relief, and it means a lot to me that they were willing to accept the poem without asking me to cut any of the sections. That they made it the Editor's Choice for poetry was just icing on the cake.

I'll have some bigger publication news in the near future.

My BookTV Appearance

2008-08-12T09:27:00.003-04:00

Back in the fall of 2004, as the Kerry-Bush campaign wound down, Stephen Elliott asked me if I would open for him as a reader at the Stanford bookstore. He was promoting his new book at the time, Looking Forward To It. I had no idea that the C-SPAN cameras would be there until the night before, when I accidentally ran into some friends having dinner in San Francisco and they let it slip.

Anyway, the appearance went off without a hitch, and I bought a copy of the DVD from C-SPAN--those are expensive, by the way--and for four years didn't have a way to rip it and put the video online. Until last night, when Amy did it for me.

By way of excusing these poems, I can say that only one is published, and only two remain in my manuscript, the unpublished one having undergone some serious changes in the intervening years. Ah, the pain of looking at old work.

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The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart

2008-08-08T11:54:00.002-04:00

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's first book is marvelous--I just want to get that out of the way right at the beginning. That she is a friend of mine has nothing to do with it. It would be a terrific book even if it were written by my arch-nemesis, whoever that happens to be.

From the very first poem, "Pastoral," Calvocoressi lets the reader know that she's going to blur the lines between storytelling and poetry, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the first word of the poem is "We." Calvocoressi not only invites her readers to join her in this world, she demands our attention, and envelops us in language. With the closing line of this prose poem, "We have never wanted anything but this," she tells us that even though the world she describes is filled with ugliness, it's still the world we want, that there is something worth having in it.

Much of her book is taken up by 4 long poems--the title poem, a sonnet sequence titled "Circus Fire, 1944," "From the Adult Drive-In," and "The Death of Towns." The first two deal with historical events--the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, and the Hartford Circus Fire, one of the worst fire disasters of the 20th century, and they're structured in similar ways--each section is a narrative from a different individual's point of view, and the individuals have varying distances from the subject matter.

For instance, in "The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart," poems are written in the voices of "Clem Sanders, bystander" and "Diane McGinty, St. Mary's Home for Wayward Girls," as well as "David Putnam, stepson" and "George Putnam, husband." The result is a picture of not only Amelia Earhart the individual, but of the public figure. We see her through the eyes of the starstruck, in the hopes and dreams of young women who saw her achievements as a metaphor for their own situations, as well as those who saw her as a false hope. From "Joel Sullivan, miner."

Amelia Earhart is a dream

my daughter won't give up.
Sometimes I want to shake her,
tell her what small towns are,

how the coal dust coats your skin
till darkness never leaves you

Small town life is a large part of the metaphor of this book, but the poems rarely slip into the tradition hinted at by the first poem's title, "Pastoral." These towns are touched by tragedy, by powers beyond the control of everyday people, whether it's the circus fire or the disappearance of a celebrity or the birth defects caused by the pollution of a local factory in "The Death of Towns."

You never saw one alive.
They just littered the shore,
fist-sized, finless, no real shape.
You'd wonder how they lived so long,
got so big. Some didn't have eyes
and others wore their organs
on the outside, bee-sized heart
peeking through and once a tongue
like a lick of hair. They were still
there after they shut the bell-works down,
after the waters started to clear.

There's great pain in this book, wrapped in lovely formal verse, and the juxtaposition of the two is sometimes difficult to bear. But it's worth the effort.

Well that was fun

2008-08-01T22:47:00.003-04:00

A little redesign, a little movement, a little redirecting of the blog to where it now comes up on my own domain name, which was going largely unused and sitting dormant, and here we are. Note to blogger--if you can get it so we can publish via ftp using the new xml layouts, that would be incredibly awesome. The only drawback to this move was that I had to go back to a classic template, and there's not a lot to choose from out there, classically-speaking.

And I am re-devoting myself to writing about poetry, so this will be updated more regularly in the coming months. I get so wrapped up in politics and pop culture over at Incertus that I tend to let this go sometimes, but I've been reading a lot of poetry--some I've enjoyed and some not so much--and I plan to express that on here a bit more in the future.

Plus, I have a new long poem coming out soon--in the next issue of Relief--and what's more, it will be the first time Amy and I will be featured in the same issue of the same journal. We're both excited about that.

And special thanks to Ron Silliman for linking to my post about Poem of a Life. I've never had so much traffic here.

The Poem of a Life

2008-07-22T23:06:00.000-04:00

Back in March, I mentioned that I was reading Mark Scroggins's new biography of Louis Zukofsky, The Poem of a Life. Mark and his family came over to our home for a dinner party a couple of months ago and he saw that I'd only gotten a couple hundred pages in. He said "that's a respectable effort," which of course meant that I had to finish the thing. And I'm really glad I did.

Some personal background on my own poetic knowledge first, though. I came to poetry in a serious way when I was an undergrad, but for me that meant in my late 20s. I went to an undergraduate university where creative writing was barely a blip on the map--there was one poet, and he taught technical writing as often as he taught poetry workshop. Good guy, good poet, but very traditional, as was the entire faculty. Criticism wasn't big in the curriculum, but what we got was basically New Criticism. And when I went to Arkansas for my MFA, that really didn't change. My reading lists didn't even include Ginsburg, much less Oppen or Niedecker or Zukofsky. The whole tradition (and I think it's fair to call it a tradition now) of Objectivist and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry didn't even really exist as far as my education was concerned. I picked up a little in passing in my workshops with W.S. DiPiero when I was at Stanford, but that's it.

So I came to Mark's book fairly ignorant of this history and of the movement and poetry that Zukofsky helped build and create, and I not only found the book informative, I found it fascinating. I took a long time to read it because I was constantly having to digest new material and fit it in with what I didn't know about 20th century poetry. It's not only a fantastic biography, it's a terrific history book in general, even if I don't share the aesthetic of the subject of the book.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book to me was the lengthy discussion of Zukofsky's formal considerations in his work. I'm not a formalist in the Tim Steele/Dana Gioia sense of the term, but I do tend to write in traditional meter and form, so I found it heartening to see that Zukofsky had that in mind when composing his poems, especially since he often made the forms he was working in more intricate, rather than finding ways to cheat. It has caused me to find ways to discipline my own writing in the weeks since I completed reading (this review has been in the works for a while now).

Which is not to say that I plan on following the poetic road Zukofsky blazed. It's just not my thing. My preference, both in reading and writing poetry, is to avoid the hermetic image. I want a poem to communicate something more than music or a frame for an idea to me. I want an emotional connection with the meaning in the poem, and I didn't find that in the selections that Mark quoted in this text. It's just a matter of personal taste. There were lots of times when Mark was explaining what was going on in a particular section of "A" and I just didn't see it, wasn't moved by the language.

That's not to say that I don't think Zukofsky did great work--this biography convinces me that he did, and anyone who can influence the path of poetry for a generation certainly had something major going on. It's just not my kind of poetry. Think of it as the clash between people who liked Swing and those who liked Be-bop. I appreciate both, but I prefer the latter. I appreciate Charles Olson, but I prefer James Merrill. The world of poetics is wide enough for all of us, I think.

Some advice

2008-07-15T18:47:00.000-04:00

Robert Lee Brewer asked around on Facebook for some advice on writing a bio for a poetry submission. I responded, and he included my comments here if you're interested. My standard opening joke is included in there.

I guess I can see that

2008-07-05T13:10:00.000-04:00

A couple of days ago at Sadly, No, Mister Leonard Pierce looked at some responses to the National Review Onine's symposium on books. To the question "If there were only one book on conservatism you could recommend to a newcomer, what would it be and why?" Richard Brookheiser answered "The Complete Poetry of Robert Frost. Not very detailed at the policy level, but lots of reality."

I have my doubts about the reality part, but I'm guessing Brookheiser is referring to poems like "The Gift Outright" when it comes to his approval of Frost's poetry. After all, it's a paean to the British-centric view of US history.

But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

I can see why a conservative would like this poem. It simplifies the early history of the US down to a single people and ignores everyone else. Dutch, German, French, Spanish, even the slaves are disappeared from the narrative--"we were England's," according to this.

But that's nothing compared what Frost does to the natives who were living here when the Europeans showed up.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Frost pulls off a nice double whammy here--without mentioning Native Americans directly, he has us give ourselves this land through "many deeds of war," thus acknowledging that there were people there before us who had a claim (one could include Mexicans in with this group as well), but then refers to the land as basically useless before we got there to improve it: "unstoried, artless, unenhanced." Of course conservatives like Brookheiser like this poem--it feeds into their sense of supremacy, of privilege, of the idea that until the white, English-speaking man came along, the land was crap, waiting for us to do something useful with it.

I think Brookheiser, at least with this poem, got it backwards. Plenty of policy--white, English supremacy, no mention of women or other ethnicities, genocidal policies toward native peoples, and revised history. Not much reality, though.

On "The Politics of Poetry"

2008-06-25T13:38:00.000-04:00

In the July/August edition of Poetry, there's an essay by David Orr titled "The Politics of Poetry" that I want to comment on a little. The subject as a whole has been on my mind a lot lately--I wrote about it some on my other blog in response to Stanley Fish's comments on his NY Times blog about politics in the classroom, and I think there are a few crossovers to this essay.

But first, a little snark about the frame Orr uses for this essay. He begins with the story of Tom Buffenbarger, the head of the machinist's union and a Hillary Clinton supporter in Ohio, who went off on the stereotypical (as he saw them) Barack Obama supporter. It was the usual tripe--lattes and Birkenstocks were mentioned, and he threw out, as an epithet, that Obama wasn't a fighter, but a poet.

Orr follows this story with the following passage:

Fortunately, this insult to the sacred mysteries of Poesie didn't go unanswered--within a few days, the poet John Lundberg angrily riposted at the Huffington Post, declaring that he "would be happy to step outside" with Buffenbarger to show him that poets can indeed mix it up. (Smart money is on Lundberg, as Buffenbarger appears to have lost several dozen battles to the combined forces of Little Debbie and Sara Lee.)

Well, I have to disagree a touch--not with Lundberg's sentiment, but with the notion that John would necessarily take Buffenbarger out. John and I were Stegner Fellows for a year back in 2003, and while I remember him as a fellow in pretty good shape--far better than the shape I'm in, for the record--he didn't strike me as the "able to take out a machinist" type, no matter how many Star Crunches he can eat at a single sitting. There's a mistaken belief by some that fat people are doughy and weak--that's not generally true, especially if they were originally people who did physical labor when they were younger. Add in that a fat guy can usually take a punch like nobody's business, and your only hope in a fight is to tire them out. I was a bartender while an undergrad, and there was a reason we had 300 pounders at the door and in the bar--they could take a punch from a drunk redneck and knock him on his ass without breaking a sweat.

Okay, to the substance of the article. One of the things Orr points to as a problem with contemporary political verse has to do with the lyric as "contemporary poetry's dominant mode." He writes:

The modern lyric may be fractured, tweaked, or warped, but essentially it remains a self-enclosed world created by a singular voice (which isn't always the same thing as a single subject called "I"). That voice is often speaking to itself in meditative solitude, yet even as the lyric insists on privacy, the act of insisting necessarily implies that there's someone to be insisted to. This puts the lyric in a potentially awkward position relative to the larger political world.

I suspect he's right about this being the problem, and I think it's no surprise that some of the more anthologized contemporary political poems today either take the form of narratives (Rita Dove's "Parsley," Carolyn Forché's "The Colonel") or extended rants (Judy Jordan's "Poem about My Rights"). Those forms lend themselves more to exclamations of political positions or illustrations of the dangers of uncurbed power.

Orr addresses another, thornier problem in the next section of his essay when he quotes a poem by Ralph Nader titled "Don't Listen to Senator Leahy." I'll let you google it rather than copy it down here for you. Orr says that this poem is noteworthy
"because it's comfortable with the idea of politics as politics; it doesn't presume to stand outside the details of political life while offering judgment on that life." That's not the case for poets, he says, and he offers a poem titled "Bush's War" by Robert Hass as an example. (You can find it here.) Orr writes:

Hass's feelings are praiseworthy and his despair at American policy is justifiable, but the poem never addresses its political subject in terms that are actually political. It puts forward no argument, makes no revelatory comparison, confronts no new audience, engages no new misconception in language liekly to be understood by the deceived, and so on and so on.

I don't think that's completely accurate. The poem has problems, from my point of view--it begins with "I" and stays there for far too long, and wanders through places not remotely connected to Bush's war. I can understand the desire to do that, to approach a subject like this obliquely, but the poem doesn't really begin to resonate until it becomes immediate, near the end.

Certainly there's a rage
To injure what's injured us. Wars
Are always pitched to us that way.
The well-paid news readers read the reasons
On the air. And we who are injured,
Or have been convinced that we are injured,
Are always identified with virtue. It's that--
The rage to hurt mixed with self-righteousness
And fear--that's murderous.

That's a political statement, no doubt about it. The problem--if we're saying that Hass's poem isn't political enough--is that it doesn't stay there. It doesn't continue this argument. It turns inward again, with the death and destruction covered over by time and nature. We know that's what will happen, but political poems tend to tell us what should happen, at least from the poet's point of view. There's a sense of advocacy to them which is missing from Hass's poem.

I've been trying, with little success so far, to make my poetry more political than it has been--the tension between artistry and rhetorical power is tough to deal with. But this gives me some things to think about.

To a Young Feminist Who Wants to Be Free

2008-06-18T18:24:00.000-04:00

Betty Adcock's poem may be a teenager now, but it certainly hasn't lost any of its political relevance. If anything, it's more relevant now than ever, given the recent Democratic party primary, and the friction that was given center stage in what some political bloggers called "the oppression Olympics." With the word feminist in the title, there's no doubt that the poem will have a political bent, but the poem begins with a surprising twist:

You describe your grandmothers walking straight
off the boats from Finland, Latvia
too late, early in this century to bear blame
for sins we're bound to expiate:

The sins are listed soon after: "slavery, lynchings, native massacre" for starters. But the argument is one we hear often today when discussions of things like slave reparations come up in the public sphere. Lots of people argue against, saying "My family never owned slaves" or "we came here after the Civil War, so what would I owe." It's a compelling argument, if it's viewed in a vacuum. Holding people responsible for the sins of their ancestors is dodgy enough, but if said ancestors didn't actually sin, well, where's the justice in that?

Before Adcock answers that question, though, she makes a point that strikes close to home for me. I, like Adcock, am a southerner, complete with accent. I don't know if it's been a hindrance professionally because I'm still young in my career (though not so much in life), but it's something that any professional person is keenly aware of. A southern accent, especially a strong one, brings along certain baggage--you're stupid, you're racist, you're backwards, and if you aren't, then you're one of the few who has struggled and managed to rise above your inbred past, et cetera. And as Adcock mentions, there's also the sense of superiority that some northerners like to hold over you:

the whole treasury of virtue hammered home
i speeches praising Michigan and the lever of the war
that undid slavery and joined the union back.

As though racism exists only in the south. As if race riots only ever happen in New Orleans or Atlanta or Birmingham, instead of in Chicago or Detroit or Los Angeles.

It would be easy to turn this into a rant on how southerners bear an inordinate burden for the race problems in the US, but Adcock doesn't do that. Southerners deserve every bit of the crap we take for it, especially since we continue to have a major problem with openly racist symbolism in the public square. Adcock says "Never believe it's gone," and that's good advice, both for those of us who live in the middle of it and for those who live in their bubbles of privilege, who use terms like "post-racial" without a hint of irony.

Which brings us back to the title: To a Young Feminist Who Wants to Be Free. What does feminism have to do with this? How can a movement built to fight oppression find itself expressing its own privilege? Adcock concludes:

Anyone who came here anytime
came here to take this country's gifts.
Not even you may refuse this one:
what's built on darkness rests on it.
And there is wisdom yet, though hard to see
in this peculiar light. It is the only light
we've got. And when was it notthe case
(except in hell) that land and history
wear another's face?
Here is the necessary, fearsome, precious
backward whole embrace.

There is no escaping the sins of our ancestors, even if our direct ancestors were not personally involved. This is our privilege, and it is important that we acknowledge it in all its forms. Adcock shows us only one, but it's an important one.

Dim Lady

2008-06-09T22:28:00.000-04:00

I certainly see nothing wrong with parodying old, famous poems--one of my last publications was a reworking of one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets (mine began "Batter my arteries, trans-fatty globules")--so when I was leafing through an anthology I'm considering adopting for a class this fall and I came across Harryette Mullen's "Dim Lady," I wanted to give it a closer look.

She's adapted Shakespeare's sonnet 130, recited at the end of this clip by the British comic Catherine Tate:

Mullen's treatment is also irreverent--she's dumped the sonnet form, which is good because the overall transformation is really more one of style than substance. Mullen makes it a prose poem, and tries to make it sound like Lord Buckley has risen from the dead to put his hipster spin on the poem.

My honeybunches peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Skinkys would grow on her noggin.

Et cetera. The overall effect, however, leaves me a little limp, because it reads more like a cutesy translation than a transformation. We don't really gain anything new from this poem that we can't get from the Shakespeare, and it seems to me that the obligation of any imitation or updating is to add to the original.

It's not less travelled

2008-05-27T22:43:00.000-04:00

Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is probably one of the best known poems of the 20th century, but for entirely the wrong reason. I teach it nearly every semester in my Interpretation of Poetry classes, not so much because I enjoy it, but because I'm tired of hearing people invoke the final three lines as though they're conveying some statement about the need to explore one's own path in life. It seems like when I ask my students if they've covered this poem--and they nearly all have, in high school--that's the reading their teacher thrust upon them. Well, I'm tired of it, and I'm taking a stand.

The problem is that too many readers hit those last three lines like an awkward kid on roller skates hits the wall, and they never look beyond them.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What a ponderous close, if that's all you take away from the poem. But it's what comes before that gives that close a cruel twist.

Frost spends most of the poem pointing out that the path his speaker chose wasn't less travelled.

Then took the other, as just as fair,...
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.(6, 9-12)

There's no difference in the roads, at least not that the speaker can make out. And that's the point. If we take this poem as a discussion of life choices, which is how it's most often read, then what Frost is really saying is that we don't know how our choices will play out. Assuming we're at a binary life choice (also a mythical situation, most of the time), we can only see so far down the roads we have to choose from, "to where [they bend] in the undergrowth," you might say. Beyond that, we're blind. We don't know how those decisions will affect us in the long run.

So why does Frost's speaker tell this story "with a sigh / ages and ages hence"? Because he's being bugged by people to tell them the secret of his success, I presume, to answer the question "how did you wind up here?" The people asking him don't want to hear something boring like "I just put one foot after another;" they want something profound. So the speaker gives them "I took the one less travelled by." It's a lie, but it's a lie they want. The fact that the options pretty much look all the same just whizzes over their heads.

Saturday Monkey Blogging

2008-05-24T00:10:00.000-04:00

I've been away for quite a while--I suspect that the people who keep popping by for my limited readings of "The Forge" haven't missed me any. I'll get back to the poetry blogging soon, but last night, my daughter graduated from high school. Amy and I call her Monkey, and there are some pictures below the fold.

Monkey before the ceremony

Monkey with Mama

Monkey with Daddy

Monkey with current boyfriend.

Publishing news

2008-05-15T16:40:00.000-04:00

Got word late last night that Relief A Christian Quarterly Expression has accepted a (very) long poem of mine for publication. I don't have all the details yet, but if they took it all, then wow, because it's ten sections long, practically a chapbook. It would be my most substantial publication to date, at least in volume. It's also an interesting place for me to publish, for the same reasons Amy mentioned here.

Most of the poem tells the story of what Jehovah's Witnesses called a "quick-build Kingdom Hall," a project where hundreds of volunteers would get together and build, from the ground up, a church that would be about 95% complete in 96 hours. (They used to do them in 48, but there were too many accidents and aggravated neighbors.) And most of the poem comes from the point of view of the believer, which is why I sent it to Relief--it's a poem that didn't get any traction with traditional journals.

But this is the surprising thing. They took it even though it has this poem as the closing section.

That house may stand a hundred years,
may outlive me for all I know.
We built it strong enough to stand
the Devil’s breath.
But now

I don’t believe the Devil breathes,
don’t count on paradise, don’t live
for future possibility,
don’t think that I will be revived

to walk with elephants and lions.
Paul said that when I was a child,
I spake as one, and thought as one.
Who knew that I’d consider my

disruption from the faith as my
commencement, graduation to
a fuller life. I’m proud of that
building, although I’ll never go

through its doors again. At times
I catch myself whistling the psalms
we sang: This house we built for you
Oh Lord, this house we built for you.

In the end, the poem is about a person who has lost his faith, but who can't quite bring himself to hate what he once believed, even though his move away from faith cost him dearly. That a Christian journal would publish voices who openly question belief is an odd idea, but it's one I hope persists.

What does it take to kill a writer?

2008-05-13T07:38:00.001-04:00

That's a post over at The Electronic Girl talking about how, in fiction at least, there's a sense that it's easy to lose writers of great books to the memory of their movies. She uses as her primary example James Leo Herlihy, best known as the author of Midnight Cowboy. But he's unknown, you say? That's precisely the point--the movie made of his book is a classic, and the book, as usual, is even better, but how many people even know who he was?

That's less an issue in poetry, because it's rare that a poet even gets a biopic, much less an option on a poem for a screenplay. It's also less an issue because there are fewer roads to stardom via poetry. When teaching my contemporary poetry class last night, I mentioned that, sadly, Billy Collins is about as close to rock-stardom as poets get--and you have to admit that that's pretty sad--and of the 20 people in the class, 3 knew who he was, and that's because they'd been in a class with me before and had heard this schtick. Who will be the big names that come out of this period, the late 20th century, early 21st century? And who will be those who Miller Williams wrote about in his poem "A Note to the English Poets of the Seventeenth Century," where he said:

You've lost the ones that were hopelessly only good,
saying things that nobody else could say
and lucky to be heard in their own day.

Williams will likely be in that bunch, along with Collins and so many others. It's tiring for me, at the beginning of my career, to think of things like immortality in my lines of poetry--I can't imagine what it must be like once you've had a career and started to see it wind down a bit. And for those who have tasted fame like Herlihy, how badly that drop must have hurt.

Early Mother's Day Poem

2008-05-08T22:41:00.000-04:00

Growing up a Jehovah's Witness, I didn't celebrate the holidays, large or small. Not celebrating Christmas always got the most attention, along with Halloween, largely because of the outward display, but we didn't observe the smaller ones either. But even though my relationship with my parents is rocky because I left the church, I still think about them, and I write about them, and to them in many ways. So here's a poem I wrote to my mom about two and a half years ago. It addresses some of this stuff.

Sonnet for my mother, November 2005

Eleven years, more if you count
time between when I last cared
and when the elders found me out,
cast me out. My mom’s despair

comes in a card. Give yourself
another chance. She’s scared.
Tsunami, earthquake, hellish
war, great tribulation, all care

of Satan, signs of end times.
Two important dates she says
are in this month, your baptism
and your birth. I hope one day

she’ll see that even if she winds up right,
I’d never make it work in paradise.

I'll Never Make This Mistake Again

2008-05-05T10:18:00.000-04:00

Way back in March, I posted the reading list for my summer class in Contemporary American poetry. Right about now, I'm feeling like Gob Bluth--"I've made a terrible mistake."

I included Billy Collins's Nine Horses for a couple of reasons. I'm focusing on the variety of voices in contemporary poetry, and while Collins's voice is bland and generally inoffensive, it is an unfortunately popular voice outside much of the traditional poetic community. It was a chance, I thought, to give my students an accessible book, which could act as a breather in an intense, six week course. I should have read the book more closely before I did that.

No, I should have read the book before doing that.

I've found my angle of attack into this book, though. It's a book that presents a world of out-of-touch privilege, and is sublimely unaware of just how privileged it is. It's going to make a nice contrast to the in-your-face politics of Marge Piercy and the outsider-looking-in voice of Mohja Kahf.

There's a series that begins with the poem "Paris" that's really indicative of this voice. The speaker in "Paris" spends three pages musing on what he's going to do after he finishes his bath in an apartment someone gave him. What paintings, what street signs will he see? What bridges will he lean against while he muses on the day? In "Istanbul," the speaker glories in a Turkish bath, the servants pouring tub after tub of water on him, servants he thanks silently. In the next poem, "Love," his speaker sits on a train watching a woman struggle with her cello case; in "Languor," he speaks of redesigning his family coat of arms, et cetera, et cetera.

I could deal with the privilege better if there were any indication that Collins is aware of it, but there's no ironic turn in it, no twist, no moment where his speaker is even conscious of the benefits he enjoys. It's poetry for the oblivious upper-middle class white person, which may be its greatest sin of all.

Influences

2008-04-28T22:15:00.000-04:00

So I'm paging through my contributor's copy of Measure and I come across this poem titled "Arrival" by Mike Carson. Now, I know nothing about Carson--never even heard of him before this poem, though he's been published in some fine journals--but I can tell you who he's been influenced by, just by reading these lines.

The riot of frog song, quivering the pond
With squiggle and hop of their screamed mating,
Suds of egg-sperm, thrum of the bulged
Necks, skin-shiver, as the green sog
Of the land seeps, thawing the dark
Grave-layer from which they croak up, snatch
And navigate the craze of their slick clutch

That's some Seamus coming through.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

The assonance, the clotted rhythm, even the subject matter is the same. And you know something? I like them both.

New Issue

2008-04-25T16:29:00.000-04:00

And I'm in it! Alas, not online, or even on the cover, but I have two poems in the latest issue of Measure A Review of Formal Poetry, and I'm in among some heavy hitters as well. My contributions to the issue are "Unhealthy Sonnet" and "i sing of Brian, born of God."

Interesting side note--John DuVal, who runs the Translation program at Arkansas, is in here with two poems of his own and a translation of Charles D'Orleans. When I was in his French Poetry in Translation class a lifetime ago, he offered a version of that translation in class. I did one of my own--not so good--but it was cool to see that translation from so long ago in print, and in the same journal with my own work.

So check out Measure--the link is in the sidebar. Excellent journal of metrical poetry.

"The War Works Hard"

2008-04-24T22:01:00.000-04:00

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi woman poet whose collection, The War Works Hard, should be required reading for anyone looking to get a sense of political poetry today. Most of the poems in this collection were written between 1985 and 2004, and so they cover three wars--the Iran-Iraq War, and both US-Iraq wars, as well as the period of the debilitating sanctions between the two US wars, and she writes with devastating honesty and a sharp wit.

My favorite of the collection is the title poem, largely because it is so painfully sarcastic. Mikhail has a simple metaphor at play--the war does so much for us and yet we give it no credit--but she holds nothing back in her descriptions.

It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
award medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters

And so on.

Part of the reason this, and the other poems that deal with the second Gulf war are so interesting is because they are ambivalent at best about the invasion. Mikhail was obviously no fan of the Hussein regime--she's part of a Christian minority in the country and was so frightened for her life that she fled, first to Jordan and then to the US. And yet, she is critical of the US invasion. Another of her poems, "An Urgent Call," addresses Lynndie England, best known as the soldier in the Abu Ghraib photos.

Hurry up, Lynndie,
go back to America now....
Don't worry,
we will send an email to God
to tell Him
that the barbarians
were the solution.
Don't worry.
Take a sick leave
and release your baby
from your body,
but don't forget
to hide those terrible pictures,
the pictures of you dancing in the mud.
Keep them away
from his or her eyes.
Hide them, please.
You don't want your child to cry out;
The prisoners are naked...

It's not an easy book to read, but it's worth the effort.

Once more into the breach

2008-04-24T14:24:00.000-04:00

Ah, the never-ending pursuit of book publication. I sent the latest version of Everyday Te Deum to a contest yesterday, and the waiting game continues. There has to be a better way to do this than the current contest system.

Why do we read this poem?

2008-04-21T21:04:00.000-04:00

For the last couple of weeks, I've been going through poems in dialogue with my 2nd year students--the post I did on Sir Robert Aytoun's version of "To His Coy Mistress" came out of that. Funny side note--one of my students for that class came across that post while googling for some information on that poem. Seems few people have written about it.

So last week we jumped into the series that Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" spawned, and it occurred to me, yet again, that Marlowe probably owes every bit of fame that poem has to the fact that Sir Walter Raleigh responded to it, because it's not very interesting on it own. I mean, formally it's gorgeous--the rhythms are perfect, the rhymes are tight, it fits the pastoral mode to a tee--but that's also the problem with it. There's nothing really, I don't know, kinky about it.

Marlowe's got this shepherd, and he wants this nymph, and so he promises her the world and then some. And? And that's the problem. There's no and to it. There's no reason why this would ever work, no matter how simple-minded the nymph. And that's what Raleigh picked up on and pointed out so brutally in his reply.

John Donne did a reply as well, titled "The Bait," and it's a good poem as well, taking Marlowe's initial metaphor and then setting off on a completely unrelated jaunt into the world of angling and all, but I don't think it would have had the effect on Marlowe's poem that Raleigh's did, because Raleigh's reply basically cuts Marlowe to shreds, while being a good, biting poem at the same time.

But even though I think Raleigh's poem is far better than Marlowe's, I don't think it would have survived on its own either, assuming it had been written in the first place. "The Nymph's Reply" needs "The Passionate Shepherd" as much as the shepherd needs to hear from his maiden. Neither is whole, and that's probably why they're nearly always placed in tandem in anthologies.

New poem

2008-04-17T12:02:00.001-04:00

A week or so ago, I mentioned that I was working on one of the poem prompts that Robert Lee Brewer had set up on Poetic Asides, and that I might post it when I was done with it. Well, I can't say I think it's one of my best, but I'm as done with it as I'm going to get for the moment. Any suggestions?

Headlines

I was born two days after Nixon won
the first time. Inauspicious beginnings
in a year of strife. Bobby Kennedy.
Martin Luther King, Jr. The Tet Offensive.
I am the same age as The ODB
and Lisa Marie Presley, as Ziggy Marley
and Vanilla Ice, and no wonder
we’re all fucked up because we
all came forth in a year of strife
and we’ve never gotten over it.
But I refuse to stay down. In ‘68
I also got Tommie Smith and John Carlos
in Mexico City, The White Album,
Cash at Folsom Prison and Lady Soul,
Of Being Numerous and North Central,
2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes
and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.
It’s not enough, but it is something,
a firebreak, a seawall that deadens
the hurricane’s storm surge, a shot
of whiskey to numb an abscessed tooth.

Happy Birthday, Christopher Smart

2008-04-11T13:58:00.000-04:00

According to this, Christopher Smart was born on this day back in 1722. He's best known for his poem "Jubilate Agno," which is one crazy bit of poetry. The piece of it that's most often anthologized is often called "My Cat Jeoffrey," in which Smart finds God in everything Jeoffrey does.

When I was working on my poems about Jehovah's Witnesses a lot, I decided to write about the difficult relationship I have with my father, and I did it using Smart's form as a guide. I titled mine "Jubilate Patro," and I'm posting it here, in honor of Smart's birthday.

Jubilate Patro

For I will consider my father Sam
For he praises God in his mumbles and circular stories
For his left arm is crooked to remind him of original sin
For half his brain was cut off from blood when he was a baby
For it rewired itself
For his right arm is mighty in exchange
For with it he did not spare the rod
For he was an elder until Alzheimer’s took away his memory
For he was an accountant until Alzheimer’s took away his memory
For he praised God in his mumbles and circular stories before Alzheimer’s took his memory and thus it is a part of his soul

Continued below the fold...

For he is still a storyteller even though he gets lost in his stories sometimes
For with his right arm he taught me how to snap off a curveball
For with his left arm he taught me to drive a stick shift
For with his half-brain he taught me to praise God among strangers
For he never explained football to me, but made me learn it myself
For he is taller than me even with the curve in his spine that causes him pain
For I will never know another man greater than him
For his favorite animal was the porcupine, a creature of defense
For when I was a child and beaten by bullies he told me it was right to defend myself with a tree branch
For he taught me what a lie was by reading to me of Ananias and Sapphira
For I became a poet anyway
For I used that tree branch and knocked one boy silly
For he made me listen to Hank Williams even when I didn’t want to
For because of him I can still quote chapter and verse of the Gospels
For he can still dance
For when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s he came to see me even though I had left the church and was an unrepentant sinner
For he taught me that there is no such thing as a fair fight
For when he accidentally bloodied my nose, he apologized in tears
For I still have his copy of Dick Clark’s 20 Years of Rock and Roll
For when Louis Jordan came on the stereo he would grab my mother and twirl her in the
living room of our trailer so that the floors shook
For he made me hold a nail while he hit it with a hammer and so taught me trust
For I learned to drive a nail myself at 7
For he drove a dump truck with one good arm and so taught me that while I may be able to do all things, some times I should not
For he has more hair than I do
For when I told him that I had been excised from the church, he hung up on me to praise God in the only way he knew how
For he took me to see Chuck Berry when I was 15
For because of him I worked shit jobs and thus built character
For because of that I appreciated college when I finally went
For he knew there is glorious music in a car engine even if he didn’t always know how to coax it forth
For he taught me to always carry jumper cables
For he went to his father’s bedside when it was time for him to die
For he stayed a month and helped build the coffin
For he would not let the funeral be held in a Kingdom Hall in order to protect the body of the church
For he taught me there are things more important than family and sometimes I hate him for that
For his father is Jehovah and he has no son anymore

Winter Bean

2008-04-10T01:19:00.000-04:00

I took this while in Chicago over a year ago. That's what happens when you stick with film and are lose track of the film canister. I've got to make the move to digital.

Challenge Poem

2008-04-08T20:58:00.000-04:00

So when I mentioned the April Poetry Challenge, I said I might post some of what comes out of that. Why not?

Here's the second poem I wrote for the challenge--not the second challenge, mind you, but the second one I wrote. I'm not real sure how I feel about it yet, but here it is. I'm certainly open to comments on it.

Headlines

I was born two days after Nixon won
the first time. Inauspicious beginnings
in a year of strife. Bobby Kennedy.
Martin Luther King, Jr. The Tet Offensive.
I am the same age as The ODB
and Lisa Marie Presley, as Ziggy Marley
and Vanilla Ice, and no wonder
we’re all fucked up because we
all came forth in a year of strife
and we’ve never gotten over it.
I turned 32 on Election Day, 2000
the day Fox News declared George Dubya
the 43rd President of the US.
I’ll be working that one out of my system
for decades—to be forever linked
with Nixon is bad enough, but to carry
the weight of the two worst presidents
ever is a bit much to ask of anyone.
But I refuse to stay down. In ‘68
I also got Tommie Smith and John Carlos
in Mexico City, The White Album,
Cash at Folsom Prison and Lady Soul,
Of Being Numerous and North Central,
2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes
and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.
It’s not enough, but it is something,
a firebreak, a seawall that deadens
the hurricane’s storm surge, a shot
of whiskey to numb an abscessed tooth.

Here's his latest challenge. It just so happens I'm working on one about seeing la grande Jatte, so if it comes out, I might post that as well.

Brain Surgery

2008-04-06T13:55:00.000-04:00

When I go looking for stories about the writing process, I don't generally hit up the New York Times, but there's a piece today by Rosanne Cash that I found fascinating. There are, of course, major differences between writing poetry and writing songs--the music is an integral part of the effect of the lyrics, and does much of the emotional heavy lifting. All you need for proof of that is to listen to the ways various bands cover the same song, the way their musical styles infect the meaning of the lyrics. A classic example is "With a Little Help From My Friends." Ringo Starr's singing galumphs along, and the song has a jaunty feel to it, while Joe Cocker's live performance from Woodstock reaches down into your cockles and gives them a good squeezing. Same lyrics--different interpretation.

But when it comes to inspiration, I get the feeling that really good songwriters and really good poets are coming from the same places. From Rosanne Cash's piece:

The instrument has a lot to do with the order of inspiration. Sometimes. And sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins....

On vacation recently, there were some Christian fundamentalists at lunch at the next table and I felt the tension and constriction of their religious beliefs wafting off them like a perfume. That is my own projection, I’m sure, but I thought of something a friend used to say about that particular brand of religion — that it was like “looking at the ground with a flashlight when the whole universe was around you waiting to be noticed.” Walking to the beach later, I was thinking about how my own idea of God was so mutable, and that even though I pray, most of the time I haven’t a clue to whom I’m praying.

And I like it that way. Sometimes God is Art, Music and Children and that is more than good enough. Ruminating on these things, I thought of a phrase — “the pantheon of my religious desires” — and I wrote it in my notebook. That line is probably too sophomore-English-major precious, but this is how songs begin for me. Sometimes.

I can relate to that a lot, in part because for most of my life, I was one of those people looking at the ground with a flashlight instead of looking at the universe around me. And it's no surprise to me that once I gave up hat view of the ground, I started writing poetry again. I'd written in high school, painful, angsty stuff like most poets, but had given it up once I'd gotten married. After my divorce eight years later, and after I'd left the church, about the middle of my second semester, I started writing again--bad, angsty stuff as well, but highly charged with a wonder of the universe that I had never experienced as a Jehovah's Witness. Suddenly I had questions instead of answers, and poetry was a way of meditating on that.

I heard a dear friend and fellow poet once say in conversation that she felt that an atheist couldn't be a poet, because there's a need to be able to feel the sublime and the transcendent. At the time--and this was several years ago--I wasn't sure how to take that. I was agnostic at the time, and pretty secular, and discounted the need to believe in something larger than myself. But now, even though I disagree with her statement, I know what she's talking about. Artists do have to search for the transcendent in the universe if they are going to have a hope of reflecting and translating that into words or paintings or sculptures or music or dance or any other artistic form. Some call it god. I don't, but I search for it all the same, and I find it at times, as Cash does, in "Art, Music and Children." Oftentimes I find it on a road, or in my memories, especially those of Louisiana, in the smells of certain meals, in the vocal accents that echo through time, in headlines and textbooks. It's there--you just have to notice it.

Old Creepy Poetry

2008-04-03T23:33:00.000-04:00

Not long ago, I discovered a poem by Sir Robert Aytoun titled "To His Coy Mistress." I was familiar with--as most people with English degrees are, I assume--with Andrew Marvell's poem of the same name, but had never read Aytoun's. The anthology I use for my Interpretation of Poetry classes has both poems side-by-side in the section titled "Poets In Dialogue." I don't know if Marvell was responding to Aytoun's poem--the identical titles certainly makes it look like that's a possibility, but the differences between the poems is so great that I wonder if it wasn't just a coincidence. (I'm sure someone has already studied this and has an answer; I haven't really bothered to look.)

Aytoun's poem is, in a word, creepy. There's really no other way to put it, I'm afraid. I know he was working from the courtly love tradition, but that, to me, only explains the creepiness; it doesn't justify or ameliorate it any. The speaker in this poem comes off as the kind of guy who, today, would deserve a restraining order placed against him. Follow me below the fold for more.

Aytoun's speaker is basically playing on a variant of a "no really means yes" argument. He opens the poem with this:

What others doth discourage and dismay
Is unto me a pastime and a play.
I sport in her denials and do know
Women love best that does love least in show.

He has this certainty that women are never honest about the ways they feel about men. It's always a game with them, he says, and the more they deny they care for him, the more he is insistent that they love him.

His delusion gets even worse in lines 10-14:

So from her coldness I do strike desire.
She, knowing this perhaps, resolves to try
My faith and patience, offering to deny
Whate'er I ask of her, that I may be
More taken with her, for her slighting me.

The woman in this poem, more properly called an object of obsession at this point, is in a no-win situation here. If she gives in, he's won, and it seems fairly obvious at this point that she doesn't care for him. But the more she refuses, the more he's convinced that she's doing it just to toy with him. He compares her to an angler in lines 15-20, and hinself to the fish that cannot help but take the bait.

Creeped out yet? This is the same kind of "reasoning" that stalkers use to justify their obsessions with celebrities, or with exes. "She" (and it's almost always a she) "is leading me on," the stalker says. "We are meant to be together."

And Aytoun's speaker goes there, most notably in the last six lines of the poem:

I'll tie her eyes with lines, her ears with moans;
Her marble heart I'll pierce with hideous groans
That neither eyes, ears, heart shall be at rest
Till she forsake her sire to love me best;
Nor will I raise my siege nor leave my field
Till I have made my valiant mistress yield.

That's a threat, at least to my contemporary ear. Aytoun's speaker is not going to let this woman go. I hope this was all an invention.

April Writing Challenge

2008-04-01T22:17:00.000-04:00

Robert Lee Brewer is a guy I know primarily through Florida political writing. We're both bloggers on that subject as well, he at Pushing Rope and me at Incertus. But he's also the writer of Poetic Asides, which I've just added to the blogroll (under Robert's name), and he's doing a poem-a-day sort of thing there for National Poetry Month. I think I'm going to give it a try, as the spirit hits me at least. Maybe I'll post some of what comes out of it here. It would certainly give me greater impetus to blog.

Seamus Heaney's "The Forge"

2008-03-27T00:04:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the thing I love the most about "The Forge" is the way it drags us back into the earliest reaches of civilization. The blacksmith, after all, was one of the most important members of an agricultural community--he kept horses shod, he kept plows sharp after having cast them in the first place, he was able to transmute iron and other metals into the tools humans needed to build civilization.

Heaney's blacksmith evokes Vulcan, the Roman God of the forge. He doesn't speak--he only grunts, and is described as "leather-aproned, hairs in his nose," but he is powerful as well, able "to beat real iron out." Even the "door into the dark" in the first line recalls the caves of Etna in which Vulcan was to have beaten out Achilles' shield, as well as the move back into the darkest, murkiest parts of human development.

It's also wonderful the way Heaney compares the blacksmith's shop to a church. The anvil sits in the center, "immoveable: an altar / Where he expends himself in shape and music." In the church, the altar is where the transformation from sinner to forgiven takes place, whether in the accepting of the host or in the answer to the altar call. Just as the blacksmith transforms raw material into a useful tool, so the church symbolically transforms the raw material of humankind into the useful tool for the church. Even the fact that the altar is "Horned as a unicorn" could be a reference to the medieval church--the King James version talks about unicorns in Job 39.

And yet, this is all pretty subtle in the poem. It's not overtly religious; it allows the reader to stick to a literal interpretation about a man whose job is disappearing as the world changes around him, while also allowing a reader who wants to grasp those deeper images another path into the poem.

Me. Not me.

2008-03-24T01:56:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of people named Brian Spears out there, and a few of them are more famous than I am. That's not a high bar to clear, mind you--I'm a poet, for starters, and even the best known poets in the US are barely recognized at literary conferences. I don't even have a book yet, which gives you a sense of where I am on that totem pole. Somewhere below the footing, I'd imagine.

One of those namesakes, probably the most famous, doesn't even spell his name the same way. He's Bryan Spears, who's the brother of the most famous Spears on the planet. I talked about it in passing here, and the coincidental connections between our families are amusing at times. They generally help me get through the first day of classes--both have mothers named Lynn(e), his sister and my daughter share a name (also different spellings), and we lived relatively near to each other. In fact, at one time, Bryan and I were in college together--Southeastern Louisiana University. I discovered this when a friend asked me why I wasn't in math class--I hadn't had a math class in a year by that time. The story gets less interesting from there.

Then there's this one, who sounds like he has a really cook job. Special effects guy with an IMDB page and everything. Seriously, I'm impressed.

There's this Brian Spears, who works in real estate and is a former Marine, and this one, who's a defense lawyer.

And then there's the other blogger, the other Brian Spears. When I clicked on his blog a couple of days ago, I saw my polar opposite. It was like that episode of Star Trek where Kirk (my middle name, frighteningly enough) gets split into his good self and his evil self. I leave it to the reader to decide which of us is which.

I'm kidding on that last part, of course, but we really are different. He's a conservative Christian who mourns that Huckabee is out of the presidential race. I'm a progressive atheist who wishes the two Democrats were more liberal. About the only thing we have in common is that we both like Macs over PCs. Look at his blogger profile--we could be brothers. At least cousins. Scary stuff.

So anyway, for anyone looking for the poet Brian Spears, from Louisiana, who went to Arkansas for grad school, who was a Stegner Fellow, here you go. Me. Not me. Me. Not me. Me. Not me. I hope that clears up any confusion.

What's the lesson here?

2008-03-20T17:29:00.000-04:00

The anthology I use in my Interpretation of Poetry classes divides poems up by form and by theme. Since it's an introductory class, I tend to work with thematic similarities more than formal ones--sophomores, I've discovered, aren't as entranced with the sonnet the way I can be, but they can get into a group of poems about, say, politics or war or nature.

The section we're working on now is a bit meta--poems on poetry and poets in dialogue. The usual suspects have appeared: "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Tell All the Truth but tell it slant--," "Ars Poetica." And then there are the poems that make me wonder just what Joe Parini was thinking when he put them into this section.

Like "Kubla Khan." I mean, I get the connection based on the story behind the writing of the poem. Coleridge, in a laudanum fueled fit of inspiration, begins this epic work only to be interrupted by a knock at the door, and when he returns, the muse has deserted him. I guess I can make that work as a poem about poetry.

But the lesson I really get from it is this: a poem that attempts to describe the sublime will always fall short. Xanadu, after all, is a wonderland, another version of Eden "where Alph the sacred river ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea." And the more Coleridge tries to describe the scene, the more he falls back on generalities: "that deep romantic chasm," and "the sacred river. / Five miles meandering with a mazy motion," and again, the "caverns measureless to man."

Dante had the same problem with Paradiso. Heaven is far less interesting than hell or purgatory, because there are only so many ways one can say that something is eternally beautiful, or can be so overwhelmed that one cannot hope to describe it before the reader tells you to piss off. Coleridge falls into the same trap when he tries to describe the song of the Abyssinian maid.

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air--

If I could only remember, if I only had the skill, I could make it appear before you and you would see the splendor. I think what Coleridge teaches us, although I don't think he does so intentionally, is that some stuff is too big for language to encompass. We get more from smaller bites, well-chewed. And besides, dirty stuff is way more interesting than the pure.

Dismal Rock by Davis McCombs

2008-03-17T23:25:00.000-04:00

In the end notes of his second book, Dismal Rock, Davis McCombs gives credit for the form of his opening sequence, titled "Tobacco Mosaic," to a sequence written by Les Murray. But I'd say there's another influence at play in the sound of those poems. His use of jargon and local description reminds me a lot of Seamus Heaney's early poems. There are similarities in the images as well--dowsing rods and farmland show up again and again. Not that this should be taken as a bad thing--there are worse people to be compared to. In fact, it's one of the things I like most about McCombs's book.

Like his first book, Ultima Thule, much of Dismal Rock takes place in rural Kentucky, where McCombs was born and raised. This is especially the case in the opening sequence, as well as in many of the poems that make up the second half of the book. And Kentucky comes alive in these sections. From "The Last Wolf in Edmonson County":

Autumn lit the wicks of the leaves; the river, foaming,
garbled, recovered its voice. I did not climb
the flash-lit, switchback trail to the rockhouse.
I did not stand before the petroglyphs again
nor rake at the midden ash below them with a stick.

And there are echoes of his last book in "Salts Cave Revisited":

I was following
Bill Cutliff, Tom and John
Lee, their bootprints
and a whiff of acetylene
far ahead, and I went searching,
as they did, for the jolt
that might come once
in a life or not at all

I can't say that I'm enthralled with every poem in the book, but then again, I rarely am, and there's way more to like than not. McCombs's lines are tight, and his images are taut and lively. Get both of his books.

Wendell Berry

2008-03-12T22:37:00.000-04:00

Berry's on my mind because I just taught his poem "Enriching the Earth" to my second-year poetry students this week, and was dismayed (though not at all surprised) at how little they knew of the world they inhabit. We live in the industrial age of food, where an ever smaller number of people grow the food we all consume. It's been the focus of many books and discussions recently--Fast Food Nation, and The Omnivore's Dilemma to name a couple--and yet it doesn't seem to be making much of an impact on public consciousness.

Berry's poem begins with a straightforward statement: "To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass / to grow and die." Death is the focal point of the poem, in fact, in the sense that death must occur for life to be possible. His speaker plows in not only "the seeds / of winter grains and of various legumes," but also stirs in offal, generally associated with dead animals, in order to "[serve] the dark."

But it's not that the farmer is separate from the cycle he or she moves in sync with. Berry's farmer, even though he or she may not understand the cycle fully, is still linked inextricably to it, it "gives a wideness / and a delight to the air," he says.

It's the following lines that are the most powerful to me, though:

It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.

Those are strong words, that one lives at the expense of life, and yet most of us do to some extent. We don't put back into the earth what we take out of it. The environmental challenges we face today and into the future are directly tied to that problem--Berry's world of using legumes and offal to enrich the earth is quickly vanishing. As Michael Pollan points out ably in the Omnivore's Dilemma, we're eating oil, because of the ubiquity of petroleum based fertilizers.

A couple of my students looked shocked when I pointed that out to them--the sad thing was that most didn't seem to mind.

What I'm Reading

2008-03-08T23:18:00.000-05:00

I am woefully ignorant for a contemporary poet about the history of 20th century poetry. Part of that has to do with my graduate school, which focused on the New Critics and the Southern Agrarians when it focused on the 20th century at all, and I was far more interested in Dante in translation and 17th and 18th century French poets than in the moderns. I read my Eliot and Pound and Wallace Stevens, some Stein and H.D. and then forward to Merrill and overseas to Heaney, Wolcott, that sort of stuff. While at Stanford, I got into some Niedecker and Oppen, but not in any real depth. So this book is a real education for me, and it has the added attraction of being a pleasant read.

Get it. Read it.

Summer reading list

2008-03-05T23:33:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I know--it feels like summer outside down here in south Florida, but we're still weeks and weeks away from it. Nonetheless, I have to provide our book purchasing system a list of texts for my class this summer. I've been given a terrific opportunity this summer--a 4000 level Modern Poetry class. It's only six weeks long, so I don't want to kill them (or me), so I'm limiting the scope a lot. I'm looking to make it more of a contemporary poetry class, focusing on the variety of voices in contemporary poetry. So here's the list, in no particular order.

Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems by W. S. DiPiero
Talking Dirty to the Gods by Yusuf Komunyakaa
Boss Cupid by Thom Gunn
The Moon Is Always Female by Marge Piercy
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey
Emails from Scheherezad by Mohja Kahf
Nine Horses by Billy Collins

Yes, gods help me, I'm teaching a Billy Collins book this summer. I figure at some point, I'll need a break, and so will they. I still have a couple of days to toss this around, and maybe add a book or two. If anyone has a suggestion, something published in the last 20 years or so, that a class which won't have a ton of time will be able to digest, let me know.

Sex in Poetry

2008-03-03T14:45:00.000-05:00

I'm always amused by how younger generations are convinced that the poetry of the past was stolid and conservative, that the people of 400 years ago certainly would never have mentioned sex, and if it did, with only the mildest euphemisms. One of my first-day-of-class activities every semester is to give my students a handout of poems, names removed, and have them try to place them in chronological order. Last fall, I gave them a surprise in the form of Robert Herrick. Here's the poem:

The Vine

I dreamed this mortal part of mine
Was metamorphosed to a vine,
Which, crawling one and every way,
Enthralled my dainty Lucia.
Methought, her long small legs and thighs
I with my tendrils did surprise:
Her belly, buttocks, and her waist
By my soft nervelets were embraced
About her head I writhing hung
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung,
So that my Lucia seemed to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.
My curls about her neck did crawl,
And arms and hands they did enthrall,
So that she could not freely stir
(All parts there made one prisoner).
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts which maids keep unespied,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took
That with the fancy I awoke,
And found (ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a stock than like a vine.

The class discussion that day was, ahem, vibrant.

What happens with a writing exercise gone wrong

2008-02-29T14:02:00.000-05:00

So I'm rooting though piles of old files (figuratively--I was searching through folders that somehow got moved onto this computer) and I come across this gem of a poem. It was written as part of a challenge in my second semester Form and Theory class. We had to write a poem about a subject we wouldn't normally write about--food, for instance. This is what came out. And if you think this is bad, wait until I post the sestina about the marijuana eating goat, or the one called "Pukey the Armadillo."

Sonnet to Sausage
-for Enid

(This is the nugget, the meaning you must
glean from this poem. You should interpret
it only this way, for there is just
one way, that I, your poet really meant

for you to read it.) I hate kielbasa,
the greasy juiciness of it; I hate
the feel of teeth that pop the sausage
casing to squeeze out the ground pig meat,

the leftover chunks that even butchers
figure can’t be sold without a disguise,
some skin or otherness. On pictures
of pigs sectioned off by dotted lines

into hamhocks, pork loins, bacon and chops,
there’s never one called sausage, no kielbasa.

Sad thing is, I really don't hate sausage. I love it, in fact. I just don't eat it much anymore unless it's imported, because I don't trust the US meat production system. Fortunately, I live near an Irish bar that imports Irish bangers and Irish bacon, so I can still get pork on occasion.

"Problems with Hurricanes"

2008-02-26T22:11:00.000-05:00

Anyone who lives in a hurricane area knows the dangers from wind and rain, but Victor Hernandez Cruz points to the real dangers. The campesino who speaks in his poem says "it's the mangoes, avocados / Green plaintains and bananas / Flying into town like projectiles" that are the real danger, because there's more than life at stake when you're riding out a storm. Family honor is at stake.

How would your family
Feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
Got killed by a flying
Banana

It's going to be hard to get Junior to accept the family name if that's what it's famous for, especially if you live in a small, close-knit community, where family name is one of the few treasures a family can hope to have.

It's easy to snicker at this point of view, if you don't live in this sort of community, if your name doesn't carry the weight of generations. I felt this way for a long time, until someone with the same last name got famous. For a while, it was cool--a chance to crack a couple of jokes, a way to get a class's attention at the beginning of the term, a witty line on my bio for poetry submissions--but lately, it's gotten old, in part because I feel like the famous holders of a name that was my own have been letting the side down, in a way.

Okay, that's not really the case. In my direct line, my sister and I are the first generation out of the trailer park. My parents were respectable enough, though for a long time, my dad, being a Junior, would often respond to people on the phone "why do you want to know?" when asked if he was Sam Spears. We have our skeletons, but since most of us are fairly anonymous (our greatest claim to fame being the uncle who has played bass guitar for Willie Nelson for nearly 40 years), our dirty secrets are our own. Any relatives who have suffered the equivalent of a hurricane-flung mango smashing their skull are safely private, the sorts of stories that come out at beer-fueled reunions. Or in poems.

My displeasure at the public trek through the trough the Spears name has taken recently is only a passing one, perhaps because it's one I've been expecting for years, and perhaps because it will soon allow the name to pass back into relative anonymity. In a way, it's as though the famous Spearses have moved beyond the "ultimate disgrace" of a plantain hitting them in the temple, and have simply been bashed against the rocks by the hurricane of traditional celebrity media coverage, giving their "death" a bit more honor.

I, like the campesino, doff my hat to that power. It's the beautiful, sweet things that can do the most damage many times, that can make you look stupid in death, when there's nothing you can do to fix the damage. It's a power to be wary of, and the people who live in close conjunction with their family honor know that. But while it's good to beware of those beautiful sweet things, it's also good to remember that those beautiful sweet things are life-affirming and useful, as long as they're not flying at your head at 70 miles per hour.

An interesting new journal

2008-02-24T22:01:00.000-05:00

I am ambivalent, at best, about my graduate school experience. Fayetteville, Arkansas isn't the hippest place in the world to spend four years, after all. But Amy turned me onto a new project that some of the grad students there have put together.

It's called Linebreak, and it's a format I haven't seen before. They publish weekly, but only one poem a week. They've been up for five weeks now, by the looks of it, and you get not only a poem on the page, but an audio version read by one of the people doing the magazine. You can listen to it there or download it as a podcast. I hope they're able to make this a success, because it looks like an intriguing way to go about doing a journal.

Speaking of poetry

2008-02-23T12:23:00.000-05:00

Guess it's time I start the shameless self-promotion. I have a poem up in the newest issue of storySouth, titled "US Route 50." It's part of a series of poems I've been writing off and on over the last couple of years that deal with unique roads I've traveled in this country. It's not really a project--more of a way of dealing with some images that refused to go away. I have some thoughts on the notion of working on poetic projects as opposed to poems, but they need some more discipline. I'll get around to them eventually.

A New Poetic Home on the Web

2008-02-22T22:58:00.000-05:00

I couldn't pass it up. I was hoping to add some different functionality to my main blog, so I set one up to test on, and the name was available. What was I supposed to do?

When I started Incertus four years ago, I was planning on making it a blog that dealt with politics and poetics, and over the years I've tried, without success, to make it more of a poetry blog. It's not going to happen, I've decided, so since I have this place now, I'll make it lit-centered. I'll put some of my work up here, boast about my successes (hopefully without seeming too geeky about it), and if and when I get a book published, this will be the main hub dealing with it.

And maybe I'll actually write some critical stuff as well. You never know.